Fast friends

Posted on 19 Apr 2015 @ 2:40am by Petty Officer 1st Class Unit Cu-47 "Copper" & EBH Mark I "Raven"

1,873 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Episode 08 - NIMBUS
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 7, Main Engineering
Timeline: MD 01 - 1030 hours

[ON]

With her friend Asahi gone, Raven needed to find someone new to run an emergency diagnostic on her program. She was having the most embarrassing problem with her visual matrix. She was testing out her various avatars, and found herself trapped in the body of a Klingon. With no one on Starbase 84 who understood her program, she thought her best bet would be to transfer herself to the Galileo and try to find an engineer who might be able to help her.

So, here she was, in the briefing room of main engineering, which had fortunately been equipped with holo-emitters for briefings and running small-scale simulations. Seeing a group of Klingon dignitaries enter, she quickly ducked behind the master systems display table, or the "pool table" as Starfleet officers tended to call it. She didn't know what Klingon dignitaries were doing on the Galileo, but felt that given their reputation, it would be better to avoid having to explain herself to them.

Patiently, she waited until the delegation left. As the doors closed behind her, she breathed a sigh of relief. Raven's relief was short lived, however, as the voice of one of the engineers rang out.

"Hey, what are you doing here!" exclaimed one of the engineers, in a stern tone. "All Klingon dignitaries are to be escorted at all times," he added, subtly reaching for a big heavy hyper-spanner. "Security, I've caught a Klingon snooping around engineering--"

"No, you don't understand," protested Raven, standing up and putting her arms in the air. "I'm not a Klingon!"

"Yeah, and I'm not an Irishman," replied the man in an accent which Raven calculated with 98.3 percent certainty to be from Letterkenny or the surrounding regions as he advanced on the 'Klingon' woman in front of him. "Don't move, I'm calling security."

"Please don't," protested Raven. As he advanced, she began to panic and took a quick step back, only to fall flat on her back as she tripped over a metallic object which looked like a floating garbage receptacle.

The garbage receptacle beeped rapidly while flashing lights at the Klingon. Though as it floated up to face Raven, it appeared it wasn't a garbage receptacle at all, but the exocomp, Copper. He beeped again at the Klingon. Copper had been hiding much the same as Raven. Ever since being briefed on the wargames, Copper had constantly scanned for intruders and detectig the Klingon dignitaries had prompted him to seek shelter in the briefing room.

Copper flashed a short holoimage of a man wearing a cowboy hat that had just punched out a man in a black cowboy hat who said, "Now, you I say, you stay down on the ground where you belong, stranger." The image vanished and Copper beeped again, but it was a different beep; he had recorded an error, then scanned Raven down. Some of the photons shimmered when he did. A hologram. He interfaced with the computer and checked it against his internal database making him beep happily after realizing who she really was. He wheeled on the engineer to put himself between them and flashed a series of red lights at the engineer.

The engineer sighed. Seeing the photons shimmer thanks to that damned floating garbage disposal that his chief actually considered to be a member of the crew, he knew that the intruder must have been a hologram. He placed the hyperspanner back down and turned around, heading out into main engineering. "All right, which one of you jokers left a hologram on in the briefing room?" he called out angrily as he disappeared around the corner.

As he did so, Raven stood up and dusted herself off. "Thank you," she said, looking down at the strange contraption, a curious expression on her face. "I don't know who or what you are, but you sure helped get me out of a jam there."

He wasn't sure how to process exactly what he helped her with or what a 'jam' was, but he understood the 'what are you?' question so he flashed the text, "Exocomp. Unit CU-47," onto his mini holo-display before he maneuvered himself to the left where a sticker with the words 'PO1 Copper' could be seen. He whirled back and flashed more text, "Errors are logged. EBH Mark I program, "Raven", does not match database. What is your malfunction?"

"Copper, that's a nice name," mused Raven for a moment before she finished reading the screen. "My malfunction?" she asked, enthralled with the little machine. "Oh right, my malfunction," she added, giggling slightly. "It's kind of embarrassing... I have multiple avatars, and I was trying them out, when my program glitched somehow and I found myself trapped in the body of a Klingon." She looked down in disgust at the bulky padded armour with metal plates for trim that she was wearing. This was undoubtedly one of her least favourite avatars. It was just too aggressive and mean-looking. "Could you help me change out of this avatar and into something a little more practical, like maybe a leather corset and some torn fishnets? This big heavy metal baldric is starting to really chafe."

"Standby." The next text read. Copper lowered himself to the briefing room table so he could disengage his anti-grav module and devout more power to his processor. He downloaded Raven's current program into his database and ran that against the version the ship's computer had before she left the Galileo. Lines and lines of code scrolled on his holo-screen so fast it seemed more like a blur of colour. He beeped happily in a tinkling of sound, when he found the error. The code was replaced with the text, "Affirmative. Copper can fix."

