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Year 1 on Vertumna, Early Wet. Special Council meeting, transcript.
HAL: Council members, thanks for seeing me. I know the importance I’ve given to this meeting may be worrying, but I’d first like to make it clear that…technically nothing is wrong per se, but there is something…I would be remiss not to bring to your attention.
EUDICOT: Which would be?
HAL: Well, I think I’ve told you before about the possibility of sending unmanned probes back through the wormhole in order to, hopefully, establish communications with Earth, right? Well, while I had a bit of time to kill, I started by estimating the possibility of a probe surviving wormhole travel, which meant checking data collected during our passage through the wormhole.
INSTANCE: I guess shield strain would be a pretty good indicator of what anything going inside it is put through.
HAL: That was my reasoning too. However, I quickly came across a…worrying piece of data. Let me show you: see, this is the shields setting put in place weeks before we even entered the wormhole, based on the work I did with Instance on the radiations emmited by the hole itself, and thus on what wavelengths we were expecting the highest exposure. Mostly UV, X-ray, and gamma, as you can see. But, uh. This is the first data point of the shields when entering the wormhole, with both strain AND shield energy focus.
RHETT: Wow. What happened here? Almost all the energy is into infrared shielding!
SEEQ: And that's before we actually have any strain. So, the wormhole warped the shields with...something else than radiation?
HAL: Well, uh…no. Actually, that data point is basically the first millisecond as we were barely entering what can be considered the wormhole. And the thing is, for proper control group reasons, we have a log of roughly the whole hour, and…see for yourself. T-60 we start with the programmed settings, they stay nicely put for a while…
HAL: And then…there. The shift in the shields begins, reaching its final state 5 seconds later, which it will keep until wormhole entry…7 minutes later. At which point, Congruence starts making micro adjustments as strain happens.
FLUORESCENCE: And…there was no strain when the shift occurs?
HAL: None beside normal space radiation. Which in no way would have caused redistribution like this – there just wasn’t much IR as background radiation. But this isn’t the spookier part. See, I then look at the actual strain data. It’s a lot of stuff, but crunching it down…well, here what it gives.
INSTANCE: Oh. Oh, shit. We got…bombarded with IR. Where did that come from?
HAL: There seems to be some kind of anomaly localized in the wormhole, where IR, or some IR emitting particle, is just swirling in the hole without escaping, which is why it didn’t show up on readings. And…Congruence and I have been making estimates. Congruence, wanna tell them?
CONGRUENCE: Given the extremely high and fast strain suffered in the IR bandwidth, especially on our starboard side, it’s very likely that had shields started in the standard configuration, I would not have been able to reconfigure them fast enough to prevent damage.
MELATONIN: …so…are you telling us…we would have died were it not for that shift?
CONGRUENCE: Unlikely, but I suspect Engine 3 and perhaps 4 might have overheated enough to cause hull breaches, which would have compromised the end of the trip, which itself could have caused even more damage. By my estimate, we would still have made it to the planet, but not intact. Hard to predict what could have been lost.
FLUORESCENT: Okay, interesting, but it was Congruence’s entire job to alter the shield configuration to ensure safe passage. Even if she acted before entry, that was probably based on data beyond strain, right?
CONGRUENCE: I am flattered, Flulu! But this is unfortunately incorrect: the altered shield setting was not of my initiative, but the result of manual input.
EUDICOT: What? Someone tweaked the settings? Who?
CONGRUENCE: That is part of Hal’s key worry: I don’t know.
RHETT: What? What are you talking about? Someone told you to shift those shields, didn’t they? How can you not know?
HAL: I…I checked Congruence’s root log. A few minutes before the shift began, Congruence received a direct root access key from the gene lab terminal.
SEEQ: Hold on, back up: someone, MINUTES from wormhole entry, used a root access on Congruence from some shadowy part of the ship to shift the shields?
HAL: That would seem to be the case.
ANTECEDENT: Oh my stars… How is anyone here still alive?
HAL: Well…because whoever did this shifted the shields to ensure that.
RHETT: Instance, did you do anything without telling us?
INSTANCE: Are you crazy? You think I would just dig my hand in Congruence’s system this close to the wormhole? Do you think I’m INSANE?
MELATONIN: Well, someone might be, because that input happened.
EUDICOT: The gene lab terminal, you say? Do we have any log on that that can help?
HAL: Uh, afraid not, that lab has no camera, and the terminal itself didn’t receive an ID log-in, just straight to the root access.
FLUORESCENT: So, we’ve got a saboteur in the colony?
MELATONIN: I mean, quite the opposite of a saboteur, it seems. If someone had root access to Congruence before we headed in, they could have done a lot worse.
CONGRUENCE: Like turning off the shields entirely, guaranteeing the destruction of the Stratospheric in the wormhole.
SEEQ: But I don’t get it. If someone SOMEHOW foresaw the risk posed by those infrareds, something neither Halitosis nor Instance managed to do, why not simply bring it to their attention to make alterations? Why the cloak and dagger?
RHETT: Emergency, perhaps? But even then, 7 minutes before…Hal, did we have any way of spotting those IR anomalies before going in? And if so, who would have had access to that information.
HAL: Rhett. I didn’t even know myself. I checked with every crew hand that was on monitoring duties. I checked Congruence’s instrumentation logs from when we went in. That infrared burst came out of nowhere.
INSTANCE: But someone must have had SOMETHING! This is too…perfect and precise to be the result of a hunch!
MELATONIN: Let’s not lose sight of Seeq’s point: why in the world do that this way?
FLUORESCENT: Well, most likely, whoever somehow discovered it didn’t have authority on shield management and didn’t think they would be believed if they alerted anyone. In other words, someone wiped their ass with chain of command.
HAL: Which is why I’m bringing this to full Council attention.
EUDICOT: Instance, I want the gene lab combed – every bit and bob that has any reading that was in that room that day. Anything that can give us any clue on who could have entered it during the suspect time window, you report it. Rhett, compile any data on the whereabouts of everyone immediately prior to wormhole entrance. Hal, keep checking Congruence’s root files, we need any indicator of how a root key might have gotten out. Antecedent, keep your ears peeled for any rumors regarding the wormhole passage. Everyone, keep this top secret. Whoever this is, we don’t want them figuring out we’re looking for them.
RHETT: Provided they’re not in this room…
FLUORESCENT: Don’t be stupid, you think any of us wasn’t with about 5 different underlings or family members in our wings of the ship, and NOT in that damn gene lab? The only one here to whom that doesn’t apply is Hal, and something tells me he didn’t come here to rat on himself.
ANTECEDENT: Flulu has a point: those of us that weren’t in an all-hands-on-deck situation at Command were with their families within view of each other. We all have at least one other person here to vouch for us.
SEEQ: It’s probably safe to assume it wasn’t any of us, indeed. But then…whom?