by David Smith
“ASBeau said he’d try to reason with it. Apparently his definition of the word “reason” encompasses the use of small calibre weaponry. He also tried armour piercing projectile weapons. And a flame-thrower. We had quite a stand-off when he tried to bring in an anti-tank missile.”
“If it’s that much of a problem why haven’t we taken it off-line and re-installed the original computer?”
Romanov visibly bristled at this suggestion and through gritted teeth said “That was the very first thing we tried after my attempt to re-programme it failed. However, it became apparent that several key components from the old computer had gone missing.”
“Missing?!?”
“I can’t prove it, but I think Chief Money traded the processors and I/O circuits for a penguin.”
Dave opened his mouth, but closed it again. What could he say about that? He was still thinking about this, when Romanov barked at one of the crew, who sprang off as if scalded, then returned a few seconds later with a Chinese woman who was even smaller than Romanov.
Romanov introduced her “This is Chief Deng Wa.” The Chief saluted smartly as Romanov continued. “She’s fighting an uphill battle to keep the ship functioning without proper supplies, but more importantly she’s the only one who’s had any kind of success with the computer. I’ll let her brief you on its quirks”
The Chief nodded and Romanov left them to it.
Deng led Dave over to the large and very battered console from which the computer was programmed. Bold writing on the panel read “Prototype Intrinsic Logical Organic Component Computer”, but the various violent attempts at reprogramming made it look like it had served time as a target down on the shooting range.
Deng began her brief in a very soft Chinese lilt, in stark contrast to Romanov’s harsh Russian accent. “The PILOCC is technically brilliant, and having gone through the specs and operational parameters it should be a quantum leap in computing capacity. It’s designed to achieve a level of sentience after a period of operation which will allow it to relate to living crew-members and therefore be able to better anticipate their needs and requests.”
“So what’s actually wrong with it?”
She shrugged “It’s just mental.”
That would’ve been her complete assessment of the computer’s issues but the astonished look on Dave’s face prompted her to expand on her diagnosis.
“As Lieutenant-Commander Romanov has probably already told you, the personality engrams used to create its matrix won’t mesh. The Counsellor spent hours talking to it and expressed an opinion that it’s medically schizophrenic. That’s when the computer expressed its opinion that Lieutenant-Commander Kagawa was a short-arsed charlatan that didn’t know the difference between Freud and a fillet steak. I thought that Katana was only decorative, but it’s the real thing! It actually sliced through the PILOCC’s casing and I thought we were going to lose the computer until Chief Belle came down and tasered him.”
“Lieutenant-Commander Beauregard came down to try and calm the Counsellor and told him that it wasn’t worth getting so emotional about because it was only a computer. You should have heard what the computer called ASBeau! We laughed soooo much!!” She smiled at the memory, but continued “He took it all in his stride until it called him a fake who was no more Canadian than Jesus of Nazareth. That’s when ASBeau took a phaser to it, and when that didn’t penetrate the casing, he tried a variety of weapons from his personal collection. We had to call in the Security team to get him to stand down. He denied it later, but I’m sure that missile was a nuke. The computer hasn’t spoken to anyone except me or ARSE since.”
“ARSE?”
“Yes, Ensign ARSE. When we reported our issues to Command, their experts suggested that we try an artificial humanoid as an interface to see if the PILOCC would respond better to something more akin to itself. They sent us Ensign ARSE, an Advanced Robotic Sentience Emulator.”
“And that didn’t work either?”
“No, they seem to spend their time arguing and bickering in binary. ARSE is programmed with MS Doors: have you come across it before?”
Dave thought back to the cybernetics course at the Academy. MS Doors was the software universally used to simulate sentience in computers, robots, androids etc. It was advertised as “Your gateway to improved Human / Machine integration”, but a after a few weeks of working with it, the most significant lesson Dave had learnt was that there was a world of difference between “universal” and “useful”. MS Doors was slow, over-complicated, resource-hungry, expensive and unreliable. It didn’t surprise him that it hadn’t been a worthwhile experiment.
All well and good, but the question was what to do next?
“So how do you get anything out of PILOCC when no-one else can, Chief?” Dave asked.
She shrugged again and started the control console up: “I call it Susan.”
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Two hours later, Dave was considering adding his own signature to the dents, gashes and burn marks in the PILOCCs casing. Even addressing it by its preferred name, Susan, the computer was still wilful, obstinate & at times, downright rude.
The artificial intelligence elements of the courses at the Academy had never specifically indicated that intelligence and compliance were related in computers. Dave had always made that assumption because in his experience, if you asked the right question, a computer gave you an answer. Two hours with the PILOCC had made it abundantly clear that too much intelligence could be a bad thing. The inclusion of human personality traits seemed a reasonable concept, but for some reason Susan’s personality construct seemed to be dominated by the least attractive facets of humanity.
She rarely answered a question directly, frequently argued with Dave and Chief Deng and seemed to delight in being obtuse and contrary. Even the simplest instructions were met with endless evasions and digressions.
