a message from the Master Control Program?

I've been going thru all the non-novel Hugo nominees, some of which I loaded on my Nook. Tonight, I was reading the last story's PDF, but I had to stop because the Nook kept freezing at the same point - the illustration of a virtual monkey in Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". I was going to read it off my laptop instead when my BlackBerry issued an alert message - one of our system's jobs had failed, and it's one that never failed.