The Impossible Mechanisim

Posted on Tue Nov 15th, 2022 @ 6:38pm by Captain William Maddox & Commander Ayanja Tusalo & Lieutenant Commander Aarix Teral

2,349 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: The Song Of Silver Wings
Location: Proteus Drive Core, USS Daedalus
Timeline: Before Launch

"Whilst within the drive chamber you must follow all directions given. This is both for your safety, and the safety of the ship. At no time should you touch any part of the drive assembly, as even in its inert standby mode its interaction with subjective space-time is tenuous at best. If I order an evacuation of the chamber at any time please do so promptly, and likewise if the detectors you have all been given register an L-field gradient of 0.2 or higher. In the event of L-field spike we are to retreat from the drive chamber to this antechamber, where we'll begin decontamination and recovery. Do you understand the directions as I have given them...Sir?"

Captain Maddox nodded and passed another of the small detectors to Ayanja.

"I do so acknowledge receipt of said instructions for the ship's log," William said with a smile. He looked at his XO and Engineer. "Don't look so worried. It's just boilerplate safety reg's to keep everyone breathing. The drive is only harmful when it's activated or get's twitchy."

The OSI specialist who had given the instruction nodded with a wry smile, and placed a tray before them.

"Please place your com badges, or any other complex electronics on the plate. It is not advised to take them into the drive chamber," they said. "Does either one of you have any prosthetics or implants? Or anything running on isoleanear chipsets?"

Aarix gave a slight closed-mouth chuckle as he removed his comm badge. "Keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times..." he muttered, plopping the badge and his tricorder onto the plate. Despite his chuckle, he silently admitted to himself that he was nervous. While it was one of the very few things he hadn't worked on on the ship, he had full confidence that the drive chamber had been thoroughly tested. His nerves came from being in a small and confined space, and the chamber looked small, at least from the outside. "No implants or anything of the sort," he told the specialist.

"We'll know soon enough. Originally we had Bynar's working near this thing, that didn't end well." The techie said off handedly.

"Nothing complex, just a shoulder replacement, could barely call it an implant." Aya likewise tossed her Combadge, Tricorder and Social onto the plate. She wondered what happened to the Binars and would have happened to them if they entered with any equipment. If it was that catastrophic they might need to setup some kind of safety measures in the case of an emergency. She didn't like the idea of crew needing to remember to take things off and put them back on under stress.

"Huum," the tech said and flicked out her sleeve to reveal the Social wristband there. With a gesture, the holographic interface sprouted like illuminated vines along her forearm. With deft hand gestures, she scrolled through data sets. "I can see it here in your medical file. Huum, inert medical grade bio printer stock, ligament attachment points...nanoscale assembly on the anchors. If you feel any stiffness or pain, please tell me immediately."

The tech then turned to Maddox.

"I would advise, captain, that Commander Tusalo undergo a detailed medical scan before departure to ensure the Encator has up-to-date specifications on her implant. To avoid unnecessary transcription errors during the transit." the tech explained.

"It'll get you to meet Doctor Kij, so its a win-win really," Maddox smiled. "I think we're ready."

"Yay..." Aya said with a forced smile, waving an imaginary flag of celebration. It wasn't that she disliked Doctors, she just wasn't a fan of anyone but Javi poking and prodding her.

"That's the spirit," Maddox chuckled.

The tech turned to the heavy armour-plated hatch set into the wall. But instead of pressing a button, or instructing the barrier to move, she grabbed the hatch lever and turned it. A clacking release of retention pins sliding back into the door chittered in the air, and with a huff of expelled air, the tech pulled the door inwards on counterweight hinges.

The room was tiled along the ceiling,'s bulkheads and floor, looking for all the world like the toroidal interior of a fusion reactor. Within the centre of this off-white space was what looked like a glass containment vessel as big as a shuttle pod, spanning from floor to ceiling. Within that was another, slightly smaller vessel, and again within that was another. Each layer of glass was festooned with contact sensor pads, and warning symbols.

DANGER-Biohazard.
DANGER-Nanoscale Hazard.
DANGER-Non Eclidian Reality Hazard.
DANGER-Radiation.
DANGER-Cognition Hazard.

But at the centre of the nesting doll of transparent cubes was an item no larger than a beer keg. In fact it looked like a clockwork orrery, roughly spherical and made of a silvery material that was as quick as mercury and yet looked as solid as tungsten.

Except...it was transparent as well? Intricate gear-like teeth meshed and rotated along the sides of the sphere, turning its innards in a constant mesmerising dance. But within those were more patterns of shapes, flickers of symbols, branching fractal patterns. Once in a while the teeth and meshing gears would part to reveal the interior, which was far too deep to be contained within something the size of a beach ball.

It felt very much like standing on the wrong side of the bars at a zoo, and realising the Bajoran tiger bear was not sleeping as soundly as you might have wished.

"Impressive, to say the least."

"Even more so when you consider it's a cargo cult relic," Maddox said. "Back in pre-warp era on Earth, when air travel was a rare thing, there were legends and stories of cargo or down aeroplanes being found by wilderness tribes in the forests and jungles. To them, these silver birds would drop treasure, impossible things from the skies. They didn't know the birds were machines made by their fellow men, it was beyond their ability to understand or comprehend."

He placed a hand on the outer glass containment vessel.

"This thing was found in the heart of an asteroid, that wasn't an asteroid. It was a cache, or resupply facility of some sort. Hell, it could have been some long-range comm relay for all we know, but alongside a few other items were these things. We don't even know if the transit effect we'll use to enter the Reef Stars is even the primary function of the device. We just know if we feed it instructions with enough data about the item its sending, it works. The how is something the science team is still trying to figure out, along with the one or two failure modes we've seen."

