TBD

Posted on 08 Aug 2022 @ 11:38am by Ensign Kat Walker & Lieutenant Callisi Veera

1,185 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: A New Frontier
Location: Fighterbay

Sensors picked up one of the ship's officers entering the fighterbay. A rather unexpected one, at that. Kat knew that Callisi didn't - ... trust her, to put it mildly, so she wondered why the latter was approaching her now. As such she activated her holoprojectors and manifested her avatar.

"Lieutenant Veera," She saluted the daughter of Ts'usu. "What can I do for you today?"

Callisi indeed was not here by her suggestion, but by Harva's. She recalled being called into the office to discuss possibilities. Security concerns. Point and counter point. Harva made a suggestion, and Callisi expressed concern. 'Then what do you suggest?' was the response. 'Can you monitor an independent firewall, constantly, and react with millisecond timing?'

Callisi shook her head at the memory. Harva was certainly making plenty of assumptions about Kat's capacity and agreeability. Though the order was given. A firewall was to be designed, independent of the ship's own computer, tied to forcefield emitters sectioning off the region the relic was to be brought into, and it was to be delivered in one hour. Harva also suggested that Kat be included in the project. Except it didn't take the Daughter of Ts'usu long at all to realize when a suggestion wasn't a suggestion.

"Today, I've been given a project that requires your assistance." despite the non-secret that Callisi had no lost love for Kat, she was polite and inclusive in her tone and body language. "There is a relic of some form outside the ship, currently under investigation. We're going to give it a kinetic test in a few hours to see how it responds to motive force. Once all parties are satisfied that the relic is safe, it will be brought aboard for more intensive study. To that end, Lieutenant Commander Taliborn has requested a firewall, independent of the ship's own systems, be crafted within the hour. It will control the internal force field emission systems around the site for storing the relic, as well as the launch assist catapults in the event of needing to eject it quickly."

"You will be monitoring the system." No amount of protocol training could hide how much Callisi thought this was a mistake. But, the Captain tolerated the construct, and Harva all but ordered her inclusion.

Kat to her credit took it all in stride. Her primary directive was to be kind and polite, it did not specify how the other had to feel about her. "I see," she said, tilting her head slightly, brows furrowed in thought. "I can certainly help with that," she continued after a moment's thought. "I have a firewall routine I can make available for this, a defensive cyberwarfare suite. There are also publicly available firewalls on the extranet I could download and modify if you would prefer something that runs on seperate Federation hardware. Theoretically I could slave a fighter or shuttle's onboard computer running the firewall to a forcefield system, or host a firewall myself on my own hardware. The latter will be more agile and responsive. I cannot speak to the robustness and security of publicly available firewalls."

"Which would you prefer, Lieutenant?" Kat asked, though she had a good idea of the answer already.

"I've never trusted outsourced security. There's no need to pull anything from an outside source. Hosting your own cyberwarfare suite should be sufficient, considering the odds of whatever the relic is, IF it's anything, being able to decipher your system to mount a counter-counter-offensive are slim to none." Callisi pointed out. "Whereas anything available to the public is just that. Public."

"Slave a shuttle to operate the force field systems but be prepared to assume direct control of them should the slave be rendered offline." Callisi checked off a few mental check boxes, and then a few physical ones on the PaDD she carried. She paused for a moment, and took a breath. "My preferences don't factor into this. Lieutenant Commander Tailborn stressed efficiency and timing. He didn't seem too concerned about my preferences."

"So, for at least taking the moment to ask.... thank you." She still didn't like her. No need to be rude about it, though.

An unexpected answer, but not one without clear logic. "Certainly. I can work on that. Would something like this work?" Ket's avatar motioned to the side, where a schematic appeared, symbolizing a flowchart of a control set-up. Her own AI core running a firewall, operating and monitoring a ship-based network of force fields, ran through a runabout's onboard computer. The flowchart was color coded. Blue for what Kat was responsible for, green for what she'd need Callisi to make ready - opening a port on the runabout, adding permissions, setting up security layers, slaving the bay's force field emitters to it - so that Kat would control the whole thing.

Callisi examined the layout flowchart. She nodded in places, while other places struck her as concerns. Concerns that didn't seem to actually concern her at the moment. "I want to add in an event trigger here. Call it a panic button. This wouldn't be a trigger to end the security event, but quite the opposite. I want to be able to have maximum security measures implemented at the touch of a trigger or a phrase. If things go wrong, I want strict measures and maximum protection at a glance."

"And we can put that matter call... here." Despite it being an alien layout, certain rules of firewalls, security, and systemic protocol still applied. "I'm expecting your own systems to be quite secure from outside interference."

"My apologies, I'm having some trouble parsing your phrasing. Sometimes language subtleties and possible multiple interpretations still elude me. It is something I am working on," Kat admitted. "What exactly to you want this trigger to do, and what do you want to be the triggering event?"

A smirk crossed across Callisi's features, "If one of us detects a threat, I'd like to be able to manually box the relic in. Or in the case of a threat that warrants, I'd like one of us to be able to manually catapult it into the dark." she paused for a moment, "Just because everything in your senses tells you there's no threat doesn't mean there isn't one. That's why I'm asking for this to be installed in the system profile."

"If something seems off. If something .. feels wrong. A hunch, a gut feeling." she offered. "Language is hard. It's difficult to explain a gut feeling to something without a gut. Though, do you understand the request now?"

"I do, Lieutenant," Kat offered with a nod and a soft smile. "A manual override to either raise or lower the forcefields or eject the artefact into space. I will make the adjustments on my end, though it'll also mean additional work on yours," she added, as a few new connections manifested on her flowchart. "This would allow myself or anyone with Lieutenant rank or above directly control the forcefields or vent the area beyond the forcefields."

"A little work never frightened me before." Callisi retorted. "Let's begin."

 

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