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Post by Amy81 on Jun 17, 2005 6:13:17 GMT -6
(this first post is also in chapter FF, but helps with continuity I think..?)
As soon as Abby had left his office, the doctor activated his com link again. He wanted to speak with Science Officer Fallel again about the discs. After a moment, Fallel was once again on the line.
Not bothering to say hello, Fallel merely lied through his teeth. "Work has stopped, doctor, as you ordered." He had complied initially, but Lucian had told him to continue while he went off to get to the bottom of the situation.
"Like I said before, Science Officer Fallel, it wasn't my order. It was the wishes of Amy's family. But that's not why I called."
"Then what?" Fallel asked.
"Just a thought. I was discussing the entire thing with Abby, Amy's mother, and we had a thought. Now this does not have her approval, but quite frankly I'm concerned about her state of mind. The woman desperately needs some closure regarding her daughter."
"But how can she get this if we give up on Captain Amy?" Fallel asked.
"Instead of trying to decode the discs and pry open the information, what if you tried to complete the experiment?
"I don't follow."
"There is a possiblity that the cylons planned to plug Captain Amy's thoughts into a blank centurion brain." The doctor half expected some humorous comment in reply. Lords know he'd thought of a few himself. But it was just a way to deal with tramatic events, he'd told himself, yet from Fallel there was no wise cracks.
"We hadn't looked at the discs for the purpose of using them as intended" Fallel said. "We've been trying to decode them..."
"Is it possible to give this a try? There'd be no invasion of privacy, and if it worked, it might provide a way for Abby to, in a sense, talk to her daughter. If of course, these discs contain what Captain Lazant insists they do."
"There are deactivated centurions on board" Fallel said.
"Then you'll try?"
The science officer sighed. "I'd better get back to work."
The doctor smiled as he closed the link, then sat there staring at his office door, thinking again of Abby...
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Post by Amy81 on Jun 17, 2005 6:14:06 GMT -6
By the time Science Officer Fallel got back to his work station in the cylon cruiser, he'd mapped out most of what he needed to do in his head. It all made perfect sense, now that he was approaching the problem from a completely different direction. While trying to get the information from the discs back into a human was next to impossible, getting the cylon-coded information into a cylon-built centurion should be nearly the easiest thing to do.
He wondered about the morality of it. Just what kind of shape would Captain Amy's mental health be if she were to wake up in a cylon's robotic body? The alternative clearly was that they would lose whatever information Amy might have given them about that final mission if they did nothing. And as the doctor said, the upside would be offering closure to Amy's mother.
In the end, the right and wrong of it was out of his hands from the moment the Cylons began this unholy experiment. And it wasn't as though Amy would suffer any pain from an attempt to conclude the experiment. She was beyond all suffering at this point...
"Hey, where are you going with those discs?" a voice asked, breaking Fallel's train of thought. It was Sergeant Pell. She looked him up and down, taking him in with her eyes.
"Uh" Fallel replied, "the doctor's have ordered work on the discs to cease. Something about Amy's family and their wishes. I'm bringing these back to medlab." It was mostly the truth, except for the last part. A smooth lie. That was two in a matter of a few microns. He was getting good at it, and it didn't feel good to him.
"Oh" Pell replied. "Then what am I supposed to do in here?"
"This is a state of the art Cylon cruiser. The question should be 'what can't I do in here?'"
Pell laughed, watching Fallel turn and walk toward the exit. "Hurry back!" she called after him. Her expression grew more serious as she stared at his back until he was out of sight, then she turned and smiled again as she saw the cruiser cockpit. This was truly a chance of a lifetime... But no. She was assigned to the discs. This cruiser wasn't going anywhere, but the discs were.
Pell whispered to herself, "No way my little friend. I was assigned to work on the discs. Where they go, I go." She left the cruiser, caught sight of Fallel across the bay, and headed that way.
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Post by Amy81 on Jun 17, 2005 6:14:44 GMT -6
Science Officer Fallel entered the science lab, and walked to the room he wanted and shut the door. He turned on the lights, walked over to the work station, and set the discs down on the counter. The lights flickered, came on, and immediately reflected off the various parts of cylon centurions in storage.
