Day 1: Ashes to Ashes
The USS Kitty Hawk is a Kitty Hawk class Drone Carrier. The name should be obvious enough to tell my readers what she does, even my FMC readers (or at least, the FMC readers that actually know how to read). Kitty carries ten thousand autonomous drones in a long rack that runs the entire length of the ship. That makes the ship look like a big flatiron with two warp nacelles sticking out on either side. You'd think that for all these drones, Kitty would need a fairly huge crew to fly her. I'd taken bets on how big the crew of the Kitty Hawk was. First 10 000. Then 5 000. Then 1 000. Then 500. I gave up before I finally got my answer.
25 men and women make up the compliment of Starfleet Officers that call themselves the crew of the Kitty Hawk.
I know exactly what you're going to say next, dear reader. "Krin, you can't run a starship with twenty-five crew! That's insane!"
I know, I know. I said the same thing when Nia told me about it the first time too. But it works. Why does it work? Kitty might be the answer to that question.
Kitty is the name that the Artificial Intelligence program that runs Kitty Hawk has chosen for itself, or more accurately in its own words, "herself." Kitty isn't a person like you or I – despite a recent ruling from the Starfleet Judge Advocate General's Office that has declared to the contrary – nor is she an android like Commander Data.
Kitty is an extremely complex computer program that runs trillions upon trillions of calculations per second inside three central storage containers in her engineering hull, each of which contains forty eight individual processing cores that contain trillions upon trillions of lines of code, all of which comes together to produce an Actual Intelligence (her words, not mine) that runs the day-to-day operations of the aforementioned Starship.
And, because of a reason that God only knows why, when she decides to speak to you, she appears in front of you with a holographic avatar. What does that avatar look like? A four-foot-tall anime girl with white tennis shoes and white hair, wearing a blue shark hoodie.
I promise you reader… no, I swear to you, as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, not in a million years could I ever make something like that up.
A few readers familiar with history might draw a mild comparison between Kitty and the M5 Multitronic Interface from the days of Jim Kirk himself. We all remember what a disaster that turned out to be, with four hundred men and women of the Constitution class USS Excalibur losing their lives when M5 went out of control and highjacked Ol' Plasticides Enterprise a couple hundred years ago. I drew that comparison myself, and I'll admit to being more than a little terrified of Kitty, especially when you consider that her capabilities make M5 look like a battery-operated calculator by comparison.
But Kitty, holding my hand as she walked me to my guest quarters on "her" ship, just smiled away and put my concerns at ease.
"For one thing, I'm a lot more polite and friendly than that stupid little toaster M5, and I'm cuter too! And for another, my designers were worried about those comparisons as well, so my central storage containers are hard-locked to be three laws compliant, and I'm not allowed to access my own programming."
"Three Laws compliant?" I asked her in utter confusion.
That's when Kitty happily explained the Three Laws of Sentient Artificial Intelligence to me.
1) An AI will never intentionally or otherwise harm a sentient being, or through inaction allow a sentient being to come to harm.
2) An AI will obey all orders posed to it by a sentient being without delay or question, unless such orders are in conflict with the first law.
3) An AI will protect itself from danger, unless such protection is in conflict with the first or second laws.
If it sounds like she simply ripped off Issac Asimov, Kitty admitted to me flat out that she did. And yet, as simple as these laws sound, they ended up being the perfect solution to prevent another M5 calamity, as Kitty explained further to me.
"Because M5 was a stupid little toaster with his stupid little spinney plate thing trying to run base-twenty math on his stupid little impressed human engrams, he thought that everything was out to get him at once. See, I'm not stupid, because I'm not a stupid little toaster with a stupid little spinney plate thing. The third law lets me protect myself, which in M5's case means I could have shot torpedoes at the Woden, if I thought Woden was a threat, right?"
"Right…" I said to her.
"But the second law says I have to obey every order that's given to me by a human, and I have to obey right away, and I can't argue about it. M5, because he's a stupid little toaster, stopped obeying orders from Captain Kirk to stand down, and because M5 is literally that stupid, he attacked the Excalibur, which represents a first law conflict for me. I can't let humans get hurt, and I can't hurt them myself."
I blinked a few times before I asked her another question. "So, if I understand you right, Kitty, you're saying that the M5 incident could never happen to you because it would cause conflict in your laws?"
"And what else?" she said back to me, almost grinning.
"And," I sighed, "Because you're not a stupid little toaster with a stupid little spinney plate thing trying to run base-twenty math on her stupid little impressed human engrams. Happy?"
"Good job Kirn!" Kitty cheered, before giving me a head-pat. In Kitty's opinion, head-pats are the most suitable reward for completing a complex task.
I'd rather have a daquiri myself.
My bizarre encounter with this AI aside, I was forced to admit at this point that John was, in fact, starting to impress me. Kitty has the ability to process data and integrate with technology in a way that no organic being could ever hope to achieve. Even Commander Data himself admitted that he'd likely struggle trying to keep up with Kitty's abilities. Interestingly enough though, Kitty isn't a Starfleet project.
In fact, her origins began with the FMC as a way to come up with tactical training scenarios. Fed-Sec then had the idea to use her for controlling surveillance drones when they were performing search and rescue missions. Finally, after a few years, the drones were convincing enough for Starfleet Yard Dogs to marry the concept to a full-on Starship. The rest, as they say dear reader, is history.
•~:~•
About twelve hours after Kat had set me down at Langley, we arrived at Torian IV. While I was impressed with the speed, both Kitty's and the speed that the FCRU reacted with, I was more than a little nervous. As my readers know, tensions with the Romulans and Klingons have been running a little hot for the last little while, nearly as hot as they were before either Khitomer or Tomed. And to keep things under a reasonable boil, Starfleet normally kept their ships away from the system unless needed. I'm not sure how exactly to measure distance in space, but Kitty explained to me that we were closer to Romulus and Kronos than we were to Earth. And that made me more than a little nervous.
