Robert Morris is still in a fish oil trance. This is unfortunate, as he seems to be able to translate a bunch of the symbols on the ship to galanglic. Experimenting with the ship's systems will be much harder until he comes around.
Misha Ravanos is getting to rather like the mystery
ship. He tells everyone to figure out everything they can here, using
the Third Eye's resources, before they return.
Shark, Mich, and Helia Sarina work on translating
the language. They have a bunch of video of the various symbols,
ones that do certain things at certain locations, and in the displays,
and in the kitchen. What they don't have is Robert's work on translation
of the mystery script, which he's been trying to translate since he first
found it on Digitis.
They do manage to correlate some of the symbols, and can now guess a few
more things on the consoles, but they don't get very far really.
Nothing correlates well enough.
Mich, remembering that the script was also used
on the missile warheads of the Anastasia, muses that it's interesting
that they fitted the standard Imperial missiles.
Misha points out also that their bodies fit the
ship's beds and seats, and suspects that's there's some cross-pollenization
or something.
Misha asks if there might be anything on the space
station computers that would help. As Shark points out, there is
no connection between station computers where it's not absolutely necessary.
They'd have to seek out the physical computer to find it. The most
likely location for that would be in Arm C.
The hiver,
Sagan, has been observing this entire operation with great interest.
Sie is very concerned that the station may be set to shoot hivers on sight,
and so although sie's very curious about the strange ships, sie thinks
it wisest to stay on the Third Eye. Sie can't help the crew
with their translation activities, though, because sie hasn't seen anything
like this script before.
Misha asks the crew for their opinions on what to
do next.
Helia, of course, wants to fly the ship.
Mich says they should first make sure they're not
going to run out of power. If it's a capacitor-type system, like
zuchai crystals, then they're essentially running the ship on a couple
of dozen flashlight batteries. It would be nasty to run out of power
while flying. The energy contained in those rods must be enormous
in order to power the ship. He can measure that when they return
to the engineering shop. He does remember that there was no heat
produced using the rods. Mich then adds that just flying gently around
the bay will probably not be too dangerous.
Shark points out that if they did take the ship
out of the bay, they haven't figured out the communications systems.
That means they can't identify it as friendly to the station's defenses.
That would be Robert's job, as communications officer
and current expert on the new ship. Misha tells Grand Admiral Baron
Bridgehead to bring him around right away.
The Doc replies that the fish oil trance has to
be allowed to run its course -- there is nothing he can do to bring Robert
around.
Shark suggests that the Doc might like to see a
super high-tech medical facility -- intact and working and powered up.
The Baron says he would, as soon as his patient comes around.
Shark offers to monitor Robert while the Baron goes
to examine the advanced sickbay. The Baron gratefully accepts.
First, however, he points out to Shark what is going on with Robert.
The changes to his brain chemistry are charging up over time,. It
changed the first time he was out -- when he drank klatrin for the first
time and was out for days -- and there was a permanent change then.
Since then, there's been an increasing buildup as if it's charging up and
might just go "Blooie" on him at any time. In the meantime, there's
nothing they can do. If there was some way to discharge it properly,
then that would be best, but until then all they can do is observe.
He does recommend that Robert should not be put in a position where fainting
suddenly could be a problem.
So they'll have to go back to the ship without Robert,
and without Shark at least until Robert comes around. Shark asks
several of the away team to carry football sensors, so he can gather data
and triangulate; one of them is strapped to his robot dog. Mich checks
his psi helmet, to make
sure it's operating properly to protect him against mind-sucking Joes or
other psionic menaces.
The investigation team will consist of Misha, his
jherig, Helia, Mich, Bridgehead, Teri, and the reindog. Sagan declines
an invitation on the grounds of hir personal safety.
Misha says that their aim today is to learn as much
as possible about the ship, with the possibility of taking it. Each
of the team is to find out everything they can about their area of specialization.
Fortunately the security systems on the station
don't blow away the dog and the dragon. The team goes into Arm A
and approaches the black ship.
The outer airlock door opens as Misha walks up, and
they all go on board.