The parts he was particularly interested in were at the work station already. It was the upper body of a centurion, connected to various wires and cables coming from a row of computers. The purpose of the testing on this particular centurion was to determine the best ways of deactivatation when encountering one in the field. This cylon had been repaired, shut down, and repaired again over and over. Fallel himself had worked some on this project, and knew the program fairly well.
Fallel sighed, took the discs, and carefully fed them one at a time into the computer. He watched the screen, entering various data when needed, but the discs seemed to be working mostly on their own. He sat back, trying to relax but finding himself extremely nervous and beginning to sweat, though he didn't know exactly why. Probably because he sort of felt like a mad scientist, and he half feared what the results would be. He leaned forward to enter more data, then sat back again, his eyes going from the screen to the centurion and back again.
Suddenly the computer stopped working. A message popped up, written in cylon code. Two boxes appeared at the bottom of the message. Fallel knew enough about cylon code to understand what the message was. "Click ok" he said aloud. "Lords, I hope I know what I'm doing..." He brought the cursor over to the proper box, and clicked.
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Post by Amy81 on Jun 17, 2005 6:15:19 GMT -6
Fallel tensed up as he clicked to proceed. The computer lit up as it drew on nearly all of it's capacity in order to complete the task. Fallel continued to look at the screen, then back to the centurion, then back again to the screen.
Suddenly everything stopped. Fallel's eyes grew wide at first. It usually wasn't a good sign when a computer stopped before finishing a task. But this was cylon technology, and brand new ground at that. But no prompts came on the screen like last time. Nothing was happening at all. He sat there nervously, waiting, until he couldn't stand it anymore.
"Come on" he said. He hit some keys, and kept looking over at the centurion, hoping for something, anything. He finally got a response from the computer, but none of the work seemed to be there anymore. "No no no" he whined, but he could see it was true.
The entire program had vanished, taking everything with it. All the disc information, everything that Lazant had brought back, it was all gone. Fallel put his head in his hands, trying to think of what to do next. But the only thing he could think of was how much trouble he was going to be in if he couldn't get the information back.
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Post by Amy81 on Jun 18, 2005 8:08:41 GMT -6
Fallel pulled himself together, and tried to think it through. The information couldn't have just vanished completely. He started going through the computer files, trying to find some trace of the information. He wasn't finding anything when he suddenly noticed that it smelled like something burning in the room.
The discs!
He hit the eject button, and the discs started coming back out. He picked up the first one, and it was warm. He tried to cradle it in his hand, but it started to lose it's shape, curving into the grooves between his fingers. With a yell he flipped it flat on the table. He tried taking the second one by the edges, but his fingers began to push into the sides before he could flop that one onto the table as well. Each disc came out hotter than the last one, and he almost felt like he'd actually burned himself by the time the last one was out.
He was patheticly blowing on them when the door behind him burst open. "What in hades is going on in here?" It was Pell, who'd been at the door for some time. "I thought I smelled something... burning..." She caught sight of the ruined discs. "What is going on, Fallel?"
"End of my career" he speculated. "End of a lot of things."
"What happened?" Pell asked, looking over Fallel's shoulder to get a better look at the carnage.
"The doctor in charge of Amy's case had an idea" he explained. "It made so much sense I didn't even consider that anything like this could happen. Instead of trying to decode the discs, we figured why not try to use them as the cylons intended."
"Just how did the cylons intend to use them?" Pell wanted to know.
"To put Amy's consciousness inside a centurion."
Pell almost laughed, then didn't. "You're serious, aren't you?"
Fallel nodded. "It all seemed to be going fine. The centurion seemed to be uploading the information, then this happened." He managed a laugh this time. "Complete fracking meltdown."
Pell looked at the centurion, who sat silent in front of them. She knocked on it's head. "Hello, Amy? You in there?"
"That's not funny, Pell" Fallel said flatly.
"None of this is" she replied. "What the frack do you do now?"
"I haven't a clue, Pell. I haven't a clue."
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