Spotting a Pattern [Group Three]

Posted on 25 Feb 2021 @ 10:24pm by Lieutenant Commander Natalia Reyes & The Narrator & Lieutenant Alexandra Dering & Lieutenant Cole Dering M.D., M.S.

952 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: The Quagmire

The light fades, showing a different room than the group had been in before. It's a large, cavernous space. No doors, again, and no clue as to what force brought them from where they were to where they are now. It's as clean and without sensation as blinking being the mechanism to change your location. This room is far bigger than before. All stone again, but there's a vaguely familiar concept to it... Ahead of them is a tall, wide area that looks almost cut out at a ninety degree angle with a near-flat space taking up the wall.

From there, the floor rises in a gentle incline. Almost...like an auditorium. Or a lecture hall.

On the flat-walled front is a glowing image, dark background and vibrantly bright numbers showing ahead of them with seemingly no source as to what has created them. The line of question marks at the bottom make it clear that this is another puzzle to be solved.

Lexi took a moment to reorient herself... and blink to get the afterimage of that bright-ass light out of her eyes. Thankfully, it hadn't burned itself into her retinas, but it had sure felt like that to begin with. Once that was done, she gave the room another look. "Nice transporter..." she grumbled more to herself than to anyone else. Though, in truth, it hadn't felt like a transporter. Hell, it hadn't felt like anything at all. That, frankly, both scared her and intrigued her. Now was not the time, though, so she pushed that away and focused on the wall with the numbers on it.

Engineers lived by pattern recognition. Everything was patterns. When those patterns were disrupted, the way in which they were disrupted told the engineer something about what was wrong. So it was no surprise that her mind immediately saw a pattern to the numbers. She looked over at her companions, though, to see if they saw it too.

Cole didn't. Instead, he was staring at it, looking totally perplexed. Although, his eyes were narrowed and his head was held up a bit as if he was thinking deeply. "I'm not sure we were transported," he said while looking away from the puzzle to looking all around them. "It may be only the room changed..."

"I've never used a transporter," Natalia said idly. "They're too risky, so I wouldn't know what it felt like one way or another." The doctor may have had a point, though. Maybe it was just the room, but... "I'm not really sure if it changes anything, whether it was transported or the room just changed?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Cole replied nonchalantly, and then his eyes, narrowing again, went over to her. "So are you going to try and help this time?"

Natalia eyed the doctor. "Is now really the time for attitude?" she deadpanned.

"Oh? So you think this is just attitude?" he responded. "So what is it you are doing?" He raised an eyebrow, "Observing?"

"How is this helping solve the situation?" Natalia asked, earnestly perplexed by this turn. She knew that no one aboard the Odin liked her, but how was addressing that now going to do anything?

Cole sighed, admitting, "It isn't," but there was no apology in his voice. He was feeling the Terran Union colonel was useless in this situation, and returning to the puzzle, had an overwhelming feeling that so was he. "Lexi..." he turned to his wife and started watching her, for she was not only focused on the puzzle, but there seemed to be recognition in her eyes. "Do you see something?"

Lexi grinned. She had not really been watching the interplay, short as it was, between Cole and the Union rep. She was more focused on making sure she had seen the right pattern in the numbers. Now, she was sure that she had. She pointed as she spoke. "See, we tend to read left to right, but we should be looking top to bottom, column by column. Column one is 11100?, so the obvious continuation of that pattern is 0. Column two is 23423?, so the obvious continuation of that one is 4. Three is 82828?, making the last number 2. Four is 10101?, making that one 0. Five is 75375?, so that one should be 3. And six is 35735?, so that one would be 7. That would make the bottom row 042037... if I've done this right." She looked back at them expectantly when she had finished that little monologue.

One by one, every glowing question mark shimmied and shook until it reformed itself into a number. That number was exactly the one that Lexi had just figured out, and then they vanished.

"Good work, Lieutenant," Natalia said, before noticing...

Suddenly, there were two doors. Side by side, carved out into the stone face.

"I choose right," Natalia drawled, casting a dry look at Cole.

"I imagine that took a lot of thought," Cole replied, like a true smart-ass.

With a huff, the Union colonel rolled her eyes and just started walking toward the right hand door.

With a mock furrow-brow, he said loudly after her, "Well, I was thinking eeny, meeny, miney, moe." Then he reached out his hand for Lexi's, "Might as well?"

Lexi shook her head at her husband. She was used to this, even found it amusing most of the time. As to the doors, she wasn't sure it mattered really which one they took since there was no way to tell anything about the paths beyond them from here. "Right is fine. There doesn't seem to be any way of eliminating one as the tiger." She took her husband's hand and started to follow the Union rep, hoping that they had chosen the princess.

 

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