Mich takes up station in engineering, where he reports
that there are no indications of power having decreased overnight.
The Baron is left in the sickbay, where he starts
playing with the systems. Every time someone passes by the sickbay
door, the old doctor raves enthusiastically about the facility. Not
only can he work out how to use a lot of it, he is delighted to find that
most of the experimental systems he was working on the Anastasia
-- brain transplant, memory transfer, cloning, etc. -- are implemented
here. There are some quite elegant solutions to problems the Doc
was encountering in his own work. He is rather more pleased when
Misha tells him that red is good, and blue is bad -- all the red lights
mean that the systems are operational.
Misha starts at the solarium in the stern of the
ship, and goes through everywhere on board using the deck plans.
He familiarizes himself thoroughly with the layout, including all the maintenance
shafts and areas containing various ship's systems.
Back on board the Third Eye, Robert has come
around. He remembers very little of what happened to him, both in
the trance and immediately before it. His first impulse is to find
out what time it is and how long he's been out. Then he gets down
to business.
"I think maybe we can work on the translation program
and figure out what some of the symbols mean."
Shark shows him what he, Mich, and Helia managed
to translate.
Adding in Robert's major work on the script from
Digitis makes enormous
strides in interpretation -- he can actually make some real sense out of
it now, both in terms of specific symbols and philosophy. He downloads
the information to his hand computer so he can take it to the other ship.
Shark and Robert head off to Arm A to join the investigative
team.
Mich has now managed to get full displays on the
jump drive, with annotations
on the holodisplay that of course he can't understand at all. He
can zoom the displays, but when he gets it to a high level of detail the
components start to look really weird. He still has no idea about
the rating of the jump unit. There is nothing that resembles his
antimatter generators. Of course it would be much easier to understand
if the symbols were translated... Perhaps he could even find a maintenance
log, manuals, and so on, but he'll probably need help for that.
In the meantime, he putters around engineering and
the workshops. There are some spares, but not nearly as many as he'd
expect. Also there are no vaccsuits, or vaccsuit lockers.
He does his investigation of the rods. The
red ones have about 6 volts across the plug sockets, the blue ones a very
weak residual voltage, and the black ones have nothing. There is
clearly not enough power to run the ship in those rods. They are
very efficient high-tech batteries, but certainly not enough to run the
systems on board.
Helia is playing with the astrogation systems.
The jump system is showing red status. The only blue item is the
airlock indicator; she presses it. A voice says "Ready to go" in
not quite as odd an accent as the day before.
Helia plots a test route to Mora.
It seems that the ship is limited to jump-6 -- the maximum theoretical
limit. She runs through the calculations in her head, and checks
that the ship is right -- which it is. The route is a direct jump-6
route, not necessarily stopping at systems on the way.
She tells Misha about it -- that it seems to be
a jump-6 ship, and doesn't neeed to stop at systems. That means the
ship may not need to refuel.
Misha asks Mich if that makes sense.
Mich replies, "Well, I've been searching for the
equivalent of a fuel guage. All I've found is that you have enough,
or you don't."
Helia says, "Mich, it seems like the ship is ready
to go, whenever you want to go."
Mich confirms that everything is ready in engineering
too.
Helia announces she's going to run a few more test
plots, and familarize herself with the systems.
Misha arrives on the bridge. He asks Helia
what she's found, and she shows him the route plots and tells him that
she can fly the ship whenever they want.
Misha takes his place in the command chair, as yesterday.
The holodisplay is still there in front of him, showing the ship and the
bay. It shows the forms on which the ship is resting, and it shows
all the airlocks.
"Ready to go," says the ship, much less accented
than last time Misha heard it.
Misha points at an airlock, and says "Open this
door."
A blue light comes up on Helia's console, and the
airlock shows as open on Misha's display.
"Show me the ship's occupants."
Nothing happens.
"Is there anyone in engineering."
Nothing happens.
Outside the ship, Shark and Robert approach the ship. The airlock door opens as they're walking across the platform towards the ship.
