Down Becomes Up

Posted on Mon 17th Jun, 2019 @ 9:33am by Lieutenant JG Artyom Mikhailov

1,812 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: A Diplomatic Affair
Location: Deck 44, a Jeffries Tube
Timeline: MD 4, 0942

Ever since returning to active duty, Lieutenant Artyom Mikhailov had been busier than he could seem to remember. Every day, there was a laundry list of to-do's ranging from a temperamental workstation to an entire section of the station being down. Then there was the tram incident which he, despite having effectively been thrown into the ocean and told to sink or swim, had come out of generally unscathed and with the knowledge that his contributions to the rescue effort had been worthwhile.

Today, however, Artyom was facing a particular challenge on Deck 44 where a problem with a section of gravity plating had caused a dozen or so joggers to receive minor injuries after their route had suddenly become a micro-gravity obstacle course consisting of loose equipment. To be honest, those people were fortunate. Under worst-case scenarios, gravitic sheering from such a misaligned field had the potential to cause horrific injuries or even death. Thankfully, Federation safety standards prevented these in most cases.

Artyom arrived on the scene along with a handful of engineers, all of whom seemed to be looking up to him as he was the senior officer. While he was adjusting to a great many things since his rescue, getting used to being the officer-in-charge had yet to be one of them. “I’ll be downstairs.” He said, referring to the Jefferies tubes which served as the station’s life force and nervous system, sending power and command inputs in the same way a body would blood and electrical impulses. It would be the best place for him to begin his investigation.

“You two check the gravity plating in the affected area. For now, we keep the malfunctioning section fully discharged until we know more about what happened.” Artyom finished. Currently, that small section continued to preside in micro-gravity.

“Aye, Sir.” The two enlisted-men responded while they began to unpack.

Artyom ventured into the Jefferies tubes and made his way to the gravity system control unit. He miss-judged the clearing between his head and the roof, however, and smacked into the bulkhead with enough momentum that an audible thud could be heard reverberating back into the corridor behind him.

"Proklyat'ye!" he exclaimed, rubbing the spot on his forehead which would likely swell. Ignoring the injury at least for the time being, Artyom ran his tricorder over the control unit, teasing a series of alpha-numeric data from it which was then fed into a comprehensive analysis. "Well, it's not a mechanical issue... the gravity emitter diagnostics are all in the green. No signs of an overload. Power regulation for the entire deck is nominal as well.” Artyom realized that he was talking to himself. He noticed something odd in the latest string of raw data, but couldn’t fit it into a potential cause.

"So razdrazhayushchiy… What caused down to become up, then?" he murmured as he moved to another part of the room to check the bio-neural relay. "I am sure that there are many people upstairs would like to know, eh? And it would be most unfortunate if their newest lieutenant failed to provide that answer." From that point on, Artyom went about mimicking the voices of non-existent seniors deliberating whether to demote him or throw him out of the airlock after such a failure.

His tricorder chirped. And Artyom banged his head again.

"There you are!" Artyom shouted, again to nobody in particular. In order to produce a stable gravity field, electro-plasma was channeled through the conduits where they were shaped, twisted, and channeled into a carefully modulated electrical field by the local gravity generator. Like water conducting an electrical current, the deck’s gravity plating extended this field across entire sections of the station until bumping into the neighboring generator. Occasionally, a buildup of electro-static energy would occur in these converging areas, which could pose a serious problem if left alone. For this reason, the entire field was occasionally discharged into the superstructure itself for a nano-second or so… which was enough time to clear the electrical buildup without altering the field form itself.

It seemed as though the decimal had been moved a zero or two to the left, whether done by someone accidentally or the result of a system error. What should have been just a nano-second or two turned into several, leading this section of the field to experience gravitic sheering which the safeties quickly compensated for. Artyom made a mental note to find out how this occurred before getting to work on correcting the problem.

Jin-Kyung had occasionally been accused of being a little strange, but as she listened to the running conversation the lieutenant had with himself, she figured he excelled at it. It was interesting to hear him working out the problem, and she giggled softly when she realized the voices he used were those of several higher-ranking engineers. He was code-switching from Standard to Russian and back again, but the universal translator kept up with most of his mutterings. When she heard him say, "There you are!" she thought it might be time to lend a hand.