Ensign ARSE had come down to assist an hour ago, but the highly advanced MS Doors software had recognised Dave as a new colleague and had started a sub-routine to create a unique personal interface protocol within ARSEs databanks that would give ARSE the ability to relate to him seamlessly. Deng had whispered that it had taken three days for ARSE to recover from meeting Romanov. Commander Cassini had specifically avoided meeting him to prevent further downtime.
The Ensign was now stood completely motionless and unresponsive, his eyes glazed over with an oddly familiar blue colour.
The only progress they had made was that while Dave had distracted the computer, Chief Deng had managed to run a discrete low-level diagnostic, but this had been even more confusing. According to the simple scan, everything was actually working fine. Too fine, if that was possible.
With just Dave talking to it, and a few general day-to-day enquiries being input from terminals around the ship, the computer was running at 90% of its processing capacity and its working memory capacity was 95% full, making data processing and transfer slow and cumbersome.
Deng had kept the diagnostic running after Dave had given up, and with no significant call on its resources at all, it’s processing capacity remained over 90% utilised and memory usage hadn’t changed significantly either. Knowing that, it was no surprise that PILOCC struggled to manage the ships drive systems when they cranked up the engines. Controlling the coils that generated the warp field was a hugely complicated task that required massive calculating capacity and incredible speeds.
Just as Dave was about to give up, there was a real glimmer of hope when Deng found a low-level log of input commands that, at first, appeared to be of no consequence. Dave didn’t even understand why she’d pointed it out to him, until he saw the last name on a long list of instructions that terminated just after PILOCC had first been brought on-line. One last extra programme had been installed by Petty Officer Park Si Yung.
Chapter 6
Ok. He had a suspect.
But that was it. He had no idea what Park had done, if anything at all. He also didn’t know
why Park had done what he had, and Dave was unlikely to get anything more useful from the computer. He didn’t even know if it was against regs for someone from the Supply Department to add programmes to the ships computer, but then, it was probably something that had never happened before. Hell, he didn’t even know if PO Park was real or a figment of some accounting fraud dreamed up by Chief Money.
He leaned back in his chair and considered his options. There was no point in taking this up with his immediate superiors. They’d had access to exactly the same information as he did and had done nothing with it. They didn’t seem to be at all concerned with minor details such as carrying out orders, or trying to complete a mission.
He could try confronting Chief Money, but he suspected that the Chief would happily brazen it out, and with no hard data there would be little he could do to force him to come clean.
No, he needed to think outside the box here. He needed to get down and dirty.
Dirty.
Now there was an idea …...
He called Commander Mengele, who sounded just ever so slightly breathless. In the back-ground, Dave thought that he could hear a man’s voice softly sobbing, and as he did, bizarrely, he felt his buttocks clench involuntarily.
“What do you want now? I’m in the middle of someone” came the Commanders terse reply, sending a shiver down Dave’s spine.
"THING!" She corrected herself, "I'm in the middle of someTHING."
“Commander, am I correct in thinking that the biometric data that the ship‘s computer reads to locate the crew comes from sensors located around the ship?”
“Correct. What of it?”
“Is there any way I could rig a portable sensor to detect a person who’s not registered as a crew member?” Dave asked.
“Perhaps. If we increase the memory storage on a standard medical tricorder we could pre-load some key biometrics for the whole crew and then scan the person in question. If they don’t match one of the crew profiles, the tricorder will flag up an anomaly.”
“Is there any chance I could get two people confused by doing that?”
“The chances would be billions to one against. Humans are very diverse.”
“How long would it take to rig the tricorder?”
“Hmmm. It would have to go to Engineering for that. I’d ask them to replace the processors with something faster too; you’re asking it to crunch a lot of data. Perhaps two days there? Then another day to download the files and calibrate the sensors to look for the selected characteristics. Are you done? I must get back to ….. er ……. work.”
“I’m done Commander, but I’ll be down to pick up one of your tricorders in three days. Would you be so kind as to ask Engineering to make the hardware alterations and ask one of your staff to pre-load the crews’ biometrics?”
“I’ll get my team to pre-load the data, but you can deal with the Dumkopf in Engineering!” Mengele grunted and terminated the connection.
Sighing, and with a distinct foreboding, he called the Engineering Officer who was as abrasive as ever: “What now??”
“Commander, I need an engineer to……”
“We’re busy”
“I appreciate that, Commander, but I……”
The line was terminated.
Grinding his teeth, Dave called again.
Before he could speak, Cassini yelled “You exceed your authority! I have told you I cannot help you! I’m committed to repairing the Fastest Ship in the fleet, and can’t achieve that with your constant interruptions and idiotic questions. Now leave me to get on with my work!!”
The line went dead again.
Dave was livid, but realised it was hard to give orders to an officer who out-ranked him. He was still wondering what to do when he received a call from Lieutenant-Commander Romanov.
“I could hear the ass-hole yelling at you. What do you need?”
