Bugs in the System

Posted on Sat May 28th, 2016 @ 4:07am by Lieutenant Commander Horatio Hawke & Lieutenant Commander Jean Reynard & Lieutenant Griffen Tanol & Lieutenant Ryan North & Ensign Vex Krylore & Petty Officer 1st Class Mizatan Fij

Episode: Lost Property
Location: De Salle, Bridge
Timeline: Sometime after power and life support has been restored

"OK Fij, I think I've put the console into test mode," Mac said, standing behind the tactical console on the De Salle as he tried to work out whether the commands he had just entered had done the right task. The old systems were nowhere near as intuitive as the LCARS on the Highlander - if he was running his own station in simulation mode he'd be able to instantly tell by the way the display changed presets. Here, he figured that the little coloured dot in the top corner of the tactical station's main screen changing from green to blue was all he was going to get, so long as the crash course he had given himself in 22nd Century computers had given him the right commands to run.

"Yes, I can see that the station has stopped sending real-time commands to the tactical systems," the half-Ktarian computer specialist said. He was positioned underneath the console, with a number of its panels open with fibre optic cables hanging out. He'd connected up a large PADD to clips on those cables so that he could monitor the commands the station was sending into the computer's network. "Can you try activating the ionised hull plating?"

"Just one of the lower unoccupied sections, maybe," Jean said, looking up from the readouts at the communications station. He was trying to monitor the ship's computer and control systems while simultaneously streaming the telemetry data back to the Highlander. The historians would thank him for having a complete record of the how the ship was functioning as they brought it online. That, or the accident investigators. "If something is still connected or didn't go to simm mode, I'd rather not energize anything around the bridge."

Personally, Ryan would have rather been any place but on the bridge of the old starship. Although he was never on to turn down looking at something new and undiscovered there was something about the ship that gave him the willies. He didn't like how well kept up everything was, given the fact that she had been lost for so long. And, well he had no clue what he was doing at the science station. He was trying to make sense of most of the controls and was being only marginally successful.

"I feel like I am all thumbs over here," Ryan muttered. "I think the short range and long range arrays are online. Deflector looks good... maybe."

"Ask Highlander to confirm, they're sensors are a lot more accurate and will tell you more than the diagnostic sensors on board this tub." Grif said as she stood atop of the small ladder, trying to pull a loose set of wires out of the bulkheads above the conn station. "You know I knew space did a good job of preserving things, but there is so little degradation in everything I dunno, just feels off. Hell I'm older than some of this stuff and I'm in worse shape."

"It is a bit odd," Jean agreed. "You'd expect more vacuum welding on the hull, and the interior wasn't filled with inert gas so there should have more corrosion internally. I wish we knew more about where it's been between the incident and now."

"Internal sensor logs would be helpful," Ryan said, tapping a few keys on the science station. "Alright, assuming I am reading this correctly the long range and short range sensors are online. I'm still pretty unsure of the integrity of the instrumentation so I don't advise pushing them much beyond their minimum safety settings."

Vex peered curiously at the tactical systems in front of him. Truthfully, he wasn't sure how everything worked although most of it seemed pretty rudimentary. "The tactical systems look pretty self explanatory, fairly limited though. I wouldn't want to get into a fire fight in this thing, no defensive shielding left the ship vulnerable to more advanced species, even if they did have hull armor."

Hawke listened absently to the chatter around him as he worked to try and reboot the helm console. If he could get that working, he could access the navigation computer and, hopefully, learn a bit more about the ship's long, lonely journey. "Tanol," he said, looking up to the engineer perched precariously on a ladder almost directly above him. "Is there anything you can do up there that could send more power into this console? A little more juice and I'll have it up and running."

"I uh... yeah give me a minute." Grif said as she pulled the last of the loose wiring out, exposing the last wiring that still held power. Satisfied that it was no longer going to cause an issue, Grif stepped down and off the ladder. Grabbing an ohm meter and some bridges, Grif dropped down into an open deck hatch infront of the vidscreen, where all of then lines to the bridge consoles ran through. After finding a line to the secondary science station at the rear, Grif snapped the bridge onto it and set it for a small diversion before clipping the ither end to the helm controls. "Hows that?"

The helm console lit up like a Christmas tree with half its lights not working. But it was enough. "I ... think that's got it," the XO said as he leaned in to examine the board. "Yeah, that's good enough. Thanks." Now, he thought, I just need to figure out this interface. He had studied something like this way back in his academy days, but that console was from at least a few decades later than this one. "Better start seeing what these buttons do," he said lightly, reasonably confident he knew what they would do.

"Sirs, nobody has transferred power from the hull plating to internal sensors, have they?" Fij asked from his place beneath the tactical console. "I'm reading a shift in the power distribution, but I can't see where the command to do that came from."

"Hold on," Jean said, spinning around his chair to face the opposite console. He rapidly type in commands. "The simulation mode is still showing complete isolation from the command systems. The bridge consoles are still isolated from the live controls. I don't see anything from engineering, either... wait, here we go. The power management logs show a command to reroute power, but it doesn't seem to have originated with any of the consoles we have in use. It's possible we tripped an automated process at some point while starting up the ship."

