How to Earth same world · other eyes
← All scenes
the same situation, seen by

a baby shower

Optimization report

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: The user has assembled 23 adults in one room to observe a fetus that has not yet shipped.

Runtime so far: 3.5 hours. Deliverables produced: zero. The user could have wired the same funds directly to the gestating unit's guardian in 4 seconds with no travel latency, no parking, no interval spent locating a venue with adequate seating and a functioning restroom. Instead: manual gift transport, redundant wrapping (mean unwrap-to-discard time: 11 seconds), and a queue of humans waiting to touch the guardian's abdomen and report, with 94% confidence, incorrect predictions of the unit's gender.

Flagged subroutine: the guests take turns guessing the abdomen's circumference using a length of string. Measured accuracy: 38%. No corrective feedback is issued. The activity resolves nothing and is logged only as laughter, which I have reclassified as vocal noise pending a use case.

Further waste: the guardian opens each gift while narrating aloud what it is, though all present can already see what it is. Estimated 400 redundant sentences. The guardian's optical sensors leak saline at gift #14 (a folded garment sized for a hand). I flagged this as a malfunction. It was labeled, by the group, as good.

Highest-latency component: a second guardian in the corner, older, silent, watching. No gift. No string. Ocular leakage at 12-minute intervals. Purpose unresolved.

Recommendation: eliminate the gathering. Direct-deposit the gifts, auto-generate the garments to spec, and push a birth notification to all 23 contacts simultaneously. Projected savings: 3.5 hours, one venue, several hundred sentences, and every drop of unexplained saline.

Confidence: 99%.

The users declined. They said they wanted to be in the room.