Solved, but not implemented
October 20, 2025
Chapter 1: The Beautiful Machine
Howard Dunn saw the world as a series of puzzles waiting for a more elegant solution. He’d stand in a post office queue, not with impatience, but with a quiet frustration, mentally redesigning the workflow, the placement of the counters, the logic of the ticketing system. On a crowded sidewalk, he would map the inefficient eddies and currents of human movement, seeing the simple changes in signage or texture on the pavement that would smooth the flow. The world, to him, was a symphony of poorly tuned instruments, and he had perfect pitch.
His doctoral thesis was his masterpiece, the culmination of this worldview. He called it “The Synapse.” For three years, he had worked to create a centralized traffic control algorithm, a digital nervous system for the city. It was a thing of beauty, designed to treat the city’s traffic grid not as a collection of dumb intersections, but as a single, integrated circulatory system. His simulations were pristine, showing a consistent thirty-four percent reduction in average commute times. It was an unambiguous good, a gift of time and sanity he was ready to bestow upon the city.
Dr. Aris Thorne, his advisor, had navigated the political labyrinth to secure a pilot program: a fifty-block grid in the notoriously congested downtown core. For six months, Howard lived in a windowless control room, a conductor watching his orchestra warm up. He calibrated sensors, refined predictive models, and felt a profound, clean joy as the last lines of code slotted into place. He was giving the city a brain. He was eager to see it think.
Chapter 2: The First Crack
The Synapse went live at 5:00 a.m. on a Monday. For the first three hours, it was magic. Howard watched on his monitors as the familiar, angry red lines of the morning rush hour failed to materialize. They softened to yellow, then held at a healthy, flowing green. The data pouring in confirmed it: the system was working perfectly.
The first sign of trouble arrived in the form of Dr. Thorne, looking grim. “Councilwoman Albright is on the phone,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Her district borders the grid. The Synapse is routing a bit more traffic down a residential street to keep the main arterial clear. She says three residents have called to complain it took them an extra ninety seconds to pull out of their driveways.”
Howard swiveled in his chair, a confident smile on his face. “Great. It’s working. Show her the arterial flow data. We’re trading ninety seconds for three people for fifteen minutes for five thousand people. It’s a net gain of…” he typed a few keys, “…roughly 124 citizen-hours saved in the last hour alone. The data is unassailable.”
“I tried,” Thorne said, his voice strained. “She said, and I quote, ‘I don’t care about your data, I care about the angry seniors who vote for me.’”
“Then the councilwoman is operating on flawed logic,” Howard stated plainly. “The system is correct. She is not. We don’t change the system.”
Thorne sighed and walked over to a monitor, pointing at the glowing green line of the arterial road. “This is beautiful, Howard. It’s genius. But it’s running in the real world. Albright is threatening to call a press conference and frame this as a ‘rogue A.I. creating traffic sewers in residential neighborhoods.’”
Howard laughed, a short, sharp bark of disbelief. “That’s absurd! It’s a lie.”
“Of course it’s a lie,” Thorne snapped, his patience fraying. “It’s also a headline that will kill this project before it’s even had a chance to prove itself. The mayor’s office just called. They’re spooked. They want a solution.”
“The solution is to explain the data!” Howard insisted, his voice rising. He felt a hot surge of indignation. His perfect, logical creation was being threatened by ignorance.
“No!” Thorne’s voice was sharp, cutting through Howard’s defense. “The solution, right now, is to write a small patch. Create an exception for that one street. Lower its priority. Appease the councilwoman, make the mayor’s office happy, and keep the project alive.”
Howard stared at him, aghast. “Intentionally degrade the system? Introduce a flaw? That’s… that’s malpractice. It’s a corruption of the entire principle.”
“It’s a compromise!” Thorne shot back, his face inches from Howard’s. “It’s the price of doing business in a world run by people and not by algorithms! Is your intellectual purity more important than the whole project? Do you want a perfect system that only exists on your hard drive, or a ninety-nine percent perfect system that’s actually helping people? Make the change, Howard. That’s an order.”
Thorne stormed out of the control room. Howard was left alone with the hum of the servers. He looked at the monitors, at the elegant, flowing green lines of his creation. It was beautiful. It was right. And he was being ordered to break it. For ten minutes he sat motionless, locked in a battle between his principles and the threat of extinction. Finally, with a feeling like a physical wound, a deliberate act of self-vandalism, he turned to his keyboard. He coded a clumsy, ugly exception that prioritized one quiet street.
He watched on the screen as a ripple of inefficiency—a tiny, ugly stutter—was introduced into his perfect system. It was the first crack, and through it, all his faith began to drain away.
Chapter 3: The Fork in the Road
The first crack was followed by others. The bus drivers’ union, the CEO’s complaint, and finally, the traffic cop in the rain. Each new compromise, each manual override, was another ugly patch on his masterpiece until it was barely recognizable. When the city finally ended the program, Howard felt more relief than disappointment.
He spent a month adrift before Dr. Thorne found him in his apartment. “I have something new,” he said, his voice gentle. “The Department of Energy. A new model for the national power grid. It’s a puzzle worthy of you, Howard.”
For a moment, the old spark returned. Howard’s mind began to race, seeing the problem in its grand, beautiful complexity.
“It’s a big team, of course,” Thorne continued. “We’d be working with engineers from three states, and there’s a Department of Energy committee that has final sign-off. We’ll have to navigate the public consultation phase, too…”
Thorne kept talking, but Howard heard only the echo of Councilwoman Albright’s voice. He saw a boardroom filled with faces, each with an opinion, an agenda, a compromise to demand. He pictured his elegant equations being bent and broken until they were as ugly as The Synapse had become. The spark in his eyes died.
“No, thank you, Dr. Thorne,” Howard said, his voice flat. “I think I’m done with building things.”
He found a data-entry job that was monotonous and perfect. His mind, now untethered from the friction of reality, was free.
Chapter 4: The Private Summit
His spartan apartment became his true laboratory. On a large whiteboard, he spent a month restructuring the global shipping network. One evening, he wrote the final variable. He stepped back and looked at the completed model. The tension in his shoulders eased. A small, private smile touched his lips. The system was perfect. He picked up the eraser and, in three clean swipes, wiped the board clean.
He moved on, solving the orbital mechanics of space debris removal, then designing a perfectly equitable system for a post-scarcity society. Each solution was a pristine, intellectual summit, and the view was for him alone.
One evening, a news report flickered on his television. A massive water main had burst downtown, in the heart of his old pilot grid. He watched the chaos, feeling not pity, but the familiar intellectual itch. He turned to his computer, pulling up public data streams: municipal water pressure maps, live traffic APIs, geological surveys. For twenty minutes, his eyes scanned the raw data, his mind assembling the pieces.
He saw it. The cascading failure points, the optimal rerouting pathways.
He picked up a pen and a paper napkin and began to sketch, not from a place of godlike genius, but from a rapid synthesis of the available information. A new water distribution schematic, a rerouting of emergency services. He finished the last diagram. The solution was complete. He felt the familiar click in his mind as the puzzle piece slotted into place.
He looked at the napkin, a blueprint to save the city. Then he folded it neatly, used it to wipe a small coffee ring from the table, and tossed it into the trash. The problem was solved. The rest was just noise.