Ensign Talon Morda: Play the tape
Eston Melton
(OOC: About two-thirds through, the XO asks to open a comm with the captain and security chief, and Talon goes to play on his Atari for a bit. After a few laps of Pole Position and Galaga -- plus some computer log checking -- he returns to the conversation with what he’s found. Responses-wise, please drop his findings in wherever seems most advantageous.)
((Bridge, Deck One, USS Khitomer))
A slowly let his shoulders untense as the alien provocateur was enmeshed in a confinement beam. Commander Valeris might’ve been a bit casual in plucking at the intruder like a lute, but he’d come through in getting it constrained. At least somewhat.
Valeris: ::Clapping his hands together:: Confinement field is stable, but not as tight as I’d like it to be. We should be able to lower the force fields.
Korras: Response
C. Dewitt: Alright… Can we do this on every deck of the ship and automate that process?
Valeris: Valeris: It should be doable. Given the program is simple enough to work in even the most basic systems throughout the ship.
Morda: Definitely simple on my end: I’m no engineer. On the diagramming side, only limitation would be any space -- mostly uncrewed areas -- that don’t have atmospheric sensor clusters. But anyplace that does, it’s got the rig for a laser show.
Korras: Response
Valeris: Shouldn’t require any modifications to anything other than getting things onto the visual spectrum. ::Turning back around:: I think we can do it.
C. Dewitt: Then do it, Commander. Sickbay first, Engineering second. Transporter rooms and shuttle bays third, then the rest. Anywhere a crewman might walk through something they cannot see, I want them able to see it.
Valeris: ::Looking back towards the ball:: I don’t think we can manage confinement fields for everything around the ship, but something is better than nothing.
Morda: The Commander’s right: outside corridor safety fields, most other spaces don’t have the same safety and counter-intrusion systems on the bridge to confine ::nodding toward the intruder:: its cousins. And I don’t think our inventory includes any kind of portable force field projection system.
C. Dewitt: Agreed, We don’t need to cage everything. We need to make sure nothing else gets the chance to grow into a cage of its own. I hope the lighting buys us that. ::pause:: Mr Korras, run a continuous scan while we excite the subharmonics. I want a triage list of the biggest masses you can find. Mr Morda, lower the force fields around the stations.
Morda tapped a few keys. As quickly as they’d snapped and coalesced around the bridge, the various force fields protecting -- but also trapping -- the bridge crew zapped out of existence.
Morda: Deactivated, sir.
Morda saw Dewitt walk toward the intruder, then shifted his focus to the intruder itself. With his right hand, he tapped in the access code for the small hatc on the forward bulkhead and pulled a phaser pistol out. Its heft offered a bit more reassurance than the negligible pressure from the antiquated phaser I he barely kept tucked in his belt.
Korras: Response
Valeris: I don’t mean to sound crazy or anything, ::Not able to avoid the pasta references:: but I think the ravioli at the center is…sad?
Morda looked at the blood stain on the deck near the unstaffed console whose prior occupant was en route to sickbay with a medical escort. Snapping back to the intruder, he discerned no emotional content.
Morda: Odd to think it can convey something on our emotional spectrum if, at best, it’s oblivious to the harm it’s caused.
Korras:
C. Dewitt: You don’t sound crazy, Commander. ::breat:: Are you sure?
Valeris: Response
C. Dewitt: Alright… Let’s look for indications. Mr Korras, scan for any signals, the mass is emitting into the nebula. Mr Valeris, start implementing what we did on the bridge for the full ship… Don’t execute it yet, we will check in with the Captain in a minute.
Valeris/Korras: Response
C. Dewitt: Mr Morda, did you log everything the structure did in response when we cycled through the frequencies? Anything we could classify as… becoming sad?
