Paint and Powder
A Star Trek anthology by Andrew Joshua Talon
DISCLAIMER: This is a non-profit fan based work of prose. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager et al are the property of CBS Television, and creation of Gene Roddenberry. Please support the official release.
"A Simple Experiment"
2376, The Cardassian/Federation Border...
Captain Adam Shelby was not the typical Starfleet captain. While he had graduated from the Academy with a degree in mathematics, he had switched from science to command track very early on in his career. His hair was dyed a bright blonde color, his skin was tanned from many sessions surfing and having fun outdoors. His other hobbies included gambling, and hologames. In particular, dating hologames. He called his crewmembers by name, and knew every one of them. Off duty, he could be seen wearing shorts and sandals as he relaxed in the ship's lounge, called "Eight Ahead".
The Martian native had gotten command of the Sutherland because after her AI became sapient, no other captain wanted her. She was an experimental AI, created by fusing several successful AI "brain trees" together. The thought was that she would take on the best traits of these shipgirls and become unmatched as a science vessel.
Well... They succeeded. Sort of.
The captain was lounging in his ready room, as his first officer Suraka, ran down a list of issues from their last little "experiment".
"The SIF is still fluctuating on Deck 15, the hydroponics bay is impassable thanks to the temporal rift, we still have four extra shuttlecraft in defiance of the laws of conservation of energy-"
"Ah ah ah, those are simply outliers from the temporal incursion, and will vanish once they catch up with themselves in the timeline," Shelby stated. Sutherland stood next to him, her wild pink hair glowing. While Suraka couldn't see the AI's mouth thanks to the elaborate technological gas mask she wore, it was obvious the shipgirl was smirking.
"And half the engineering section is still having conversations before they actually happen," Suraka finished, "sir, I again ask you to please shut down this Mannheim Generator Experiment."
"Hey, Starfleet Command gave us the go ahead," Shelby said cheerfully, "and until they say 'no', we're still gonna keep experimenting!"
"The temporal variance is still off," Sutherland added, "until we can get it to within one point four seven Mannheim seconds, we must continue on. For science!"
"For science!" Shelby said cheerfully, holding up a beer bottle. Suraka snatched the bottle away and tossed it into the replicator to be recycled. Shelby pouted at his XO.
"Aww... Come on Suraka! That's my favorite beer!"
"You should not drink beer while on duty," Suraka stated, her eyebrow twitching just a little, "and you promised no more beer after you and Lieutenant Wiel attempted that experiment with the antigravity torus."
The doorbell chimed. Shelby beamed.
"Come in!"
Said Lieutenant Wiel floated in, the young German girl wearing her hair in white spikes above her retro goggles. A hula-hoop like device was around her waist, keeping her above the deck. Despite her predicament, she was smiling broadly.
"Hey Emily!" Shelby greeted the science officer cheerfully, "what's up?"
"Captain! I tried to disengage ze torus with an concentrated graviton field!" She chirped.
"Did it work?" Shelby asked eagerly. Wiel shook her head, still grinning.
"Nein! But we now have a portable gravity gun! We can increase gravitational pull on objects through Higgs field manipulation of gravitons! Up to 100 times!"
Shelby leaned forward, grinning. Sutherland too looked happy, even though she was probably aware of the entire project. She always was, Suraka noted darkly in her mind.
"How long does the effect last?" Shelby asked eagerly.
"We have documented it out to twenty seconds! Made the oranges for our mimosas very fine, Captain!" Wiel reported cheerfully, as she rummaged around in her knapsack.
At last, Wiel held up what had once been a simple tractor beam emitter, but it was now tricked out with so many new parts Suraka couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Suraka stared at the abomination against good sense and aesthetics for a silent moment.
"Is... That bubble gum?" She asked.
"Ja!" Wiel said happily, "it keeps ze wires from flopping about! And sparking! Mostly!"
"Get some duct tape on that, we want to continue the experiments!" Sutherland ordered. Shelby nodded eagerly.
"Absolutely!"
"No more experimenting until you've fully filled out the experiment report forms!" Suraka stated, her Vulcan calm teetering. Wiel nodded, managing to hold back her pout.
"Ja, Commander! May I go now, Captain?"
"Of course! Great job, Wiel!" Shelby said cheerfully. Wiel wiggled a bit in mid-air.
"Can I get a push?"
"Certainly," Sutherland said. She created another holographic avatar, who began to happily push Wiel out through the doors. As they shut, Suraka slowly turned to look back at her captain and ship.
"Sir," Suraka stated, "while the pursuit of scientific progress is one of our main goals, and absolutely laudable, you must adhere to Starfleet procedures and safety protocols," she said.
"You've been saying that a lot, Suraka," Shelby observed, scratching his fuzzy chin.
