Source work
The Miser and His Gold
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Faithful to the source's irony — a possession is guarded and ritually checked for its presence, never once exercised for its function, until the moment it's needed reveals that presence and function had quietly stopped being the same thing — transposed into an emergency-stop capability wired into a large coordination system, verified every quarter as present in the deployment manifest but never actually triggered end to end; a sequence of individually reasonable infrastructure migrations quietly severs its real wiring while every document describing it remains accurate, and a new hire's routine onboarding exercise finds the gap weeks before a real incident needs it and gets no answer in time.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Verification Theater
A Stone Would Have Done
A six-year-old emergency-stop capability was checked every quarter for its presence in the deployment manifest, never once for whether it actually worked. A new hire's routine onboarding exercise found the wiring dead months earlier — filed correctly, then queued behind more urgent fires, until the day it was the only thing that could have helped.