Short Story Extract – Driver Not Found

Today, Saturday 11th July, I am attending the Edge-lit convention at the Derby Quad. Among my many activities I will be attending the launch of a new anthology from Boo Books, entitled We Can Improve You. It includes my short story Driver Not Found, an excerpt of which is below.

Another twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds of investigation revealed the anomaly. Last night’s update had erroneously imposed the 3.2.1 driver on his cortical link, which needed 3.2.3. He couldn’t fathom why the download would do such a thing; it was automated direct from Microsoft Neurohub.

Then he caught himself. Of course it was entirely possible that the automatic download was messed up. It was just like the time that it had missed out the version update on his SkyWeb subscription and he’d missed four hours of his favourite sitcom. Then there was the time his location filter had been de-synched and the pizzabot had taken his order to a flat three floors above. Or the time…

He realised that recounting past corporate cock-ups was not going to fix his present situation. All he had to do was rollback the version driver to the last one that had worked. Except, he remembered with a snarl, he had submitted for automatic backup on his downloads after getting bored authorising them every morning when he woke up. There was no rollback driver to install.

Finishing his coffee, Luther tried to work out what he could do. The problem was that he really didn’t have much of a clue about the various implants that were stuffed into his head. He wasn’t a technician, or for that matter much of an educated enthusiast. He’d bought each upgrade and new brain peripheral as they’d come out, just like everybody else. He wished he had paid more attention and at least completed the tutorials.

If anything but the receiver had gone wrong he could have manually reinstalled the data from off the neurohub, but without a connection that was impossible. It was the same thing with hooking up to a helpdesk: no signal, no contact.

The more he thought about it, the angrier Luther became. Of all the things he had hoped to do on his day off, mucking about with his synware was the last. He’d envisaged a morning spent channel-surfing and relaxing in his underpants. He’d also planned to dial up Marko and some of his less-employed friends to see if they fancied spending the afternoon in an Omega Wars 3 group-sesh. Now he was going to spend ages sorting out this mess.

Resisting the urge to hurl his coffee mug across the room, Luther tried to link with his synmail again. It didn’t work. Whatever the solution was, it wasn’t going to be sitting here and hoping the problem might fix itself.

He would have to go out.