The Fruit of Boredom

A little ficlet of the behind-the-scenes characters at the SGC. Set early season 1. Probably a one-shot but if i do write any other ficlets about these characters, I'll post them as separate stories.

Lt Benjamin Torres was bored. Unless something went wrong with the latest patch for the dialing computer, he had nothing to do but watch the screens slowly scroll through line after line. If anything did go wrong, it would automatically roll back to the snapshot made right before they switched the gate control over to the secondary systems. In a worst case scenario, he might have to manually restore the snapshot from the backup disk sitting beside the terminal.

It resembled watching paint dry.

Last night, he'd had the relatively chatty Airman Crawford; tonight it was Airman Diaz, a likely winner if there was a competition for the smallest number of words spoken in a duty shift. Torres's attention wandered again and landed (again) on the silent stargate. Two teams were off world right now, and Torres wondered what they were doing. Was it the equivalent of 0200 for them right now? He doubted it and frowned. It should be easy to know what the local time was for off world teams. The information existed; they used it to schedule missions. But it wasn't at their fingertips!

Having found a problem to solve, Torres picked up his notebook and started outlining the requirements for calculating the local time on another planet. Ignoring Diaz's unfriendly looks, he pulled up the information on P3X-836, where SG4 were right now and made notes of exactly how it stored the MALP data on the length of the planet's day and the comparison points with SGC time. The maths was sufficiently complicated to absorb him; the challenge of how to intelligently handle incomplete or approximate data enough to keep him busy for the rest of his shift.

Another night, another set of patches to install and another stretch of hours with only the dour Diaz for company. Torres finished putting together his program and fed it the details of PX4-298, where SG7 were. It obligingly spat out a set of numbers:

Cycle length: 1268m (21h, 8m)
Midnight: 0m
Noon: 634m (10h, 34m)
Dawn: 349m (3h, 49m)
Sunset: 919m (15h, 19m)
Total Daylight: 570m (9h, 30m) NEAR-EQINOX
Current time: 1117m (18h, 37m) EVENING

Torres grinned in satisfaction. However, such a number orientated output had it's limits. It was precise, but he wanted a better way to convey at a glance of where in it's diurnal cycle a planet was. He went back to pencil and paper, sketching a few ideas. He started with a set of clocks and immediately found them too constraining – but clocks were something easily understood. It took a little while of back and forth before he came up with a design that he thought doable and appropriate.

By then, another shift had slipped by.

For the next while, Torres wasn't assigned to night-time patching, and he only had a few minutes here and there to keep at his little project. Eventually the roster cycled through again and he was back there at 0130, this time with Airman Crawford looking over his shoulder. The comments and questions slowed him down, but Crawford's intelligent critique of the interface Torres had designed was useful. A bit more tinkering and a bit more polishing and he was ready to take it to his CO.

Captain Webb commanded the mixed bunch of NCOs, officers and a stray civilian who maintained the SGC's specialized computer systems and databases. He was a talented programmer himself but only a few months into this posting, had resigned himself to having little time to get into the code himself. It all got chewed up in coordinating the efforts of his team with the tinkering of Captain Carter and the irregular input of the rest of the eggheads. Change management was always a bitch, but keeping up with Carter made it a nightmare.

"You did this when?" Webb demanded crankily.

"Night shift, sir. While the patches are being installed."

"Umm..." He fired up a sandbox and ran the program Torres had just presented him.

SG6: PX2-008

A dial was displayed - 214deg of a circle was displayed, marked at 15deg intervals. A 'needle' was visible just past the vertical. It was surmounted by a small sun.

Below the dial image was text, a read out of the pertinent numbers defining the day of PX2-008, what time of day and what time of year it was there right now.

"Huh. Where's it getting it's data?"

"Text input file, sir. I'd need to link it to the databases for dynamic results."

Webb studied it a little more and nodded. "It's a good idea," he said at last. "Now, take it back and code it to produce a better display. I want several layouts – cover all SG teams, all teams off world, a custom list of teams, any other grouping that you can think of. Also, an option to just pick a planet to check, rather than go by teams. Oh, and include a reference dial with local data at the top left." Giving Torres a slight smile, he handed back the disk. "I'll write a connector to the databases; I'll email you a sample of the input format you'll need to handle."

"Yes, sir!"

When tidied up and polished to Webb's standards, Torres's little 'planets-zone display' program was distributed around the base. General Hammond always had it running, although usually minimized. Hammond's aide and Walter Harriman found it a invaluable tool when scheduling missions. In the control room and the infirmary, it was almost always visible on an out-of-the-way screen. The cooks were known to check it in an effort to keep track of who was likely to be wanting an out of place meal. Various groups on base referred to it regularly as a way to know who was coming back badly gate-lagged and in later years, Dr Felger always had it displaying SG1.