Chapter Text
The infirmary had dropped to its night-cycle amber, and with the recovery ward empty it was quiet enough to hear the old Cardassian monitor on the wall above Biobed Two. It ticked. A dry relay click behind the panel, every seven-tenths of a second. Its housing lay on the floor next to Julian's boot.
Julian stood at the surgical console with his sleeves pushed to his elbows. A raktajino sat by his left hand, the foam long since collapsed into a brown ring. On the left display, the Federation biobed's telemetry scrolled in clean columns. On the right, the Cardassian monitor's feed ran in the same columns, half a line behind, caught up, and fell behind again.
JULIAN: (muttering) No. No, you're still doing it.
He tapped the right display. The columns snapped level, held for four lines, and slid apart.
JULIAN: Point five and point seven. You only agree every three and a half seconds, and in between I'm making you guess, and you guess badly...
He pulled the interpolation routine up beside the feeds, deleted two lines, wrote three, and ran it. The columns came level and stayed there. He watched ten lines go by, then twenty, his lips moving along with the numbers.
JULIAN: Good. Right. Now the nasty one.
He called up a stored patient file. Kolar, son of Dravek. Admitted 47.3, disruptor graze, left flank. The biobed's simulated readout filled in, and halfway down it a red line blinked: DUPLICATE CARDIAC SIGNAL. SENSOR FAULT SUSPECTED.
JULIAN: (to the display, exasperated) It's not a fault, he's a Klingon, there's supposed to be two of... honestly, who wrote you?
He sighed through his nose and scrolled up through his own code.
The door opened behind him. Ezri stood in it for a moment in a dark blue dress, her hair pinned back on one side, and watched him lean so close to the display that his nose nearly touched it.
EZRI: Julian.
JULIAN: (not turning) Mm. One second, I've almost got him, he's got two hearts and the bed thinks one of them is lying...
EZRI: It's nineteen-forty.
His hands stopped on the panel. He looked at the chronometer in the corner of the display, then at her, then at the dress, and his eyes went wide.
JULIAN: Oh, no. Oh, Ezri. I said ten minutes. At eighteen-thirty I said ten minutes, I remember saying it, I was going to change and meet you at Vic's and I just... I'm so sorry. You look... that's new, isn't it? You look wonderful, and I'm standing here in my uniform yelling at a Klingon who isn't even here.
Ezri came in and stepped around the housing on the floor. She bent and studied it, then tipped her head up at the bare panel on the wall, which ticked at her.
EZRI: You took the wall apart.
JULIAN: Just the cover.
EZRI: Vic's holding the table. He said, and I'm quoting, "Tell the Doc the band's been vamping for forty minutes and their lips are getting tired."
JULIAN: (wincing) They're holograms.
EZRI: I told him that. He said it's the principle. (She nodded at the displays.) So what's the Klingon done to you?
He brightened before she'd finished asking, and he swung the left display toward her.
JULIAN: All right, so. It started as an upgrade. Just the infirmary. Everything in here was built by somebody different, the beds are Federation, the wall monitors are Cardassian, the surgical frame is a Bajoran design from after the withdrawal, and none of them talk to each other properly. They report in different units at different rates, and the old system just bolts translators between them, one patch for every pair. So I thought I'd clean up the patches. Tuesday. That was Tuesday.
EZRI: It's Friday.
JULIAN: I'm aware it's Friday. (He tapped the right display.) Because every time I fixed one thing I found another. The Cardassian monitors sample at seven-tenths of a second, the beds at half a second, so the readings only line up every three and a half seconds, and the old patch just rounds in between. Which is fine until someone's arrhythmic and then it's not fine at all. So I fixed that. And then a Klingon came in last week and the bed decided his second heart was a broken sensor. And Ferengi! The neural monitor reads four lobes as two brains. I had eleven special cases written by Wednesday night, and every one of them was me telling one machine what another machine meant.
Ezri pulled a stool out from under the counter and sat. She propped her chin on her hand.
EZRI: And eleven was too many.
JULIAN: Eleven was absurd. And there'd be a twelfth tomorrow, a Tamarian, a Tholian, I don't know. So I stopped writing translators. (He was gesturing at the wall now, then the bed, then the frame across the room.) Each device describes itself instead. What it measures, in what units, how often, how much you should trust each channel, what it can be told to do. And there's a layer underneath that just reads the descriptions and does the reconciling itself. The bed doesn't need to know the monitor is Cardassian. Nothing needs to know anything about anything else. Watch.
He reloaded Kolar's file and ran it. The readout filled in. Where the red line had been, it now read CARDIAC CHANNELS: 2. BOTH NOMINAL.
JULIAN: (delighted) There! The bed's description says Klingon physiology carries redundant channels, the layer reads that and stops calling it a fault. I didn't write a Klingon case at all. And the surgical frame, I plugged that in twenty minutes ago and I wrote nothing, it just read the frame's description and...
He stopped. His hand stayed where it was, raised toward the frame across the room, and it didn't come down.
Ezri lifted her chin off her palm.
EZRI: And?
JULIAN: It doesn't know what a heart is.
EZRI: The bed?
JULIAN: The layer. The layer underneath. It doesn't know what a heart rate is. It doesn't know it's in an infirmary. It reads descriptions and reconciles them. That's all it does. (He turned to her slowly.) None of that's medical, Ezri. I spent three days thinking I was writing medical software and the only medical part is on top.
EZRI: Is that bad?
JULIAN: No, it's... (He laughed, short and startled.) It's the opposite of bad. You could hang anything off it. Environmental controls. The replicators. Ops. This whole station's held together with Cardassian-to-Federation patches, one between every pair of systems, Miles spent half his life writing them and the other half swearing at them, and you could just... take them all out. Every system describes itself and the layer handles the rest. You could build anything on that. You could build a whole...
He pushed both hands back through his hair, and they stayed clasped on top of his head.
JULIAN: It's an operating system. Eventually. Not this, this is three days old and the error handling is held together with spit, but it could be. Someday. I think. I'd have to... no, I know. It could.
Ezri looked at him with her chin back on her hand, watching his face.
EZRI: Then send it to R&D.
JULIAN: (dropping his hands) I will. I'll write it up properly.
EZRI: You said that like you're going to bury it in the backyard.
JULIAN: I'll send it. I just don't expect anyone to read past the header. (He picked up the raktajino, looked into it, and put it down again.) "Lieutenant Commander Julian Bashir, Deep Space Nine." There's only one thing most of R&D knows about me, and it isn't my work on infirmary telemetry. I'm not exactly their favorite.
EZRI: Some of them must like you.
JULIAN: I'm sure somebody in there is fond of me. I've just never met them.
EZRI: Send it anyway.
JULIAN: I will. I said I will.
She slid off the stool, picked the housing up off the floor, and set it carefully on the counter beside his cold raktajino.
EZRI: Good. Julian?
JULIAN: Mm?
EZRI: You have a date.
JULIAN: I know, I'm coming, let me just save...
EZRI: And your girlfriend is standing in the infirmary in a new dress, starting to wonder if Kira was right.
Julian's hand froze over the save key.
JULIAN: What? Right about what? What did Kira say?
Ezri was already at the door. It hissed open in front of her.
JULIAN: Ezri! What did she say?
He slapped the save key, grabbed his raktajino, put it back down, and ran after her. The door closed behind him.
On the wall, the bare Cardassian monitor ticked on. Beside it, the two displays scrolled side by side, line for line, in step.