Page 28 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

The Golem of NASA

Gabe Solomon’s expert system had been set in motion only
four days earlier. It had been difficult for him to contain his
excitement at the prospect of secretly, silently striking a blow for the
Zionist cause. Nobody could ever be told about the golem, and now
nobody could stop it undiscovered. But Gabe as yet had no intention
of stopping his avenging angel: first he had to verify the existence of
a bug in his algorithms.
He entered the command:

target(n)=khazak?

And the golem replied:

TARGET(2)=KHAZAK,MORDECAI

Gabe’s fingers froze on the keyboard. Something had gone
terribly wrong. Khazak was a major figure in Israeli politics, a
super-patriot with loyal followers in the army, the Knesset, and
the immigrant Sephardic and Russian Jewish population. In times
of military crisis, the government could be expected to turn to
him for decisive guidance and leadership. He could have been
the nation’s savior, the man on the white horse. And now he was
a chess piece removed from the board forever, eradicated by a
programming error. But where was the mistake? Gabe invoked his
diagnostic tool, often used during his testing of the golem’s
analytical processes:

target=khazak why?

Seconds passed palpably as data arrived from disparate
sources, passed through the inference engine, and translated into a
man-readable format. Like any digital evaluator, the golem assigned
points in various categories to individuals under consideration; the
relative weight of those points had been fine-tuned by Solomon,
based on his understanding of the dangers threatening Jewish survival
in the modern world. A publicly anti-Semitic Arab head of state
might score higher than a little-known terrorist because the latter’s
potential for mischief was limited by the weapons at his disposal—
which, in turn, were graded according to their destructive potential.

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