Computer Diagnostic

Posted on 18 Oct 2024 @ 10:49pm by Commander Morgan Tarin & Lieutenant JG Serran & Ensign Mimi

2,873 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 4, Computer Core; Deck 2, Captain's Ready Room
Timeline: MD 02, 1815 hrs

[ON]

Passing through the doorway into the Galileo's primary computer core Mimi put her toolkit down and looked up at the tall device, for a ship that only possessed 8 decks the main computer core climbed through a full quarter of them.

A Level One diagnostic was going to take a very long time, with each component and system being manually checked for faults, functionality, and anything that seemed out of the ordinary.

The conclusion of Serran's rather interesting and revealing conversation with Theo would have to be postponed which was disappointing to the Vulcan, but probably a relief to Theo.

He entered the room just behind his team member.

"Greetings. It is agreeable to meet you," he said. "I apologize that we have not formerly met since I came on board, but I have heard great things about you and your record is exemplary."

"Now though, I believe we should focus on the task at hand. Would you agree?"

Mimi chuckled slightly, the Lieutenant must not have been reading from the same file Tarin was. "Yes, we should. Computer route all ship functions through secondary computer core, primary core into maintenance mode."

The lights coursing around the port side computer core flickered repeatedly before dimming slightly. "Right, where shall we start."

Serran raised his right brow. "I suggest we start with the primary core before we go to the secondary. What would you suggest and tell me a little about your experience in this area."

"I am no computer specialist, the words are long and complicated," Mimi replied. "But I am very good at spotting things that are out of the ordinary."

"That's good to know, give me an example."

Mimi thought for a moment. "My species eyesight is sharper than a humans, on the way to Regula we had a problem with the transporter system. Every part checked out so we decided it had to be somewhere in the coding, I spotted a single digit error in over 5000 lines of code in only a few minutes."

"That is quite impressive," the Vulcan replied. "I hypothesize that it was more than just your eyesight that helped you spot that anomaly."

"Shall we get started?"

"That was just a simple example I could think of," Mimi said as she picked up her toolkit again.

Serran didn't exactly smile, he was after all Vulcan, but the corners of his lips curled up slightly as he began inputting data. "Well, we'll see if your sharp eyes can catch anything here."

Several hours passed in relative quiet only broken by snippets of conversation between the two officers. Systems were checked and rechecked, billions of lines of code examined. Eventually something in the memory banks caught Mimi's attention. "Lieutenant, I think I have something." She called down from halfway up the computer core.

"What is it?" Serran who was on the other side of the room asked.

"It's a partial personal log, there is no audio but the text is mostly still intact 'At one point, they were part of a moon that encircled the world, not unlike the one around Earth. However, those who would come to be called the A'ksu saw that we, as a culture, were descending into chaos.'" Mimi read some of what lines remained in the entry.

The Operations Chief came up and read the text over her shoulder. "What do you make of that?"

"This is a log entry from Commander Warraquim, it is her style." Mimi said after a few seconds of pondering. "and I recognise the name A'ksu from somewhere I am sure, I think she once told me a story about them."

"Normally I would be opposed to looking at someone's personal log, it's an invasion of privacy. But these are unusual circumstances."

"Is there anything in there that would pertain to our investigation?"

Mimi nodded slightly and handed him the Padd. "check the date it is listed as being recorded on."

Serran read through it. It was short and didn't take him long. "This is interesting, and it tells us something important about our Chief Medical Officer, but how does it apply to us or our investigation?"

Mimi took the PADD back zoomed in the display on the stardate and handed it back. "It was recorded on Stardate 94371.1." Mimi unintentionally paused for emphasis. "That is far into the future."

Serran took a closer look and both brows shot up. "Wait. That is extremely strange. There have been reports of anomalies and crew members having strange dreams and false memories. Perhaps they aren't so false after all."

"94371.1 is...." Mimi did some quick maths on the Padd. "around the middle of 2417, 25 years in the future."

"Twenty-five years?"

"That is improbable. We should take this to the Captain, but before we do, let's see if we can discover similar entries from other crew members."

"Improbable it may be," Mimi replied as she turned back to the computer to search for more personal logs from the future. "but we have all heard stories of ships being caught in temporal amomalies, spending months in their little pocket while only a few days have passed outside and things like that."

She hadn't quite got the pronunciation of anomalies right, but he wasn't going to correct her. That would be impolite and wouldn't accomplish anything useful.

"That is true," he acknowledged, which is why this warrants additional investigation and there have been some incidents among the crew, that would support the hypothesis that the Galileo experienced an event of that nature."

