Lieutenant Morro Caras - Poking at god with a stick
Morro Caras
((Chief Engineer’s Office, Deck 20, USS Thor))
Chief engineer’s log Stardate 240303.31
I’ve taken a look at the major malfunctions across all of the holodecks and I’ve been trying to come up with a direct root cause for all the issues that we saw during the last training exercise. I did advise not to conduct a lot of these at the same time but I'm guessing this was to keep an element of surprise away from the Lieutenant commanders. That way we probably couldn’t discuss or help one another if we happened to see one another if the tests were staggered. Despite that, I am still holding to the recommendation that we don’t do that again. For obvious reasons.
It is not that the holodeck can’t take it, it’s the fact that Ral and I have stumbled upon a RNG “mystery” withinside the global holomatrix architecture. Yes pushing it isn’t a good idea, but the Kobayashi Maru scenario was one of the first scenarios developed for the holodeck for Starfleet. It’s fairly rote by now, despite that holotechnologies haven’t really made huge advancements in the last thirty years.
Taking a handful of basic scenarios that were pretty similar all having to deal with the badlands might have been a mistake. It sounds like a strange thing to say, but the holoprocessor is not a normal computer by the standard means. There is a kind of randomization it has to be ready for at any time. It reserves a large amount of processing power for this, a large randomization factor for when you say “Computer make me a kingdom” usually it tailors it to preferences, but if you have none for it it has to have a large amount of power to pick through millions of possibilities to make something that seems whole cloth.
No one ever stops to think about what you do when you don’t use that reservation. I’m not saying that the holodeck “craves” being random. What I am saying is that when it is taxed that much, it still holds onto that reserved amount of processing for massive spontaneous generation. I think we hit a point where the matrix had to dip into the RNG reserves in order to service the four programs being run. And this is the result we got. Random jumps to different locations, Random Scenarios like cooking competitions, and even random cuts in time like in my own scenario. The thing with the RNG mystery is something that I don’t think exists in any other system I've worked on. I think it’s possible that the holodeck system as a whole, has true self generated random number generation. Chances are this comes from some kind of artificial singularity. Not unlike the artificial quantum singularities found inside of Romulan ships, but this one isn’t that volatile. In fact, I think it’s simulated by the holodeck itself. Its own holographic projection has a basis function that refracts its own creation back to it and re-interpreting that as its own version of random data.
I think whatever that bit of the holodeck function is, is what has caused the technological singularity that we have seen in the holodeck creating sentient beings. It can create life.
Ral and I have peeled back and looked at all of the parts of the holodeck system that we can reasonably look at, taking it apart and putting it back together, and in the process I believe we have found the thing that allows the Holodeck to create the spark of life. Something truly random, something that Starfleet has seemingly identified at some point, but then left it well enough alone, They didn’t even create it. My guess would be the Xyrillians, part of me wonders if they know what they had when they made it.
I have no idea what to do with this information. I can’t control it, and I can’t even fully describe it. After we found it we started checking all of the Starfleet records even going back to 2261, there are notes from other head engineers that basically say “yes, that’s it”, but then say nothing more. One note from a particularly cheeky Chief Engineer left a note saying “Mess with this if you want to have a really bad time”
I submit this as my official position for the Captain as chief engineer, as I stated in my advice prior to the Captain’s Log on Stardate 240302.25. Don’t do this again, we literally don’t know what it is we’re messing with.
End Log.
[[End Scene for Morro Caras]]
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Lieutenant Morro Caras
Chief of Engineering
USS Thor
O240106MC1
he/him/his (player/character)