Through the transparent wall of the bridge, Misha
notices his first officer and sensor operator approaching. He studies
the display carefully, and indeed finds them represented there.
Misha points to them on the display, and says, "Scale
up this area."
Nothing happens.
"Make this area bigger."
The area zooms in, doubled in size.
"Bigger."
Misha continues to zoom in until he can recognize
Shark and Robert on the display. The two figures are close enough
to read their lips, and they have a red halo around them. Red is
good. They're about 100m from the door. Misha points to the
door and tells the ship to close it. It closes, and the blue light
on Helia's console turns red.
Helia asks, "Are we playing with the doors, folks?"
"I am," replies her captain.
"Just wondering why the light goes blue - red -
blue - red." She's been concentrating on her plots, and not paying
much attention to what Misha was saying.
Robert and Shark walk up to the airlock, and the outer door opens for them. "Let's get in before they close it!" says Robert. They enter the ship, and the door closes behind them.
The two figures disappear from Misha's holodisplay.
Misha points at the airlock. "Magnify this
area."
Nothing happens.
He calls them on the commdot: "Welcome aboard."
"Thank you, captain," says Shark. "How did
you know we were aboard? Oh, that's right, you can see out the walls."
Whether the walls are actually transparent, or whether it's a camera /
display system, remains to be seen. Now doing that over three decks
of height, making it accurate from any viewing position on board, and on
a wall that's a tenth of a millimeter in thickness is another matter.
Shark immediately notices something odd. The
panels beside the doors have all vanished. "Who turned the doors
off? The buttons next to the doors, that you hit to open them, are
gone."
Misha says, "How can they be gone?"
"How did they appear in the first place?"
"You don't mean the cranks?"
"No, the buttons beside the doors." Shark
steps towards a door. It opens. "I think I understand.
The ship is learning us. It gave us door handles until it figured
out how to recognize what we wanted. Now they're gone."
The two arrive on the bridge. Misha asks, "How
are you feeling, Robert?"
"OK. I've a beginning of a translation."
Shark steps up to the command dias, and takes a
seat.
Robert bustles around the bridge, labelling buttons.
He shows Helia how to reconfigure her console, and where the button for
the sparkly pink mode is. She puts labels on her console in a language
no-one else knows.
Shark asks him where the security chair is supposed
to be. Robert hasn't been able to find a security system yet; the
closest he can find is internal ship's status, like on the main holodisplay.
He can set up a smaller version on a console close to Shark.
"So they don't have a security," says the first
officer. "No wonder I don't have a seat. Boss, I'll have to
figure out something else to do."
Misha is ready to go. "Anyone have a reason
why we can't fire this puppy up and fly it around the cargo bay?"
"Yeah," says Helia, "I didn't bring enough toys.
But I guess if I'm going to be flying... OK! Can I fly it around
now?" She broadcasts on the commdots, "Everybody be careful!"
Down in the sickbay, Grand Admiral Baron Bridgehead
wonders exactly what he's supposed to be careful about. He mutters
to himself under his breath, and continues exploring the equipment.
Helia goes into sparkly pink mode and flies around
the bay. She says, "Open the door," as she wants to leave the bay.
|
(Referee and Helia's player only) |
The ship flies around inside the bay, first approaching the bay doors, then swooping close to the walls. Then it hovers.
"Robert," says Helia, still in sparkly pink mode.
"I don't think we need to open the doors to go through, but it might leave
damage behind. But I think we'll be OK. What do you think?"
Misha says, "Don't go through any doors."
"What do you think, Robert?"
"I don't think we should go through the doors right
now. I'm checking on the communications systems."
"Just think about that, though. Tell Mich."
Helia swoops the ship around some more, then sets
it back down again, gently and perfectly into the cradle.
The pilot comes out of sparkly pink mode.
She says, "Guys, this ship literally flies. We can do whatever we
want with it. Let's get going."
Meanwhile, Robert has found communications. He's figured out transmit and receive, but not any way to indicate frequencies or communicator system. He'd like to be able to figure out how to get into the station's security system from here so he could open the doors, rather than just blasting a way through.
