“The shift was coming to an end. Herman sat in a transparent egg-shaped cabin and watched the luminous scale along which a thin red strip lazily moved. From time to time she began to twitch, trying to jump out of the safe zone. This is where the operator was supposed to intervene - by pressing the necessary buttons, he had to restore the balance of the process. But what process? Herman, despite all his learning, could only guess about this. The giant automatic line, being reconfigured, produced hundreds of different types of products. What to produce at the moment? This was decided by a supercomputer that knew the market conditions down to the last detail. He was never wrong - so was it worth the operators bothering themselves with other people’s problems?..”