Posted by Lieutenant Commander Faye Calloway (Counter-Intelligence Officer) in Wedding Bells- An End and a Beginning

Posted by Captain Alexander Cochrane (Commanding Officer) in Wedding Bells- An End and a Beginning

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Faye Calloway (Counter-Intelligence Officer) in Wedding Bells- An End and a Beginning
Posted by… suppressed (7) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

Halstead smiled slightly and moved the door at the back of the room. As it slid open, there was a noticeable pressure change and the two women stepped through the door and into…

Nothing.

That is to say, nothing that could have been expected. The room was stark white and broken up into two meter by two meter squares by thin gold lines from floor to ceiling. There was no equipment, no consoles, no material interfaces anywhere. Instead, in the center of the room, was a bright blue hologram of a large sphere with a constantly shifting surface. Three people stood around the display and when the door opened, one of them turned to look. She was a human woman with bright blue eyes and warm smile… Dr. Octaviana Drulae, PhD and Star Fleet Captain. She held a PaDD to her chest and walked over to Faye and Halstead.

“Commander Calloway, a pleasure to meet you finally. Allow me to congratulate you on a most fascinating accomplishment. An almost real-time cross quadrant .communications relay is quite an achievement. And even more fascinating is how you managed to pin down Daggum. I thought the man was immune to female charms… kudos, Commander. And congratulations.” sge said with a grin.

Drulae

Faye couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s hard to say whose charms were the stronger ones there,” she said with a shrug. “But thank you! He’s a great person and I’m looking forward to seeing what trouble we can get ourselves into in life.”

Stepping forward, her eyes taking in the sphere, Faye tilted her head as if she could peer through the hologram. “As for my relay system, I was hardly the only one working on it”-she threw Drulae a smirk over her shoulder-“but the project made exponential strides when they brought me into it.” Yes, she could take the compliment and pat her own back. It was a major accomplishment! And it had taken her going through hell and back in order to see how excellent she was. She could let herself bask in some praise for awhile because at the end of the day Faye knew she didn’t have an overbearing ego that would get her into trouble. No, plenty else could but not her ego.

“Now, what can you tell me about what I’m looking at?” Faye said, a thread of excitement weaving through her words.

~Faye Calloway

Drulae moved next to her and looked at the shifting sphere with a sense of pride. “That? Oh… thats just the entirety of the Federation database compressed to a quantum singularity. We have entangled every bit of data at the quantum level, and introduced a pervasive RI - Redundant Intelligence- that calculates relationships between data points and entangles them in a quantum lock. So you no longer look for data points… you look for and request relationships between points. You ask for the date of the Protestant Reformation, and you get the date… along with a codex of related searches and data points.” and she looked at Faye.

Faye’s brows rose as she took in the sphere. And it was now that she began to understand how her own work might have contributed to this accomplishment. Redundancies within hierarchical reference systems. Compressed data streams. Yep, she could see the roots here, but this was next level, beyond anything she could have imagined.

“Pretty neat, uh?” and she grinned.

Drulae

“Magnificent,” Faye said with all the awe she felt.

Hands akimbo, she circled the sphere, her mind exploding with tangents, threads upon threads of ideas, hypotheses, and understandings. “How much of a pain in the ass was it to reconcile any referential errors? In something like this, the errors would have been cascading.”

~Faye Calloway, Fascinated Bride-to-Be

Drulae smiled and said “We have you to thank for that. In your white paper on data irregularities in sub-space communication distortions, you said that data errors could be seen as a king of communication in and of themselves. Recognizing errors and reverse engineering them shows were preliminary ideas and builds failed, so it is way of the past communicating with the future. We hit on that, and ran with it. So what you see…” and she looked up at the sphere and then tapped a small dot of red, ‘… is an error in relationship between two points. The RI doesn’t have the ability to reconcile those, so we fix the problem at this point and…” and she tapped a few commands on her PaDD. Suddenly, the red dot spiderwebbed out dozens if not hundreds of lines turning back and forth in right angles. When the lines reached a blue spot, it would turn purple and then slowly fade into blue again.

“If the errors could be cascading, we thought the solution could be as well. So when you fix one relationship, the RI repairs all entangled points as well. And to ensure that the repair is not an error itself, the RI runs a million calculations per point and if the success rate is 95% or higher successful, the repair goes through. If not, the repair is stopped before it starts and the ‘bug’ sent for investigation to our staff. It then falls to us to research and investigate the correct solution.”

Drulae

Her lips parted as she took in the totality of what she was seeing, and she was speechless. But Drulae and Halstead couldn’t know what was going on in her head, could they? Did they even begin to understand? Ignoring what the hologram actually was, the image before her was no less than a representation of her brain in all it weird and wonderful glory. Tangents upon tangents weaving paths, crossing, colliding until new understanding was found. Showing people a screen of rapidly scrolling code had bene her one way to demonstrate how her mind worked, but this, this complicated, beautiful hologram was the first time she saw herself reflected in anything.

And then she understood. How many time had both Daggum and Alex told they cared for her, not in spite of her oddities and challenges, but because of them. That they made her who she was, and that that was special and remarkable. It wasn’t that she couldn’t believe them, but that she had never had a reference for it. A way through to understanding.

But here she was, Lieutenant Faye Calloway (decorated officer, command trainee, and gifted data manipulator) and she was gazing upon a magnificent feat of science and data engineering that her work, her mind inspired. So as she shifted her gaze to Drulae and Halstead, there were unexpected tears shining , but she wasn’t embarrassed by them. Not this time. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who cries at how beautiful that is?” Faye said, cracking a grin.