Shark says, "If we just steal this ship, the entire
Imperial Navy is going to come down on us."
Helia counters, "We've got the Baron with us, it's
not like we have him hostage. I'm sure he could convince them he
was authorized to take it."
"No, he can't. He only got two levels of security
below where we are now."
"But Robert could."
While all this was going on, Mich observed various things going on, including power usage increase. He watched power go to the thrusters in the outriggers. Still there's no indication of the amount of power available.
Misha has been watching his display the whole time,
except when distracted by the outside view of rushing close to the bay
walls. Nothing exceptional happens; the gunnery system projection
comes on briefly while close to the doors, then it goes off as the ship
swoops around again.
(Mich has vision of a soft hum as a thousand missiles
a second fly out of the gatling launcher system... of course, there's only
720 missiles in the magazine, but that doesn't mean they can't be launched
in less than a second.)
Robert tells Misha he can transmit and receive...
that's something, at least.
A voice comes over the commdot. It's the Baron.
"Hey, Robert! If you're done playing around with stuff up there,
why not come down here and do something useful in medical?"
On the communcations console, the transmission is
indicated. "Cool," says Robert. He fiddles around for a bit,
and gets the ship to transmit on the general commdot frequency: "I'll be
down in a few minutes."
On Mich's display, the communications system shows it's in use. The power consumption is indicated.
Shark checks his football data. He did get
a reading when Helia was in sparkly pink mode. It was a low level
of activity, but continuous through her pink mode. To his surprise,
there was no activity related to the door operations.
Helia asks, "Does that make me a mind-sucking Joe,
or does it make the ship a mind-sucking Joe?"
Shark say, "The ship was reading your mind, doing
exactly what you wanted it to do."
"Cool. Well that's a good kind of mind-sucking
Joe, isn't it?"
Misha laughs, "Is there such a thing as good demons?"
Shark collects the footballs, and arranges them
on the bridge to triangulate a reading accurately. He also cranks
up the sensitivity because he's expecting very localized activity.
"So, Boss," he says, "Show me how you ran that screen, and looked outside."
Misha shows him. The footballs record nothing.
Shark says, "I want that display here also."
Nothing happens.
Misha says, "I'll try. Put this display over
there."
Nothing happens.
"Duplicate this display over there."
Nothing happens.
"Can you change the labels to galanglic?"
"No," says the Voice.
"Why? Not?"
Nothing happens. Of course, if the labels
were in galanglic it wouldn't help him, as Misha can't read.
Robert has arrived in the sickbay. He helps
the Baron out greatly, and the noble is very pleased.
Shark calls, "Robert, the captain just asked the
ship to change the labelling system to galanglic, and it said no.
Literally. Said. No."
"Right. It'll take a little bit, but I'm working
on that."
The Doc is asking Robert to lie down on one of the
beds. "I need to get a baseline on this equipment. Good.
Now lie still, relax, this won't hurt." A very nice holodisplay of
Robert appears, and the Baron peers at the brain. "Bigger," he says,
and is delighted when it works. He continues pottering around, telling
Robert to stay still.
Shark asks Robert to help Mich in engineering, while
Shark goes down to sickbay to be the guinea pig for the doctor.
Robert gets up to leave.
"Oh," says the Baron casually, "Be aware you might
faint at any moment. Did Mr. Teeth update you on your status?
No? He should have done. Your brain's charging up. The
brain chemistry changes, since that first big trance episode... taking
that as a baseline, it's been charging up every time you pass out and I
take a reading. In fact, looking at this right now it's charged up
more than when you passed out yesterday. It seems to be an ongoing
thing. If you've got any way to reset it or something, that would
be good, but in the meantime don't stand near any edges or anything like
that."
"I'll try not to," says Robert dubiously, and walks
aft to engineering.
Shark is popular with the noble
doctor. His broad experience, combined with the Doc's, helps figure
out quite a lot of the systems. Shark learns how to work the scanner,
and is shown the baseline scan. Attempts to find a portable medical
scanner result in an object of about the right size, which Shark wants
to check with Mich to see if they can use it.
