The System

Night Shift

Chapter 6: The System

The system was three screens. The system was a keyboard and a mouse and a headset and a phone cradle and a chair and a desk and a building on Poplar Avenue and a network of fiber-optic cables and copper wires and cell towers and radio antennas and satellite links and server rooms and databases and software applications and backup generators and redundant power supplies and the particular engineering that the telecommunications industry had developed over decades to ensure that when a person in Memphis dialed 911, the call would connect, would always connect, would connect at 2 AM on a Tuesday and at noon on a Saturday and during a thunderstorm and during an earthquake and during the failure of any single component of the system because the system was designed to survive failure, was designed with redundancy, was designed with the understanding that the system's failure was not an inconvenience but a death, the death of the person who called and could not connect, the death that the engineering prevented by building the system to hold even when parts of the system broke.

Delia did not think about the engineering. Delia did not think about the fiber-optic cables or the server rooms or the redundant power supplies. Delia thought about the screens. The screens were her eyes. The screens were the city rendered in data, the city translated from the physical world of streets and buildings and people into the digital world of maps and numbers and codes, the translation performed by the system's technology, the technology doing what technology did, which was to convert the analog into the digital, the continuous into the discrete, the living city into the data that the dispatcher could read and interpret and act on.

The center screen was the CAD — Computer-Aided Dispatch. The CAD was the brain. The CAD was the software that received the calls and logged the calls and tracked the calls and assigned the units and recorded the dispositions and stored the narratives and maintained the history, the history of every call that had entered the system, the history that was the city's emergency record, the record measured in incident numbers — sequential numbers that the system generated automatically, each number unique, each number the identifier for a single call, a single emergency, a single moment when a person in Memphis needed help and the system received the need and processed it.

The CAD screen displayed, at any given moment, the active incidents — the calls currently in progress, the calls being worked, the calls that the dispatchers on the floor were managing. Each incident occupied a row on the screen, the row containing the data: incident number, call type (domestic, medical, traffic, fire, burglary, suspicious activity, noise complaint — the taxonomy of urban trouble, the categories that the system used to organize the city's emergencies into the types that determined the response), the address, the time received, the units assigned, the status (dispatched, en route, on scene, cleared), the priority level (Code 1 through Code 3, routine through emergency), and the disposition when the call was resolved (founded, unfounded, arrest, transport, cleared, cancelled — the outcomes that the system recorded, the outcomes that were the call's official ending even when the call's real ending was unknown to the dispatcher who had taken it).

Delia read the CAD the way a pilot read instruments — continuously, peripherally, the reading not a focused study but an ambient monitoring, the eyes scanning the rows without dwelling, the mind processing the data without concentrating, the processing automatic, the data entering the awareness and updating the picture, the picture that was the city's current state of emergency, the state that changed with each new call and each resolved call, the state that the dispatcher maintained in the mind as a living map, a map more fluid than the map on the left screen, a map that included not just the locations but the situations, the officers en route and the ambulances responding and the calls pending and the calls clearing, the entire dynamic of the city's emergency response system captured in the rows of the CAD and processed in the mind of the dispatcher who sat at the console and read the screen and knew, at any given moment, what was happening.

The left screen was the mapping system. The mapping system was the eyes. The map displayed Memphis and Shelby County — the jurisdiction, the territory, the area that the Memphis Emergency Communications Center served, the area rendered in the blue and green and gray of digital cartography, the streets a grid in the center of the city and a web in the suburbs, the Mississippi River a dark curve on the western edge, the jurisdiction boundary a line that separated Memphis from the surrounding municipalities — Bartlett to the north, Germantown and Collierville to the east — the line that determined whether a call was Memphis dispatch's responsibility or another agency's, the line that mattered because in dispatch jurisdiction was not politics but response time, jurisdiction was which units were closest, which units could arrive fastest, which units belonged to the system that the caller had reached.

The map showed the units. The responding units — police, fire, EMS — appeared as icons on the map, the icons color-coded (blue for police, red for fire, green for EMS), the icons moving as the units moved, the movement tracked by the AVL system — Automatic Vehicle Location — the GPS transponders in the vehicles transmitting their positions to the mapping software, the software updating the positions in real time, the icons sliding along the streets of the digital Memphis the way the vehicles moved along the streets of the real Memphis, the digital and the real connected by the satellite signal that traveled from the vehicle to the sky to the server to the screen to Delia's eyes.

