Familiar

Posted on Mon Feb 28th, 2022 @ 9:08pm by Lieutenant JG Marjan Qaisrani

Mission: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Location: Starfleet Academy
Timeline: 2391

The classroom was bustling with activity on this Thursday afternoon, and third year Cadet Marjan Qaisrani sat at his workstation, diligently going through hundreds of lines of code.

His three teammates each had their own computer terminal, which along with his occupied all four sides of a large desk, all of them looking toward the centre. All were third year cadets specializing in Operations. All were quite smart, having progressed this far in the Academy already and scoring fairly well in their tests.

“I still don’t think anything is wrong,” said Vrimix, the Bolian who was nominally in charge of their little team. “We’ve been through this entire program three times.”

“Maybe that’s the answer,” suggested Jabii Shote, a Bajoran whose skills at thinking outside the box often made Marjan jealous. “Sometimes a piece of code is fine. Maybe that’s the lesson.”

“The others are all having trouble, too,” said Niqala Tsokolaev, the only other human on their team. “If it’s there, it’s well hidden, and if it’s not, then no one else seems willing to admit it either.”

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Vrimix said, looking at Marjan and trying to catch his eye.

Marjan looked up to acknowledge his teammate and then returned his eyes to his screen. “I just…I think there’s something familiar here. I can’t…quite…”

[Ajilon Prime, four years earlier]

“These power fluctuations aren’t being caused by nothing, people!”

Major Karoline Jost was the senior officer in Ajilon Prime’s civil defense unit. She oversaw the police constabulary, the defense satellites, the planetary shield, and a small squadron of outdated Peregrine fighters. If something was defense related and wasn’t Starfleet’s direct responsibility, it fell on her.

And she was annoyed.

The planet had been experiencing brownouts every day for the past week and so far no one had been able to explain it. At first, the systems being affected were innocuous, but eventually the power cuts began affecting critical infrastructure. The planetary sensor grid went down for ten minutes two nights ago, and last night an orbital phaser fell into the sea. Until an explanation could be found and a solution implemented, it was all hands on deck, including part-time computer programmer, seventeen-year-old Marjan Qaisrani.

The room has computer screens lining three of the four walls, while the fourth featured one dominant Master System Display.

“Marjan, come take a look at this,” said the young man’s supervisor, an older man named Urutu Keeti. A veteran of the Klingon attack against Ajilon, Mr. Keeti was one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it came to its defensive systems, having helped rebuild them over a decade prior. “Do you recognize this?”

Marjan left his station to look over his boss’s shoulder. “No,” he said. “These artifacts, here and here, make me think it was maybe written in another coding language and translated before being forcibly inputted here. Maybe during our last patch from Colonial Services.” He looked more closely. “I think…I think it lets someone activate some other piece of programming in our system.”

“It can’t be much.” This was Cerze Vihn, one of Marjan’s coworkers who was sitting next to Mr. Keeti. “We’re having so much trouble finding anything. This foreign code must hijack existing setups rather than make use of anything else that’s been added.”

“Can I run a simulation?” Marjan asked. With a nod from his boss, he returned to his seat, opened up the computer simulator, and tried executing a few different commands with the foreign code. “Mr. Keeti? You should see this.”

In the simulator, Marjan was able to show his superior, who then showed the Major, the bit of code that, when accessed, could essentially fake any condition in the system and trigger loops that responded to that condition. He could easily cut power to the civilian housing by making the system think an overload was happening, requiring it to shut down. The power cut to the sensor grid was even simpler, it told the sensors that a solar flare was in progress, which shut them down to avoid damage. It simulated a small amount of gravitational force on the orbital gun, which caused it to burn one of its thrusters to compensate.

“What else could this do?” asked the Major.

“A lot of things,” answered Uruti. “It could bring the shields down. It could disable all of the guns. Lock the doors to the fighter bay. Drop containment in the antimatter pods.”

“Options?”

“Marjan and Cerze can patch it,” said Uruti. “But we should also audit the system completely, just in case we missed something else. I’d also scout the area for the person transmitting into our system and using the code. They’re probably in-system.”

“We should probably also notify the Colonial Authority,” added Cerze. “They have a leak.”

“Good work, team,” said Major Jost, smiling for the first time all week and patting old Mr. Keeti and young Mr. Qaisrani on the back. “Get it done.”

[Present]

“See these?” Cadet Qaisrani said, highlighting some symbols on his screen, which everyone else could see.

“Looks like some junk signs,” said Niqala. “Someone wasn’t very clean. That happens all the time.”

“It also comes from code that was programmed in another language and translated into LCARS before being inserted,” Marjan explained. “It’s very similar to something we encountered back home a few years back.” He typed as he explained until the lights in the classroom all went dark.

“I take it Gamma Team found something?” asked one of the instructors, to which Cadet Marjan Qaisrani could only grin.