trans_9 | Ohm Thing Leads To Another...

Even among the clusters of machines, Anwei wasn't hard for him to spot. What was a little more difficult was navigating through the workstations holding a large black bike. But he managed anyway, setting the motorcycle gently down near Anwei's workstation.

"Thanks for making time to meet with me," he said. "I know you must be busy, pulling double duty at Medical."

Having someone approach you who was holding a large heavy piece of machinery over their head was - surprisingly commonplace, actually. At least on this ship. She really should learn how to get used to it.

"Hello, Zouichi. Not at all, I appreciate the chance to take a break. And the best break from work is different work, sometimes." She looked at the motorcycle. "Hello, Fuyu."

Right on cue, Fuyu materialized in the empty air, giving Anwei a little wave. "Long time no see."

Zouichi cleared his throat. "Well, let's hope this is a good break, then. You know that Starfighter Command was recently involved in an engagement with the Ohm, yes? Since I was part of that engagement, I thought it might be useful to share the information I obtained about the battle capabilities of the Ohm present."

Anwei waved back, her smile going a little wistful. Clearly it was proof that Stacy valued Zouichi over her, because he had his companion and she sis not. Unless this was all a test to see how she would do without him - she slammed that train of thought to a halt, hard.

"Yes, I heard, Faiza was down in the Hangar, and I was," she blinked apologetically, "asleep. I'm glad you came back all right. Is this information above and beyond what the normal debriefing would cover?" She was still a little miffed that no one seemed to have brought back a chunk of Ohm for dissection and gene sequencing - or if they had, they were examining it in private.

"Yes, actually." He paused, not quite sure how to phrase this. "How much do you know about synthetic memory systems?"

"I presume you are talking about your memory systems, yes? Because synthetic memory could also mean confabulation - memories of events that haven't happened."

She settled back a little in her chair. "Well, I know quite a lot about how memory is stored in computer-based AI's in terms of my own dimension's technology, because I learned it with Horanckk. Perceptual tiering, stage congruence, and interlace perception - the last quite a lot of, because he would split himself and then re-merge, and have to assimilate two sets of memories from two different perspectives into one whole.

"And while Horanckk wasn't a military AI per se, I certainly worked with him in interpreting data from military sources." Which include data from AI's that the two of them had attacked and stripped of their memories, but let's not get into that, shall we?

He nodded. "I am. During combat, my systems automatically generate an information feed that I can use to better guide my decisions -- projectile analyses, damage projections for a given target or angle of fire, that sort of thing. During the battle with the Ohm, I amassed a large amount of this data, as well as recorded footage of the Ohm we encountered. Much of it will no doubt be centered around my particular perspective from the cockpit of a VF-171.

"However, I believe a good portion will also be relevant to anyone who wishes to examine the battle capabilities of the Ohm that we fought. Behavioral projections for individual Shrikes in a swarm, as evinced by recorded positional data, projected top speeds, the angle at which an individual Ohm can turn on its tail and give chase, splash damage reports from Ohm hit by reaction missiles..."

He shrugged. "That sort of thing. It's useful to me as a combatant, but since we know so little about the Ohm, I thought the raw data might also be of interest to others aboard the ship."

She beamed, her smile with just a bit too sharp of an edge to it. "That sort of information would be invaluable to us, I think. Just the raw footage would be worthwhile, but tactical and material evaluations as well..." Her right eye shivered a bit in its socket, as though looking for a video feed.

Then she calmed down a little. "Is the data stored in your brain currently, and can it be downloaded or otherwise duplicated without any risk to you?"

Fuyu took the opportunity to speak up. "Copying the data isn't an issue; I can help with the uplink, since I have a direct connection with Zouichi. The question is, are my systems compatible with yours? I can jack into most any terrestrial system, but I'm not really familiar with what you work with here.

"Once we figure out how to get the information to your machine, I can provide you with the relevant storage algorithms to decode it. From there, it should just be a matter of determining which information someone will be interested in, and putting it together in a useful format."