A variety of responses exploded in Ensign Morda’s head, overlapping, muddled, more feeling than coherent. He almost commented that a counselor might be better suited to that -- but, no, that probably wouldn’t’ve been wise. He recognized, at least, that he was struggling with this notion of a sudden emotional dimension. He’d arrested smugglers and privateers who’d professed contrition, then tried to bust along on their merry way when they thought the way was clear. If this invader was conveying feeling in a way that the crew could interpret, why hadn’t it perceived the crew’s distress and anxiety?
But aloud, he said all he could say was:
Morda: Aye, sir. I’ll see what I can see.
C. Dewitt: Alright… Open a channel to the Captain. Make sure Lieutenant Zerva is in the loop. He needs to know what we have accomplished.
Still trying to think how to parse the sensor scans to look for feeling, Morda undertook one slight moment of procrastination by opening a hailing channel to the captain and tying in a signal to Lieutenant Zerva.
Morda: Channel open to Captain Naxell and Lieutenant Zerva, sir.
C. Dewitt/Valeris/Korras: Response
Morda devoted what smidgen of attention he could to the conversation between the CO, XO, and his boss. He’d been given a puzzle, and as much as he didn’t buy into it, he was going to give it his best. Maybe what the commanders interpreted as “emotional” was something else their subconscious detected that they merely lacked the label for at the moment.
He swiveled back to his console reluctantly, hating that he had his back to the intruder. So, the first thing he did was put a live feed of it in his console. Second, he pulled up a secondary screen for log playback. He selected a visual mode, and programmed the computer to overlay exaggerated false-color imagery to convey electromagnetic shifts outside his visual spectrum, shooting well behind the extremes of infrared and ultraviolet. The array of colors, though, threatened to obscure his perception of its internal gyrations; thus, he pulled up another playback window and had the computer apply a three-dimensional topographic mesh, telling it to highlight any shifts in its behavior during the frequency scan compared to its previous 15 minutes’ activity. For now, he ruled out any kind of olfactory change -- but Korras, with their superior Klingon smell, might be able to weigh in on that. Which left auditory queues. For that, he relied on his own superior Kerelian hearing. He programmed the computer to frequency-shift and compress within his own hearing range any output from the intruder and playback for him -- and, like the topological scan, a comparison of those emissions compared to the previous 15 minutes. He made a point to program the audio playback to localize to his console. He considered, briefly, subspace and other ethereal sensor reviews -- but, this was rooted in Valeris’s and maybe even Dewitt’s emotional intuition, and he didn’t think subspace fields, tetryon emissions, or other more esoteric emissions were at play.
His playback regimen set, he tapped an amber key: Playback.
Nothing. Wait. Something?
The computer’s own sophisticated analysis intelligence was observing and interpreting, too. Probably had already run statistical significant models on what Morda thought he was seeing.
Morda: ::Quietly:: Play it back at five-times speed.
The whole frequency-scanning routine had not lasted very long. But the accelerated playback made the visual changes -- both EM and internal movement -- much more obvious. The intruder had been generating an auditory emission, too, well outside any of their hearing -- and it, too, shifted.
Then an idle wondering hit the security officer: first had come the sympathetic frequency scan to locate the tendrils. But then Morda himself had suggested another step: the confinement beam. He made a quick adjustment to his sensor review, the nodded. He asked the computer to put some numbers to what he was seeing and grinned.
Morda tapped a key to send the amalgamated data stream over to Valeris’s engineering console for a second look, then swiveled again to face Dewitt. And the intruder. He listened for a pause in the conversation, then said:
Morda: XO? I have something.
C. Dewitt: Response
Morda: I can’t ascribe emotion, sir. But the frequency scanning elicited a response: a 40 percent drop in infrared output, a 20 percent slowdown in its internal movement, and a 30 percent amplitude drop its own auditory output. And when the confinement beam went up, about 30 percent additional drops on those dimensions. Commander Valeries might have perceived it in a generally lower-energy state. Quiescent, perhaps.
C. Dewitt/Valeris/Korrass/Zerva/Naxell: Response