Simulator
"Have you ever flown a spaceship?" The Doctor asked, he flicked the light on as he walked through the doorway ahead of me, harsh white light filled the empty spherical chamber,
"Not common round my way, Doctor."
"You'd be surprised." He replied. "Lockmart Bison." He said to empty air, a set of consoles and a chair shimmered into solidity in the centre of the room. "This is a fairly ubiquitous humanoid space vehicle of the 22nd century, a workhorse of the galactic rim, a good place to start. Sit down."
Feeling completely inadequate to the task I sat, "Tutorial mode, " said the Doctor, "engage." The room lights went down, the console lights came up and a holographic humanoid appeared to their right.
"Instruction mode." Said the program.
Tedious, detailed and relentless. Flying a spacecraft was not going to be any fun- if this was any indication- if I ever got as far as flying the damn thing. I quit, grumbling, after several hours by the onboard chronometer, and went in search of something fun to do.
By dint of glancing meaningfully at me every 45 seconds or so the Doctor chased me out of the library where I was playing Kurushi with the computer, I could all but hear him tutting about wasting time on frivolity. Grumpily, I went away. I ambled down to the arboretum, idly trying to figure out how closely two of the specimens were related to Sorbus aria, the whitebeam of earth, one showed almost gymnosperm qualities to the bark and vascular system, I didn't remember anything about a missing link between primitive pines and deciduous trees in biology, so where did this fit? Where was it from? When was it from? If other planet's ecologies followed the models observed on Earth, had something of the sort existed in terran ecology too? I'd mulled it over before but hadn't got as far as researching it, the arboretum catalogue was corrupted somehow and the Tardis wouldn't access it to answer my questions.
Coming out of the other side of the tree garden I caught sight of smoke leaking out under a door down the corridor,
"What the hell?" I yelled a warning to the ship intelligence and ran to the door, wrenched it open to find a space ship bridge interior, power crackling around broken consoles, lights flickering, alarms, crashes, shifts in gravity and frantic enquiries sounding from comms units, the zero-chamber flight simulation. Did I break this? I thought I turned it off, "Simulation off." The lights continued pulsing and a klaxon began blaring. A voice punched through the static, "Command! Command- the gravity stabilisers and core containment are stuttering- we need power reroute! Repeat, we need power reroute! Command, please respond!"
Oh fa fucks sake, I waded into the wrecked bridge mockup and hit the three keys I remembered from systems setup, then added a fourth, the shuddering and light flickering stopped, but it remained dim and smokey. Somewhat put out, I ran my eye down the status readouts, hull integrity was well down in a fore section, heading to hull breach, no signs of attack, could be rock strike, the section was sealed, the areas around it needed atmosphere rebalancing and power rerouting, I couldn't remember how to do that but the simulation instructor hologram flashed up, glitching, and answered questions. With prompting I got the pretend ship stabilised and finally got the hooter shut off (oxygen loss), all was quiet, if a bit dim in the zero-chamber. I vented the smoke straight to space, wasteful of atmosphere but it wasn't a real ship.
"Status?"
"Ship has lost 22% atmospheric volume, 46% power generation, port fore manoeuvring thrusters disabled, hull integrity down 77% port fore section, 82 casualties..."
"Simulation status!" I barked,
"Simulation real time run 6 hours 24 minutes.."
"I turned this off! I terminated this simulation when I left the room!"
"Simulation real time run 6 hours 24 minutes.." I hate computers, "temperature anomaly in command console."
"What?!"
"Temperature anomaly reaching critical"
"Where?"
"Command console."
Round the back of the console there were two square access panels, "Raise lighting intensity." The panels popped off under my finger nails, the lights brightened a bit, I could see smoke trailing off a fist sized block plugged into a transparent printed circuit, it was hot to the touch. "Cut power to board." I hoped it did, "Raise lighting intensity." The lights went up a bit more, I yanked the smouldering component off the board, dropped it on the floor. "Status?"
The holotrainer glitched out completely in a burst of wet sounding static.
"Status?!" I demanded to the air,
"There is a fault in the simulation." said a flat, disembodied neutral voice.
"Does the fault extend to Tardis systems?"
"The fault is in the simulation systems."
"Specify fault."
"There is a fault in the simulation graphics system."
"Specify fault." This was getting old quickly.
"There is a fault in the simulation graphics system."
"SIMULATION OFF!" The construction flickered out, leaving the bright, featureless spherical no-room. Suspicion niggled at me. "Simulation on." It came back, dim, smokey, "Simulation reset." It faded and came back still smokey and dim.
"System diagnosis."
"There is fault in the simulation graphics system." I ground my teeth, "System instability." Squawked the synthetic voice, the lights began pulsing erratically, and I felt a shiver through the deck. The mockup status readouts were squiffy again, and reactor coolant was venting into space. "Oh great." I'm supposed to learn flying on this, am I?
