The Good Regulator, Part One
Fictionalization of a Mathematical Proof. 700 words, 2 minute read. With ChatGPT.
The alarm didn’t beep; it shrieked, a metallic banshee ricocheting through the DSS Kelvin. Dr Mira Lawson pelted down the corridor, slipping on a sudden rain of condensation that fogged her goggles. A junior tech staggered out of a side hatch, palm blister-red where scalding steam had kissed him. The ship—a steel lung two miles under the Pacific—was cooking itself by coin toss.
In Control, sensor graphs juddered like seismographs in an earthquake.
SEAWATER 4 °C ←→ CABIN 49 °C
R-25 POLICY: Heat 64 % ‖ Vent 36 %
Jo, drenched in sweat, kept one hand on the manual override. “It vents when the water chills, then reheats because the vent cooled us. We’re yo-yoing ourselves to death!”
Mira studied the numbers. They didn’t just fluctuate; they dithered, unable to choose a story. “Entropy run rampant,” she muttered, and the ship groaned as if to agree.
She opened the regulator’s source code. Every seawater spike branched into weighted probabilities, a forest of shaky maybes. R-25 doesn’t know the ocean; it’s guessing. She copied the file to her tablet and sprinted for the one table wide enough to spread schematics: the mess.
Steam haloed the overhead lights; the mess hall smelled of soy protein and burnt insulation. Mira laid out a whiteboard, sketching two curves: erratic cabin temperatures in red, the smooth line they needed in blue. She labeled the gap UNCERTAINTY COST.
Vivian Park entered, high heels clicking like a metronome. Even her panic was pressed and tailored. “Engineering logs show you tampering with certified control software.”
Mira didn’t look up. “Certified to kill us at random, yes.”
“Redundancy saves ships,” Park said, arms folding into a corporate wall.
Mira snapped a dry-erase cap so hard it pinged across the galley. “Redundancy without understanding is junk ballast. The Good Regulator Theorem—”
“I don’t brief the board with theorems. I brief them with liabilities.”
Mira pointed the marker at the tech nursing his burn just outside the hatch. “There’s your liability. R-25 flips a coin every five seconds because it likes options. A good regulator is a mirror—it shows the system what it already is, then adjusts. No guessing.”
For once, Park’s polished calm cracked; her gaze darted to the injured tech, to the temperature still inching upward. She tapped Mira’s tablet. “Show me the mirror.”
Lines of code scrolled—probabilities collapsing into certainties:
makefile
CopyEdit
IF seawater_temp > 8 °C: cool = 1
ELSE: heat = 1
# no other branchesNo wiggle room, no noise. Park’s shoulders dropped a millimetre, as though some internal switch hardened from maybe to must. “Two minutes. Then we audit.”
Mira allowed herself a half-smile. Good regulator, meet good manager, she thought. Even people, it seemed, behave better when they model the situation instead of hedging.
Upload. Execute.
Fans roared to synchronized life, a single chord replacing the previous cacophony. Hot air sluiced into coolant labyrinths; frost-cold brine hissed through exchangers. The cabin temperature graph carved a clean, downward slope, settled at 22 °C—then levelled, ruler-straight.
Jo’s jaw hung open. “Flat as a prairie highway.”
Mira’s muscles finally registered exhaustion, trembling as adrenaline drained away. That tremor served as her only confession of fear.
Park watched the steady line, then glanced at her own reflection in a stainless panel, as though testing the mirror metaphor. “Outcome entropy: negligible,” she said. The ice in her voice thawed by a degree. “Doctor, remind me of the theorem’s wording?”
“Every good regulator of a system,” Mira recited, “must be a model of that system.”
Park nodded slowly. “And every bad regulator?”
Mira swept an arm toward the silent alarms, the unblistered steel, the unboiled crew. “You just met one.”
They listened: no klaxon, only the steady hum of machinery that finally understood itself. The injured tech limped past, bandaged but smiling at the cool air. Mira inhaled; the ship exhaled—two lungs, human and metal, in rhythm.
Outside, two miles of blue-black gravity pressed in, indifferent. Inside, the Kelvin’s heartbeat settled into metronomic calm.
The scene held, perfectly balanced—
and stopped, exactly where a good regulator should.