Then a line of code replaced the words. The code had been extrapolated from Raven's 'Avatar Management Selector'. He wasn't sure how it got changed or slightly corrupted. He was a fixer of problems, not an analyzer. He overwrote the code to the previous version, giving Raven access to change her Avatars on her own. He even cleaned the code up a bit making it a little cleaner -- at least cleaner to a machine that was. When he completed the fix, happily shot up into the air and did a little acrobatic flip before slowly lowering himself down. He materialized a small 'handful' of confetti that floated down with him. He dematerialized the confetti just before it hit the table.

"Complete." Copper typed, as he simultaneously uploaded the repaired code to Raven's program.

"Yay!" exclaimed Raven, smiling at the curious little device. She then closed her eyes for a moment as she shimmered and returned to her default avatar. "Thank you so much! This is such a relief! I was afraid that this big mean-looking Klingon caregiver might scare the children!"

As hesitant as Copper was around flesh-machines, their alpha version (flesh-machines 1.0) were generally a lot happier to see Copper than some of his colleagues were. It was intriguing to the unit to find that there were holoprograms designed for the stewardship of the 'alpha versions'. In some ways, Copper saw himself as a caregiver as well -- a steward of the space-computer that was. His left appendage blinked blue, twice then he typed, "EBH Raven and the unit Copper share functions."

"Yes, I suppose we do..." Raven smiled at the exocomp as she took a seat on the "pool table" in the briefing room. "So," she added, crossing her legs. "It doesn't seem fair that you've got to look at my subroutines and I barely know anything about you. Aside from fixing holograms and maintaining the ship, what do you do for fun?"

Copper beeped in confusion at first. He knew the definition of the word fun and he figured in this context she had meant what does he do when he's not engaged in work duties. Since he had no idea what pleasure or enjoyment felt like to a flesh-machine he listed the things he usually preferred to do first in his off duty hours. "System diagnostic routines. Axionic buffer reconfigurations. Powercycling auxiliary cells, and--" Copper stopped typing then deleted the word 'and'. He didn't want to get in trouble for that admission so he decided against typing it out.

"And..." replied Raven, beckoning him to continue. She was curious as well; she had no idea what an exocomp might do in his leisure time, if he even had any.

Copper blinked lights as if considering the idea. He beeped once, then made his way to a small section of the hull near the floor that hid sensitive wiring for the main console display for the briefing room. He replicated a pair of his thin tiny clamp arms and removed the small paneling hiding the area he had repaired several hours previous. He turned towards Raven and showed her the back of the panel normally hidden from view. A small brightly coloured fractal design had been sprayed on with extreme detail. The spirals were all mathematically created and to Copper it was his representation of the repair he'd done to the circuits as a fractal.

"Wow!" exclaimed Raven, mesmerized by the intricate mathematical patterns and colours on the back of the panel. "Copper, this is beautiful! If I had quarters, I would hang it up on my wall!" She leaned down for a closer look and to avoid drawing more attention to the two of them. "Have you shown anyone else your work?" she whispered.

"Negative." Was all Copper typed before quickly replacing the panel. He de-replicated his spindly arms and hovered back towards Raven. "This unit makes them for the space-computer." Copper made a few beeping sounds as work orders began downloading. He hovered a little higher. "Copper has more malfunctions to repair."

Raven sighed. "All right," she said, looking down at the little machine. Even though he was a robot and she was a hologram, she couldn't help but feel some sympathy for the exocomp. The only one of his kind, surrounded by flesh and blood humans, trying to fit in... in many ways, he wasn't that much different from her. "But we should hang out sometime," she continued. "Maybe you could show me some of your artwork, and I can show you some of my talents..."

Copper seemed to blink his lights and make his beeps and boops for a few moments longer than he had previously. Perhaps he was thinking about Raven's words piecing together it's meaning, or perhaps Copper in his own way felt somehow thankful for the suggestion. Having no face or a lack of body language to convey his feelings if he had any he simply replicated a small toy exocomp. He typed the words, "For your version 1.0 flesh-machines." He turned and began to hover away to continue his never ending work.

"Awwwww," muttered Raven as her exocomp companion floated away as she turned the little toy over in her hands. "It's so cute," she added, not sure if she was referring to the little exocomp or the big one.

[OFF]


EBH Mark I "Raven"
Emergency Babysitting Hologram
USS Galileo

&

PO1 Unit CU-47 "Copper"
Damage Control Specialist
USSGalileo
(PNPC played by Beaumont)

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