A Byte of That, Please

Posted on Sat 9th Dec, 2017 @ 2:05am by

931 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: A Phaser as Deadly as a Candlestick
Location: Bits and Bytes, Deck 641
Timeline: MD 2, mid-morning

Mid-morning was a time Reon liked to wander the Promenade before going to work at Orchids & Jazz. Vanguard's promenade covered 100 decks, and there was something for any species in the quadrant, maybe in the galaxy. He didn't know how many civilians and Starfleet personnel were actually on the base, but he knew it had room for over 300,000, a fair-sized Federation city, no matter how one looked at it. He guessed there might be half that currently on the starbase, still a good-sized city on most planets.

All of that explained why he preferred to wander through the shops at mid-morning. Most of the shops were open at least half the base-hours every day, some never closed at all, but mid-morning seemed to be a time he could often find almost empty decks of shops to explore. He supposed that humanoids were basically night people, no matter what they liked to think. That seemed when they were most actively shopping, anyway.

Velasquez stopped in front of a store he'd never entered before. Bits and Bytes, the sign above it flashed in blue. A window display showed a variety of communicators, tricorders, and holocubes, and one of the latter caught his eye. He walked through the wide entrance and looked around. The walls were covered with an almost infinite variety of tech parts, in all shapes and sizes. Large locked cases contained merchandise similar to that in the display window. Reon wondered why he'd never noticed the shop in his wandering before. It was a paradise of treasure for his interests!

His eye caught sight of a medium-blue Andorian whose antenna were toward the front of his head, behind where a Klingon's brow ridges would be, but not as far back as some Andorians who had enjoyed the entertainment in Orchids & Jazz. The man was arranging a stack of small cubes on a counter, and Reon wandered toward him, stopping twice to look at particular things which caught his interest. On the way, he found packages of isolinear memory chips and, since he was about out, he picked up a package of twelve.

"Can I help you with something?" the Andorian asked, observing his meandering approach.

"Maybe," Reon said. "I'm interested in the large holocube at the back of the window display. What can you tell me about it?"

"Anything you want to know," th'Elex told him. "They're the latest model from NikonSony. Probably the best on the market for clarity. Most of the size is actually for show. The newest craze is having holographic displays one can watch from a distance."

Velasquez laughed, "Yeah, I was reading about that in "Quad Squared" the other day. It sounds to me as if they've created a market for an updated holo-version of the old television from the 21st century." He shook his head. "I don't see the need, but then, marketing is about creating a need, isn't it?"

"That it is. If you want the storage capability of that holocube, without the display features..." th'Elex pulled a much smaller cube from the display he'd just set up. It was about 5 cm on a side. "This will store the same amount of data. The reference and signal rays are incredibly narrow bands on this thing." He picked up the sample cube which he'd used to record customer traffic the previous night. "Take a look at this."

He switched it on and Reon could see the data encoding rays. "But it would be impossible to tell the details of what you'd recorded," he objected.

"That's right. This is a data recording device only. See this?" he slid a section of the cube's covering to the side and revealed a connection. "You plug that into any display you want from your computer to a holodeck, and you've got a realistic holo display."

In spite of himself, Reon was impressed. "No kidding? So you can record holovids, books, anything at all on here?"

"Anything that's compatible with holo technology can go right on one of these. And the capacity! Let me tell you, if you had a baby born today, you could keep a recording of every second of his life for two hundred years and not fill the thing. If recording space is what you want, this is the cutting edge," th'Elex said.

Reon looked at the disks in his hand. "What about these?" he asked. "Are they going to be obsolete in a few years?"

"I don't think so. Remember, I said holographic data. Not everything we record is holographic. For instance, if you're sending a message back home, you're probably not going to want to send a holocube. The isolinear chip is still your best choice for that," the Andorian assured him. "If you want to listen to music, the chip. If you want to experience the music as if you were there in the performance hall, then you download the performance to the holocube. See the difference?"

Nodding, Velasquez said, and grinned, "I surely do. Tell me, you talk all your customers out of the big screen, how are you going to accumulate any latinum?"

The shop owner smiled, "I don't talk everyone out of it. You looked like a man who wanted storage, not fluff."

"You nailed me. I'll take the small cube and this pack," Reon told him, chuckling. A few minutes later, he walked back out the door, whistling. He had just enough time to get to his post at Orchids & Jazz, and he'd had the opportunity to talk tech. It was a good day to be alive on Starbase Vanguard.

 

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