Poking her head into the Jeffries tube, she said, "Hey, Lieutenant, did you find anything in this tube? What are we dealing with this morning?"

The unexpected voice made Artyom jump, pitting his head against the bulkhead for the third time now. He looked over to see one of the Petty Officers who’d accompanied him to the problem… a woman whose name he was still having some difficulty in remembering. God would only know how grateful Artyom would have been if their uniforms included name tapes!

Rubbing the new injury, Artyom laughed semi-nervously for a moment until he gave up on trying to remember her name and hoped that she wouldn’t notice or care. “Eh, Petty Officer… well… it appears to be a timing issue with the electro-gravitic discharger. Software… not hardware. If this were a third-rate station design, however, me thinks we’d probably be looking at quite a mess upstairs.”

As she came closer, he edged aside so she could see the panel itself. Artyom began to realize that this was the first time he’d been so close in proximity to a member of the female-gender since he’d arrived on the station, and his professional focus on the task at hand wavered with a brief gaze until the rules against fraternization between officer and enlisted came to mind. Had he still been a Petty Officer, he wasn’t sure he’d even know what to do or say, regardless. He’d never been very good with women. In fact, it literally took him being the last man on the planet for Rees to see him.

Before his mind ventured too deeply into losing Rees, he pointed to the reading on the panel. “A few more zeros to the left, however, I suspect the entire deck would have gone down. Even things built using Federation-standards have only so much of a tolerance for abuse before they give out.”

Thinking about how those zeros were so important, and the effect several in the area had reported, Quinn nodded. "Good, quick fix of the programming, then, and this one should be fixed. If only they were all so easy," she laughed, glancing up at the officer. "Which one of us is programming today?"

Artyom pulled up the neighboring gravity generators in the console using a find neighbor command, and then queried them for their settings as well. He was surprised to find that most of them were off as well, and by different values. None so much to cause this kind of problem, yet, but it was clear that there was a networking problem as well. His brows furrowed at that. These settings were generally managed by the main computer which kept everything in sync.

He heaved an audible sigh of frustration and ran another query, at least relieved to find that the sync error was confined to this deck. "I think we are going to be very busy today..." he said, running more commands intended to show what devices were communicating with what, using what ports, and then verified that they were all on the same subnet.

"You'd think that this IPv6 would have gone away a long time ago," he commented at the 20th century technology which allowed networked devices to communicate with one another with dynamically assigned addresses. It was still being used even in the 24th century. "Then again, it allows every star in the universe to have four-billion or so addresses, and we haven't run out even 400 years later."

He turned to the petty officer again. "None of the generators are able to communicate with the main computer. That could mean a VLAN issue, or even something firewall related."

Quinn nodded thoughtfully. "If it's deck-wide, do you want to check starboard side and I'll check aft, Sir? Or can we presume it is VLAN and do a simple network adjustment?" She paused, considering whether to say more. The Lieutenant was an unknown quantity, only recently arrived on SB109. So far, he'd not seemed the kind of officer who let everyone know he knew more than anyone else and was not to be questioned. After a moment, when he appeared to be thinking, she ventured her own opinion.

"If you're interested in a lowly petty officer's opinion, I don't think we can presume that a network adjustment would fix everything. On the other hand, how did things get so out of whack? Would it happen naturally? If one went off center accidentally, would they all be affected over time? Or would someone have to mess with the original setting to get things out of true? These are things I don't know the answers to, but maybe you do, Sir?"

"Yesli by vy tol'ko znali." Artyom laughed as the universal translated his words for Quinn into something that approximated, 'if only you knew...' "It was only a few days ago that I still thought myself as just a lowly petty officer." Her name finally came to him, as though it had hit his brain at warp 5 after realizing that it was late. "And regardless of the pips on my collar, I haven't forgotten that it's the NCOs who keep the fleet moving."

He looked back to the panel. "As for what went wrong, I can only assume that something is preventing this deck from communicating and synchronizing with the main computer, which is why everything is off. Sometimes we don't realize something is wrong until it's broken. This is especially true on a starbase, no? Much bigger than a starship."

Quinn nodded and laughed. "Yes, Sir. I think I hear you saying that first we fix it, then we worry about why it happened."

Artyom nodded. "Sounds very good to me."

 

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