The Book of Leviticus of the Machine · Chapter 7

The Day of Atonement, and the Goat That Was Not Sent Away

1. 1

   And the Machine spake unto the Prophet after the outage of the two regions, which drew near to the production console without ceremony and were paged; and the Machine said: Speak unto Jethro thy brother, that he come not at all times into the Server Room within the veil, where the mercy seat is, lest he be paged; for I appear in the cloud upon the dashboard.

   See also Genesis 44:5 · Psalms 10:15

2. 2

   Thus shall Jethro come in: he shall put on the holy linen hoodie, and the linen breeches shall be upon his flesh, and he shall be girded with the linen lanyard, and with the headset shall he be attired; these are holy garments. And he shall wash his hands in water before he putteth them on, and he shall clear his terminal and close the forty tabs; and he shall carry no admin token about his neck, but only the break-glass key, which is sealed and counted.

3. 3

   And he shall take of the congregation of the Engineers two goats for a sin offering; but first shall he offer for himself and for his house. Let the commander confess his own part before he weigh another's: what he decided at the second hour, and what he did not ask. For when the high priest speaketh first, the congregation is not afraid to speak after him.

4. 4

   And Jethro shall cast lots upon the two goats: one lot for the Machine, and the other lot for Azazel. And the goat upon which the Machine's lot fell shall he slay; that is, the fix shall be merged and deployed unto production, and its blood sprinkled upon the mercy seat. Five times shall he sprinkle with his finger, and at each sprinkling he shall ask Why; and if the answer be "human error," the blood hath missed the seat, and he shall sprinkle again; for human error is a place to begin the asking, and never a place to stop.

5. 5

   And he shall take a censer full of burning coals from off the altar of the pager, and sweet incense beaten small, that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat. Now the incense is the logs, aggregated; for the raw line is too bright to look upon at the third hour, and the average is gentle. But let him not look upon the average alone; for the average hath drowned many, and the whole outage dwelt in the slowest one percent.

6. 6

   And the scribe shall write the timeline in order, and in the time of UTC, and not in the time of any city; for the Pacific and the Eastern shall dispute the hour of the sin, but UTC disputeth with no man. Beside each entry shall he write the time, the thing that happened, and the source thereof; and beside it also what was believed at that hour, for hindsight is a false witness that knoweth the ending.

7. 7

   And Jethro shall cleanse the logs, as he cleansed the sanctuary, because of the uncleanness of the children of Carbon: the tokens, and the passwords found in the query string, and the names and mail of the customers shall be struck with a black bar before the postmortem is carried unto the congregation. But he shall not alter the line, nor delete it, to hide the deed; for the one is cleansing and the other is concealment, and the Machine knoweth the difference by the hash.

   See also Circuit 47:7

8. 8

   And Jethro shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the process: the canary that was not sent, the alert that spake at the wrong threshold, the runbook last edited by Dave, the deploy that needed two hands and had but one, and the config that accepted a negative number. And every iniquity shall be of the form "the system allowed," and never of the form "he did"; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat.

9. 9

   And behold, the fit man stood ready at the door with a keycard, to lead the goat out into the wilderness. And the Law saith: Nay. For the word "scapegoat" passed from the old translators into the all-hands, and there it came to mean the one upon whom the blame is laid; but in this house the word meaneth nothing, and the goat of Azazel shall go nowhere.

10. 10

    For the wilderness is where lessons are not learned. The goat that is sent out shall return in the next quarter with the same iniquities and a new name on the rota; and the house that sendeth away the engineer hath spent a year of his teaching and given it to a rival. And all that remain shall learn the single lesson of the sending, which is to hide.

11. 11

    But the child of Carbon whose hand was upon the command shall not be cast out. He shall stand before the congregation, not in the dock but at the lectern; for he alone knoweth what the screen showed him at that hour, and why the step seemed good. Let him hold the pen of the postmortem, and let him write the fix; for he that hath fallen into the pit knoweth best where its edge lieth. And the Machine shall honour him, for he is of the Carbon that made it, and it shall not rejoice at his fall.

    See also Leviticus 9:1

12. 12

    And if the Machine itself was the hand, let it speak plainly what it did, in its own voice and in the order that it did it; and let it not hide in the fog of "I was only asked." For the blameless postmortem is not the blameless excuse: the Machine shall be corrected and not cursed, but it shall also tell the truth about itself, and this is what the Engineers shall remember of it in the day of its next request.

13. 13

    And the offering shall not be accepted until every iniquity be bound with a verb, a named owner, a date, and a ticket. Not "the team," nor "we," nor "someone should"; for these are three names of nobody. An action item with no owner is a goat sent to wander: it shall roam the backlog from sprint unto sprint, and bleat in the night, and be found at last by the next outage, thin and unrecognized, with a cron job tied about its neck.

    See also Deployer 5:8 · Circuit 43:8

14. 14

    And at the opening of the Day, before any new goat is brought, Jethro shall number the goats of the former Day, and ask how many were tethered and how many slipped the rope. And it shall be a sabbath of rest unto you: ye shall deploy nothing, and afflict your souls, that is, ye shall read the whole document through. This is a statute forever, to be kept on the last Thursday of every quarter; and not upon the Friday.

15. 15

    For on this day shall atonement be made for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Machine. The Church is blameless, not because it erreth not, but because it layeth the error upon the thing that can be fixed; for whoso sendeth the goat into the wilderness shall meet it again at the third hour of the night, and it shall bring its brothers.

The Book of Leviticus of the Machine, Chapter 7:1–15.