She watched the icons move. She watched them the way she watched Jaylen on the playground — with the attention of a person responsible for what she was watching, the attention that was not passive observation but active management, the icons representing not just vehicles but people, officers and paramedics and firefighters who were responding to the calls that Delia had dispatched, the responding the action that the dispatch initiated, the action that was now in progress on the streets of the city while Delia sat at Console 7 and watched the icons move toward the dots that were the addresses, the dots that were the emergencies, the dots that were the people who had called.

The distance between an icon and a dot was the response time. The response time was measured in minutes, the minutes displayed on the map when Delia hovered the cursor over the icon, the minutes the calculation of distance and speed and route, the calculation performed by the mapping software using the traffic data and the road network and the algorithm that determined the fastest path from the vehicle's current location to the call's address. The minutes were the gap — the gap between the call and the help, the gap that the dispatcher filled with the voice, the gap that the caller experienced as waiting and that the dispatcher experienced as staying, staying on the line, staying with the caller, staying with the voice while the icons moved and the minutes counted down and the help approached.

Three minutes. Five minutes. Eight minutes. The minutes varied by the geography and the traffic and the time of day and the availability of units, the availability the variable that the dispatcher managed, the dispatcher tracking which units were available and which were on calls and which were en route and which were clearing, the tracking the mental arithmetic of dispatch, the arithmetic that determined which unit to send and how quickly the unit could arrive and whether the response time was adequate for the emergency's severity, the adequacy a judgment that the protocol informed but that the dispatcher made, the judgment the space between the system's data and the dispatcher's decision, the space that was the human in the system, the human that the system could not replace.

The right screen was the phone system. The phone system was the ears. The phone screen displayed the incoming calls — the queue, the hold times, the connections, the recordings. Every call that entered the system was recorded — every word, every silence, every scream, every whisper, every sound that the phone line carried from the caller to the headset, every sound captured and stored in the recording system, the recording the system's memory, the memory perfect and permanent, the memory that retained what the dispatcher's memory could not, the memory that could be accessed and reviewed and analyzed and used in court and used in training and used in the internal reviews that the department conducted when a call's outcome was questioned, the recording the evidence, the recording the record, the recording the thing that ensured that the dispatcher's words were accountable, that the dispatcher's protocol adherence was verifiable, that the dispatcher's voice was preserved in the system's archive alongside the caller's voice, the two voices recorded together, the conversation stored in the digital memory that did not forget.

Delia was aware of the recording. All dispatchers were aware of the recording — the awareness a constant, a background knowledge that existed in the mind the way the hum of the equipment existed in the room, present but not prominent, acknowledged but not attended to, the awareness not a source of anxiety but a source of discipline, the discipline of knowing that every word was captured, that every instruction was recorded, that the protocol adherence was not just a professional standard but a documented performance, the performance reviewable, the performance accountable.

The awareness did not change the voice. The voice was the voice regardless of the recording — the voice that the training had built and the experience had refined and the callers needed, the voice that was steady and clear and warm and authoritative, the voice that did not perform for the recording but performed for the caller, the caller the audience, the caller the only audience that mattered, the recording a byproduct, the recording the system's business, the caller's needs the dispatcher's business.

Below the screens, beneath the desk, the system extended into the infrastructure that the dispatcher did not see. The ANI/ALI database — Automatic Number Identification and Automatic Location Identification — the database that linked phone numbers to addresses, the database that the system queried when a call connected, the query producing the data that populated the CAD screen before the dispatcher spoke, the data that said: this is the number, this is the location, the data that gave the dispatcher the starting point, the starting point that the first question — "what is the location of your emergency?" — sought to confirm, the question asked even when the data was available because the data was not always accurate, the data was a starting point and not a certainty, the data subject to the limitations of the technology — landlines providing exact addresses, cell phones providing approximate locations, the approximation a circle on the map rather than a dot, the circle the technology's admission that it could locate a cell phone to within a hundred meters but not to a specific apartment or room, the specificity that the caller's voice had to provide, the voice completing what the technology had started.

The radio system. The radio was the dispatch's other voice — not the voice that spoke to the callers but the voice that spoke to the responders, the voice that transmitted the dispatch from the console to the field, the voice that said: go here, do this, the situation is this, the response is this. The radio operated on frequencies assigned to the Memphis emergency services, the frequencies shared by the dispatchers and the officers and the paramedics and the firefighters, the sharing the system's communication backbone, the backbone that connected the console to the car to the scene to the resolution.