The Baron would rather just call people into sickbay
for monitoring. "Do you suppose we can get this sickbay onto the
Third
Eye? It's actually a decent quality sickbay, up to my standards,"
he says.
"No," says Shark. "I think what's going to
happen is that we're going to take this ship. The staterooms here
are three times as... Have you been to a stateroom?"
"I've only been here, and this is excellent."
This facility is indeed enormous.
Shark resolves to show the Doc the luxurious staterooms.
He's sure that will convince the Baron to transfer to this ship.
The Baron asks, "Well, if we're going to take the
ship, shouldn't we try flying it?"
"We have. You were on board."
"Oh. I wish people would tell me these things."
"Didn't you hear her say hold on, be careful?"
"Well, she I didn't say why. She says all
sorts of strange things, I ignore it."
"She's a pilot. What do you expect?" laughs
Shark.
Robert has helped Mich as much as he did the Baron.
They've found the manual for the ship. Unfortunately, it's in a fractal
ideogram representation, and is unintelligible at first glance. Also
at first glance, Robert's head starts to spin. He makes his excuses
and goes to the garden to sit down quietly.
Even so, they've done surprisingly well. Mich
had not thought of talking to the computer -- when engineers talk to their
drives, they aren't usually very complimentary. Fortunately the exploded
view of the system is something that Mich has already managed to bring
up on the holodisplays, even though the labelling is not readable.
Now, though, he has found the power grid.
The power indeed comes from the large box, and goes all sorts of places
in what is shown as a straight line from the box to the unit. Depending
on magnification, he can see where in the unit the power is going.
The main power is powering all the ships systems, and also all the little
handheld devices and everything else. "Powering the entire ship on
a car battery," mutters Mich, "With no wires."
Back on the bridge, Misha starts trying anything.
"Ship, do you understand what I'm saying?"
Nothing happens.
"Is the ship ready to fly?"
"Oh yeah," says Helia.
"Ready to go," says the Voice.
"Fly... that is the word!" adds Helia, with a touch
of awe in her voice.
Misha says, "Could we jump from here? I'm
not asking you, Helia."
Nothing happens.
"What's our fuel status?"
Nothing happens.
"Are the batteries fully charged?"
Nothing happens.
"Do you have any training programs?"
Nothing happens.
"Where's Mich?"
Nothing happens.
"Which is the captain's stateroom?"
Nothing happens.
"Where is the gymnasium?"
Nothing happens.
"Where is engineering?"
Nothing happens.
"How many missiles do we have on board?"
Nothing happens.
"How much energy did we use in our most recent flight?"
Nothing happens.
The Doctor is through now, so Shark takes him on
a quick tour through engineering, the garden, the living areas, and then
to the bridge.
In the garden, Shark shows Robert the device he
thought was a handheld medical scanner. Robert shows him how to turn
it on.
Shark tries it out on himself and the two other
people there. He, and the Doctor, show red; Robert shows mostly red
with a touch of blue at one end. Now all they need to do is get some
detail out of it... Shark is a little surprised that he was totally
red himself, as he has an artificial elbow, but he guesses that he is "normal"
in this state.
Eventually they arrive at the bridge. Shark
and the Baron take up the other chairs on the command dias.
Misha asks, "Does this make sense to you?
Any of it?"
"Of course it does," replies the Doc. "It's
a ship. Medical is excellent, unlike that primitive ship we've been
travelling on."
"So, it would be your opinion that we should upgrade?"
"Absolutely."
"OK. So you think you can run medical?"
"Yes. I've already taken baseline scans of
a couple of your crew. I'd like some supplies that are labelled so
I can read them."
"Have you had Robert come by and label things?"
"Yes. Helped a lot. You know, his brain
is very interesting. But you might not want to put him in a position
of too much responsibility, because he could flake out at any moment."
"I only have six crew. I think everyone is
in a position of responsibility."
"Well, he might flake out at any moment."