"Five hundred sixty two times since she came on board," Sutherland added. Suraka nodded slowly.
"That sounds correct," the Vulcan woman stated, "as without proper documentation for all of these experiments, we cannot hope to reproduce it and thus equip the fleet with them."
And perhaps find ways to counter these maniacs, went unsaid by Suraka.
"You're right, Suraka," Shelby said, rising and walking around the desk. He was again wearing a non-regulation white labcoat over his uniform. He wrapped an arm around Suraka's shoulders and beamed.
"Even the great Zephram Cochrane carefully documented his every bit of work on the Phoenix so long ago, which gave humanity warp drive!"
"Yes sir," Suraka agreed, glancing over at one of the pictures Captain Shelby kept on the bulkhead. This was of himself as a young Starfleet Graduate, standing in front of the statue of Zephram Cochrane in Bozeman, Montana. He was pouring a beer and a can of some kind of energy drink down his throat, while his friends were chanting in encouragement.
"But!" Shelby cried, "he also included a lot of notes about other things, like the best margarita recipes. The rules for naked beach volleyball. A modularity theorem to produce the best band album cover."
"Truly a great man," Sutherland sighed happily, putting her hands together and swooning. Shelby grinned and leaned in closer to Suraka.
With most humans, this would be considered an insult, but... The charismatic man was the same inside and out. A ball of positive energy. One that Suraka was annoyed by... But couldn't help enjoying. Just a little.
"The thing is, paperwork is absolutely required for science, and we will do it properly," Shelby said with a nod, "but the process of science is messy! It's chaotic! You can't be afraid to try new things, to experiment and risk it all to learn something new! To uncover another secret of the universe... And create something awesome!"
The red alert klaxons sounded. Shelby immediately stood up and walked out onto the bridge. Suraka dutifully followed, as Sutherland appeared next to the captain's chair. Shelby sat down, as tactical officer Lieutenant Manuele Atoa relayed a report.
"Sir! Three Dominion fighters and two heavy cruisers are closing on us," he said.
"Huh," Shelby grunted, "not quite what I wanted for the live fire test, but it'll do. Manuele! Shields up, arm weapons! And be ready to step in case this doesn't work."
"Sir!" Atoa reported. Suraka looked over at Shelby.
"Sir?" She asked.
Shelby held out his hand, and Sutherland cheerfully beamed a headset onto his head. It appeared to be built from a colander, with numerous wires, isolinear chips, and devices stuck to it. Shelby strapped it to his head with a plain leather strap and grinned.
"Sir, what are you doing?" Suraka asked.
"Test of Combat Neural Interface 1, test subject Captain Adam Shelby, in live fire combat," Sutherland recited.
"Hope everything's recording right, Sutherland," Shelby said cheerfully.
"Captain!" Suraka said urgently, "this is hardly the time-!"
"Interface established!" Sutherland said. Her pupils widened. "Woah..."
Shelby's pupils also widened, as he swayed back and forth.
"Oh... Woah... Incredible," he murmured, "I can taste the sky..."
"Skin is amazinnnng," Sutherland moaned.
"They've entered weapons range, sirs!" Atoa warned, "they're readying torpedoes! Firing!"
"Mister Atoa!" Suraka shouted, "prepare to lock phasers on target and-!"
Multiple photon torpedoes launched from Sutherland's launchers, in ten torpedo spreads. They formed a fractal pattern as some of them flew nearby the Jem'hadar torpedoes... And then detonated, taking the enemy munitions with them. The other torpedoes flew on, taking out the three fighters. The heavy cruisers tanked or evaded the hits.
"All right... Took care of those," Shelby and Sutherland said, "but we're gonna need something bigger for those heavies... Aha!"
"Uh, the Mannheim Generator is online, sirs," Ensign Alaula Kaai, the wide eyed operations manager, reported from her console. "It's powering up...!"
"Captain! Sutherland!" Suraka tried.
"Nope! Too late!" Shelby and Sutherland cried.
The universe... Split with brilliant yellow energy... And there was now a second USS Sutherland accelerating away from them. Shelby and Sutherland grinned. Well, Shelby grinned, but you could tell around Sutherland's eyes she was doing the same thing.
"Sutherlands! Open fire!"
Both Nebula-class starships charged the two surprised Dominion heavy cruisers, firing phasers in a furious barrage. The duplicate was struck by torpedo fire, but continued to blast away. Its target cruiser soon exploded, having taken several torpedo hits already. The final cruiser...
"They're trying to ram us!" Atoa shouted in disbelief.
"CROSSFIRE!" Shelby and Sutherland shouted.
The two Sutherlands broke, and fired on the Jem'hadar heavy cruiser from both sides, blasting away and keeping out of range of the kamikaze. It erupted into a massive explosion, sending fiery debris flying everywhere.
