Saturday August 7th 2021
Lieutenant Commander Ezekiel “Zeke” Pride Flight Controller
Lieutenant Elli-Navine Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis Chief Medical Officer
Lieutenant Scott McIntyre Chief Tactical/Security Officer
Podcast: To Boldly Roll The (Mis)Adventures of the USS Potemkin
(this report 756 words)
TBR#016 = 106 mins ~6,330 wds
Pax watched as his officers were plunged into darkness. He was in main engineering looking over the shoulder the deputy Chief of Engineering. The four members of her senior staff were currently in one of the Holodecks and from their actions it appeared that they had no idea they were in a simulation. He had a team trying to gain access to holodeck 2 by any means needed, short of explosives! So far, they were running into all kinds of blocks.
A few minutes before the ship had been struck by a powerful communications pulse. No physical damage of course but it had overloaded their communication network with petabytes of what could only be described as spam messages. Once they had been quarantined and systems started to come back online, they discovered that Ezekiel, Alexander, Elli-Navine and Scott had been transported into Holodeck 2 and a simulation booted up. Communications were going through the data now looking for the program/s that started all of this.
“Can you override it?” he asked he was answered with a shake of the deputy chief’s head. He knew that already; he had seen everything they had. The Programs was playing out, they had managed to make sure that the safeties remained active, they were more hardwired that on newer ships and for once he was glad many of the systems were a decade or more out of date. For it meant that none of them would die.
In the simulation, Pax saw, the away team was working their way through the ship, a close call with a creature only a mother could love set him on edge. They couldn’t die but he wondered how much they could be hurt. Minutes later they came across another creature, it was all teeth and muscle and it had them trapped in the armoury. He smiled as he listened to them come up with a plan to turn the tables, they were going to us the geometry of the armoury to trap the creature. It was a cleaver plan, it had risk though.
Two hours later and they had made their way through engineering and to medical. The Doctor beamed a simulation version of security officer Basin, and an alien stasis tube on to a hastily repaired bio-bed. However, has he started to scan the security officer the energy from the tricorder scans accelerated the life cycle of some kind of parasitical lifeform and in a display of blood and horror that made everyone watch turn away creatures, the Doctor described them as leeches with wings burst from every blood vessel in poor Basin. Pax didn’t turn away, he knew this wasn’t real and the real Basin was right now in his quarters, safely asleep.
The reactions of his crew were real though. The away team were horrified and even though Basin was dead, well the simulated Basin was dead they transported him right away to a stasis tube. For now, they had more pressing matters, like the alien in main engineering who was overloading the warp core. Pax glanced up at the dominating fixture of the room, the cascading blue reaction back lit everything in the room. He made sure that whatever was happening in the simulation, wasn’t being shadowed in real life. The core was fine out here it seemed.
Looking back at the visual of the holodeck Pax noticed that Elli was pulling parts from everywhere she could and patching together a working station. Once it was active Scott and Elli worked to overcome the heavy encryption the alien had programmed.
“Record what they are doing” he said to no one. “I’m recording everything captain”
“Good”
He watched as they powered down the core, stopping it from going into melt down and breaching the core and thus killing everyone and destroying the ship. A flash of light and the simulation ended in destruction. He frowned, panic setting in. Had they just been killed. Light returned to normal and all four of them were waking upon the floor of the black and yellow grided holodeck. He sat down releasing a breath he didn’t realise he had been holding.
“Get teams down there now” he ordered but didn’t listen to the response. They were safe, there was noting he could do for them right this second, so he turned to a console and brought up the code of the recording. “Sneaky bastard” he muttered half an hour later.
“Bring them to my ready room” he said meaning Ezekiel, Alexander, Elli-Navine and Scott.