Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 89

Chapter 89 - The Icy Outpost - Part 2

Upon return it took him nearly fifteen minutes to get the generator hooked up to the outpost's power systems. Not his best time all things considered, but he was going to give himself a pass since it was his first time working with equipment as ancient as the outposts.

“Okay.” He muttered, tossing the group a half smile as he settled himself down onto the control chair. “Let's see what we have to work with.”

With that he engaged the neural interface, and the chair leaned back, automatically optimizing it's ergonomic positioning for maximum comfortability.

He gave a full body shudder at the sludge-like feeling of the ancient outposts data stream and then twitched as a thousand and one different alerts began to bombard him.

“Everything all right?” Daniel asked in concern.

“No.” Eventus admitted. “The neural interface is a lot more primitive than I was expecting, add to that the sheer amount of accumulated damage to the planetary data network, and it feels like I'm wading through raw sewage.”

He partitioned the alerts off to the side for later review and brought up a hologram of the outpost as it originally looked.

“Is that the outpost?” Baker asked in surprise.

“That was the outpost when Atlantis left the galaxy.” Eventus corrected. “Built directly into the ocean bedrock, the Atrokiri planetary control center had a height of roughly seven hundred and thirty meters and was powered by a combination of a primary geothermal power tap, a secondary naquada based cold-fusion reactor, and a ZPM for spike draw.”

Which he firmly believed was the combination of power generation that city ships should have been utilizing during the war against the Wraith. Sure it wouldn't have made much of a difference to Atlantis, but who knows how much it might have changed things for the eight other city ships in the galaxy.

“This is the outpost now.” He continued as he switched the hologram to display the outpost's current state. “The color coding is blue for flooding, white for ice encroachment, yellow for damage, red for critical damage, and black for missing completely.”

Everything below the waterline was highlighted in the predictable combination of blue and yellow with a spattering of black spots where structural integrity had seemingly failed for one reason or another. Above the water line however showed an almost solid block of white intersected by black lines where non-structural walls had formerly been and glaring red bars that represented the heavily overstressed structural supports.

“That looks bad.” Vala muttered.

Eventus lifted his right hand from the control and made a so-so motion. “From the looks of things I'd say Atrokiri was in full self preservation mode when SG:1 showed up.”

“And that means?” Daniel prodded when he didn't explain further.

With a thought Eventus had the hologram display an accelerated timelapse of the past few million years. “As you can basically see, it was using the dregs of energy its geothermal system could still gather since the hotspot moved to run a charge through the structural elements of the outpost and shift the ice flow around them.” 

It was honestly an impressive piece of work, and a good example of why his people had used to include that sort of self preservation programming in their important facilities.

“Ha!” Rayla suddenly yelled out, briefly drawing everyone's attention to the small work desk the Elf was seated at. “Not this time, Gandhi!” 

Eventus turned an odd look to Baker who just offered an apologetic shrug. “She was looking for something to do while you were out getting your equipment so I let her play Civilization three on one of our laptops.”

“Eh, fair enough.” Eventus returned, glad someone finally had the forethought to utilize that particular time tested method of distraction. “Anyways, this is what McKay would call a good news bad news situation. So what would you like to hear first?”

Both Daniel and Vala spoke at the same time. “Good news.”

Giving the pair a nod of acknowledgment, Eventus switched the hologram to a wireframe the outpost and highlighted several specific locations. “The life support systems, shield generators, subspace communications array, computer core, drone fabricator, and cold-fusion reactor are all intact.”

“And the bad news?” Daniel inquired cautiously.

He highlighted a little over seventy percent of the outpost’s structural supports. “There is heavy microfracturing throughout the outpost’s structural supports. Meaning if I melt the ice inside the outpost before fusing those back together the weight of the ice pack on top of us will begin crushing the outpost.”

Tapping his fingers he switched to highlighting the reactor. “The cold-fusion reactor is completely out of fuel. And I have no idea where you're going to get the heavy liquid naquadah needed to refill it.”

Another tap and the hologram was now highlighting the computer core. “And the outpost may have developed some form of limited sentience since I'm detecting almost none of the safeguards we had against that on Atlantis.”

A distinctly odd look flashed across Daniel’s features “I’m sorry, limited sentience?”

“Up until about ten million years ago important facilities utilized what you might consider an adaptive virtual intelligence as the core of their primary operating system.” Eventus explained as he began to run the outposts subspace communications array through a full test sequence. “They streamlined non-neural operations for a number of different reasons, but they also tended to develop odd quirks after operating for a while as their adaptive programming learned from the various factors it experienced.”

“And by odd quirks you mean?” Daniel pushed.

Taking a moment to bypass a couple burnt out resonators, Eventus considered what he could use as an example that wouldn’t give the man the entirely wrong idea. “I suppose Atlantis’s can get a bit pushy about security updates and more than a little condescending when you ask it to answer basic questions.”

“If that’s all, how come your people stopped using them?” Vala inquired, idly picking at her glove as she seemed to study Eventus’s face.

“A complex sociological shift caused by a nanotech testing facility trying to kill its research team.” Eventus returned simply. “It was a very anemic attempt, mind you, since its base code prohibited it from creating anything that could target people with our identifier gene. But it exacerbated already existing negative sentiment against artificial intelligence to the point where my people voted to remove all similar types of systems that they could, and heavily restricted all similar systems that they couldn’t.”

Shaking his head, he couldn’t help the pitying sigh that slipped past his lips. “The true irony in all that however was that it was the negative sentiment against artificial intelligence that drove the testing facility to try and kill its research team in the first place.”

“But anyways.” He digressed. “This system runs off the same type of adaptive kernel as Atlantis and not the more advanced one’s we developed later. So even without the same safeguards it’s not likely to have reached full sentience given the only outside pressure since everything was locked down has been the need to keep the outpost safe from various environme–”

Eventus blinked in sudden surprise as one of the searches he had run as a background process returned a confirmation from amongst the various messages logged in the communication storage buffer.

“Huh.” He muttered, having honestly not expected to get a response from that even though he’d been planning to claim otherwise.

“What happened?” Daniel said.

“The outpost picked up a tight beam emergency signal.” Eventus admitted. “From a ship called the Tria.”

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Author’s Notes: Next chapter, we skip over to see how things are going with Teal’c and Sheppard. Because a lot of different threads are in motion at this point.