For a moment, it looked like the duplicate ship had been consumed... But it flew through the fireball triumphantly, only slightly singed.
"YES!" Shelby and Sutherland shouted, jumping up and high fiving each other.
"Okay! Now we just gotta do the temporal reintegration-"
The other Sutherland vanished. A console that had not exploded before... Exploded, though thankfully the crewman at it had ducked in time. Suraka looked over at Kaai.
"Damage report?" She asked blandly. The young Hawaiian girl looked through.
"Er... It seems we have damage to the starboard warp nacelle... I mean, that the duplicate ship took, we now have it," she said, "not enough to impair the warp drive."
"Hypothesis confirmed!" Shelby and Sutherland cheered. "YEAH! Great job everyone!"
More cheers filled the bridge. Sutherland and Shelby turned to Suraka, face beaming.
"See? It all worked out!" They both said cheerfully. "We totally used the Mannheim Effect for combat, a record first!"
"Yes sir, we did," Suraka said blandly, "while utilizing a neural interface."
"Well it wasn't that hard," Sutherland said in Shelby's voice, "we utilized the self-organized time criticality method for analyzing the captain's brainwaves..."
"And utilizing the same method for Sutherland's neural pathways," Shelby said in Sutherland's voice, "we were able to find the common functionality needed for the blending!"
"Do you know how to shut it off, sir?" Suraka asked.
Sutherland and Shelby blinked in unison. They looked at one another.
They turned back to Suraka, grinned, and shrugged.
"That'll be the next project!" They both said happily.
Suraka closed her eyes. She then opened them and walked over to the replicator.
"Dark chocolate liquor, highest proof, non-synthahol," she ordered.
She needed it. She deserved it.
USS Sutherland, NCC-72015 Nebula-class advanced deep space science vessel/battlecruiser
Bio: While the science of constructing shipgirl AIs hasn't changed much in the last century, research and experimentation continues on all aspects of the silicone crystalline quantum computer system. Usually, it's little improvements. But in the case of the USS Sutherland, it was a completely new approach to it. The silicone crystalline computer grows like a living thing as it absorbs energy and information. Occasionally, grafts have been made between SCQMs to repair shipgirl AIs. Much like grafts between trees. In the case of Sutherland, her SCCM was an attempt to not just graft the pieces, but fuse them and make them grow together.
Most such experiments have failed in the past, but Sutherland came out a conscious, mostly-stable AI. Built from some of the most successful science vessel AIs, the Sutherland became sapient in record time. She bonded with the scientists working on her, and began to suggest her own experiments. Many of which were successful, others which were less successful, and a few were utter disasters. Though fortunately, the San Francisco Yards were able to repair the damage. The spacetime warp echoes are still being detected even now.
The Sutherland, while a capable AI, is prone to distraction and flights of what might be called mad genius. She is often willing to push the boundaries of science, wanting to know and understand even more. She also gets a thrill in exploration and in the realization of new experiments and findings. As a result, crewmembers who are less than thrilled about such endeavors do not tend to last long on the Sutherland-Though none have been killed in the AI's experiments.
(A few have been injured though).
The Sutherland is also known as a party ship, and Sutherland enjoys parties. Studying how various species mingle and relax is fascinating, and participating in it is very fun for her too. She is hyper, cheerful, happy, and enthusiastic. She can get carried away, but thankfully she has made several good friends among her command staff who help keep her on an even keel. When she's angry, she is... Quite dangerous. During the Dominion War, she invented hundreds of new tactics, weapons, and upgrades on her own time. Of all Federation science vessel, Sutherland was one that the Cardassians definitely feared. If the Jem'Hadar felt fear, then the Sutherland would have definitely made them feel it.
She wears orange tinted glasses, pink hair, and an elaborate technological mask that constantly changes whenever she is working on something new.
Her abuse of temporal mechanics to briefly create temporal duplicates in combat was particularly nerve wracking, as was her abuse of the Mannheim effect. She also developed phasers that would function as point defense weapons without dangerous nadion feedback, as well as power sharing beam techniques to reinforce various ship systems in combat. And many, many other advanced and techniques. Nicknamed "The Witch", in a positive or negative light, Sutherland is nevertheless a loyal, brilliant Starfleet AI who loves the Federation and bringing joy and new knowledge to others.
Captain: Adam Shelby, a friendly, professional human officer born and raised on Mars, with a love of gambling and incredible skills in reading people. He has beaten Will Riker in poker twice, though he's been beaten just as many times. He has a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Tharsis. He is intensely loyal to his crew, and Sutherland. And good friends with Jadzia Dax. He has no relation to Elizabeth Shelby of the Excalibur-It's a big universe, after all.