~Faye Calloway, Stunned Bride

Drulae smiled and took Faye’s hand in hers. “Every. Damn. Day.” and she squeezed the hand and let go while saying “Daggum thought that you would appreciate this more than anyone. And since you are partially responsible for this, he wanted you to see it. And I was happy to oblige. I swear, between your brilliance in data and his in logistics? The two of you have done more for this project than any four of us. We wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for your work providing new perspectives… and we wouldn’t be here if that giant logistics genius hadn’t procured some very delicate and very hard to find equipment. I mean, I was on a two year wait for emitters for the interface and I mentioned it to him in passing. A week later they were sitting on our workbench! If I didn’t know better, I’d think he had stolen them.” and she laughed.

Drulae

“Better not to ask,” Faye deadpanned. The squeeze of her hand had been strangely comforting and it was that feeling of being seen by someone who truly knew the depths of your own intellectual prowess. If people from before could only see her now! She flicked her gaze back to the sphere. “I’m glad my crazy ass experiments have been useful. I…” She looked back to Drulae suddenly lost for words and suddenly was taken back to an underground space with a wise elderly Romulan who seemed to also see her.

---

“One does not need a reason to show kindness, Faye. Have you never had a moment where you felt compelled to do something nice for others because you can?”

Faye felt immediately defensive, but after calming that sensation, she looked back into his eyes. “My life has not exactly been one of altruism…”

“But?”

“You use the words ‘nice’ and ‘kind’, but can’t a necessary act be kind one even if it’s not an overtly warmth inducing one?”

Lansait smiled deeply. “Tell me more.”

Pushing the lentil-type things around on her plate, she gave the question its due consideration. “When I was a teenager, my parents were Maquis. And we fought as needed to defend our home. I believed in our cause. It made sense to me, because I cared about the people around me. They were family, friends. My community. So… does fighting for something you believe in, with those you care about, does that count?”

He folded his arms on the table, letting the top take his weight while he took in the woman before him who in comparative age was but a child. And yet, she clearly was not young and naive. There was no innocence present in those eyes. “It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what you think.”

She laughed. “Mnaes! That’s such a cop out!” Faye leaned forward, her brows raised. “I wanted to know what you in all your lifetime of wisdom believes.”

Though he didn’t outright laugh, Lansait was clearly amused. “I believe that community can be a source of connection, and connection begets kindness. You did things for those you cared about because it mattered to you if something happened to them. That shows you where your moral compass lay. Kindness seems simpler but it’s a much deeper thing Faye. I do believe you are capable of it, and I suspect you may even be showing it in your own unique way when you least expect it.”

---

This felt like shades of the same thing. Necessary actions that spurred something wonderful and better. Science was all about building on what had come before and for Faye she had resigned herself to being a footnote at best. But here were people who appreciated her work and showing her just how much. It was overwhelming. And that overwhelm might have been a problem except for the fact that she was just so damn happy. It wasn’t that the distance couldn’t take over in happy times but it was very unlikely.

Blowing out a breath, she realized she had just trailed off. “Best damn wedding present,” she said, looking at the sphere. She tossed Drulae a smirk. “I’m not sure mine is quite as… life changing, but we don’t keep score, so I think I’m fine.”

“Thank you for letting me see this. I really hope you’ll keep in touch and let me know how things go.” She frowned slightly. “If you’re allowed that is. Though I have crazy ass security clearance these days, and I was allowed here in the first place.”

~Faye Calloway

“Funny uou should ask…” Drulae said with a knowing grin as she walked away, leaving Halstead and Faye alone for a moment. Halstead looked at her and shrugged. “Commander… maybe now you can see why I was just so damn excited to meet you before! Dr. Drulae has talked about your work for months, and to finally get to meet the person that she is impressed by? I mean, c’mon Ma’am. You’re kind of a big deal in here.”

Faye just looked a little stunned at Halstead. “And that is bizarreto me,” she said shaking her head. There was still a part of her that just couldn’t quite comprehend it all. Even now when she was not just confident in her skills, but proud of them. Still she flushed, dropping her gaze, not use to such enthusiastic admiration from perfect strangers.

Drulae came back carrying a white case about the size of a standard Away Team communications pack. “I was hoping to ask if you would be interested in field testing this for us? Its a remote sub node to the database here. Both are quantum entangled… but there is a mutli-phasic suppressor installed that only allows the two nodes to communicate when it is deactivated. You can input data and use any 8nformation the mainframe has when the two are connected, and when they aren’t you can use the device as your own mainframe, but the information contained will not be the most currant version. Everything will synch when the two connect again. We were hoping you could use it as a kind of cryptologic system prototype. If you can make it work for you, we could move into full field testing in a year or two.” And she smiled.

No. Way! Her eyes widened even as they took on an excited gleam.

“So, Commander? Want to be our guinea pig?” and she chuckled.

Drulae and Halstead

“Oh… Captain, I think you might be my new best friend!” Faye rested the side of her hand beside her mouth. “Just don’t tell Captain Cochrane,” she said with a wink.

Holding out her hands, Calloway was positively vibrating with energy. “Come to mama,” she said before shifting her gaze back to Drulae. “Any limitations up front? Otherwise you know I’m going throw everything I can and I can’t promise what that looks like.”

~Faye Calloway, Happiest Data Geek in the Galaxy

“By all means… break it if you can. That will help us determine stress and capability limits. And make sure that only you have access to the device, Commander. This is strictly Fleet R&D, and no one has access save for the research team.” Drulae then smiled and said “Now… you have three hours in here, Commander.” and she gestured to the holographic interface. “Lets see what you’ve got.”

Drulae