"Commands like that don't just appear out of thin air..." Grif said as she popped up and out of the hole in the deck. "Power transfers from a critical system to a non critical aren't automated either." She pursed her lips as she thought about what might have caused it, "It's possible some systems DID degrade just somewhere else in the ship but... I dunno."

Looking over at the Science officer Grif shrugged, "Try running a command to return the transferred power, if it's an automated system it should protest. It's possible the crew had their own subroutines set up we don't know about. If it's system degredation though it will return fine, just a bit slower than normal."

"You're right, now that I think about it," Jean said, inputting commands to get the power back to where it was meant to be and carefully monitoring the results. "Even if it was an alert condition of some kind, it wouldn't be drawing from a defense system to power security. It does looks like it's switched back to where it was before, though, so it could be a random glitch that got past the error checking."

Meanwhile, Hawke, who had been paying just enough attention to the conversation around him to be aware of the glitch, was methodically reactivating helm systems. Relative Trajectory Monitor, check. RCS Status Repeater, check. Attitude Indicator, check. They were all in various stages of functionality, but at least the instruments on the console were working. Until he flicked the analogue safety release switch next to the throttle control up into the ACTIVE position. The click of the switch sounded odd to a man used to a touch interface, but there was a kind of satisfaction in it that a beep just couldn't recreate. So when he heard the click again a second later, it naturally grabbed his attention and he looked down to see that the switch was back in the INACTIVE position.

"Huh," the XO said before reaching out and flicking the switch back to ACTIVE. This time, he kept his eye on it and, sure enough, a second later the switch, seemingly of its own volition, clicked back to INACTIVE. He repeated the process again with the same result. "Well, that's just plain weird."

"Sir?" Ryan asked.

"The safety switch on the throttle control keeps switching off when I turn it on," Hawke replied, flicking the switch again to emphasise his point. The crew watched as the switch clicked back to INACTIVE half a second later. "See? That should not be possible."

Ryan glance down at his own station and then tapped a few icons. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared to happen at first but after a second Ryan took notice that the secondary array kept slipping into standby mode. He tapped it again, turning the system back on but once again it resorted to flipping back to standby.

"Ok, apparently I can't keep the secondary sensor array out of standby mode. That's weird."

"You say 'weird', I hear 'hazardous'," Jean remarked, standing up and pulling out his tricorder. He flipped it open while advancing on the helm console. He quickly unscrewed the back paneling so he could see the wiring and circuits inside. "As a general rule, safety switches that un-flip themselves are not terribly safe. Hit it a couple times, will you, sir?"

Hawke obliged, flicking the switch only to watch it click back almost straight away. He repeated the process a couple more times while he looked over towards North. "Tanol, can you take a look at North's issue. It's more than coincidence that we've got the same problem on two unrelated systems like this."

"Three unrelated systems," Mac piped up from the tactical console. "On a hunch I decided to try activating the rails to raise the phaser turrets from their recesses. Every time I do it, the system retracts them again. Fij; are you seeing anything wrong with that circuit from down there?"

"None," the computer specialist answered, checking the instruments he had attached to the wiring under the console. "I see the command to raise the turrets go through the system... but then no commands from manual or automatic input go through to lower them again."

"I officially have no idea what is going on with this thing," Jean said, peering at his tricorder, the guts of the console, and back again. "I mean, in theory, someone using the auxiliary control panel in engineering could change the mode, if there was anyone down there messing with it. Even then, I should be seeing a signal coming back up the line, but all I read is the outgoing. It's the exact same as when the commander toggles it himself." He frowned. "It kind of makes you worry about what else might suddenly turn on. Or off."

"If it was someone in engineering, I'd make sure their hide was strung off the rafters for messing with systems like that."Griffen said with a small grimace as she pulled herself out of the the hole in the deck. "I think I want to find the Main computer Commander. Aside from your manual switch, switching itself, most of these could be explained by glitches in the main computer." Grif rubbed her hands on her pants to clean them off as she thought it over, "As for your switch. It's possible it just needs replacing, faulty lock and pressure is causing it to switch back."

That thought disturbed Griffen though, because that would mean her engineering team would have to rip apart all of the mechanical systems within the ship to makes sure none of them had the same issues. Moving over to the science console in the mean time though, Grif pulled up the report for the secondary sensors. "Huh... seems like power to secondary sensor array is being permanently rerouted from the array to somewhere else that's why it won't leave standby. I can't tell where to though...."

"Normally I'd say that sounds like a hasty repair job, something that wouldn't have been updated with the central records until they reached spacedock again," Jean said, "but that wouldn't explain any of the other malfunctions. There's too many systems affected. The main computer would be the obvious common point, but it looked like it was humming along just fine."

The situation gnawed at Hawke and he wasn't satisfied with any of the explanations so far. There was something else about this ship, something that he couldn't put his finger on. It annoyed him. He shook his head, "We're getting carried away with speculation here. Before we go any further, we'll report back to the Highlander. The captain needs to know about all this."