0221 - Doc Crashed

[dr pepper]

[cleveresttitle]

It probably definitely means nothing interesting that the colored stripes on Doc's monitor have been more red and less green over the past several strips.

[FlyingFish]

Most likely, this is exactly what it looks like. All those Zoe "turn on!" signals (especially the ones that interrupted its shutdown procedures?) finally overloaded Doc's memory or processor or something. It might not help that, although Doc's software got an update, the hardware is still the same as it's always been. (I speak as someone who has just gotten some holiday cash presents to toss out my aging home computer, which crashed not 30 minutes ago.)

However, a more interesting option: Doc's manufacturer, or monitoring software owned thereby, noticed something weird. It appears that this one licensed instance of Therapro Psyhealth is booting up thousands of times a second. That makes no sense. Further investigation reveals that the license was upgraded within the past hour. Conclusion: some hacker somehow applied the same license upgrade to thousands, perhaps millions of copies of the Psyhealth AI while making it LOOK like only one was operating. Even if that's not what's going on, this is not Authorized Use As Intended, which gives Therapro the authority to shut down the license until it can be determined what's going on.

[wumpus]

I can't see this story line taking a left turn into sudden tech-crash "end of modern civilization" apocalypse but I confess I would love to see what that looks like for our various dysfunctional protagonists

[chelonianmobile]

It's never good when there's smoke coming out of your technology, which is what those white cloudy things look like. Eek.

[MarkGyver]

It's never good when there's smoke coming out of your technology, which is what those white cloudy things look like. Eek.

I think that's steam, coming from the cleaning tube. It's there in the previous page too.