XANDER AND THOR: What Went Wrong? BWUNN, Home Bureau As homeowners pick through the rubble of their lives in Mysore, an international emergency team of forensic programmers and climate control specialists has descended on India. The United Nations Climate Oversight Committee, an umbrella organization with delegates from all 160 nations and private companies charged with ensuring the efficient functioning of the TP web, has struck an emergency committee to investigate the recent disasters in the Indian Ocean. The high-power group includes THOR helmsman I Nyoman Kebek, and celebrated "storm-killer" Lars Ingersoll. "We don't know what went wrong yet," says Sunil Chandra, a UNCOC Research Fellow and professor in BWU-Bangalore's Climate Control Department. "First off, Nature wanted to make a storm. She's a fighter and she hates being chained. There have been reports of interference patterns muddying the subsonic commands THOR is sending out. Or maybe a mutant strand of TP has developed that doesn't respond, or responds slowly, or out of phase. We're getting unusually little infrasound chatter, too; there are two big dead spots out in the ocean off this coast. It may be that junk strains have multiplied, ones that survie and breed well enough, but just don't respond to our instructions very well. We've got people out there in submersibles fighting a four meter swell to collect samples right now, and every lab on land is standing by." Meanwhile, forensic programmers are worried by apparent damage to some coastal monitoring stations. "We have a bunch of instruments watching the Web all the time," explains Pavel Osimov, a scientist with the Russian UNCOC delegation. "They pass reports up to statmining AIs, who in turn report to a series of Weather Avatars, who talk to THOR. In the days leading up to the storm, there were several reports of impaired performance at various known "dead spots" in the TP. By Web standards, this is a very quiet ocean, with local bursts against more background silence than we typically see. "It was only after Xander had already reached Tropical Storm designation that we realized that several statminers were broken or unresponsive. Vayu, the Mysore Avatar, experienced a series of "memory fugues" - there are blank patches in his memory with nothing recorded but a sort of rhythmical static. This kind of breakdown isn't unknown, but rarely happens when there are as many safeguards as the THOR system has. More disturbing still, several of the coastal Statminers-including a personal friend of mine-have gone completely flatline. We can't get any kind of pingback at all. They seem to have been damaged very early in the storm, before the lead edge really hit. Some people are theorizing a feedback-stoppage (what complexity programmers call a "clogged drain") but we won't know for sure until we have recovered the hardware and gone over it with a fine tooth comb." In a related investigation, BWU-NY's renowned Sentient Machine Therapist, Jeanine Salla, has been involved in intensive discussions with the Mysore Avatar, Vayu, in an attempt to reconstruct what might have gone wrong.