Ensign's Kettick and Sera - Afterlife

[Tomas Falt]

Wanted to take a moment to share this shore leave sim from two of the Juneau's 'newest' crew members @Kettick and @Sera. You're both fantastic writers, it was hard to chose which one of your sims to share from this thread! I can't wait to see what you both come up with during an actual mission! 

Quote

(( Afterlife simulation ))

Kettick: By the way, each and everyone of us is a vital and necessary part of our societal whole, and has about as much need to be hailed for that than the common and equally vital self-sealing stem bolt, you glorified replicator menu. You should consider yourself lucky that I was in charge of my very specific side of this coordinated task, because if I know her well, the second thing Ensign Sera has done was to create a backup of your code for safekeeping.

The bemused avatar turned towards the Vulcan Engineer. 

Kettick: The first thing being of course to cut you from any control over what she is doing while I monopolized your limited computing power with my pointless ranting. 

And, as he glanced furtively towards his counterpart for confirmation, his trust was vindicated. 

Sera:  I have isolated the program.  Any further disconnection from the core of the program could cause the avatar to become unstable. 

Kettick:A commendable display of restraint. oO That doubles as a threat of withdrawing it. How Vulcanly efficient of you, Ensign Sera. Oo

Sera:  You were the one who brought up first contact.  Although I do not believe this is the case as the AI self-awareness is fairly limited based on the coding I’m seeing, I have no desire to irrevocably break alien technology before anyone else has had the opportunity to study it. 

Which, once again, served as a reminder that she had no desire to, but could nonetheless. Kettick didn't respond verbally, but shot the Greeter a half-smug, half-commiserating look, as if to say 'What, did you for a minute there think that *I* was the bad cop?".

Greeter:  Wait a minute.  You changed something.  ::walking over the Vulcan woman with an air of an exasperated school teacher::  Undo it right now. 
Ah, yes. Demanding things from the person who can annihilate you with a finger tap. A negotiating masterstroke for sure.

Sera:  I will not.  Your coding has been isolated, and you will be deleted if you do not tell me how to reverse the transfer back to our corporeal forms. 

The avatar was clearly at a loss.

Greeter:  I do not understand – you have everything at your fingertips!  You, Vulcan are no longer a slave to your biology! You will never have to suffer— 

Kettick was known to be a disaster at reading people's expressions, and other species' emotions were still largely a terra incognita for him, in spite of the injection of a little Terran in his mind. But one didn't think any kind of talent to see the flash in the eyes of the Vulcan. Angry didn't begin to cover it. It was the kind of glare that could have convinced an Hirogen to take up crop farming.

Sera:  Kroykah!  <<silence>> I refuse to change what I am because it is…inconvenient.  Kettick refuses to act in a manner that is reprehensible to him because it goes against all he believes in – this is not a paradise; it is an escape from the inescapable.  This entire amalgam is rife with cowardice.   
 And, with the aforementioned keystroke, Sera sent the Greeter back to oblivion - temporary as it may be. He would hardly be missed, Kettick thought; in all of their interactions, the self-styled Greeter had been a force of obstruction more than a source of reliable data.

Kettick:  An apt evaluation. One simply hopes that this escape was meant to be temporary.

Sera exhaled slowly, reining in her emotions once more before squaring her shoulders and diving back into her task.

Sera:  This was not really designed for the purpose of reversal.  The initial transference algorithm is going to have to be reverse engineered.  :: She sounded somewhat doubtful ::

Kettick:  Which is precisely within our purview.
And without another word, the two of them focused their minds on the task at hand.

An unspecified amount of time later, Sera's voice called Kettick's attention away from his screen.

Sera:  I may have it…but it would be prudent to have a second opinion.  Would you care to review the coding? 
Nodding respectfully, Kettick disentangled himself from his console and walked to Sera's, looking at the code on display.

Kettick:  Elegant... but somewhat hard to visualize. What do you estimate could be the consequences, should we send our consciousness out of this simulation, and someplace else than in our bodies?

Sera:  Well as the computer greeter stated, there is no after-afterlife.  If the programming is not sound, then…. who knows what could happen?   

Kettick nearly shrugged. As far as he was concerned, there was no afterlife either, and yet there they were. What was one final frontier more?

Kettick: Contrary to what our creed would imply, I suggest we refrain from boldly going and finding out, this time.

Sera: Response

Kettick remained silent for a moment, trying to make sense of the lines of code that danced before his eyes. Then, with an annoyed flick of the hand, the raw code on the screen was replaced by a complex mechanism - logic connectors became gears, conditions became diodes or one-way valves, gaskets or overpressure vents... 
He was, however, not quite sure what the bouncing ball, the mousetrap and the spinning wheel thingy were supposed to represent.

Kettick: There. Analyzing systems always came more naturally...

Sera: Response

Kettick: You said it yourself, we are not here in corporeal form, and yet I can communicate. So I deduced that for the purpose of this communication, either I was telepathic or the whole environment was. No matter how improbable each hypothesis, the effect is the same as regards interfacing with the local reality. Ah, there.

He made an extra gear appear as an intermediary between two others, thus changing the direction of the spinning wheel from clockwise to counter-clockwise and slightly to the side.

Kettick: I am afraid that would be the extent of how far I can help you with the code itself. But I would volunteer for testing its application, though.