Posted by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) in Jefferies Tubes

Posted by Warrant Officer Walker Darach (Chief Operations Officer) in Jefferies Tubes

Posted by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) in Jefferies Tubes
Posted by… suppressed (4) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

Walker nodded, “Just what I was thinking. Better safe then sorry, and we can always tweak it again after they finish repairs later.” Sliding into place Walker used a spanner to manually readjust the receptors. He kept an eye on his tricorder as he slowly adjusted the settings. Making one final turn, they finally lined up back to what was considered the default settings.

Making one final check of the systems, that everything was back to the way it should be, he snapped the tricorder shut.

“All good?”Faye asked.

“And that should be good for the engineering teams later. We just have to wait for them to do the cleanup.”

He slid the spanner and tricorder back into his kit. “So where to next?”

WO Darach - COO

“Section 84. We can re-jig my set-up there and complete the loop. Once everything is installed there, we can do a test on the rate, and you know, make sure no more explosions happen. I’ll let you handle the power adjustment during the installation. You I think I can trust,” she said idly. But reality was that Faye didn’t easily trust anyone. Darach had sense though and had demonstrated it several times already. He was someone she could work with.

Gathering up her tools and supplies, Faye eased the antigrav cart through the jefferies tubes carefully. The section she needed was next to their current position but on the other side of that line of bulkhead, so they had to get into the parallel tube.

~Faye Calloway, Data Scientist

“I’ll take that as a compliment Lieutenant,” Walker said as he grabbed his kit and followed along. “I’m just here to help, I’ll let you officers figure out what is important or not.” Walker chuckled.

She snorted.

“Plus, explosions tend to ruin my day. Something about the fire and the exploding part.”

“They tend to suck, big time,” Faye agreed.

Taking a look at the bulkhead numbers, he noted where they were heading. It wasn’t that far to section 84. Really though he was more curious how all of the updates that she had done went together. Because with what information he had so far, he didn’t quite follow.

“So, how many junctions did you have to modify for this little project?”

WO Darach - COO

“Twenty-six,” Faye said simply before glancing at Darach. He’d know just by the bit he’d already seen that that had meant hours of work at the individual junctions along with the connecting cabling through the systems. “The jefferies tubes and I are very well acquainted.”

“I can only imagine,” Walker said taking a second to stretch out his wrists. He was definitely not as young as he used to be.

Pulling out her supplies, he opened the compartment to expose the network of cabling in and around the manifold. Faye sat with one knee up and leaned in a bit, pointing out things as she talked. “So, basically, we take the manifold and add a processor to the exiting power supply. Think of it like a baby firewall. It slows things down. This particular part of the system is in a key spot of the ship. The info relays are equidistant positions from the computer cores and the sensor suites and communication relays. This is one of two funnelling points where we can catch bad data.” She lifted up her cylindrical device and smiled softly. “And this beauty will be our extra interface that I can change how we process data, or shut it down entirely. Whereas normally you’d have to kill data transfer from the inciting point or the receiving end, with this I can have better and more precise control to kill it at any juncture along the pathways.. That and I can insert additional commands to override anything should a virus start trying to modify our systems before they hit the cores.”

~Faye Calloway, Data Scientist

“Ingenious. I’m sort of surprised that no one hasn’t done this in the past,” Walker said looking over Faye’s shoulder. “How much does it slow the data transfer down by? I’m assuming it doesn’t add much of a buffer, or it would start to impact most of the ship systems.”

Why had no one ever put a system in place to easily kill the processes. It was almost as if the designers had forgotten the idea of computer intrusion into the systems. But he also wondered if there was a way to overwhelm the system, so it couldn’t shut everything off.

WO Darach - COO

Faye turned a corner, and continued over to their target junction. “Well, it’s not as much as you might think. Only fifteen percent, because if we do much more than that, the lag in the various systems would make working and living on the ship rather annoying. Mostly, it’s only going to fire if it detects anything unusual, but there are some programmed aspects of the firewall that allow for viruses that might try to mimic good data.” Calloway came to a stop at the manifold and pushed to antigrav cart slightly ahead of her, creating some work space. She looked back at Darrach. “That’s where you folks still need me. I’ll be monitoring data streams, not for the content, but for markers that it’s been tampered with, or contains structures that have the capacity to alter our systems. I’m not reading the actual sensor data, or people’s mail, but instead it’s more like I’m just giving everything a general health scan with skills that are uniquely adapted for data incursions.”

She smirked slightly as she brought the device out again and offered it to him. “Hold my baby for me, will you?”

Walker nodded as he took the device, “Sure thing. That makes sense, it would be next to impossible to actually scan every single piece of data flowing through the system.”

“Would you believe that I’ve been doing this kind of work since I was a teenager?” she said, feeling rather amused.

~Faye Calloway, Data Scientist

Walker chuckled, “after what I’ve seen over the years, it definitely is believable. But what got you into this type of work so young?”

WO Darach - COO