No Big Deal

[Cassie Granger 0]

No Big Deal

A Cass Log

 

<<This log takes place during the 20 minute TBS.>>

 

Cass was no engineer, but she did know a thing or three about the nav technology SOCCENT entrusted to her. The nonstop 48 hours on care and feeding last earth-fall spoke to that. But the thing with the isochips? It had her going long after her convo on the bridge with Shalin and Belo:

 

Cassie’s stylus stopped mid-flip with the thought that there was no account for time travel or universal shift built into the AI SPECOPS nav system. But hell, how could they account for that when they had nothing to base it on? Time travel and jumping universes wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.

 

“That's it,” she had said, not really quite sure what ‘it’ was. She was thinking aloud and the pieces were fitting together. Kind of.

 

“You're trying to account for ... what exactly?” Shalin had even stopped humming.

 

“The warped isochips,” she said to Shalin before turning to Belo at science. “Ma'am... the isochips? They overloaded on the universal shift. Dealing with vector analysis in nanoseconds, the universal shift created an overload that arced repeatedly in tandem with the analysis transducer.”

 

“Universal shift,” said Belo. “I had not considered that possibility.”

 

“The isochips couldn't handle the load. They're AI... or as close as we can get. It’s like us. When we’re trying to analyze a problem? If the parameters constantly shift then suddenly turn in on themselves? They twist around, like ropes in a flood tangling into a freakin’ mess? And that twist in the rift tunnel I accounted for made the feedback worse.”

 

“This could change the way we look at time travel,” said Belo.

 

“Fix that problem and there'd be no problem with time travel,” Cass tossed out, not quite sure. It just jumped out. Knee-jerk. Gut reaction. Not exactly Marine protocol, more like Cass in the raw.

 

“Right, but this doesn't lessen the complexities of time travel theory, it in fact expands them.”

 

Or that. Belo was right; she was the scientist.

 

Once again the stylus flipped, weaving in and out, one finger to the next. Left hand. Right hand. Finally she flipped it into its holder, draped an arm over the back of her chair and kicked back.

 

Why the hell was she worried about isochips? Enterprise, their high-dollar tugboat, loomed prominent on the viewscreen. Splitscreen aft showed venting plasma, just waiting for a few molecules of oxygen to pass by. Hell of a situation. But after what they’d been through? No big deal.