"I couldn't find any complete computer systems on XaXing - or at least, none that met my specifications. So I just bought components, and have been assembling them myself. And since so much of the equipment here is from Earth or Earth variants, it made sense for me to make my builds Earth-compatible."

Anwei leaned under her work table, muttering. She pulled out a metal casing, about the size of a briefcase, with four metal insectile legs folded tight against its sides, but put it aside. "Not you." She reached down again, and came up with a small black box, covered with mesh grilles on all sides and a row of gold sockets and gold-edged lenses along one edge. "This will take an optical feed, and," she quickly read the note taped to one side, "there's nothing in here now."

"And my premise is going to be that all the information is of interest - if not now, later. It could turn out that the evidence of the Ohm's state of mind is how they hold their mandibles, or the color their eyes turn, or something. Nothing should be discarded. Once I have all of the data in accessible form, I'll probably lay out a visual-only sequence, and a visual-plus-data sequence, and put them both in the Library. With the bulk data as a backup file." She smiled up at Zouichi, while her hands moved through connecting the black box to a power source and a monitor/keypad combo. "Or should I offer it to General Chacon first?"

Fuyu smiled. "Then we shouldn't have a problem, should we?"

Zouichi closed his eyes, pulling his motorcycle helmet on as he seated himself in a nearby empty chair. He didn't particularly need to be sitting; it was just one less thing for him to think about while he called up the data in question. When he opened his eyes again, he could see the beginning of the battle quite clearly, the image from the Nightmare's cockpit sharp and crisp against his vision. "Got it. And actually, I hadn't given it much thought." He paused, considering the idea for a moment. "The library, if you please."

He respected the general, but he didn't want his tactical data ending up only in the hands of those some higher-up had deemed worthy. The point was to allow anyone who wanted to know about the Ohm the opportunity to see them up close, to know some small part of what they were capable of.

A slender black cable snaked its way out from the sleek black motorcycle, making its way to the black box Anwei had offered. It stopped just short of making contact. "May I?" Fuyu asked.

"I hope not. I ran some pretty strict tests on all the components before assembly."

She nodded; she thought the library was the best destination as well. The more copies there were of the data, the less likely they could be hunted down and destroyed - or ever just lost. She sternly reminded herself that this was going to be a serious record, and that she was not to score it with any Earth music. No matter how amusing it would be.

The screen at her elbow lit; she turned one eye to it, and watched the cable with the other. "Go ahead, please."

Score it with Earth music? How about My Boyfriend's a Pilot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpM6KpRtxMM)?

With Anwei's permission, Fuyu interfaced with the storage device Anwei had provided. It was even easier than she'd been expecting; within nanoseconds, she was supervising the data transfer, careful to filter out any information about Zouichi's operational status or background processes while she was at it. Sharing information about the Ohm was good, but that was all they were going for here. Fuyu's holoimage flickered out as she concentrated on the task.

"It shouldn't take too long," said Zouichi, glancing at Anwei. "A minute or two, tops."

Anwei's rather fond of John Williams; considering the scale of the Ohm ships, perhaps the theme from Jaws would be more appropriate?

"Take as much time as you need," she said, watching intently on her screen as the display flickered lines and graphs, showing the data as waves of color. "I intend to take multiple passes as this, and match each pass against the next to make sure I'm not losing anything.

"How do you want to verify that my translation of the data is accurate? Would it give you fine enough detail if I could use it to create a simulation of the battle in one of the Sensoriums, and you could re-watch it?"

Zouichi nodded. "That should be fine. I appreciate the trouble you're going through for this, Anwei -- I'd ask someone who wasn't pulled in two places at once, but..."

But Alex wasn't around any more, was he?

"...a simulation in the Sensoriums will be just fine."

"We're all pulling double duty, one way or another. Believe me, it's a relief to just work on something that is finished, that only needs to be polished up and presented." Better than watching the patients in Med Bay get smaller. She was extremely relieved that there were no others of her species on board, so that she wouldn't have to baby-sit any carnivorous monkeys with opposable thumbs and no sentience.

"So, if the storage algorithms process correctly, and I can arrange this data...you realize, I could be pulled back to Med Bay at any point. I can't give you a firm time when this will be done. But as soon as it is, I'll comm you," she promised, and smiled.

