Glitch in the System: Science Fiction

He would wonder for the rest of his life how he had possibly slipped by. A glitch in the system, he'd thought at first, but by the time he was an old man and wise in ways that he could never have imagined back then, he suspected that it had been deliberate. Whether it was a necessary balancing or the intelligence's need to add random factors into an equation as a way of making the colony more stable in the long run, he didn't know. For the first while, though, he was convinced that somebody, somewhere, had made a horrible screw-up, and any minute they'd appear to take him back to where he'd come from. Because of this, he'd kept his head as far down as possible and done just enough work to earn him a little praise but--

Inspiration: I was thinking of guidelines and applications and whatnot.
Story Potential: Medium potential. No story spark, but a nice basic setting.
Notes: ...and then it all went horribly wrong....