By Ensign Rada Dengar
Stardate: 80202.15
After Ghost in the Machine
--=Engineering: USS Alchemy=--
Stardate: 80202.15
After Ghost in the Machine
--=Engineering: USS Alchemy=--
Rada foresaw great danger for every engineer working on the Alchemy. At the rate they were going Rada was sure that anyone who hadn’t gone mad from sleep deprivation by the time this job was done would undoubtedly end up in sickbay from caffeine poisoning.
With all the time that they had already put into the repairs to the Alchemy and after all the setbacks they had encountered, the idea that they’d ever be finished seemed ludicrous to say the least. Rada was feeling the affects worse than most due to the drowsiness already inherent in the use of his current medical regimen.
Rada couldn’t help but recall the words of his uncle, not exactly a philosopher but a man who spoke his mind, who had once told him "You’d have to be mad to take the treatment for madness". It was true that before Rada was institutionalized he would never have agreed to anything which would slow him down like this. Thinking back to where he’d been and what he’d almost done, he was now much too terrified to stop.
Rada had found himself unable to continue work on the assembly until he had finished working on a realignment of a warp coil for the trans-warp drive. Traditionally such a thing would not be done when a machine was still as toasted as the Alchemy’s trans-warp drive was but the intricate nature of the system meant that the coil had to be successfully aligned before some of the burnt out systems, which would need to be replaced for a successful test of the assembly, could even be removed. He was not getting through it nearly as quickly as he had hoped.
Rada knew he was tired when he suddenly became willing to take chances. He had tried to cheat with a resonating beta band wave based positioning method he’d designed which should have been much faster than traditional methods for achieving correct alignment.
*Just my luck,* thought Rada, *My first practical test of this system and an inordinate level of Beta Wave emissions make the technique next to useless.*
Rada really felt sometimes that when people took actions as blatantly inconvenient as this directly applying to him that it had to mean that people were listening in on him, still he knew that that was probably quite unlikely.
"How’s it looking?" asked Crewman Jack Halliday.
Rada felt he was probably holding the young crewman up because he had needed the coil aligned before he could do what he had to and thought it was probably best to apologize. Rada believed, however, that this was not what he wanted to do. He had an image to keep up and our apologies are where our true self tends to come through.
"Not well, it serves me right for mucking about with something new," Rada explained laughing slightly to hide his anger with himself.
"What’s this?" The crewman bent down and indicated a modified tricorder which had been patched in through a nearby console.
"That’s my mistake," explained Rada "This console is tied directly into the trans-warp drive and faced some consequential damage when the drive burned out. Unfortunately, the defect runs both ways and certain components relating to this console would need to be repaired before any console could be used for the warp coil alignment. I’ve been trying by networking this device to the console and using a beta band wave technique to complete the alignment so that work which will be based around that can be started earlier. Unfortunately the technique seems to be flawed."
Rada made sure at no point to take credit for the technique, because as far as he knew it really was quite flawed.
"Two heads are better than one," the crewman offered. "Would you mind explaining to me how it works?"
Rada took this as a suggestion that he didn’t know what he was doing, but since he felt he probably didn’t, he took no offense to this.
"It’s a simple enough idea. Conventional alignment techniques require you to set the alignment in degrees through the computer, and to try to adjust it to the optimum point." Explained Rada, realising that the crewman would already know this.
"And this doesn’t do that?" asked the crewman curiously.
"No, this uses a floating adjustment system. It emits certain beta waves towards the coil and then using a specially designed algorithm calculates the coil efficiency using the reflected waves. Due to split second sensor delay, when the optimum level is discovered the coil will have passed that point and so will be reversed and slowed leading to the coil resonating back and forth within a shrinking range until the point is achieved within an accepted accuracy. The coil should then lock in place."
"That’s a really interesting idea" commented the crewman "Any idea what the problem is?"
"Yes, quite a good idea" replied Rada instantly regretting claiming to have had a good idea but knowing he had to continue now.
"The system is calibrated so precisely that it refuses to accept the alignment is correct with even the slightest interference around. It’s found the point but it just keeps getting closer and closer to it without ever reaching it. For the moment I might as well just unplug it…"
It was then that it hit Rada. *What an idiot I’ve been,* he thought.
"That’s it," he declared and bent down and unplugged the tricorder from the console, he put a smile on his face because he knew most people would be happy to have finished. "It’s done."
The crewman looked perplexed.
"The tricorder wouldn’t accept the alignment as being correct but…" the crewman realised what Rada was saying and eagerly finished his sentence for him "It didn’t have to. Since resonance has been already been achieved and given enough time asymptotically approaching the desired point the alignment must be within an acceptable margin of error. By removing the tricorder and hence stopping the float you locked the coil in the desired position."
"Exactly," replied Rada as he typed into a PADD. He then asked as politely as possible "What brings you over here?"
"I was told to take a five minute break by Kellyn, I mean Lt Commander Lair, I was curious about your unusual engineering technique."
"What do you mean, unusual?" Rada asked.
"Typically a good engineer will attack a problem by jumping straight under the nearest Work Console or into the nearest Jeffries Tube…" explained Halliday.
Rada didn’t know what to say to this, it had only been on the rarest of occasions in Rada’s career when he had considered himself to be a good engineer but he still hadn’t expected to be confronted like this.
Jack picked up on part of this and quickly said apologetically "I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t a good engineer, your work speaks for itself. I just meant that you prefer to take the time to think about something before diving into action… you don’t touch anything before you know what you’re going to do with it. Generally engineers who actually care about their work are so eager that they can have a relay completely pulled apart before they figure out that the problem is actually down the line somewhere."
Rada realised that the crewman wasn’t trying to insult him and actually saw a little of himself in Halliday. They may have been of similar age but Halliday was in many ways what Rada once was long ago.
Rada had once eagerly jumped into problems like Halliday still did but life had led him to become much less decisive over time, Rada was still talented but he wasn’t what he once was. When Rada was happier with himself he had also been as honest as Halliday; that had been sometime though. Rada did find this a bit depressing.
When he started at the Academy, Rada had been so eager that after reading chapter one of his warp theory textbook he had designed a revolutionary kind of warp bubble only to discover that chapter two explained how that idea had been invented already and chapter three explained how it had been made obsolete.
In the years since that day, life had led him to give up on dreaming of creating anything great as an engineer. He’d taken to solving every problem before him but never trying for more. Rada had entered Starfleet with a dream of finding a particular answer, but had only found more and more ways that potential answers had proved themselves wrong.
"Thanks" Rada told Halliday, although he wasn’t thanking him for what Halliday thought he was. Rada was thanking him because he had now decided that it was time for a change.
Ensign Rada Dengar
Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012