It was just past 1:30, a remarkably bright and cheery afternoon. Steel City was bustling (as always), with Pokemon running to and fro to catch buses, elevators, and trams in order to meet appointments, go to work, get lunch, or get home. There were many levels to the city, many indeed, but most of the creative and inspirational work happened on the upper floors. This also happened to be where the wealthier citizens lived and where a lot of the food was grown. Steel City was not a place of imports. Exports, sure, but they rarely took in from outsiders. This suited most everyone within the city limits just fine.

It wasn’t at all a day during which you’d expect a great disaster to occur. Disasters rarely occurred in Steel City, you see. Everything was automated, controlled by these amazing Pokemon called Porygon. There were scores of them, their functions all varying wildly. There were Porygon for every light system in every building block, there were Porygon for controlling which rails were open during which hours, there were Porygon for ensuring the multitudes of elevators all worked correctly and took everyone to the right floors. These tasks were generally very simple to allow for a single Porygon to manage many of a single task at once. It worked out quite well for the most part; a Porygon only ever malfunctioned under specific circumstances, both outlandish. Not to say they never glitched... but Porygon spent most of their time in machines, and it wasn’t often that anyone would douse these gadgets in water. (You could say this never happened, actually, and no one would be able to correct you, for it had been really quite a while since the last time anyone spilled anything on a Porygon’s machine. It was beyond everyone’s memory, only briefly mentioned in the instruction manuals left behind.) The only other way that anyone knew to cause a glitch in the system was to physically maim a Porygon, and there was simply no desire to do so on anyone’s parts. They seemed so devoid of emotion, they were even worse conversation than Magnemite and Voltorb. They had personalities, sure, but they just didn’t seem to have any humanity built in, whereas at least Magnemite seemed to feel... something. (It was up for debate how much the machine-like Pokemon actually could relate to those of flesh and blood, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

To Pokemon outside of Steel City, the idea of Porygon was always a bit hard to grasp at first. Most Pokemon who got a temporary passport usually ended up not liking the city very much and moved out after a month or two. This wasn’t always the case, no, but a great deal of Pokemon felt too uneasy with the idea of emotionless machines running the place. It hardly made sense to the residents; there was no reason not to trust the Porygon to function exactly as they had been programmed! And besides, they all listened to Blaine, who was a bit more personable than the rest of them. Blaine was simply a Porygon2, a fantastically updated version of all the others. He had been around and ensuring every single Porygon functioned without error since... well, for centuries now. Blaine was rather intelligent, too. On top of being able to run thousands of tasks at once, he could actually hold multiple (meaningful and helpful!) conversations with Pokemon across the city via an ingrained speaker system. Even if all Porygon were said to have an ‘artificial intelligence,’ there didn’t seem to be anything artificial about Blaine. He was even funny, and liked jokes, puzzles, and riddles; what other ‘artificial’ intelligence could be said to like things? Or seem genuinely delighted at them? And maintenance was easy. He always had multiple networks he could hop into at a moment’s notice and rarely spent time outside of the machines. They weren’t just any machines, but... ones with fancy electronic panels and wiring and whatnot. It was always hard for an outsider to grasp, but that was okay. The engineers in the city had been running things smoothly for ages, always making sure the machines were rebuilt, parts were reinstalled, and Porygon were maintained.

So, it was with incredulity that Jules regarded the message from a student on her receiver.

8388388381919julestramrun19ng pleasestop itgoingwrongway
jules tram is notslowing pleasejules
838

It... aside from the weird numbers, it didn’t really make sense. The trams would not go the wrong way. Blaine knew the schedule. He always had the trams running the right way at the right times, so it was ludicrous to consider anything else. He had been free of errors this morning (and she was always conscientious about running error checks each and every morning across the few dozen Porygon, as well)...

So.. what?

She sent a message back.

Hey Jean, can you please be a bit clearer? Your last message seemed to have some junk in it, and I think probably part of the sentence got messed up.

She hit send, and to her annoyance saw that it had become slightly garbled as well. It had become:

H99y Jean, c/////////clear838er? Your las&&&&&&&message se/ probably99got flglllllll.?./

This would not do. Something was amiss. Was it one of the Porygon? It had to be. One of the messenger Porygon had to be interfering with it. One of the lesser students, maybe, or perhaps a jealous boy--

But before she could finish her thought, her receiver dinged and showed a series of messages. One looked like it was probably from Jean again, but the rest was an error code she had never seen before. Jean’s (supposed) message was too cluttered with extra letters and numbers to read, but the error message was intact enough.

