It wasn't a normal error. It was a deep, arterial crimson. A single line of text appeared, typed in a stark, serif font: PROPOSED REMEDY: DEMOLISH FLOORS 45 THROUGH 49. REBAR DENSITY INSUFFICIENT. ALTERNATIVE: CHANGE SOIL BEARING CAPACITY CLASSIFICATION AT NODE A-1. Thabo stared. Demolish four floors? That was fifty million Rand. Change the soil classification? That was fraud.
Then the screen flashed red.
He deleted the last eight hours of work. He pulled up the original Prokon 2.0, running on an emulator in a dusty corner of his hard drive. The interface was blocky, the commands were DOS-based, and it took four minutes to run the analysis.
"No," he whispered. He zoomed into Zone G-7. The steel ratio was 1.8%. The code required 1.5%. He was well within safety. He was over -engineered.
They had taught the software what pain looked like.
The air in the consulting room smelled of stale coffee and plotted ink. Thabo stared at the screen, the cursor blinking mockingly at him from the corner of the black and white interface. It was 2:00 AM, and the Sandton skyline glittered outside, indifferent to his panic.