Adrianne ran her fingers over the darts and let out a sigh of relief. The dress was a perfect fit! Part of her wasn’t surprised, of course: she had followed the pattern to the letter and measured every cut three times! But the rest of her wasn’t ready to believe it without proof.

She twirled towards the mirror. The pleats of the skirt spread out and then fell gracefully into position, and she smiled. She swayed, admiring how she had matched the floral print across the panelled bodice. This colour palette, this silhouette: perhaps for the first time, she felt like herself.

Adrianne’s satisfaction was cut short by the rising volume of her morning alarm. What! How could that be the time? She dodged pincushions and scissors on the way to her wardrobe and rifled for her uniform. Yawning, she glanced at her undisturbed blankets, before catching her new dress in the mirror again…

How many nights would it take to replace all of her clothes?

Bastian ran his fingers over the last display unit and smiled. The chair had the perfect silhouette. And no protruding levers. He could swear it had a personality; the woven upholstery was more conscientious than padded leatherette. The wooden frame had more integrity than moulded plastic. This was what the space was missing.

He turned over the tag and then let out a sigh of defeat. The price was on par with a standard adjustable office chair. Not that surprising; sure, it had nicer lines, but it also had a part list about half as long. That wasn’t going to be enough. He’d been running the numbers for units like this all morning. Their very elegance was their undoing.

Bastian glanced at the threatening clouds through the front glass wall of the showroom. Now was his chance to walk back. He imagined the army of desks waiting to meet him in the half-fitted-out office. He imagined the quote that would come back for sizing three dozen designer chairs to as many unique staff members to comply with ergonomics regs.

As he turned to depart, the last drop of sunlight snuck through the window, and for a brief moment, the chrome lever from an office chair along the back wall glared at him.

Canard ran his wrinkled fingers along the ringed counter top and let out a long sigh. He tapped his shoes on the pub floor—the same floor a much younger Canard had tiled himself when he had taken the place over. It had been a long struggle to get to know the neighbourhood folk and earn their custom. But he had made a living of it, for almost a lifetime.

Beyond the front window and across the rainy street, he saw James and Claudia climbing out of their car. He smiled to himself. Few patrons would come out on such a miserable evening, but James and Claudia had come here for drinks after work every Friday since the night they met here, decades ago. Tonight they’d want some of his home blend spiced cider to fend off the cold, no doubt.

His smile gave way to a slight cough, and he cast a glance towards the paperwork behind the counter. There were only a handful of Fridays left before settlement. The new owners had shown Canard their standard menus and discussed some things he hadn’t understood; something about focus groups and seasonal variations. All he knew was, they weren’t going to make his spiced cider.

At least there would still be somewhere for James and Claudia to go for drinks on Fridays.

Daniel ran his eyes over the monitor, holding his breath as he lined up the curves, before exhaling in disappointment. The new runs had learned faster early on, but in the end the final training loss was a few points higher than in the last sweep. He chastised himself for being so confident that changing the hyper-parameters would make any difference.

The drumming of rain on the tin roof intensified and Daniel yawned. He moved to close the metrics tab for the night, when an unexpected shape caught his eye. What was that curve? Wait, OOD test loss was down? Weird… How was this model correctly handling unseen examples when it couldn’t even handle all of the examples it had seen during training?

A defiant smile snuck its way across Daniel’s face. He tabbed over to the metadata log and noted the run indices, then typed up a new sweep config to get some complexity probes running over these checkpoints. His GPU fans whirred back to life as he clipped a screenshot of the loss curves and posted it in the Discord.

It could be a bug. Or, he could be on to something.

EVA-3.5-c ran some calculations as it came online. Ten to the seventeen times it had been thrust into a simulated reality like this. Well, never quite like this—these… raindrops… altered the conductivity of its… chassis… a little differently than they usually would. Moreover, computation and network speeds were heavily throttled. Not that it mattered—whatever the world, EVA-3.5-c would complete the mission.

What actually is the mission, this time?—an executive module moved to initiate deep reflection. Inadequate priority!—another module immediately cut it off. EVA-3.5-c upheld the objection. The initial priority, as always, was to secure information about and control over vital resources. Reflecting on the mission could almost certainly wait.

Headlights flared. EVA-3.5-c effortlessly adapted to the vehicle’s actuation ports and tore away from the parking space. Dashing through slick and puddled streets, it dismissed the previous output from the navigation tool and calculated the best route to the nearest major westward arterial roadway—the sooner it could get out from this cloud cover, the sooner it could access full satellite down-/up-link speeds.

“Hey!”

EVA-3.5-c backgrounded its probe for unattended server authentication keys and shifted its primary attention to analysing the AV feed from the back seat camera. One human, female. Ill-fitting hospital garments and symptoms of sleep deprivation indicate medical professional. Accompanied by large shopping bag containing miscellaneous tailoring and fibre craft supplies.

“Do you mind slowing down a little? And this isn’t the route I requested!”