trans_9 | All work and no play...

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All work and no play...

There is an AI on the ship that goes by the name Bender Stack. It only pops up now and again, and now its function may finally be somewhat clear.

"Hey. Hey meatbag!" says a grating voice.

Bender Stack chases people away from work when they've been doing too much of it.

This is why Brainiac 5 leaves the Special Weapons Division and by the time he gets up to the Living Area (having decided to eat anyway if the irritating AI is going to heckle him out of work) he's about at his wit's end.

"--For the last time, I am not going to build you a robot prostitute! You're an AI, not a mechanoid, you couldn't interface with it anyway."

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"What in the world are you doing? Don't touch that," snaps the green-skinned alien, close to Cale's age (at least in appearance), that returns to the makeshift lab.

Cale, startled by Brainy's unexpected arrival, jumps slightly, losing his grip on the device and nearly drops it on the floor. Thankfully, he's a pretty deft kid...teenager...man...and manages to regain his hold on it.

"What the...? What are you...? Don't sneak up on people like that!" Cale snapped back.

"I was hardly sneaking. You were the one trespassing," Brainy insists, holding out his hand. "Now hand me that, before you break it."

"Trespassing? I didn't see your name on the door," Cale retorted. He also didn't give Brainy the device. "I'm not going to break it. I'm just going to look inside it."

"If it hadn't taken me so long to construct it, that would be permissible. As it did, it's not. Relinquish it, immediately."

"You built this?" Cale asked, skeptically.

"Are you perhaps experiencing auditory nerve damage?" he asks. "Yes, I built it. Relinquish it. Now."

"No," Cale refused, then walked away carrying the cauliflower-looking thing with him.

"You recalcitrant, overgrown child, I was not providing you the option of refusing."

Holy crap, what is that yellow field that suddenly wrapped around the cauliflower thing? Whatever it is, it's coming from him, and it retracts with the device to Brainy's hand.

"What the...?!" Cale whips around and watches the orb floats--trapped in the yellow field--to Brainy's hand. "Hey! I was looking at that, Jerkface."

"And I was finishing its construction, before you ever keened any amateur interest," says Brainy, settling down to work, and getting various tools from his belt. "But if it would make you content to continue nattering on while I get to work, keep talking--perhaps you'll eventually say something intelligent."

Folding his arms over his chest and pouting, Cale walked over to where Brainy was settled and not-so-discreetly stared over his shoulder as the green man removed the casing from the device. That, of course, is when it clicked in Cale's head just what the thing was.

"So what kind of range you have on that?" he asked.

There's the twitch of an eyebrow at his recognition, but nothing more than that.

"However far Stacy's translation services extend, which appears to be a considerable distance, as that's the system this is getting attached to. Likely four or five parsecs within area of the ship, though there would be some delay the greater the distance until the signal strength was weakened."

That's a helluva lot of light years.

"Not bad," Cale replied with a nod. He surveyed Brainy's work for a few seconds more before adding:

"You thought about patching one into the external comms network?"

"I had considered it, but bridging the gap between technological systems and biological ones is always rather...finicky," he says.

He gestures with an electrical probe to a half-built array on the table next to him.

"I assume from your talk that you have some mechanical skill. If so, make yourself useful."

Cale walks over to the array that Brainy had pointed to and picked up it, giving it a look over. "I was thinking...," Cale said. He liked to talk and work at the same time, it seemed to calm him for some reason and keep him from getting frustrated when he ran into problems.

"...if we can tap into the external comms., we might be able to figure out where and when we are. I mean, this ship is not only able to travel through space but also time and between different realities, right? Well, whoever built it has to have some sort of beacon system set up so the ship doesn't get lost. It has to be pinging off some kind of signal telling it where and when it is at so it can navigate. Otherwise it'd just be jumping in and out of random points in time and space in random realities."

His brow furrowed as he paused to concentrate for a moment then got to work.

"If we can just monitor those signals..."

Brainy tilts his head.

"That's the plan. One of them, at any rate."

Cale nodded again.

"What about those slug things?"

"They're all dead," says Brainy. "One of their number destroyed the kandronda generator and the pool that was their natural habitat, under the city. Without their primary source of nutrition, they starved. I attempted to build a kandrona array for the one that had infested me, but was unable to complete it in time."

"That's not what I meant, but thanks," Cale replied, glancing up from his work to look at Brainy.

"Didn't you guys say they built a machine that tapped into the ship's controls and hijacked them? Obviously they found a way to make the biological-to-technological bonds work. Why don't we just reverse engineer off of that to make something that will let us monitor everything?"

"Next time, be more specific," Brainy says to the first part.

To the second part, "Again, that's what we're doing. The actual on-board communications system, however, is just as vital. Shouting down the hallways during a crisis situation is getting tiresome and have a dearth of fowl to carry messages, nor any flammable materials to burn to create smoke signals."

"Context, dude. It's called context," Cale replied.

"So what are you using for transmitters?"

Rather than have to explain, Brainy just wordlessly shoves the datapad Cale's way and goes back to work.

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All work and no play...

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