ERROR 99
Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed. Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed. Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed.

It scrolled on further, dinging her several more times. It would be a lie to say she wasn’t slightly perturbed at this point, because she was. However, errors were best dealt with swiftly and calmly. She quickly scurried from the balcony of her workplace back into the dimly lit room and through the door leading to one of the many server rooms throughout the city. This wasn’t the main server, but she would be able to directly access Blaine from here and get control of the malfunctioning Porygon in no time. Maybe then she would be able to see Jean’s message.

She ran to the terminal and talked into the microphone imbedded in one of the blindingly bright screens. “Blaine? You there? What’s going on with that Porygon?”

Silence. Static flickered across the idle screens.
She wondered if perhaps he was already busy dealing with the problem and as such would take a moment in getting back to her. Sometimes that would happen, and he’d be back within seconds, making jokes about how he had thousands of things to finish first. She gave it a few moments.

With each tick of the old-fashioned Pikachu-themed clock on the wall, Jules grew more anxious. A full half minute had passed, and her received had beeped at her several more times with an array of messages that she couldn’t bring herself to check.

Blaine never took this long to respond. Blaine was never this tardy. She tapped on the screen (something she was loathe to do under normal circumstances, and something she would never be caught dead doing in the presence of a student)... to no avail. Her heartbeat started to erupt in her chest, in her head. Something had gone wrong. Or had it? She was entirely unsure. This “error 99” was never mentioned in the manuals. Perhaps someone was playing a horrible trick instead. That wasn’t entirely unlikely, either -- boys had been known to try to pull terrible tricks on Jules. This was just another tick on the long list of reasons for why they were not allowed to work with the Porygon. Why, just look! This was the type of malfunction that could very well happen if a boy had any part in messing with her machines in her city! She was protecting everyone by stopping them from learning the engineering the city required to keep chugging along... It had been good so far, so why the error now? What had gone wrong?

In her panic, the minutes seemed to stretch out a great deal longer, in that funny way Lord Time has of slowing down during terrible moments and horrible disasters. Her tapping on the screen turned to frenzied pounding.

“Blaine? Blaine? BLAINE?!”

Nothing, there was nothing! The screen kept at its idle state, static flashing here and there, until numbers started to pour across the screen. Jules didn’t recognize them at first, until she realized that they were schedules. Schedules for the elevators, buses, platforms... and trams. And trains...

To a normal Pokemon, the problem with the schedule wouldn’t have been very obvious. In fact, most Pokemon might have ignored the schedule as meaningless garbage. Jules might have had she not received a message from Jean. Jules didn’t even believe it possible for Blaine to behave this way until a few minutes prior to the schedules scrolling. This was behavior expected of Patricia, the thing that wasn’t a Porygon or a Porygon2... but not Blaine. Blaine was controlled, predictable, and dependable. Blaine wasn’t full of anomalies like Patricia. But now...

The thing that caught her eye was two 1:39 trams in the DEPARTED category, ones she took quite frequently to and from her workplace. Jean often took the same ones with her, and in fact, Jules would have been on that very same ride had she not stayed behind instead of grabbing lunch elsewhere.

The problem with this was that there was only one tram that departed at 1:39pm. The other, tram 19, crawled along the same path, but at 1:39am. And... Jean’s message...

Jules had to double check the receiver’s text messages. Bile crept along the back of her throat as she reached Jean’s first message, threatening to break out and cause retching, but she managed to hold on for a bit longer.

Among many other things going wrong, two very full, very fast trams were headed right toward each other. Not only that, but if Jules was correct in her calculations, they would meet at a point where there was no real flooring beneath -- so debris would simply shower down upon Pokemon minding their own business below. She was taken by paralysis caused by this revelation. What to even be done? Blaine was simply not responding.

No... there was still something she could do. She hadn’t tried pulling him out yet. If she pulled the plug on him, all the other Porygon would stop their functions. Sure, it would put the city to a halt for a while, but it had to be done. It was the only choice.

She bounded out of the room, a brown blur, confounding a few Pokemon left in the maintenance building during their lunch break. She had to make her way to the main server room in time. There was no other option. This was it.

=====

Part 2 of "Spiritual Malaise" (I wrote this one, marl wrote the prev)
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