Then her smile wavered. "This will be the first record of the battle that I will have seen," she said, laying her hand on the black box. "I hope it helps others to see it."

"That'll be fine. It's just that we know so little about the Ohm, what they can do. I hope it will be of use to someone."

He hesitated for a moment, not sure whether he'd like to hear the answer to the question he was about to ask. "Anwei, you haven't seen Alex around lately, have you?"

"I'm looking forward to matching this against the recordings from Zokez II," she said animatedly, hands swooping over the keyboard. "See if we can identify any patterns the two battles have in common. The more we know, the more likely we'll find a weakness."

Her hands faltered and fell back to the keys. "I know he was spending some time by himself recently. I hadn't seen him in Med Bay. I haven't seen him in," she frowned, a crease showing between her brows, "a while. A long while."

Zouichi nodded. "If I'd been there personally, it'd be easier to compare the data, though. Working from footage only takes you so far; there's always data loss making a recording of a recording."

He frowned. "I haven't seen him, either, Anwei. I think he might be gone."

"But with this and Zokez, we'll have footage of both a ground and a space battle against them. The data from this attack will be much richer, thanks to you, but we still may be able to extrapolate some parallelisms. Of course ideally we would have won BOTH of them instead of just one..."

"Gone? But he was-" She twisted in her seat, looking towards a far wall in Engineering as though expecting to see a fair-haired familiar face bob into view, the rat on his shoulder, laptop under his arm. "But he was just here. I, he, oh hell." She swung her attention back to her screen, watching the datagraphs, and widened her eyes wide enough that the tears thinned out and didn't escape.

"He might just be in GLaDOS," she finally offered, but they could all tell from the tone of her voice that she didn't really believe that.

Zouichi shook his head. "I don't think so, Anwei. When I last talked to him, he'd just spent an extended period of time there. I haven't been able to raise him on the comms, either."

And he really doubted Alex was the type to dodge his friends just for kicks.

She worked her fingers over the keys, not touching them. When she spoke again, her voice was low.

"Well, he's safe. I guess. Him and Alice. I'll make sure we have copies of all his medical records, ready and labeled so that when he comes back, if no one remembers him, they will know what he needs, at least."

She sighed again. "With the mercenaries, you always try to say that you've made a person's life better for your meeting them, somehow. Because you might never see them again. They might drop off at the next planet, or transfer to another ship, or go home - or die." She clenched her fist and rapped her knuckles angrily on the table; she did not pound her fist, because in a low-g environment that would send her flying. "But at least you know! At least there's some word, some announcement. People don't just - melt into the walls."

Zouichi nodded. Yet another thing about this ship that fed into his first impression. On the other hand, he didn't want to get into another argument with Anwei about it. He closed his eyes, briefly.

"Do you know where his possession locker is? Perhaps when he wakes up, he could find a note from you there -- after all, there's no telling when he'll be back."

Fuyu rematerialized again, her small form shimmering in the air. "Transfer complete."

She could see the programmer in her mind, going through the prison ship's code. A prison would need to be able to report on the location of every prisoner at any time, so if Stacy was no longer a prison, she should not be reporting. But rather than give her the option of telling, they just turned the function off.

Either that, or she was reporting - just not to the crew.

She shook her head slowly. "I don't know where his locker is. And I think that Stacy might clean it out, the way she apparently takes people's personal possessions and stores them. No, if I'm to leave a note it should be with the items in Med Bay."

"Thank you, Fuyu. And the storage algorithms?"

"I placed them in their own separate file on your device... I hope that's all right? I thought that might make it easier than trying to get you to write out the necessary equations..."

"That's perfect, Fuyu," she said warmly. It was reassuring to know that at least some people still had their partners. That there was still hope that Horanckk would arrive someday, even if he wasn't embedded in a physical object like a motorcycle.

