[The following was scratched out in my notebook at a Chinese
restaurant downtown this evening. As is generally the case with my
fiction, it could really use editing to make the words more clearly
communicate the complicated images in my mind. Tips are welcome --
from grammar critique to scientific mythbusting]
His eyes
heavy, Andrew struggled to complete the configuration he'd been working
on for -- oh, he couldn't remember how long, but it should have been
done ages ago. Streams of characters torrented across the screen,
looking like Greek to his blurring vision. He reached for a half-empty
cup of cold coffee, only to miss, spilling a container of DocChips all
over the floor.

At first the tiny electronic capsules landed like pebbles on the hard
ground. After a few seconds, however, each button-sized square emitted
a pert little chirp, which signified the activation of thousands of its
nanoscopic hairs, used for locomotion. Slowly at first but with
increasing order each chip sought out a companion. They clustered,
chirped excitedly at any stragglers, and finally clambered on top of
eachother. The finished display yielded three neat towers of chips,
tweeting like a nest of baby robins separated from their mother.

Andrew watched the miniature acrobatics dispassionately, with his
forhead pressed against the desk. One of the chips seemed disoriented
from the rest, despite their friendly cries, and wandered about in
wide, frantic circles. Andrew reached down to retrieve the quivering
pile of office supplies, and took the whole city of them -- which had
stopped screaming upon detecting recovery -- over to pick up the
rogue. It climbed on board with the rest, but as the hand of God
lifted them all to safe keeping, disaster: A sharp prick caused
Andrew's hand to twitch, sending the whole population screaming in
dismay as they plummeted through thin air.

He chuckled passively. Pop culture regularly capitalized on hyperbolic
images of "death by DocChip," when a swarm of activated DocChips,
searching frantically for paper to clip together, mistake a human for
meeting minutes and pierce him with a million tiny needles. Nobody was
genuinely afraid of them, however, as the little switch that activates
a DocChip's paper-seeker is only seldom pressed on accident, and never
en masse, and furthermore they can be deactivated by voice.

"Pfft," Andrew smirked, "dumber than a doorknob." A hundred small
black flakes were purring contently in a neat stack on his desk before
the irony hit him. Dumber than a doorknob? The computer in his
apartment door could have not only completed, double-checked, and
executed the system configuration he was working on by now, but it
would also have written, artsied-up, dramatized and delivered a
presentation to Dr. Thiery summarizing the procedure and its results.

"Andrew!" Jolted from what he was sure couldn't have been sleept, a
wave of dread shivered down his spine. "No I haven't," he mumbled in
hopes of curbing the oncoming tyrade by being blunt. Dr. Thiery asked
anyway. "Are you done? Can you give me a demo?"
"No, I haven't," Andrew repeated himself.
"Why not?" said the scientist, who hardly cared to hear details.
"It's this blasted Percy algorithm. I've tried a dozen different flag
parameters, and checked the documentation a zillion times, but it's
just broken!" A pause ensued as the manager glared at him.
"This is despicable!" grunted Thiery in a snide rumble, "teach em to put trust in an intern for gopher work!"
I don't even see why we do this anyway," Andrew mused angrily, rendered
belligerent by two nights without sleep. "The Ci's could have it done
in seconds!"
"And so could an intelligent grad student," Thiery shot back,
exasperated with his upstart pupil for daring to discuss politics when
there was so little time. "You *must* focus, Andrew! We only have two
hours left until the signal arrives, and the chiefs expect these
results yesterday!"

Andrew sighed, and zoned out sleepily for the next two minutes while
his supervisor -- who normally scared the hell out of him -- told him
in no uncertain terms what a terrible technician his student had turned
out to be. Andrews' head dropped apathetically. He heard something
about how he would be fired if the mission weren't so close, how his
GRE scores were too high for someone of such low intelligence, etc,
etc. nothing he hadn't heard last time Dr. Thiery laid on last-minute
pressure.

Too tired to fight despair, Andrew found himself musing half-aloud,
albeit eclipsed by Thiery's ranting. "You know, he's right" he
whispered, "first word from the Markians in eighty years and we're
going to miss the transmission. Not because some council chairman
thought it was 'too important' to let the Ci's record it. Not because
of an interstellar EM burst. But because I'm an idiot that can't even
handle a Percy transform." With that, he stomped out the door of the
lab.

"Where you going!" belted Thiery, who'd been cut off in mid sentence.
"To get my doorknob!" Andrew yelled without turning around.
[SigmaX]
PS: It may have been deja vu from something I've read
about computational intelligence, or coincidence, but apparently
there's a real "Percy algorithm."