Shark goes down to the science lab, looking for some
sort of a scanner. He puts his computer there, and looks for a button
to turn the scanning equipment on. He sees nothing that looks likely,
and says, "Computer, scan this device."
Nothing happens.
Shark sighs. It was what he expected, but
now he'll have to go get Robert to help him later. He returns to
the bridge, where he tries to keep everyone from asking Robert anything
symbol-related for an hour or so. Turning Robert's commdot off, and
with Teri's help fielding any physical approaches, he succeeds.
So it's an hour later when Shark asks Robert if he's
feeling better, andsuggests he should limit the amount of symbol reading.
The Baron laughs, "We'll just put all the symbols
in front of you, and give you a couple of liters of fish oil!"
Shark says, "We don't have a couple of liters of
fish oil."
Robert says, "Yes, we probably do. About that
much. And it doesn't take a couple of liters."
Shark turns to the captain. "We have determined
that if Robert overtaxes his ability to read heiroglyphs, he feels bad,
and the doctor has said that his brain is exploding."
"Charging up," the Doc corrects. "If I could
come up with some way to relieve the chemistry, I would."
"So what we need to do is figure out all the things
that we need Robert to read and label, and then prioritize them, because
he might just pass out at any moment and have his brain explode."
"Oh, I don't think it would explode, but he might
go into a total breakdown for a while. Maybe permanently, actually."
The Doc still sounds interested rather than concerned.
Misha says, "OK, here's the priority. Let's
have him concentrate on teaching the ship to translate for us."
Shark suggests to him, "Here is my computer.
Please ask the ship to read all the data from my computer."
"Ship, please read the data from his computer."
Nothing happens.
Sharks says, "Now ask it to translate the labels."
Misha says, "Can you translate the labels to galanglic?"
"No," says the voice.
Shark asks, "What languages can you translate them
into?"
Nothing happens.
Misha asks, "What languages can you translate into?"
Nothing happens.
Misha points at a label. "What does this say
in galanglic?"
Nothing happens.
"Can you translate this into galanglic? Spoken.
Verbal."
Nothing happens.
Shark says, "Can you tell me what this means?"
Nothing happens.
Shark touches the display. "Bigger."
The display zooms.
Shark grins, "This is the first thing other than
the doors I've got to work! I'm happy!" He continues, on more
a serious note. "Display the data from this handheld computer."
Nothing happens.
Misha says, "Can you read the data from this handheld
computer?"
Nothing happens.
Shark ponders for a moment. "Can you contact
the ship known as the H.M.S. Third Eye? Contact the ship H.M.S.
Third Eye. Vonish?"
There is no answer.
"What is the present range of this ship?"
Nothing happens.
Misha asks, "Are there places on board this ship
where the set of verbally accessible functions or the set of queriable
alternations is larger than here?"
Nothing happens.
Shark tries something else. He asks Helia,
"Can you take us one meter off the deck and put us back down, please?"
"Sure," says Helia. "Just one meter?"
"Just one meter."
Helia slips briefly into sparkly pink mode.
The ship lifts up a meter, then sets softly down again. "Is that
it?" she says.
"That's it." Shark checks the footballs, and
triangulates the center. It was right where she was, and nowhere
else. It did not emanate from anywhere else. Very odd indeed,
he thinks.
Shark continues, "Display the ship's log."
Nothing happens.
"How many orbits of the local star has this ship
been here?"
Nothing happens.
Misha says, "Is this ship aware of it's history?
So it's smart enough to be able to figure out our language, but it's not
smart enough to talk to us."
Shark says, "It can answer some questions.
Very limited questions."
"Do you think it's being annoying, or...?"
'No, I think we're expecting too much from it.
Last time I heard about a computer-controlled ship, it tried to kill the
crew. And then it misjumped and crashed on a planet, and they were
rescued. It was the Anastasia."
Misha looks for the bay doors on the display.
"Ship, do you know how to open these doors?"
Nothing happens.
"Ship, does this ship have a transponder?"
Nothing happens.
Misha turns to Shark. "It knows some things,
but it doesn't know very much. Or it just doesn't answer questions
that it can't make into a sentence."