"I will run a search for logs dated around that stardate." Mimi typed on the Padd as she talked. It didn't take long before several results emerged. "Here is one from Ensign Turell, 'Well... we're in the future, somehow. Science was never my strong point. The Klingons and Romulans teamed up against us and the federation is all but gone, and to add to all that, every one of us in this future is already dead; I hope I took plenty of Klingons or Romulans with me when I died.'" Mimi stopped reading and slowly took in the last few sentences "Wow..."

"Wow is a correct reaction," Serran replied, though his face remained impassive.

"One log entry might indicate the person was having a psychotic episode. Two, however, especially combined with other rumors and shipboard scuttlebutt suggests a pattern.

"I believe we should take what we know to the Captain."

"You are the department head, you can do the honours." Mimi said, she turned her attention back to the computer core to look for even more proof the Galileo had indeed visited the future.

Serran found an empty PADD atop his desk and loaded the data the Ensign had discovered.

"Come with me Ensign we are going to see the Captain, I want you to confirm the information we've just discovered. After all it wouldn't have been discovered if not for you."

He led the way to the turbolift and waited for her to enter.

"One moment Sir," Mimi said, she'd just found the icing for this particular cake; a log entry from Tarin herself. She quickly loaded it onto her padd then dashed out the door to join Serran in the turbolift

Within a minute the turbolift opened onto deck 2 and Mimi quickly crossed the short distance between the lift and the Captain's ready room and hit the chime. Her tail twitched with anticipation, the next few minutes were going to be interesting.

It was only a short multi-second delay before a reply came through the comm from within the private room. "Enter," acknowledged Tarin's voice after which the single door swished open to reveal the interior of the captain's administrative chamber.

Serran following Terran-based etiquette and manners stepped to the side, indicating with a small sweep of his arm that the Ensign was to proceed him.

"If you would like to make the presentation, that is your prerogative. If not, I will handle it."

"You are the head of the Ops department Sir, I think she would expect the report from you," Mimi replied as just before she stepped into the Captains ready room. "Captain." She greeted Tarin.

Serran stepped in behind his teammate and then to one side, "Captain, we've made an intriguing discovery. I am uncertain whether it answers our questions about the anomalies or only adds to the confusion, but we thought you should be made aware."

The arrival of the two gold-collared operations officers captured the captain's attention. Tarin's observant eyes snapped up from the PADD in her hand to take sight of the Nekomi and Vulcan. "A discovery?" she repeated while setting her administrative device down on the desk with a soft click. She shook her head with mild annoyance at being disturbed. "This better be good news."

Serran's left brow. "I suppose that it would depend on your definition of good, but it is news. It sheds light or helps shed light on the hallucinations the crew has been experiencing. The evidence will show, well perhaps you should just review what we found."

He handed the Captain the PADD "I should point out that it was Ensign Mimi who was the one who made the discovery."

Tarin reached out with a skeptical and cautious hand to take the offered administrative device. She didn't particularly enjoy the suspense of what she was about to read nor the lack of a verbal briefing prefacing said content. However, she'd reserve her judgement for the next 90 seconds until an initial review was complete. And so she started to read and scroll through a quite confusing set of log records she couldn't make sense of. One after the other - seemingly entered by various crew members - a long collection of both duty and personal logs created a fractured and unrecognizable series of events.

"...What is this?" she mumbled while she continued to scroll through the contents. "Where did you find there? Are they from this crew?" They were officially marked and authenticated per standard computer stamps, but what they contained...and the assigned stardates.

"I noticed an oddly high data storage capacity was being used for personal logs." Mimi replied. "There were quite a lot of logs being made in the hours around Stardate 94371. Almost all of the crew made several during the period, almost all of them mentioning the future." Mimi offered Tarin another PADD. "Including you."

The red-collared commander fixated on the slowly-moving words in the small screen. "Captain's Log, Stardate 94371.6. I'm recording this log with the hope it will be preserved for historical review in the event Galileo returns back to its original time period. This starship - along with Praxis - has been pulled into the future through a temporal anomaly, and we now find ourselves in the year 2417. The cause of the temporal anomaly...was the Galileo-B, a future Nova-class vessel from this time period apparently equipped with temporal-generation technology..."

While the Captain was still viewing the PADD, Serran said, "Those entries in combination with the visions many members of the crew have been having would indicate that we were indeed in the future."

"Not only is it the only logical conclusion, there have been reported incidents of time travel throughout Star Fleet history."

It was rare that Tarin was rendered speechless but such an occasion now unfolded while she continued to read the entirety of the entry - her entry, apparently. The verbal dictation style unmistakably belonged to her but even more unsettling was the contents it contained. "Galileo-B..." she whispered.

