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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “Question Everything” cc&d, v280 (the February 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:  |
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Niche Empire
Ian Bowman
Karl had known the value of that recording, when he bolted every bolt and riveted every rivet. It was all filmed as he replaced head gaskets, gauged inlet manifolds with the mass flow meter, or used the uni-syn balancer on the ultra classics. And he smiled when he saw that his son Carl just wanted to program the ancient IBM PC.
Carl’s friends thought his dad Karl was crazy. And they made fun of the sample videos.
“Your dad could have like, pre-planned the filming and showed us the important parts... I want my car to get fixed without seeing a mechanic walk up from three different angles and slide under it. Why go to your dad’s shop when he’s going to creepily archive everything he does?”
But Karl had loyal customers. They were smarter than Carl’s dumb ass friends and they wanted all the work filmed. They paid Karl to keep that footage around.
Years later, those customers put their luxury cars up for auction. By that time, Carl’s application of a machine learning library developed as his Master’s thesis solved a once intractable verification problem. It reeled through every pixel of Karl’s footage. And it validated the mechanics. When it found problems with Karl’s work, the processed video archive was even more valuable. The buyers of all cars wanted that footage, that data. And so the automotive mechanics paid Karl for filming and storage solutions, and the buyers paid to use Carl’s cloud-hosted software.
Karl’s retirement left Carl exclusively in charge.
And now Carl was an old man. He fed his dad’s footage into his new solution. And it defined his dad across all the layers of the autoencoder. It mapped Karl’s responses. It didn’t get them all right. But as Carl lay there on the 40 inch mechanics creeper and he asked KARLIX whether a 1995 Ferrari F355 supported OBDII and received an answer back
YES BUT YOU’RE GOING TO NEED THE ST5 DIAGNOSTIC SCANNER FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF OF THE RIGHTMOST CABINET IF YOU WANT TO READ THE NON-STANDARD CODES.
Carl teared up. He forgot the time of day, what year it was, if he lay under the car or floated above it. Then he asked KARLIX where he could find the ST5.
GODDAMN, QUIT IT WITH THE REPEAT QUESTIONS. I’M GOING TO BED.
And Carl told his dad goodnight. He walked to the corner wall of the garage and leaned his head against it. Behind the partition lay the 37 rooms, where Carl’s 37 clones would be. They were all named Car. They were all industrious, all productive. Naturally, as they hosted Karl’s recombinant DNA. From multiple angles within the 37 shops the cameras rolled and the cloud-based solution reeled through every pixel of each Car’s work. It informed at 60 frames per second the subtle nuances across all the layers of KARLIX. It made each response more accurate, so that every day Carl and his dad could bolt every bolt, and rivet every rivet.