"Coolant leak protocol."
"Reinitialise coolant valves excluding those disabled." No shit. The power subsystems let me run that procedure but there was a blinking fault on the board's main grid, I looked, the burnt out component was still on the floor behind the console. "Replacement unit." I said.
"Specify."
I picked it up, turned it so the light picked out the part number, "002/¤¬¬/fifa62815, umm.. no, that's shell, not shepa, 002/¤§§/fifa62815." A duplicate component appeared on the floor,
"Part specified encoded." I picked it up, at least this one was cold to the touch,
"Power down board." I reached in and pushed it into it's connector slots. "Power up." It started smoking, "Power down!"
"System diagnosis part 002/¤§§/fifa62815 failure." If I bang my head hard enough on the console, will this stop?
"Part 002/¤§§/fifa62815 has failed."
"WHY has it failed?"
"Part 002/¤§§/fifa62815 has failed." Kill computers.
"Is the part faulty?"
"Part 002/¤§§/fifa62815 is a correct representation of tertiary data file 001781239999¬."
"This simulation is fabricated from which data file?"
"Tertiary data file 6022140857§§ß."
"Is the data file corrupt?"
"Data file 6022140875§§ß shows no errors, continuity intact." It was built with a faulty- with faulty components.. "Simulation system analysis: proximal causes failure component 002/¤§§/fifa62815."
"Diagnostics: power fluctuation; heat damage; component fault; programming fault; memory fault; system fault." Oh god..
"Display system diagram of console." A glitching, scratchy hologram flickered up- at least that worked, I started matching components to the chart.
I lay on the floor surrounded by components. The heat sinks were fine, a little toasty, but not dangerous; the replacement power unit fried component 002 just as nicely as the first; the simulation wouldn't reboot; it didn't have anything to compare the data file to to find inaccuracies; the memory on the boards appeared fine- I'd dug out and replaced 35 memory status bricks ("Seriously, you want me to unplug and plug it in again?" "Uninstallation and reinstallation of component may facilitate connectivity.") Which left programming...erm...I wondered if this could be done from the library, or a bar, somewhere..
The room was dusty, darkened, but the beer fridge had beer in it, I drank most of one in one go, grabbed another,
"Hard day at the office?" Such a suspiciously innocent voice- the Doctor walked in behind me and sat down opposite,
"Bloody simulation's broken."
"Oh dear." he swiped the untouched bottle,
"Where did you get the simulation program?"
"Recreated from the Tardis data files taken from encounters with the ships."
"You got a duff one, some ghosty malfunction the system can't pinpoint itself. It's screwed up, can't fly it." He rolled the misted bottle from hand to hand, not actually drinking it, but looking like he was going to,
"Have you checked the integrity of the data file?"
"It says it has nothing to compare it to."
"That would require a duplicate file, you'll have to check it manually."
"Don't know how." I pouted, tired,
"Librrarry." He gave the rs an extra roll, to signify what, exactly? That he was stating the obvious? I glared at him, daring him to comment, "Well, must get on." He breezed out, taking the bottle with him.
The first thing I pulled out was the simulation log- because it was easiest. Preflight checks, take off, it flew along- apparently talking to someone on the bridge, it hit a rock. Apart from the start time it had no acknowledgement of outside reality- ie. me trying to turn it off. I pulled up the powergrid diagram of the mockup, console by console- as the program insisted on showing me the whole ship, if a fault exists in an imaginary circuit- does it in fact, exist? I pulled up technical parameters of the zero-room to try and figure out where the interface was- that was a whole mess of operations I didn't understand. It basically turned out to have all the shields, suppression and manipulation fields necessary to negate any effect encountered in, pretty much, the whole universe- to nullify it, to create a space where no outside influence could impinge. Which made it a terrific simulator. I managed to identify and rule out the psycho, biological and gestalt tranches, I was pretty sure those weren't involved, I wasn't sure about temporal and extreme electromagnetic, the simulation had run in real time and I couldn't detect the other- just that it would be a stupid training simulation if it sprayed the trainee full of holes with hard radiation straight off.
The biosupression field was particularly interesting- it took a reading off the subject, compared it to file records and/or phyla information and suppressed target enzyme reactions deemed to incompatible with the subject. Way to kill your cold virus. I actually asked the Tardis what it thought about the mess in the zero-room, it thought everything was running like it was supposed to.
I went to bed with a book on programming.
I didn't really understand all of it, but I had a lot to understand, and all of it really boring. I used the book as a frisbee in the morning and booted up the audio-visual unit in the library instead, maybe there'd be some kiddies' instructional vids.
There was a bottle of beer on the table, fridge cold, water beading on the glass, like it had just been set there. It was so clearly a pat on the head I snarled.