Intriguing Similarities

Posted on Tue Mar 24th, 2009 @ 10:38pm by

607 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: In The Dark
Location: Larkin's Quarters
Timeline: Current

ON:

Larkin awoke in his quarters, feeling rather rested after his meeting with Ensign Carter. This surprised him, as the experience itself had been rather draining. He had yet to fully comprehend most of the images he'd seen while he was under, but a few things had been made clear for him. It was obvious that he was suppressing an attack on the Dragoon by another vessel, but he was unsure as to whether or not the ships destruction was directly linked to this attack; he was quite sure it had taken place weeks before Starbase 87 had picked up the Dragoon's distress signal, which had led them to his disabled shuttlecraft amongst the ship's debris.

As the Archimedes' CSO forced himself up out of his comfortable bed, he tried to push off thoughts of his own problems. He needed to be on duty in two hours, and it would be much easier to perform his job if he wasn't hampered by lack of memory. He was still in the midst of a large yawn when he sat down at his desk. "Computer, display Ensign Childer's report on her survey of Citadel Prime's tectonic activity."

"Unable to comply. No such file exist," came the response in that familiar feminine voice.

"Was it deleted?"

"Negative. There is no record of such a file being created or deleted."

"What? That's impossible. The file was there last night. What happened to it?"

"Unknown."

Larkin sighed, slightly frustrated, as he was once again reminded of how unimaginative the computer could be. "Did anything out of the ordinary occur between 1830 last night and now?"

"A brief, ship wide power failure occurred at..."

Larkin did not allow the computer to finish. "A power failure? I slept through a power failure? Well, if someone was accessing the file at the time, I suppose it could have been deleted from your memory banks." Larkin fell silent for a moment. His curiosity was peaked, and he quickly forgot all about the file. "What was the cause of the power failure?"

"Unknown. This is currently under investigation."

The CSO mused. For the next ten minutes, he had the computer pull up several files on power consumption, sensor data, and the like from the hour in which the incident had occurred. Nothing particularly odd struck him, until he got to the bio-neural gel-pack system readings. At the moment of the power failure, there was a clear distortion in the gel-pack system. This distortion didn't look like anything special, as one would expect a disruption in it before and after the incident, but it's shape looked strangely familiar to Larkin.

This distortion bore a striking similarity to the power consumption readings from a gel-pack that he'd once been experimenting on at Starfleet Academy. He'd been trying to increase the pack's effectiveness, in order to facilitate a very precise measurement of a nearby galactic cluster, but his procedure had nearly destroyed the gel. The distortion in the ship's record wasn't exactly the same as the one he'd observed at the academy, but it was similar.

Larkin decided that it would be prudent to inform someone of this. It might have been indicating that the power failure was tied to something in the gel-pack system, and so he wrote up a quick report on the issue, which he sent to the CEO, COO, XO, and CO. He was sure that the CEO and COO had already seen this particularity, but it had produced a similar result to his experiment, which he was sure only a few people in Starfleet would recognize.

OFF:

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Kevin Larkin
Chief Science Officer
USS Archimedes

 

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