New Digs

[Hakran K'hal 0]

New Digs

A Hakran K’hal Log

With his personal gear chucked into his quarters on deck 3, and little thought of checking out his office on deck 9, Hakran made his way to deck 7: the home to the NSSL Sector, or non-specific science laboratories. This new setup, with entirely new types of variable-use-equipment, allowed for greater flexibility depending on mission profile, and allowed more than one lab to work in the same mode. That’s what was on the specs, anyway. Hakran wasn’t going to sign off on that as an “improvement” until he’d seen it for himself.

Coming to the first double doorway for NSSL 1, he took a breath and coded himself in on the side panel. Stepping in, his first reaction was “bright!” His second reaction was “shiny” followed by “hmm.” Naturally the brand new layout still had that new lab smell and was sparkling clean. It seemed the room’s default lighting profile was set to “might as well be walking on the sun,” and he dimmed them by 25% just so he could get a better look without his pupils contracting so small as to turn into black holes, instead of, well… black holes.

Able to take a proper look around, he was struck by just how generic the lab seemed. He’d had more dedicated purpose laboratories at his public high school back in San Francisco. He walked over to the storage room and open the doors, and was heartened by what he saw inside. Here were a lot of the items missing, which could apparently be dragged out on demand: low and high level containment units, quantum particle generators and more. Opening another door revealed an intriguing multi-purpose unit that, upon reading the label, could either act as a biological incubation unit or specimen holding. As each of the five labs of this type were supposed to be equally stocked, there certainly was flexibility.

Hakran walked over and turned on one of the built-in consoles with multi-purpose analyzer unit. The familiar LCARS interface was slightly updated, and the unit was asking for which mode to load into.

“Enable 4-D specimen analysis,” he said to the unit. The interface immediately changed with a very familiar (to him) set of readouts and options. His sensitive Caitian ears could hear the analyzer unit shifting its innards about. “Very nice,” he murmured. He poked around the interface a bit, occasionally finding the newest update to LCARS had finally added more intuitive next-action buttons so he didn’t have to pull up menus to do what was necessary.

“Cancel operations,” he ordered. The computer asked if he would like to save his work, which of course wasn’t necessary, and upon getting the negative response the screen reverted to the state exactly as he had found it.

With a scratch of his pointy beard, he found he had an administrative quandary on his hands: where to put his people, and how to deal with possibly having to punt them out of a lab if the mission required a change in the room’s profile.

Well, he still had the more intellectually oriented rooms to look at, which supposedly were heavy on the consoles and display screens, as well as variable seating options to be the conference room of a scientist’s dreams or a suitable forum for sharing data and batting it back and forth, and more besides. There was also astrometrics, right next to the torture chamber, i.e. his office. He would have to visit that far sooner than he’d like, as he had a few personnel juggling acts to do.

Other than the paperwork, he was starting to look forward to the new digs.