Remember landlines? – Chap. 6, Act 4, Strip 101

Having made quick work of the obstacle in front of the entrance, the Professor has made it into the mecha-kaiju control room. Unfortunately, this is the precise moment when some past sins catch up with him – back then they seemed minor and readily permissible, but right now they seem decidedly less so.

One of them was his failure to simplify the mecha-kaiju backup controls. Having five separate controls for every actuator made sense during the test and experiment phase, but with the conclusion of that phase he could easily have simplified the controls down to several hundreds of buttons, instead of several tens of thousands. He knew he should do that, but back then he was quite convinced that the backup controls would never end up being needed, anyway, and with so much else to do…

His other past sin was not designing a fatal flaw into the mecha-kaiju. While it is true that including flaws is not currently considered best practice in engineering, but the Professor has enough experience in the specific field of B-movie monster engineering to know that anything that could be considered a ‘monster’, or billed as such, should have a fatal flaw designed into it from the get go, in preparation for the likely event of it turning against you. This goes for robots, mutants, clones, crossbreeds, abominations, you name it. And the Professor had fully intended to, and included it in his task planing…just that, again, there was so much else going on, and it looked like it would never become relevant, anyway, and…

Of course it remains possible…faintly possible, but still…that the mecha-kaiju still harbors some kind of fatal technical flaw, even if it wasn’t designed as such on purpose. But firstly that would require the Professor to have made one of his very, very rare mistakes, and secondly, how would the Professor be able to spot that flaw right now, preoccupied and under time pressure, when he didn’t spot it the first time around?

And then he stumbles across something, to boot. Truly an all-around bad day for the Professor. >_>

More on Thursday.







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