Pan often wondered what Dr. Z thought of when he mentioned their workshop, but doubted it was anything like the truth.  They stepped onto the basement floor and into their favourite place in the world.

What Pan thought of as their workshop was a lab with most of the equipment in the best of BioComp’s labs and a few pieces they would have been eager to get.  One of Pan’s little secrets was that their tinkering had resulted in several important patents over the years, some at the heart of BioComp’s own research.

The patents were managed by a legal team that ensured most of the revenue was donated to worthy causes, but Pan always drew enough to fund the workshop.

The workshop did have a workbench, though not full of hammers and saws and other tools of destruction as Dr. Z no doubt imagined. Pan’s workbench was a high-tech marvel, most of the tools on it were Pan’s own inventions. Creative and powerful versions of the tools at BioComp and other research labs and others not even dreamed of in most like the nano-stitcher and cryo-lattice sythesizer.

Pan rushed to the workbench, knowing the organic support system of the NOVA module could fail at any moment. The night’s work at the lab—and who knows how long before Pan found it—meant the neural cells were on borrowed time.

Most of the changes to the X-1 series were in the heart of the module, the neural organic interface, but the signal strength readings were still mostly green, and Pan couldn’t have done anything if that was the problem anyhow.  The hardware interface for the support and communication systems was identical to the previous series. It was damaged—but that was something Pan could fix – and would.

There were spare parts, harvested from other, deceased NOVA modules and Pan set to work replacing the sabotaged ones.  The work went quickly and well, the only oddity that Pan couldn’t quite figure out was a fluctuation in the signal from a few of the pins, but they were all within tolerance and didn’t seem like a good reason to discard a module as expensive as a NOVA. Besides, the organics were going to fail if it wasn’t attached soon, so there was no time to worry about that now.

With the sabotaged parts replaced, Pan carefully inspected the module one last time. The repairs looked solid, and though the pin signal fluctuation still lingered in the back of their mind, time was running out. Pan connected the module to the workshop’s support system, holding their breath as the boot sequence began. This was the point where other NOVAs that Pan had tried to save had failed.  Either the module was too defective to boot at all or the module was unable to pass the Pong test for intelligent processing. And those weak pin signals were still a concern…

The first hurdle passed as the interface booted and Pong began to load on the nearby monitor.  Pong might seem like an odd test, but learning how to play was part of the BIOS training for growing NOVAs and making sure they still could was one of the startup tests.

When the repaired NOVA not only remembered how to play Pong but performed as well as a small cluster, Pan couldn’t help but laugh aloud and do a small dance around the workshop.  As exciting as this was; no other NOVA had made it this far before; there must have been SOME reason that it was disabled then discarded, and Pan set out to find out why.

Pan started some benchmarking tests to see if the NOVA module had any processing problems and started looking for answers.  They already knew all the status codes, and CF wasn’t in any of them, so that would have to wait. But between the more accurate readings of the NOVA environment and the technical specs for the previous NOVA series, the fluctuations could at least be checked.

The affected pins were all part of the negative feedback system.  Now that was curious.  Pan knew enough about the training of the organics to know that the negative feedback system was only used in the earliest training of NOVA modules. Fluctuations like these would have disqualified the module from training in the first place if they had been there and would hardly make a difference if they developed later.

(Negative feedback system is a nice way to describe swatting a digital dog with an electronic newspaper.  Effective but not very nice)

Pan pondered this as the benchmarking system chimed that it was done.  The test results just deepened Pan’s confusion.  The NOVA module had passed every test with flying colours!  All of the readings showed the single unit processing as well as a small cluster of the older series. 

Now this really made no sense.  The negative feedback system should have been long deactivated by this stage. Its presence suggested the lab had been attempting to fix a serious issue—but the benchmark results showed no errors that Pan could see.

Pan was determined to find out what was going on, but without more to go on, that would have to wait.

Saving a NOVA module didn’t change Pan’s life much at first.  Certainly not in big ways. 

Most days in Pan’s life were still pretty typical, at least for Pan. They went to work and chatted with Dr. Z as he left.  Took out the kitchen garbage every day and checked the special garbage when it was there.  Even the discovery of more X-1 NOVAs deemed unusable had a certain typicality, although it deepened the mystery of the CF code and should have suggested to Pan that things had changed very much indeed.

The repaired NOVAs were all healthy and working well.  The addition of more modules was increasing its power all the time, although it was still a small cluster and not capable of the processing of large clusters of the previous series.  Pan’s experiments with using it to drive the pattern matching models showed promising results and interesting insights.  The models emulation of a human mind improved steadily.  A few new patents were registered, but those were more of a side effect and hardly counted.

Pan noticed that their daily chat with Dr. Z had begun to change the day they found two X-1 modules tagged for incineration just days after a previous one.  The X-1’s had been showing up a little more frequently, but never 2 at once.

Dr. Z’s greetings had begun to get a little more terse.  The reference to the garbage a little bit sharper and the references to tinkering a little more sarcastic. He had also begun to look tired and drawn, something Pan realized had begun around the time the first X-1 was recovered.

What did it all mean?  Why were X-1 modules being discarded when they were working so well? What was Dr. Z so concerned about?

More and more of Pan’s thoughts were occupied with these questions when the first errors began to appear.