BackLog - JDL - Ens Jon Peters, Ens Gordon Jones, Ens Balman - Engineering Officers - "Deflecting Deflections"

Posted on 241502.25 @ 3:43am by Ensign Balman & Ensign Gordon Jones

Mission: Holy Cow
Location: Deflector Control

The Bolian cussed under his breath and wiped sweat from his brow. He didn't know what was going on, but he'd been crouched in the jeffries tube now for over 2 hours. Everytime he thought he'd isolated a problem, it either moved, or disappeared then reappeared looking slightly different. He couldn't make heads or tails of it.

All Balman knew was he needed to get out of the accessway and straighten his back.

Jon Peters had just left sickbay and had come straight to the deflector array main control core. On his way, he'd run through simulations on how to handle the AI that was at the root of the virus, and had narrowed it down to two possibilities by the time he'd reached the jefferies tube that would give him direct access to the system. He pulled open the access hatch only to find someone already in there as he bent down to crawl inside.

"Oh, excuse me," he said, standing back up.

Balman started, conking his head off the top of the access port as it opened before he had a chance to tap the panel.
"Oof!" A big blue hand ran through a mass of tousled white curls attached to a head that popped out of said port.
"I wasn't expecting anyone down here. Is there anything I can help with?" He looked up from the port to Peters, smiling in genuine greeting and friendship.

Gordons voice broke over Jon's commbadge "Peters, Jones here, any idea how long your going to be up there? The CMO's getting pissy again!" Came the voice.

"Bless her heart," Jon muttered, glancing down at the Bolian that hung half out of the Jefferies tube. "Your heavy hand seems to have been doing just fine keeping her corralled, Gordon. Just tell her to make more tea or something?" He shook his head. "I found an unexpected helper when I reached the deflector dish, let me bring him up to speed and get this sorted out in two shakes of a rattler's tail."

"That's easy for you to say! She has Hyposprays, I have a hyperspanner, who's gonna win that battle!" Gordon replied. "Fine, just please, hurry up, or I might be one leg short next time I see you!" Gordon said, cutting the Comm channel.

Balman, by now, was standing, stretching and limbering up as he listened to the banter, a peculiar look on his face.
"I get the feeling you're here to deal with what I've been tearing my hair out for the last 2 Hours, over." He offered his engineering pad up, filled with the tests and results he'd been coming up with.

"It's possible, though surprising if that's the case. I would have expected the AI in the virus I'm tracking to be a little more careful about hiding itself," Jon mused, accepting the PADD. In return he offered up his own with the two techniques he hypothesized to capture the AI driven virus. "I think we're going to have to trick the AI it's trapping itself, then we can go and squash the little subroutines it's deployed all over the ship. It's taken quite a fondness for sickbay, nearly as much as the Doc seems to have taken for Jones, considering she probably should have strung him up for insubordination by now." Jon sighed and shook his head.

Balman blinked, head tilting ever so slightly, "Is that what's got me chasing my tail? Originally I ended up here because OPS reported an unexplained fluctuation in deflector services, which I have repaired... but then I got distracted trying to find the source. I've never seen anything like it. Do you know what's going on?"

The Bolian looked quizzically at the information on the PADD he'd been handed, realizing it was much more indepth than the information he'd just handed to... uh... He looked up and offered a hand, "Sorry, I'm Ensign Balman, I didn't catch your name?"

"Where are my manners, excuse me," Jon muttered, tucking the PADD in his hand under his arm and offering his hand to shake. "I'm Ensign Jon Peters."

The Bolian smiled, shaking the smaller man's hand powerfully.
"Alright. So we have an AI controlled virus with subroutines running amok, and you think the root is here in deflector control?" He looked quizzically past Peters, seeing through him for a moment as he thought.
"I wonder if it would react anything like a weed? Maybe we're chopping the head off a flower and it's just popping through a different crack in the pavement. If we feed it something and it takes it back to the root, wherever it might be, it could brick the AI and give us time to track it down and squash it?"

The Bolian looked down, realizing he was slowly crushing poor Jon's hand, which he promptly let go of, "Heh, Sorry"
Balman rubbed the back of his neck non-chalantly.

"We traced it back here from sickbay," Jon insisted, rubbing at his hand after the Bolian had released it. "I was hoping if we handled it here, it would stop spawning varmints elsewhere in the ship. Then we'd go around and scrub up the rest of the mess."

Balman nodded, looking pensive again.
"Wait, how did you catch it in sickbay... what's going on there that's so interesting?" A seed was growing in his mind.