She opened up an interface and looked at the data, then back up at Zouichi with startled eyes. "Your system's information feed is extremely detailed, apparently. It's going to take me some time to cook this raw data. Did you ever receive any guidelines from Starfighter Command on what format they prefer their records in? If not, I'll just generate the most cross-system compatible material that I can. We could end up designing the battle information template for the ship together."

Zouichi shook his head. "No; they didn't ask me for it at all, actually. This is entirely a request from my end."

In fact, no one had bothered to ask him very much at all, except whether he could pilot a fighter. Once they determined that he could, they didn't seem to care why he could move around easily in a 50kg depowered EX-GEAR.

"I'll leave it in your hands to determine how best to support cross-compatibility... I'm sure you're much more familiar with the computing environments here than I am."

"No debriefing?" That wasn't good at all. She knew that the crew was mixed, but surely they could be convinced to tell stories about their exploits, even if they didn't have training in detailed analysis and reports. "I wonder if I have a post-combat debriefing template..."

"There are - needless to say - a lot of different platforms to try and support. That might be another reason to have so many Earth-descended people here; most of their equipment runs on programming that shares some of the same rules. If every person and their gear was unique, this would be impossible."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a short gold lozenge, one of her datastores: it had been modified with an optical lens at one end. "Fuyu, any interest in an outline of the systems available on the ship and the cross-compatibilities of each? Could be useful."

"Afraid not. A lot of the pilots limped off to Medical after the mission was over. If there's a template for debriefing, I am not aware of it."

Fuyu regarded the lozenge with interest. "Certainly, if you're willing to part with it."

"If there was a debriefing scheduled, you'd think that Medical would have information on it as well." How many times had she helped soldiers in their beds or free-fall hammocks dictate their memories of the battle, zapping them with the appropriate recall chemicals as necessary?

"Actually, I'm not entirely certain what else might be on here. Is this the one I put the glacier porn on?" She scowled at the datastore. "Does the motorcycle have a 40 gbs optical feed? If not, it might be easier for me to just drop the file into here," she patted the black box on the table in front of her, "and you just take it from there. Plenty of room."

You would think. Zouichi merely shrugged; from his time here, it had been made quite clear that simply standing around complaining about the way things should be done didn't accomplish anything. Which was why he was here.

"Please go ahead and drop the file, since I'm already connected. I'll pick it up from there," Fuyu said.

And the penalty for seeing that something was wrong or missing, and suggesting how it should be fixed, should not be to have to wade in and fix it yourself. Putting that sort of responsibility on people was a great way to get them to shrug off making any suggestions.

"That works." She opened up a second interface window, clicked the datastore into place on top of the black box's connection strip, and scanned it. "You want the files in the section labeled systems_compats," she directed. "If you find any errors or if something isn't clear, please tell me so. I want to make all of this as accessible as possible."

"Thanks," Fuyu said, retracting her cable. "Got it! I'll check for errors when I get back."

Zouichi nodded to Anwei. "Do you have everything you need? If so, I'll let you get back to work. Once again, I apologize for taking up so much of your time."

"Of course." She guessed that it would be best if there were no errors, but she did like talking to Fuyu. And of course, now she had the compatibility file, so if there was an emergency and she had to move out of her current casing, she would know where she could go.

"Zouichi, you aren't taking up my time," she said with a smile. "You're doing important work, that will help all of us. And I'm happy to help you. My regret is that there isn't a full-time records-keeper delegated to do this sort of work, and you have to make do with me."

Zouichi gave her a little half-smile. "Well, I hope that the others consider it as important as you do." With a slight bow, he picked up the bike once more by its handle, heading back towards the exit. Fuyu waved cheerily back at Anwei, trailing after her partner.

"They'll consider it important when I'm through with it," she said to herself, answering Fuyu's wave with one of her own.

Then she turned back to her little black box, fingers flying over the keyboard as she made notes. She would have to go down to the Hangar and see if she could download the specifications of this - Variable Fighter 171. Grab the Zokez II data and see if there were Ohm types who were sent into both battles. Split out the raw data from the projections, motion-correct and plot against a map of the battle as a whole. For that matter, perhaps she could see what she could download from the other fighters.

Busy, busy, busy.

Ohm Thing Leads To Another...

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