Aarix was already unsettled by all the warning signs and the size of the thing, and it didn't help that the technician basically said "who the hell knows what will happen" in tech speak. He was starting to understand the skepticism of new tech that engineers liked to show off back in the days of early space travel. "Failure modes?" He asked, clearly not liking the idea of relying on this machine to get the crew to where they need to be.

"The drive acts like a transporter, deconstructs the object on one end, reconstructs it on the other. It's a horrible oversimplification, but that's the gist. Now being an engineer you're aware that Federation transporters can, on occasion, suffer failures. Transcription errors where things don't quite line up the way they should. Most of the time they're minor, bodies can adjust. And machines are simpler still when transported. But we've seen evidence that when a Proteus drive hasn't got sufficiently detailed instruction sets, it does a lot of guesswork. The first test ship we put through was unmanned, an old Oberth outfitted with bio-neural gel packs and automated systems. It jumped from Me567on the edge of Federation space, and arrived in Alpha Tucanne." Maddox said. "It was the same mass as when it left, but it was now over five meters in diameter and two kilometres long, with a fully working warp drive, impulse manifold, and life support system all crammed in. The Proteus Drive remade the test ship so it was functionally identical, but only in function. The bio-neural packs, which were to simulate a live crew, were similar reconfigured so that they worked. We have the test vessel here in a sealed dry dock, its...not a pretty sight."

"You filled me with inspiration and snatched it all away in a single moment Captain." Aya grumbled, as she too observed the device. It was like nothing else she'd seen in her time in Starfleet. Completely alien to Federation design philosophies and yet somehow they'd figured it all out. It was awe-inspiring, almost magically so... and yet it was terrifying to its core.

"I find honesty in the face of existential dread works best," Maddox said with a sigh. "But what matters is that it works, and we know how to make it operate in a safe manner. Same way we use nuclear fusion, and matter/antimatter reactors: dangerous processes with some very macabre failure states. It's our job as explorers to enforce the view and stance that devices like these are for the furtherance of knowledge, and not the pursuit of power. Pre-warp Earth had the devil's own time taming the atomic genie when it got out, and we very nearly didn't. But without it we'd have never broken the warp barrier, we'd just be another cratered world to use as a metaphor for caution in the Vulcan Science Academy."

"Better, sir." Aya smirked. The Captain certainly enjoyed his speeches. Not half bad, but she of course grew up on Picard and Sisko, and trained during the Janeway era. She had quite the high standard when it came to being inspired.

"Lot of sleepless nights hanging near this thing makes for more introspection than is healthy," Maddox shrugged. "But I think that's enough staring into the abyss for today."

He let out a sigh.

"Lunch?"

"Oohh yes, I hear that the new Diplomatic Chef arrived this morning. Supposed to be one of the best in the Fleet." Aya could always be picked up by lunch, the woman was definitely snack and food motivated.

"More like you know how to operate in a way that yields the minimal risk," Aarix grumbled to himself. If they didn't know how the technology worked, there was hardly a "safe" way to use it. At the change in conversation, the engineer asked, "wait, we aren't going to use it now? Why did we have to ditch comm badges and all that if we were just getting a tour?"

Maddox held up the L-field detector in his hand. He flipped open the cover, to reveal an anachronism: a clock face. Whilst simple in design, instead of hands it had over a dozen intricately carved and machined facets all ticking slowly around each other. The inner facets turned quickly, whereas the outer ones moved slower. Or they would have had the three most inner cogs began to jam together.

"The drive, even in its standby state, is affecting the local space-time topography; This room is shielded to a point, but that field is slowly altering the quantum gird upon which all creation is set. These detectors are machined to within a nanometer of tolerance. So as the grid flexes, that tolerance shifts. Now you, me? we're flesh and blood so we can bounce back from that pretty easy. The worst we've seen in testing from being near it is a nosebleed," Maddox said. "Now imagine that field effect working on your combadge, or a complex biomedical implant. Things machined to do a precise job. A combadge power cell has enough explosive force to put a tend in a display panel, and you wear it on your chest. Imagine..."

Maddox chuckled.

"That's why we're cautious around this thing because the moment you take your eyes off it, it'll do something that's not conducive to three-dimensional beings."

Aarix looked at the detector, then raised a brow at Maddox's words. After a moment, he sighed in defeat. "Fair enough." Turning to the technician, he added, "if possible, I'd like to read up on this... you called it a cargo relic? In case it does damage anything, I want to have an idea of what to expect. Calling for a tow back to starbase ain't in the books."

The tech looked at Aarix, and glanced for a moment at Maddox who gave a brief nod.

"I'll have a hypospray sent up to your quarters," the tech said before handing Aarix a data padd. On its screen were...words? Muddled and fumbled, utter gibberish that defied easy recognition as anything other than the scrawlings of a mad beetle dipped in ink. "Security Dyslexia, an OSI technique. The hypo will contain a memetic virus that will enforce temporary neural structures that will make the text legible to you and no one else. If needed a booster can be supplied as those structures will break down over the course of a few days. No code to break, steal, or copy."

She tapped the data pad.

"I'll want that back Sir, as its the only hard copy file we have on the drive. I have my handwritten notes at the back concerning drive settings, and I'd like to have them on hand for when we activate in a few days. Calibration can be...finiky," she said through pursed lips.

There were indeed letters on the PaDD, and for a brief moment Aarix thought he suddenly forgot how to read before the technician explained what he was seeing. He gave the technician a nod, realizing this was the best (and likely only) information he was going to get on this damned device. "I appreciate it. I'll make sure it gets back to you as soon as possible."

"If we're done," Maddox said nodding towards the door away from the gently flexing impossibility. "I think I'm feeling Brazillian for lunch?"

 

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