"The original purpose of the virus was to target Commander Rinehart, specifically to prevent the emergency response systems from helping her in case of a medical emergency. All I can guess is that when we patched that, the AI at the core got bored and continued to run amok in the sickbay systems since they were already familiar to it?" Jon shrugged, looking at the PADD that Balman had handed him. "I don't have specifics of what it's been doing in sickbay, but I can have Jones pull up the system logs and find out. He's still up in sickbay, awaiting my go ahead to start cleaning once I've got the critter cornered and cleaned up down here."

Balman nodded again, in understanding.
The intelligence officer? He'd never actually met her, but considering her position, she could easily be a target to someone.
"Well right now, it's in the Jay29Tango circuit," Balman pointed back up the tube he'd just come from, "I was trying to isolate it, but I didn't realize it was as sophisticated as it seems to be. If you want to catch it, and it's intelligent, we'll need to distract it so it can't run off to another system and you're back to square one."

"It's your show, sir. Let me know if I can help."

"Well, if you wanted to make it think there was an incoming emergency call for Sickbay, and see if that'll keep its attention, it would be mighty helpful," Jon insisted. "While you do that, I should be able to flick the array over to maintenance mode so we can isolate it in there. Sound good?" He knelt down at the entrance into the tube, awaiting the blue man's response.

Balman flicked a few scenarios through his head then nodded, "I wonder, if we mask the attempt with Commander Rinehart's comm signal if it would confuse it better? Either way, it won't take me long to rig something up." He motioned to the panel behind him, as indication he was ready.

"It's not huntin' Rinehart's signal anymore, we patched that as far as I can reckon, just a general purpose call should do it," Jon insisted, crawling into the tubes. "I'll watch for your decoy, then I'll start."

Balman nodded, moving over to the panel, already tapping in some commands on the PADD, before he reached up and started keying in a sequence.
"Ok... this should mask the origin enough... and... that should... about... do it..." He thumbed the PADD with an electric blue hand and waited to hear the result.

Jon watched the systems as the Bolian deployed the decoy, and as the signal coursed through the system he initiated the maintenance protocol. The Deflector array slowly isolated itself and disconnected from the other ship systems. As that happened, Jon shot a quick warning to ops so they'd know this was unscheduled but intentional. Once the system finished the isolation process, Jon patched directly into the array to verify that the beastie they hunted was still there.

"It looks like it worked," Jon called out of the tube. "I didn't see any transmission out of the array systems during the isolation process, did you?"

Balman checked the PADD once more, before shutting it down and pulling the microisolinear chip from it.
"Looks like it's cornered and dormant for the moment," he said offering the chip to the Jefferie Tube entrance.
"Here if you store it on this, there is no chance of it re-entering the mainframe without a trace, and it should be permanently isolated so long as it remains physically isolated."
Despite doing little more than playing bait, Balman felt accomplished, which was plain by the smile on his face.
Maybe going officer had been the right choice after all...

"Great minds think alike," Jon insisted, poking his head out of the jefferies tube in order to accept the chip. "I could have sworn that I'd packed some spares in my toolkit, but I'm all out. Thank you." He disappeared inside, quickly transferring the AI over to the chip. "We're going to have to verify the backups for the deflector before we initiate the restore on this thing, and then we'll start combing the rest of the ship systems for all its little subroutines it spread like dandelion seeds. Once we're done with that, then I can drop this thing in a sandbox, and pick it apart for a report."

Balman nodded, offering the handsome Ensign a hand up from the Jefferies Tube.
"Aye. We can cover more ground if we divide and conquer... And since I basically threw a food fight with this thing, down here, I'd say leave this part of the mess to me. I'll send you a full report when I'm done?"
The Bolian flashed an ever charming smile.

Jon paused a moment. It occurred to him that whoever had unleashed this beastie on the ship was likely a member of the crew, and he'd had no previous interactions with this Bolian man before. Granted, he has no reason to mistrust him either; he was going to have to take a leap of faith, though he had enough information that if the leap was misplaced, it should provide a noose to ensnare him with. Hopefully that wouldn't be needed, Jon quite liked the guy so far.

"Sounds good to me. Give the report a little extra spit and polish, it'll probably go across the CO's desk, as well as Intel's, in addition to the normal engineering channels," Jon warned as he returned the smile.

Balman blinked for a moment, smile unwavering, despite the slight pang that went through his gut then.
This was a really serious situation, what had he stuck his nose into?
"Aye sir. I'll do my best" With that the Bolian moved back to the console behind him, beginning the process of isolating and clearing the systems locally.
He glanced back over his shoulder, as Jon set off at a hurried pace, smiling a secret smile again before turning back to his work. This was gonna be a while.


=/\= End Log =/\=

Ensign Jon Peters
Engineering Officer
USS Enterprise

Ensign Gordon Jones
Engineering Officer
USS Enterprise

Ensign Balman (APB Sh'eik)
Engineering Officer
USS Enterprise