“I can’t ask you to undertake works without going through Commander Cassini”
“Yes you can. He’s an ass-hole, and he hasn’t spoken to me in eighteen months. He certainly hasn’t got a clue what I’ve done during that time. I, however, know exactly what he has done, which has been limited to yelling a lot, getting on everyone’s nerves and generally being entirely unproductive.”
“Is he really that lazy?”
“To call him lazy is unfair. That ignores his bad attitude, his arrogance, and breath-taking incompetence. How about “Useless”? No, no,” Worthless”, that’s it!”
Dave smiled “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you were carrying a torch for the Commander!”
Dave could almost sense her smile behind the intercom as she said “Only if it’s an oxy-acetylene cutting torch and I get to geld him and cauterise the wound in one easy sweep! He won’t know and doesn’t care what I do, so how can I help you?”
“You’re not doing this help me are you? This is to piss him off.”
“Underlings privilege, ExO!”
He explained the tricorder modifications suggested by Commander Mengele, and Romanov agreed that she would give the unit to crewman Ottershaw, who was an electronics specialist. She was confident he’d get it done and back to the sick bay inside two days. Dave thanked her, glad that someone in Engineering was competent, and also that she hated her boss as much as he did.
His next call was to the ships Security Officer, Chief Barbie Bell.
“Glad to speak to you ExO. How can Security assist you?”
Dave was mightily relieved to hear a professional sounding reply. “I need a team to come with me to Deck 10 forward, 0800, three days time. I have a particularly hush-hush mission where I might need back up.”
“Deck 10 is the main stores area, sir. Is this to do with Chief Money?”
“Is that a problem Chief?”
“HELL NO!!! I’ve been trying to get something on that little scrote for years!”
Excellent! Thought Dave
“Well it looks like your luck’s in, Chief. I’m waiting for Engineering and the medical team to prepare a piece of kit and then I’ll be back to you to finalise time and location. Hollins out”
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With time on his hands, Dave turned his attention to other problems. Deng and Romanov had run through the rest of the ships problems so quickly that Dave could scarcely take it in.
They admitted that the apparent state of disrepair was a result of the Tiger blowing over fifty main power relays during her record breaking speed run. That was why the Turbo-lifts, many of the doors and other lighting and secondary power circuits were down.
They didn’t have replacements yet, and Dave wanted to ask why but knew that would inevitably lead back to Chief Money.
There wasn’t a courier vessel due for several more months, but Dave personally requisitioned and authorised a long list of essential stores the engineers needed to get the ship running. With the delay in getting the requisition to command, and the long transit time, even in the best scenario it would be four months before anything would get to them. It would more likely take five or six months to get here and whatever did arrive would still need to be installed and tested after that.
When he met with Chief Money the next day he broached the subject: “Chief, we need to get hold of spares urgently. We can’t afford to wait four months or more.”
The Chief shook his head “Sorry sir, this is a one shop stop. Hole is the only Federation colony within our reach and they just aren’t equipped to support major Starships.”
Undeterred, Dave continued. “It looks like power relays are critical to everything Engineering is doing. What are the chances of us getting anything from Hole?”
“Slim, I’d say. There’s nothing on Hole with the power ratings we use, so they’ve got no reason to hold such stuff.”
“What about at component level rather than the relays themselves?”
“Well, you’d have to talk to the engineers for the detail of what they’d need. It could probably be done even if i
t was a case of obtaining raw material and manufacturing some items in the workshops, but I’m guessing that would entail a huge amount of man-hours and at the end of it, it’s still a bodge job. And it’ll cost you big-time.”
“But the materials we want aren’t massively expensive?”
The Chief smiled “That’s Chief Moneys Theory of Special Relativity, ExO. The value of something is not constant; it’s relative to the buyer’s position in the market-place.”
“Thanks Chief, I’ll bear that in mind. Good work with those shipping orders, by the way.”
With just the faintest of smirks on his face, the Chief replied “My pleasure sir!”
I’ll bet, thought Dave.
He dropped down to Engineering before beginning his climb back to his quarters and was told that Commander Cassini was too busy to see him again. Fortunately Chief Deng was on the lower level, and Dave took the matter up with her.
“Chief is it possible to repair any of the damaged power relays if we could get the raw materials or components?”
She thought about it and answered “Theoretically, yes, sir.” but then added a note of caution. “But it would be a huge amount of work, and they almost certainly wouldn’t hold up under stress as well as factory-built units.”
“Who’s your expert on power relays?”
“PO Vijay Kandampully, sir.”
“Get him to draft a list of components and raw materials we would need for repairs, together with ideas about where the civilians on Hole might use something like that. I’ll run through the list with him in my quarters this afternoon.”
A nagging doubt sprang into his mind and he added “Don’t involve Chief Money or anyone from supply if you can avoid it. I don’t know how far I can trust the Chief yet.”
“Aye sir.”
Until he had a better idea of the Chief’s motives, capability and culpability, he assumed it would be best not to tempt fate.
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The list wasn’t as long as Dave had feared it might have been, and he breathed a sigh of relief to see there were no show-stoppers on the list.