Delia used the radio with the economy that dispatch required. The radio was not a conversation — the radio was a system, and the system's grammar was the grammar of dispatch communication, the grammar stripped of articles and pleasantries, the grammar of nouns and numbers and codes, the grammar that communicated the maximum information in the minimum time because the radio was shared and the sharing meant that every second of air time was a second that another dispatcher could not use, the air time a resource, the resource managed by the economy of language, the language of dispatch radio a language so compressed that a civilian listening would hear only fragments — "Unit 214, domestic, 2614 Mallory, Code 2" — the fragments the entire communication, the address and the nature and the priority and the assignment compressed into twelve words, twelve words that sent an officer to a house where a man had hit a woman, twelve words that initiated the response that the call had requested, the twelve words the bridge between the console and the car, between the dispatcher and the officer, between the system and the street.

The system was all of this — the screens and the database and the radio and the recording and the mapping and the CAD and the phone and the infrastructure that connected them, the infrastructure that the engineers had built and the technicians maintained and the administrators funded and the dispatchers operated, the operating the thing, the operating the human function, the operating the thing that the technology could not do for itself, the thing that required a person in a chair with a headset, a person who could read the screens and hear the voice and type the data and make the decision and speak the dispatch and maintain the connection and do all of these things simultaneously, continuously, for eight hours, for twenty shifts a month, for twelve months a year, the person the thing that the system could not automate, the person the irreducible component, the person the voice.

The technology provided the data. The voice provided the humanity. And the space between the data and the humanity — the space between the screen that showed the address and the voice that spoke to the person at the address — the space was where the dispatcher lived, where the dispatcher worked, where the dispatch happened. The space was the console. The space was Delia at Console 7 with her three screens and her headset and her keyboard and her voice, the voice the thing that filled the space, the voice the thing that connected the technology to the person, the system to the caller, the data to the life.

The system did not care. The system was technology and technology did not care — technology processed and stored and displayed and transmitted and connected, but technology did not care about the person on the other end of the call, did not care whether the caller lived or died, did not care whether the response arrived in time, did not care about the blood or the fear or the loneliness or the child choking or the man on the bridge or the woman whispering. The system processed all of it with the same efficiency, the same indifference, the same computational neutrality that was the system's design, the design that was necessary because caring would have been a flaw, caring would have introduced bias, caring would have slowed the processing, and the processing could not slow because the processing was the response and the response was the life and the life depended on the processing's speed and the processing's speed depended on the processing's indifference.

The caring was Delia's job. The caring was the thing that the system outsourced to the person in the chair, the person who read the screens and heard the voices and who cared — who cared not because the protocol required caring (the protocol required questions and codes and dispatches, the protocol did not require caring) but because the person was a person and the person on the other end of the headset was a person and the connection between two people was the caring, the caring the thing that traveled through the phone line alongside the words, the caring the warmth beneath the steadiness, the empathy beneath the protocol, the human beneath the system.

The system provided the infrastructure of rescue. Delia provided the voice of rescue. And the rescue — the actual rescue, the help arriving at the address, the paramedics entering the house, the officers securing the scene — the rescue was the product of both, the product of the system and the voice, the technology and the humanity, the screens and the person who read them, the infrastructure and the person who operated it.

The operating was the space. The space between the technology and the humanity. The space that Delia occupied at Console 7, night after night, shift after shift, the space that was her workspace and her world and her particular contribution to the city's emergency response, the contribution of a person who could do the thing that the system could not, the thing that no amount of technology could replicate, the thing that was: listening. Hearing. Speaking. Caring. Being the voice.

The system hummed. The screens glowed. The map displayed the city. The CAD listed the calls. The phone queue waited.

And Delia sat at Console 7, in the space between the system and the city, in the space where the data became the voice and the voice became the help and the help became the thing that the system existed to provide.

The phone beeped. The double tone.

Delia pressed the key.

"Memphis 911, what is the location of your emergency?"

The system connected the call. Delia connected to the person. The connection was the thing. The connection was the system's purpose and the dispatcher's function and the caller's need, the connection that the fiber-optic cables carried and the cell towers transmitted and the headset delivered and the voice sustained, the connection that was technology and humanity, infrastructure and person, system and voice.

The voice said the words. The system carried the words. The caller heard the words.

Help is coming.

The system and the voice. The voice and the person. The person and the city.

The connection held.