IKC FHew 7C6110
Bug Hunt – Doing the homework
by Soghla' Jared & HoD Ro' Matlh
Post Details
Jared lifted his Quasomniscopic goggles and looked at the goop in the scanner in front of him - liquid leaked from the enemy ship, and painstakingly harvested with the ship's bussard collectors.
This was quite the most complex chemical structure he'd seen in millenia. He'd encountered plenty of alien biology before, but this was something else.
He glanced over at terminal two, running borg algorithm interpretations on the signals Marie's nanites were putting out.
Good. That was good news at least.
He pulled the goggles back down and looked onto the goop again.
There it was. Like a little... chemical cargo bay in each cell. Space for these little variable chemical chains he kept finding loose in the fluid. Chemicals with an enalytic structure that didn't actually seem to... DO much. They were mostly inert or generally chemically mundane. They were just oddly complex - allowing for millions of variations on a similar structure.
Jared paused for a moment.
Data encoding?
That would make some sense. Use these tiny structures as some kind of... words. You could encode messages and information on a chemical level.
Jared lifted the goggles again and whistled.
That's cunnning. Come up with a mechanism to decode those chemical patterns into synaptic memory structures, and you've got chemical memory. The structures he was looking at were probably the black box of the F'Hew's pursuit. Encodes the memory chemically and floods the plasma stream. Nearby cells pick up a few samples and store them. Then all you'd need would be a few mils of fluid and the right biological mechanism to get the full story of what happened to their missing ship. If the creatures themselves had similar biology, they could practically eat their own dead to gain the corpse's memories. Cunning!
... and vaguely familiar.
Jared frowned for a moment.
He'd heard of that before, somewhere. Long ago. Not the eat-the-dead thing so much, but a species that could encode knowledge into chemical structures and feed it to their larvae to make specialist drones.
Nothing like this species, of course. No cloak technology. Different physiology. Different weaponry...
Well... not much like this species, anyway. And it was a LONG time ago...
...oh.
Jared bustled into Ro's office with a handful of data-pads.
"Good news... I think. News anyway. Few different things. Which do you want first?"
Ro' sighed heavily. The Tiq was excited, which rarely happened and was seldomn 'good' in any sense that Ro' understood. The key was to try and keep him on topic.
"What is happening to Marie?" he decided to begin with. "is she going to start attacking us or something Borg related?"
"Yeah, I'm still pretty sure Marie's not being assimilated," Jared responded. "She's flooded with Borg medi-nanites, but that's just how borg medicine works. They're not building assimilation structures in her body. They're using her DNA as a template for repairing the system. Only problem is they're not programmed to LEAVE once they're done, so they're just doing what sleeping borg nanites do - they're clinging to her nervous system converting nearby useful borg signals and information into nerve impulses."
"If there was a cube nearby she could possibly sense it, but they wouldn't sense her - the nanites can receive, but only have a broadcast range of about 30cm, so she'd need to be hugging a drone for them to sense the nanites in her system."
He looked at Ro's face which was unmoving. Ro' knew if he waited long enough Jared would say something in a language he understood.
Jared did so, "Which could all be summarised as 'she's got nanites in her, but she's safe.'"
"So what is happening?" Ro' asked.
"It seems like these aliens have a method of communicating that's not dissimilar from some of the Borg emergency signal methods, though - and the nanites aren't smart enough to know the difference. I think that's why she was spouting gibberish. Picking up the alien signals, and trying to interpret them as language."
Ro' considered, playing with a half drunk bottle on his table, "So they are like the Borg, but not the Borg. Have you anythign else we can report?"
"I THINK I recognise the species. Sort of."
Now he had Ro's full attention. He sat up and looked at teh elderly crewman. This was teh big advantage of having Jared on board. His specvies remembered things that the Klingon Race had not even encountered yet.
"They're VERY different now, but I think I might have encountered the race a long time back, when they were less advanced. My people called them the Icthoids. They're... sort of like insects, in the same way that a starship is a little like an asteroid."
"Not local though. Not at all. Based out the back end of delta quadrant, last I knew. I was told they were dead, actually - wiped out in some war."
"Anyway... knowing that has helped a little. Running some interpretations on the chemical structures in the ship fluid we collected in parallel with the gibberish Marie was spouting... I have a rough idea at a translation."
Ro' Was listening, his eyes fixed on the science officer. Information was power.
"Basically... I think it's a distress signal of some kind. There's a sense of fleeing... home, or back to base, or something. Injuries, or casualties, I think. A strong sense of urgency. And... there seems to be two separate threats hinted at. One's just a secondary consideration, but there does seem to be two."