Shark says, "It doesn't answer questions it doesn't
know the answer to, or has no way of communicating the answer to us."
"You would think it would say 'I don't know,' but
apparently that isn't what it does."
"I could tell it to do that, but I think it might
be doing that an awful lot."
Misha resumes interrogating the ship. "How
are the batteries on this ship recharged?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
Shark observes, "We told it to say 'I don't know.'
It did."
Misha says, "I didn't tell it to do this, but I
guess it figured it out." He continues: "Where is Mich?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
Shark: "Where is the engineer?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
"Where is the captain?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
Shark points at Misha. "This is the captain.
I am the first officer. Where is the captain?"
A position lights up on the holodisplay, showing
Misha's seat on the bridge.
"Thank you!" chorus Shark and Misha happily.
Shark turns to Misha. "Captain, we are working
with a brand new, untrained, ship. It knows absolutely nothing until
you teach it. So we're basically working with a blank slate.
It knows how to make all of its appendages move. It can fire missiles,
it can move, it can -- whatever -- but as far as any other knowledge, it
doesn't have any. It does have a starmap, but... So if I sat
down here, and said this word is 'captain' in galanglic..." (displaying
the word on his hand computer) "... Computer, display the word 'captain'
in galanglic on your display."
The label for Misha becomes "captain," in galanglic
script.
"That's what we've got to do. OK."
Misha asks, "How many people are on board this ship?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
Shark says, "We are people. There are four
in the room. How many other beings like us are on the ship?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
"Hm. Well. That's interesting."
Shark sighs, then looks over at the Doctor. "Now you can go down
to medical and start teaching it the procedures you want it to do."
"I think I'd rather do it myself, thank you very
much," says the Baron.
"Things like check temperature, prepare this, routine
stuff..."
"I can do that already. I'm smarter than any
dumb computer. I can always ask you to do it."
"I won't be there. I'll probably be on the
bridge," smiles Shark.
Misha resumes, "How many lifeforms have entered
this ship in the last couple of days?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
"Do you know what time is?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
"Actually it does know time," says Shark, "because
it knows transit durations and other stuff. We've just got to figure
out how to tell it."
Shark walks over to Helia's console. "Computer,
can you change the symbols on your console to match the ones on these pieces
of paper?"
"I don't know," says the Voice.
"Please do that."
"I don't know," says the Voice.
Shark then collaborates with the Baron in trying
to get the computer to save "I don't know" for responses where it really
doesn't, rather than doing it all the time.
Baron Bridgehead walks over to Helia's console,
points at the label and then the button, and says, "Computer, that is that."
The label on the button changes to the sticky text,
exactly as Helia wrote it, duplicating her handwriting. A moment,
then all the others change too.
Shark calls Mich to find out if this has happened
all over the ship. "Mich, do the buttons now match your stickies?"
"Yes, they do," says Mich with surprise.
"You're welcome! The Baron actually did it."
Shark turns to Bridgehead, "Thank you."
Bridgehead acknowledges with a nod.
"Now we have to teach it handwriting, and handwriting
recognition, and details... Oh, and Mich, can you bring up a status
display, and tell me if any of the labels have changed to the same as the
buttons?"
Mich confirms that they have. They are starting
to get somewhere.
Shark's plan is to show Robert what they've done,
show him how they did it, now using his handheld computer can he do a high-speed
dump of galanglic and start getting more and more things labelled.
This will be Robert's high priority duty: he shows
his current translation table between ideogram and galanglic, and says
"Make it so." With some work, and quite some time, he suceeds in
getting a whole bunch of stuff translated. It's not complete by any
means, but it is good groundwork.
The task weighs heavily on Robert. His head
starts to throb as he finishes it. A good fish oil trip would be
really relaxing right now...
Misha contemplates what it would take in crew terms
to run both ships together. The Third Eye is set up to be
handled by a crew of three, but they are woefully short of qualified engineering
personnel. They could of course handle it remotely, checking out
the drive, then setting the jump coordinates, and leaving nothing for the
Third Eye crew to do but press the button.