Serran nodded his head. "It is of course incredibly disconcerting, I too have been dealing with it since we discovered this. Another Galileo is perhaps the least of the anomalies we must deal with."

Once the captain was able to discharge the initial shock of what she'd just read - along with the notion there were more of these supposed logs - she held up a cautionary hand to temper any further immediate conclusions. "This all seems...fantastical," she countered. "Too precise of an explanation and too convenient in conjunction with Vala and Ullswater's hypothesis. Yes, time travel is certainly possible, we can't argue. But has this cache you discovered been vetted? How were they stored without our knowledge, and why - if they're truly from the future - aren't there any computer logs in the database to corroborate them? Navigation and sensor data, medical records, Starfleet uplink downloads?"

"No ma'am they haven't been vetted, but all of them are too real, too much like our personal logs that have been vetted, for them to be planted. That would be illogical, despite the conclusions of the Vulcan High Council.

Still, it makes sense for us to check out the other channels you mentioned. The only one I'm unsure of is Starfleet uplinks and downloads. If Starfleet knew anything about this, they would have said something about it before now. At least to you, if to nobody else."

Tarin shook her head, her shoulder-length brown hair bobbing slightly atop her shoulders. "The Starfleet uplink from whenever these logs were supposedly recorded - from the supposed...," she hated to use the following word, "future. All Starfleet vessels automatically receive routine updates from Command through the Federation's long-range subspace relay network at standard intervals. Data that includes updated orders, task group deployments, geopolitical changes, anything pertinent to the operational needs of every ship. If we - Galileo-A - traveled to a future and recorded these logs, then there should be more data to validate this theory. How could stores of personal and duty logs be retained without any other accompanying information?"

"Many of the logs mention being at war with both the Romulans and the Klingons and the Federation was losing. Perhaps wherever location in the future timeline we were there were no Federation subspace beacons in range, all destroyed by them?" Mimi proffered, it made sense to her.

One of Tarin's hands reached up to rub her forehead and temporarily conceal the growing anxiety she was experiencing. Was the ensign's hypothetical explanation possible? As reluctant as she'd been to accept any of these new findings as legitimate, she couldn't deny the merit behind the hypothesis. "Perhaps," she conceded. "But that's not good enough for now. Retrieve all of these new logs from the databanks and partition them, then authenticate their validity." She lowered her arm back down to her waist then took a deep breath through her nostrils. "Have you found anything else that qualifies as anomalous?"

"From the computer diagnostic, not yet Sir," Mimi replied. "When the reports from the medical department about these hallucinations come in, we can see what information matches up with these personal logs."

"What about our ship's Counselor, Captain? Has she reported anything unusual? Has she been consulted with?" Serran asked.

Carlisle's investigative efforts hadn't produced any pertinent revelations thus far which was a blessing in disguise. Hopefully, it meant the crew wasn't going insane...at least not yet. "She hasn't reported anything so far and we still aren't positive these hallucinations are purely psychological in nature and not the result of a biological affliction. Which is...not ideal. But what you've uncovered here in this trove of logs might change our perspective."

"If it's not biological, and it's not psychological, it does rather limit the logical, conclusions." Serran reported.

"We'll get to the heart of this. Soon. As much as I admire Vulcan logic and its propensity to resolve complex matters, it isn't infallible. We're going to need more than that. For now," Tarin shook her head to herself again, still in disbelief that these new crew logs - fabricated or real - had been discovered, "keep searching the mainframes' cores and backups to see if there's anything else we might have missed. Anything else hiding in there."

"Aye Sir, we will keep looking. If there is any more evidence in the computer logs we will find it." Mimi said, so far the hunt for the evidence had proven long but intriguing, and while she hoped it wouldn't take much longer to prove or disprove what they'd found they did need to be thorough.

"While Ensign Mimi searches for additional logs to corroborate what we, or at least I, believe to be true, I will run another diagnostic to search for any other discrepancies that may have been overlooked."

"Good. See to it, then. Anything else?" Tarin was a woman who hadn't been born with much patience and the longer this new discovery remained unsolved, the more demanding she would become for answers.

"Not now," Serran replied. "I think it's best that we resolve this situation sooner rather than later."

"Agreed and dismissed. Report back to me as soon as you finish the authentication process." A sole curt nod terminated the conversation from Tarin's end.

"Aye Sir." Mimi said then looked to Serran for a few moments before turning for the door.

[OFF]

--

CMDR Morgan Tarin
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo-A

Ensign Mimi
Deputy Operations Manager
USS Galileo-A

LTJG Serran
Operations Manager
USS Galileo-A

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