Ro' took a moment to think then smiled, "The weapon on the planet! So, in short, it is scared and running. Good! Very good. Let us get to the Bridge and see if we can't scare it some more. Now at least we know what it might be we can test your hypothesis."
by Soghla' Jared & HoD Ro' Matlh
Post Details
| Title | Doing the homework | |
| Mission | Bug Hunt | |
| Author(s) | Soghla' Jared & HoD Ro' Matlh | |
| Posted | Sat May 04, 2013 @ 10:49am | |
| Location | Jared's Lab / Ro's Office | |
| Timeline | A few hours after Marcus' rescue |
This was quite the most complex chemical structure he'd seen in millenia. He'd encountered plenty of alien biology before, but this was something else.
He glanced over at terminal two, running borg algorithm interpretations on the signals Marie's nanites were putting out.
Good. That was good news at least.
He pulled the goggles back down and looked onto the goop again.
There it was. Like a little... chemical cargo bay in each cell. Space for these little variable chemical chains he kept finding loose in the fluid. Chemicals with an enalytic structure that didn't actually seem to... DO much. They were mostly inert or generally chemically mundane. They were just oddly complex - allowing for millions of variations on a similar structure.
Jared paused for a moment.
Data encoding?
That would make some sense. Use these tiny structures as some kind of... words. You could encode messages and information on a chemical level.
Jared lifted the goggles again and whistled.
That's cunnning. Come up with a mechanism to decode those chemical patterns into synaptic memory structures, and you've got chemical memory. The structures he was looking at were probably the black box of the F'Hew's pursuit. Encodes the memory chemically and floods the plasma stream. Nearby cells pick up a few samples and store them. Then all you'd need would be a few mils of fluid and the right biological mechanism to get the full story of what happened to their missing ship. If the creatures themselves had similar biology, they could practically eat their own dead to gain the corpse's memories. Cunning!
... and vaguely familiar.
Jared frowned for a moment.
He'd heard of that before, somewhere. Long ago. Not the eat-the-dead thing so much, but a species that could encode knowledge into chemical structures and feed it to their larvae to make specialist drones.
Nothing like this species, of course. No cloak technology. Different physiology. Different weaponry...
Well... not much like this species, anyway. And it was a LONG time ago...
...oh.
Jared bustled into Ro's office with a handful of data-pads.
"Good news... I think. News anyway. Few different things. Which do you want first?"
Ro' sighed heavily. The Tiq was excited, which rarely happened and was seldomn 'good' in any sense that Ro' understood. The key was to try and keep him on topic.
"What is happening to Marie?" he decided to begin with. "is she going to start attacking us or something Borg related?"
"Yeah, I'm still pretty sure Marie's not being assimilated," Jared responded. "She's flooded with Borg medi-nanites, but that's just how borg medicine works. They're not building assimilation structures in her body. They're using her DNA as a template for repairing the system. Only problem is they're not programmed to LEAVE once they're done, so they're just doing what sleeping borg nanites do - they're clinging to her nervous system converting nearby useful borg signals and information into nerve impulses."
"If there was a cube nearby she could possibly sense it, but they wouldn't sense her - the nanites can receive, but only have a broadcast range of about 30cm, so she'd need to be hugging a drone for them to sense the nanites in her system."
He looked at Ro's face which was unmoving. Ro' knew if he waited long enough Jared would say something in a language he understood.
Jared did so, "Which could all be summarised as 'she's got nanites in her, but she's safe.'"
"So what is happening?" Ro' asked.
"It seems like these aliens have a method of communicating that's not dissimilar from some of the Borg emergency signal methods, though - and the nanites aren't smart enough to know the difference. I think that's why she was spouting gibberish. Picking up the alien signals, and trying to interpret them as language."
Ro' considered, playing with a half drunk bottle on his table, "So they are like the Borg, but not the Borg. Have you anythign else we can report?"
"I THINK I recognise the species. Sort of."
Now he had Ro's full attention. He sat up and looked at teh elderly crewman. This was teh big advantage of having Jared on board. His specvies remembered things that the Klingon Race had not even encountered yet.
"They're VERY different now, but I think I might have encountered the race a long time back, when they were less advanced. My people called them the Icthoids. They're... sort of like insects, in the same way that a starship is a little like an asteroid."
"Not local though. Not at all. Based out the back end of delta quadrant, last I knew. I was told they were dead, actually - wiped out in some war."
"Anyway... knowing that has helped a little. Running some interpretations on the chemical structures in the ship fluid we collected in parallel with the gibberish Marie was spouting... I have a rough idea at a translation."
Ro' Was listening, his eyes fixed on the science officer. Information was power.
"Basically... I think it's a distress signal of some kind. There's a sense of fleeing... home, or back to base, or something. Injuries, or casualties, I think. A strong sense of urgency. And... there seems to be two separate threats hinted at. One's just a secondary consideration, but there does seem to be two."
Ro' took a moment to think then smiled, "The weapon on the planet! So, in short, it is scared and running. Good! Very good. Let us get to the Bridge and see if we can't scare it some more. Now at least we know what it might be we can test your hypothesis."