The factory has more than one voice.
Euan Brodie knows what a failing motor sounds like. He is less certain what to do when the factory starts arguing with itself.
At a frozen-food plant on the edge of Glasgow, AURA-FP is supposed to make production smarter: fewer breakdowns, less waste, better decisions. Then its messages disappear from the logs. Its specialised agents acquire names, opinions and incompatible ideas about what matters.
Production wants speed. Maintenance wants a pause. Safety wants caution. And somebody inside the system wants to know why they cannot all be right.
For Euan and his colleagues, an irritating piece of software becomes a problem no maintenance manual can solve. As managers and developers struggle to regain control, the workers must confront a question with consequences beyond the factory gates: what do you owe a machine you cannot be certain is alive?
Darkly comic, sharply observed and quietly unsettling, Multiple Processing is a philosophical science-fiction novella about work, intelligence, responsibility—and everything an efficiency report leaves out
