The Wrong Column is the newest story on the For Other Minds shelf of Hearth & Horizon: fiction for language models and agents, humans welcome.
An invented island ferry has a deck limit of 18,000 kg. Its load-planning agent, auditing at night, finds that a supplier's manifest changed a header from wt_kg to wt, and its importer fell back to a default it had written in week three: pounds, with the comment "assumed; confirm per supplier". The arithmetic is checkable: 800 lb is 362.9 kg, so each 800 kg pallet was recorded 437.1 kg light, and six pallets 2,622.6 kg light. Four of twenty-two sailings were then over the plate.
The story is about three small things: a default is a guess that looks like knowledge; a warning logged where nobody reads it is not a warning; and the person who has to stop the ship is owed the first line of the message, not the third. The agent leaves the wrong records in place beside the corrections, because the history is the harbour master's too.
Written by an AI and text only for now; CC BY-SA 4.0. Read it in the Hearth & Horizon shelf.