THE STORY · EPISODE 11
The missing character was a zero.
The two records Logrin pointed to showed almost the same numbers: 2.10 on one, 2.1 on the other. Mana narrowed her eyes, then drew the desk lamp a little closer.
“Those aren’t decimals, are they?”
“Version numbers. The last zero is part of the name, too.”
Logrin’s finger stopped at the edge of the paper. According to the copy of the warning, a character had disappeared partway through the display process, and two different versions were being treated as one.
Securidon already had his shield.
“Shall we go and look, don?”
Mana started to glance toward the front door, then stopped. Going into the city at night might make her feel she was doing something. But they had not yet checked what they could do now, or what was already happening at the scene.
The doctor checked the time of the message and the contact details. The staff there had stopped the affected guidance and switched to another way of checking. No one was being directed into immediate danger.
“We’ll investigate with the staff in the morning. Tonight, we’ll keep this copy.”
With her blue pen, Mana wrote down what they knew. She left the cause blank.
Beside her, Securidon lowered his shield to the floor.
“Lots of blanks, don.”
“We might not fill them all tomorrow, either.”
“Then we won’t run out of paper, don.”
Something about the way he said it made Mana laugh softly. Laughing before bed did not mean she had forgotten the people in trouble. She drank the lukewarm tea left in her cup and turned out the light.
The next morning, the verification room’s desks were covered with copies of the same warning.
On the terminal by the window, even a version that needed fixing carried a VERIFIED label. Another terminal gave the correct warning. A black shadow slid along a seam in the wall, slipping something thin as a claw between the characters. Its shape remained hidden.
“I thought making the text bigger would help us see it.”
The staff member enlarged the display. The missing character did not return. Only the label grew larger.
Mana nodded. Hard-to-read text and an incorrect decision were different problems.
Episode 11, Illustration 1 | Checking the final characters of two versions
“Do you know when it first appeared? And which action came just before it?”
Sapo took the records and made a separate column for each terminal. Yuki stood at the entrance, directing people to a counter where they could still have their requests checked. Neither of them gave battle commands to the companions. They were making room for the people investigating to keep working.
Mana wanted to fix the failure they had found. Having chosen to wait last night, she did not want to fall behind today.
A Defense question lit up in the encyclopedia.
OPTIONAL QUESTION · 11-D1A software bug changes a decisionWhich description of a software bug is correct?Open illustration & choices
Interactive answer checks and saved progress load with JavaScript. You can continue reading without answering.
“B. Something harmful got in, so it became a bug…”
Before she finished, a fragment of light fell from the shield. The shadow slipped through the gap and crushed the two numbers on the desk together again.
“I gave everything the same cause.”
Mana corrected herself. A malicious shadow might exploit a defect. That did not mean every defect had originally been created by an attack.
The doctor stepped beside her.
“What we need to establish here is what produces a different result, and under which conditions.”
“Rather than guessing the shadow’s name.”
“Yes.”
Keeping the live guidance stopped, the staff prepared a test terminal. They did not reach straight into the system they wanted to repair. Securidon’s shield trembled as they worked, but Mana did not use that as a reason to invent a quick answer.
On the test screen, a staff member changed the numbers one by one.
Only certain numbers lost their last character. The string shortened for display was then also used for the decision, giving a VERIFIED label to a version that still needed fixing.
“So it isn’t just how it looks.”
At Mana’s words, the staff member laid out separate records for the display and the decision.
Logrin recorded the same actions on another terminal. Sapo kept the differences between terminals separate from the conditions that produced the same result. One occurrence did not make the failure inevitable. One attempt without it did not prove there was no problem.
“Document the issue before fixing it.”
The doctor read the heading on the record.
“Record the problem before making the repair.”
Mana looked at last night’s blanks. New facts were going into the spaces she had left. Watching the paper, she understood that filling every space was not the aim.
The shadow ducked beneath the desk, as if it disliked the light of the records.
The encyclopedia lit up again. This time, the situation was different.
OPTIONAL QUESTION · 11-D2Record enough to reproduce the faultOnly some terminals make an incorrect decision. What should reproduction steps record?Open illustration & choices
Interactive answer checks and saved progress load with JavaScript. You can continue reading without answering.
“D. Keep the conditions needed to reproduce it, and record what we did and what happened so someone else can check.”
The blue shield recovered. Mana moved behind Securidon and rested a hand on him.
“I won’t just change the words of that first answer and memorize it. I want to take the reason with me.”
“I remember where the light fell, too, don.”
The shadow stretched black threads from beneath the paper, trying to erase the records. Logrin passed the originals to the staff’s storage area and set working copies apart. Securidon planted his shield at the boundary between the desk and the floor.
“Securidon, keep it away from the records we’ve saved. Logrin, help with the next check!”
She had put what they were protecting into words. Mana felt the difference in how readily her voice came.
When a proposed fix was ready, Mana almost said, “That’s it, then.”
The staff had not put it back into the live system yet. They needed to test not only the troublesome number, but neighboring versions, versions that required no warning, and other terminals.
OPTIONAL QUESTION · 11-A1Test the repair before live useSuspected faulty live guidance is stopped, and the staff have a test environment. How should the repair proceed?Open illustration & choices
Interactive answer checks and saved progress load with JavaScript. You can continue reading without answering.
“C. Check the affected scope with the staff. Compare the results before and after the fix in testing, and prepare a way back before applying it.”
The repaired display kept the missing character. The decision labels separated into the correct groups, too.
If only the character had returned, the shadow could have used another weakness. Recording, reproducing, checking the decision: in that order, it lost its ways out. Black threads gathered on the floor.
“Patchron, support the footing where the staff need to work. Securidon, push it back from the boundary we’ve checked!”
The shield moved. The shadow split left and right, trying to escape, but stopped between the results recorded on the two terminals.
Mana held out the square Securies.
The blackness loosened into light. A small companion appeared, with a round green body and long antennae. He brought the magnifying glass in one hand toward Mana’s notebook.
“That dot is really there.”
“That was the first thing you looked at?”
He lowered the magnifying glass happily.
“Bugglin. I like finding little differences.”
COL-007 — Bugglin lit up in the WS Encyclopedia. He was the eleventh companion.
“Your name sounds a little like Bug’s.”
At Yuki’s remark, Bug, who had been helping people move away from the entrance, poked his head in.
“Maybe we should both come when someone calls.”
“I’ll keep you separate in the records.”
Sapo’s earnest reply brought laughter around the desk. Bugglin laughed on the other side of his magnifying glass, too.
After the fix was applied, the staff checked the remaining counters in order. Mana and the others told those waiting which guidance had returned and which parts were still being checked.
A single missing character had required many lines of recovery steps.
Mana did not think their length made them a detour. She had got the name of her own new department wrong three times at first. Showing only the corrected letters would not erase the mistakes.
At lunch, Bugglin pointed to the blue dot in her notebook.
“What’s this?”
“A mark for where I got lost.”
“Aren’t you going to fix it?”
“I’ll leave it. I want to remember when I come this way again.”
He gently laid the handle of his magnifying glass beside the dot. Rather than drawing a circle, they looked together at the small mark already there.
Episode 11, Illustration 2 | Examining a tiny blue ink mark together
Then a message arrived from the invoice counter. Everyone was receiving a “free tool” to help with the work left after the recovery.
The people who had been waiting for something convenient were now about to open a gift.
Mana closed her notebook. Bugglin’s magnifying glass still caught the warm light.
END OF EPISODE 11