Star Trek Hunter
Episode 10: Interview With An Ethicist
Scene 13: The Library of the Progenitors
10.13
The Library of the Progenitors
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About the time that Lieutenant Kenneth Dolphin was making calls from Deep Space 9 and using Justice Irons' influence in ways that would almost certainly put him in her bad graces, the U.S.S. Hunter, fresh from being saved and dwarfed by the giant machine 800 light years below the galactic plane of the Milky Way, was once again dwarfed - this time by an enormous ring structure that completely encircled a star. The ring was approximately a kilometer deep, between 0.5 and 15 kilometers wide and almost 16 light minutes in diameter.
The ring was bilaterally symmetrical, with two large sections that were 15 kilometers wide - on exact opposite sides of the star - and tapered to a width of a half-kilometer. These two narrow segments served as axis points for the ring structure as it revolved, creating an enormous gyroscopic motion around its star.
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"These people had way too much time on their hands," said Pep.
The senior staff were observing a holographic projection of the structure in the executive conference room.
"Please tell me that whole thing isn't the library…" said Gamor.
Tauk allowed himself a light cough, cleared his throat, then said, "The library isn't there at all. It is in a separate orbit, farther out."
Gamor called for the ship's interactive avatar: "Hunter…"
The avatar appeared next to the holographic display of the ring structure.
"It's good to see you again, Hunter," said Dr. Carrera.
"Thank you, Dr. Carrera," the elderly looking hologram replied. "Lieutenant Gamor, I assume you want me to display the library?"
"Yes please."
The avatar turned toward the display, which pulled out, then zoomed in on what appeared at first to be a small planet in an orbit beyond the ring. As the image grew, it became apparent that it was not a moon, but a very large machine, encircled by a debris field similar to the one they had encountered below the galactic plane.
"Can we take the Hunter inside that field?" asked Justice Minerva Irons.
"Yes," Hunter replied. "The structure inside the field appears to be open - I project that we can enter the structure and travel safely inside it."
"Is that field active? Will it protect us against gamma waves?" asked Lieutenant Commander Mlady.
"We could test it with a short gamma burst," Dr. Carrera replied.
"Approved," Irons said. "Test it, then take us inside. We will reconvene once we have a sense of what's in there."
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Nearly an hour later, the Hunter was inside an enormous, open structure. The Hunter's floodlights only provided partial lighting inside an area that could support a large number of large space vessels. On one side of a transparent barrier was what appeared to be a vast, dense field of randomly swirling particles. On the other side was enclosed space that the Hunter floated in – and that entirely dwarfed the patrol vessel. A series of 144 transparent tubes containing what were evidently workstations was attached to the transparent wall that bifurcated this enormous structure. Each tubular booth contained six workstations.
The Hunter started near one side wall of this structure, traveling slowly just below the level of the workstation booths. An atmosphere was beamed into one of the workstation booths, pressurizing it. Then two of Hunter's crew beamed in, wearing full EVA suits. After a few moments, they removed their gloves and helmets, which remained attached to their EVA suits by lanyards and floated nearby; apparently there was no artificial gravity within these booths. The Hunter crewmembers sat side-by-side at two of the workstations. After a few more moments, the Library came alive - particles on the other side of the transparent barrier whirled, a number of particles racing toward the workstation booth - forming images and what appeared to be writing against the wall in front of the workstations.
The Hunter moved on, pressurizing another booth and beaming in two more researchers. Some of the booths were broken and could not be pressurized, but most of them were intact. Two-person teams were deployed at 15-minute intervals and allowed to work for two hours. At the end of that time, each two-member team would be beamed back to the Hunter, followed by the atmosphere the Hunter had used to pressurize the booth.
Both interceptors launched from the Hunter and trailed the boat, using their sensors to record the images that each team managed to evoke from the Library and transmitting those to the Hunter for storage.
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Irons had a crew full of brilliant individuals with diverse and broad educations and backgrounds. To make best use of this brainpower, each crewmember was given at least one two-hour shift within the library booths to attempt to understand how to operate the Library's reading technology, find the information that Admiral Scumuk had somehow found and decipher the alien language.
Predictably, Flight Engineer Tomos, who had been a curator at the library at the Sanctuary of the Waterbirds on Cophus II for most of his life, was the first to understand how to use the workstations and how to focus the search for what the Library-makers - whom everyone assumed were the progenitors - knew about the gamma wave, what they knew about the great machine below the galactic plane that apparently had been built to protect the Milky Way against those gamma waves, and the function of the ring structure the Library shared this solar system with.
It was also not surprising that Dr. Carrera and Lt. Tauk, the Hunter's two most brilliant mathematicians, were able to identify the math - which a majority of the characters presented by the Library represented - was built on a base 12 number system. With help from the many other crew members with advanced math training, including the transporter engineers and the navigators, they were able to learn how the higher math functions worked.
The language itself was cracked by the Hunter's giant first officer, Commander David Pepper, whose doctorate in literature had exposed him to both the written and spoken forms of more than a dozen alien languages. These crewmembers were highly productive and took several shifts in the library booths. Other crew members might have made only one or two useful observations - or none - during their first shift. But Irons made sure each crew member served at least two shifts in the booths and each found their second shift far more productive than the first.
Irons pulled two shifts in the booths herself, but dedicated most of her effort to working with the interactive holographic avatar to develop an overview of the cascade of information being elicited by the crew from the Library.
It swiftly became evident that the 144 workstation booths functioned identically. Nonetheless, Irons kept the Hunter moving slowly, determined to use as many of these booths as were functional. This strategy paid off when Transporter Engineer K'rok, during a shift in one of the booths discovered a sheaf of large square papers on the floor of the booth. These turned out to be detailed notes in Admiral Scumuk's handwriting. Once these were deciphered and the information propagated to the research teams, the search for the needed information leapt into high gear.
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One of the results from all this research was a prediction of the frequency and timing of the onslaught of gamma waves into this region of space. During the 36-hour period Irons had allowed for the initial research, the Library's gamma shield had activated 6 times with wave protection periods between two and eight minutes. A quiet period of 49 hours was predicted, which would give the Hunter sufficient time to return to the protected hangar near the romulan border where it had survived a previous gamma wave. Which put a hard deadline to the crew's research at the Library.
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10.13