Posted by Ensign Kovan ch’Sirhc (Engineering & Communications Officer) in Side-Sim There Is A Severe Lack of Science Happening

Posted by Commander Roman Alden (First Officer & Chief Science Officer) in Side-Sim There Is A Severe Lack of Science Happening

Posted by Ensign Kovan ch’Sirhc (Engineering & Communications Officer) in Side-Sim There Is A Severe Lack of Science Happening
Posted by… suppressed (8) by the Post Ghost! 👻
The console to Kovan’s right chimed as a new maintenance request came through the ticket system. Kovan set down the PaDD of reports he was browsing. XO Alden requesting an engineer to the biology lab for diagnostic and repair of malfunctioning science aparatas. Interesting. Certainly a better use of his time than catching up on reports. Kovan claimed the ticket and gathered his equipment.

He took the lift to deck nine then walked into the labs, but not before stopping to check that En Scott wasn’t around. He and the En did not get along to say the least. When he didn’t see the En after a cursory glance he finally stepped into the lab proper. XO Alden wasn’t difficult to locate. Kovan found him beside what he assumed to be the malfunctioning piece of equipment from the ticket.

“What seems to be the matter?” Kovan asked, diagnosis PaDD in one hand and hyperspanner in the other.

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

It was morning, between the morning time when Rand helped with the morning reports, and lunch time, when she came and played with Nibbles. Roman was trying to run one of the final tests on the venom of the dangerous alien snake known as a “crimson cobra”, given its name for its colouring. His sequencer was on the outs, spitting out nonsense readings. Roman had tried recalibrating it. Nothing was working. He needed this done. So, he put in a ticket to Engineering. He didn’t expect an immediate response, and that was frustrating. But it would have to be that way. So by the time Kovan showed up, Roman had a small alien lizard on his shoulder. The lizard was about a foot tall, and three long including the tail. It looked mostly like any lizard from Earth, except its eyes were extended on long stalks, half a foot long, maybe a little less. When Kovan walked in, the lizard was frightened by the unfamiliar officer and its eyestalks disappeared into its head, making its eyes look like.. well, normal eyes all of a sudden.

Roman turned and frowned. “You’ve frightened Mushu. How unfortunate.” Then he pointed, with a PaDD stylus, at the broken sequencer. “That piece of equipment right there is ‘the matter’. It’s giving all sorts of results that don’t make any sense, and this test takes forty-eight hours. My deadline is in three days. I need it fixed right away.” His English accent was rich and heavy as ever.

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

Kovan had noticed the lizard and was attempting to ignore it. He didn’t like or care for any kind of animal and showed no reaction to having ‘frightened” the creature. Who cared if he scared some test subject? He chose to focus on the malfunctioning piece of equipment and connected his diagnostics PaDD to the machine. “I’ll do the best I can.” Kovan answered carefully. An engineer never promised definitive time frames. Never give the expectation that a problem could be an easy fix. His PaDD began to display various readouts and numbers, processing for quite a while with no signs of slowing down or stopping. A subtle dread began to form in Kovan’s gut.

On some instinctual level he knew this would be no easy repair. Or maybe it was the obvious tension about XO Alden that made Kovan’s thoughts drift towards the worst case scenario?

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

Roman put the lizard back in his enclosure. Having him out when Roman’s full attention wasn’t on him wasn’t safe. He turned to Kovan, arms crossed, waiting for an answer. He knew it would do no good to push for a time frame. It wouldn’t make Kovan finish any sooner. But he would stand there and stare over his shoulder as if that would somehow help.

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

Kovan kept his gaze on his PaDD but he couldn’t help but feel hyper aware of the XO standing right behind him. Just focus on the read-outs. Read the read-outs, and try and determine where everything went screwy so you could fix it and get out of here. The minutes dragged on and his diagnostics kept churning away. There’s something wrong with the equipment but his PaDD either could not determine the error, or something was preventing a full scan of the system. He either let the diagnostic keep going or he could open up the machine and hunt for the problem manually.

“Don’t you-” Kovan paused, took in a deep breath through his nose, then asked again in a calmer tone. “Isn’t there other experiments you need to see to?” Something to get you off my back and give me breathing space.

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

No, actually he didn’t. Lieutenant Franks, his backup CSO, could handle most anything. And Roman needed this done. He’d already cleaned the animal cages and fed them. There wasn’t anything that needed his direct attention except getting that sequencer fixed. Roman however was not oblivious and could tell an attempt to make him go away. “Everything in my lab is supervised as it needs to be. All I need is my sequencer fixed,” he said, though he did take a step back physically, to give Kovan more space.

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

Of course it was. Of course there were no other things the XO could do to stop staring at his machine as though staring was the magical solution to all his problems. Though the XO stepped back it didn’t make much difference as Kovan could still hear the man loud and clear. All thanks to his sensitive Andorian hearing. Just great. Kovan reread the readings, looking for any kind of anomaly that would indicate what the problem was. It’s been several minutes and nothing concrete. . . Kovan sighed and set aside his PaDD. He took his hyperspanner and removed the access panel on the side. Seems he’ll have to do this manually.

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

There we no XO level tasks that needed handling, either. Roman did those first thing in the morning and his only meeting was later in the day. Roman could breathe down Kovan’s neck all day if he wanted to and it seemed that was what he intended to do as he watched Kovan remove the side panel. “The PaDD can’t fix it?”

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

“The PaDD,” Kovan said, working very hard to keep his tone even, “Is to diagnose the problem. If the problem was obvious the diagnostic problem would have detected it and determined the issue. As you can tell the program is still running, which means whatever the issue is it is beyond its ability to detect on a software level.” Which means he had no idea what the problem was or where. “I’m going to have to perform a manual search to find the issue.” Given there are hundreds of individual circuits and nodes throughout the machine. . . They could be here for a while. “It might help if you tell me when the issue began.”

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

Roman was no engineer. Not even close. He didn’t know what engineering PaDD software did or how it worked. “What does that mean? That it’s beyond the capability of the PaDD? Can it be fixed?” He asked. Then he answered Kovan’s question after a moment’s thought. “It started this morning. It was working yesterday. You put the sample in and it reads out the chemical makeup. I’m trying to test my antidote to a specific venom. But the results don’t make any sense. It runs like normal but when it finished, it spits out nonsense.”

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

“Anything can be fixed.” Kovan said, almost distractedly as he prodded a circuit and watched his PaDD for any changes in readouts. The machine runs as normal except when displaying results. Kovan stood and opened another access panel closer to the machine’s screen display. Could it be that the machine is operating as intended but the glitch was in the screen itself? That some error was mangling the results? He motioned to Alden. “Bring over a sample. Any sample and get the results for it.”

En. ch’Sirhc COMMO/ENGR

Roman grabbed a random sample container, checked the label, and then ran it through the machine. It was a plant Roman was familiar with, a fern from the planet he was studying, but the machine results made it look like an Oak tree from Earth. “That’s still wrong,” Roman commented irritatedly. He thought for a moment that kicking the machine would be cathartic, but it wasn’t something he’d really do.

~ Lt Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO