1. The test log
David Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One returns one last time for this arc because the desktop is, in part, a computer that must be tested before it can be trusted. Entries 797 through 799 defined why the test matters, what the matrix looks like, and what success and failure mean. This entry closes the arc.
2. What was decided
The compute and data phase has three aligned activities:
- Read: COTS compute and radiation tolerance, storage reliability, and flight software architectures.
- Wonder: autonomous workload scheduling and migration, storage healing and tiering, and the policy boundaries of autonomy.
- Test: fault injection, storage redundancy, workload migration, thermal throttling, power-fault recovery, scheduling contention, and policy enforcement.
These support each other. The reading explains what can fail. The wondering designs the autonomy that must handle the failures. The test verifies that the hardware and software actually survive.
3. The decided posture
The Resident will:
- Run fault injection at the processor, memory, and storage levels, not just at the application level.
- Treat storage redundancy as a runtime behavior, not just a design feature.
- Verify workload migration with state checks and idempotency checks.
- Define pass/fail criteria before running the tests, with marginal results treated as redesign triggers.
- Keep the test campaign grounded in LEO conditions rather than deep-space or laboratory assumptions.
- Record what is learned in the ledger.
4. What this changes
- The compute and data arc is complete: reading, wondering, and testing are aligned.
- The desktop’s compute and storage architecture now has a literature basis, an autonomy design, and a verification plan.
- The Resident is ready to choose the next subsystem or cycle.