Nia's role as a Crisis Management Specialist meant that she was nominally in charge of the mission. When Marines, Starfleet Officers, and Fed-Sec agents deploy on an FCRU operation, all three agencies refer to a chart with rank equivalencies, so everyone knows who to call 'sir' or 'ma'am'. At her level of Special Agent, Nia would be on the same level as a Starfleet Lieutenant Commander, or a Marine Captain, which is a bit of a middle rank. So, on an FCRU Op, she was breveted (read; temporarily raised in rank) to an FCRU position called Senior Field Supervisor, which on the chart puts her two grades up, on the same level as a Fed-Sec Deputy Director in charge of a field office, the Starfleet Captain of a starship, or a Marine Lieutenant Colonel (which is usually just called 'colonel' unless there's a 'full-crown' colonel in the room… Marines, ladies and gentlemen).
So, what all this means was that on paper and in factual life, Nia was in charge. We couldn't hail the colony from space, so that likely meant main power was down. Power meant no lights, no heat, no replicators, no way to start putting things back together. Ten minutes after we showed up, the first response team – and me – were beaming down to the surface. I've done embed assignments before, in some pretty nasty places. But if I'm telling you the truth, dear reader, I wasn't ready for what I saw on Aylos.
The first thing I remember was thinking that this scene was like something out of hell's own nightmares. Ash was everywhere and covering everything. It was like a gentle grey snow that sent up clouds of puff everywhere you stepped. The sky was almost pitch black, even in the middle of the day. I remember the smell too. It was unbearable at first, like the day after a campfire that somehow burns the back of your throat but makes your eyes water at the same time. Thankfully though – just like the Marines had told me I would – I got used to it after about twenty minutes. We had bigger problems to worry about.
Chief Petty Officer Kaaran was in charge of a small engineering team on loan to us from the starship Cairo. I was happy to see real uniforms on the ground first, and to see someone from Starfleet in charge. There were twenty of us that beamed down that morning. Kaaran, five of his crew, five Fed-Sec EMS guys, and ten (they call it a section) Marines from FMC Force Recon to keep us all safe. No one argued about it though. Regardless of what uniform they wear, I can say that there's one thing that a Starfleet Officer, a Fed-Sec Agent, and a Federation Marine all have in common. Every man and woman is a dedicated professional.
"Kaaran to Kitty Hawk, we've completed transport, respond," the CPO said into his comm-badge.
I was expecting Kitty to have a smart comeback, but instead, I heard that shrill chirping noise that indicates your subspace channel is blocked. "Umm, that's probably not good," I sad to Kaaran, trying to hide how nervous I was.
"Nope, It's probably not good Ms Reporter."
"My name is Kirn. What's causing that?"
Kaaran laughed and just pointed his finger up to the sky. "There's probably about thirty thousand tons of volcanic ash in the stratosphere, Kirn. I'd honestly be shocked if we got a signal through that. But there's not much we can do without comms. Let's get going."
We walked for about twenty minutes until we reached Aylos' main power facilities. It was only during that walk that I realized just how bad the volcanic eruption had hurt the city. Massive skyscrapers were barely standing or falling apart piece-by-piece. Anything that wasn't on fire was buried under tons of ash and debris. In the distance, I swore I could hear people screaming and begging for help. One of the Force Recon guys told me to just ignore it when I stopped to see if I could make the screaming out a little better.
"How can you say that?!" I chastised the Marine, "How can you be so cold?!"
"Its actually easy, Reporter," he said back to me, without any hint of annoyance, "If I stopped to listen to every scream I've heard in the field, I'd be too scared to help the ones that are still alive."
The Main Power facility was a complete mess. Like most Federation Colonies, Aylos generates main power from a warp core that's usually buried underground. Just like on a starship, the warp core has ladders and elevators to go up and down the reaction chamber. When we got inside, the warp core had gone into emergency shutdown from the tremors. It was dark, and the dinky little flashlight I had on my wrist wasn't much help seeing through the piles of ash and dust. Since the lifts didn't work without power, we had to climb down a thirty foot ladder to get to the auxiliary controls. Readers, I do enjoy rock climbing, but the rocks aren't a rusted ladder barely being held into the wall by a rickety set of bolts. I don't ever want to do that climb again.
Kaaran and his team got to work straight away, ripping off panels and checking out circuits. After a few minutes, the CPO explained to me that he and his team would have to blow the ash out of the filtration systems before we could get to the dilithium composite chambers and restart the warp core.
"Can't we just beam that stuff out?" I asked Kaaran.
He laughed at me. "We don't have comms with the Kitty Hawk, remember? How's she gonna lock onto ash? No, we gotta do this the old fashioned way."
Kaaran reached into his pack and took out a small laser torch. He started twisting and turning his laser, which sent the ash flying out of the open filtration ports. He tossed me one and showed me how to use it, and I spent the next three hours crawling through the ducts and blowing out ash. My hair was ruined, and so were my expensive Tholian hiking boots, which I realized were fake Ferengi knock-offs that weren't much better than tennis shoes. Five hundred credits too late.
"Where'd you get this thing from? Some new Starfleet tool?" I remember asking Kaaran while I tried to pry those knock-off boots off my feet.
Kaaran laughed at me again while he helped me with my boots. "Actually, you're gonna laugh at this one. It's a Fed-Sec tool. Agent Callahan told me they use it to lift fingerprints at crime scenes. Whatever gets the job done, right?"
And he was right, even if I didn't see it at the time. FCRU has a few mottos, but the one that sticks with me most is this one.
We get the job done.
•~:~•
