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[Situation Vacant] Reactor Chief Engineer
RE: [Situation Vacant] Reactor Chief Engineer
#24
Anika killed the account with a single, spiteful button push, and rewarded herself with a bite from a Cherry cheesecake. Another dickhead that seemed to get glee out of cheating on a free non-competitive game.

A hate filled death-threat was answered by a concatenation command to dev/null and another soothing bite from the cherry.

Aces churned on, network traffic and system loads relegated to a single monitor where she could keep an eye on it.

The rest of the room was the domain of the MAGI system itself - a dozen monitors reading out thousands of critical station parameters. One entire wall had been replaced with a wire-frame map of the station itself, showing the location and status of every critical system. .

Everything looked okay.

Anika simply sat and watched as the MAGI system swallowed up thousands of different metrics from across the station - failure rates, parts quantities, work-rates, breakdowns, food supplies, supplier orders, personal orders, delivery schedules, injuries, radiation levels and funnelled them into a thousand ‘recommendations’.

New orders were spat out, shipments were organised and resources allocated. Failures and issues escalated themselves all the way up from the miner at the rockface, through the supervisor, the engineer and up to the station council if necessary.

In a moment she allowed herself to feel a small spark of pride - as one of the principal architects of a true Level 5 system, and likely the only one that didn’t come with a cheerful anime-related personality.

In theory it even worked.

She sat and watched it for a second, daring it to prove her wrong again.

Her job was to keep the channels to the system open, to keep the data moving, to fix the bugs crawling through the system and keep it from getting munged by the wrong bad actors and the right idiots.

Answering the dare, a single alarm sounded, answered by a dozen more as an entire data node fell over. Half-blinded, the system went into full panic, begging for her help.

The failure cascaded from node to node, as data re-routed then overloaded each node in turn - like an avalanch begun by a single snowflake. In moments a dozen more flashed from a safe green, to an angry red. She switched the system to master priority. Scorpy messages from angry residents followed within seconds.

Someone glitched out of a paid KoFen match while they were winning. Two job interviews were interrupted. A CDN for Fenboards toppled moments later. A dozen video streams dropped.

MAGI prioritised every single bit of bandwidth to keep itself fed, then prioritised the critical over itself. Power, Water, Air and nothing else.

Anika fought to keep the network alive. Her fingers raced across keyboards, manually adjusting the tables to route around the damaged areas. Her earpiece buzzed as someone finally found speed-dial for the control room’s extension.

“Yeah, Anika here,” she answered.

All five comm-lines lit up on the console. A dozen other calls were bounced for being too slow.

“My stream just cutout and I’m in the middle of a donation drive,” a voice shrilled in her ear. "Do you know how much money this is costing me? I need my network back.”

“I’m sorry, I’m doing my best.,” Anika pleaded, her mind more focused on the screens in front of her than the drill of a voice piercing her ear.

“Get it done. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes and you’re slowing me down.”

“You people are so rude. I’m going call Jet.”

Be my guest, thought Anika. The line went dead. Five others chirped for her attention. A moment later, comms to the control room were limited to a very specific whitelist. Anika had the space to focus, to get ahead of the cascade and create a sort of firebreak in the network.

She raced from terminal to terminal, setting one running a script while writing up another on the fly. Reams of green text flashed past as the terminal set to work.

She had to get in front of the rot. It had to be stopped before it poisoned the entire network and forced a hard restart. Half her mind had already begun to plan for that eventuality.

She wheeled her chair from console to console, working only by the illumination from the switches and screens. The master display showed nodes turning red across the map as each one timed out.

Her wristwatch buzzed.

“I’m here,”

It carried a request for an RT connection.

Radiotelepathy was more than a sharing of words. In a moment, fully formed ideas could be shared - entire plans and intents. In the time it took a human being to blink, two cybernetic minds could share an entire concept.

After a moment’s discomfort, Anika relented. Her interfaces had been designed for a specific hardwired protocol - RT comms just didn’t feel right run through them, like suddenly being able to see with her fingertips and hear with her eyes.

Jet’s mind made it just a little bit worse. Not quite an AI - her thoughts had an odd colour to them, a slight off-focus haziness. The background Bokeh of her mind carried a strangled sense of frustration.

The plan took less than a second to form. What needed to be done, how to do it, who could do it. Anika got ahead,

Only Jet’s onboard comms had the bandwidth to take care of the next part.

A single command spread through the Exocomp hive, relaying from machine to machine, then answering back through the interface. In the back of her mind, Anika could see each machine flickering to life, acting with one mind.

Nodes flickered and died - being disconnected far faster than the network could compensate. In three seconds, the poisoned sectors had been completely separated from the main network into their own island.

Isolated from the main system, the island died in darkness.

Anika learned its fate as the swithboard exploded with a dozen calls. It blocked her from calling out to the rest of her team.

Idiots, she thought. She blocked all inbounds, then tried everyone in her control group, one after the other, getting dead lines with attempt.

The words came out of her mouth more as a data chirp - a burst of noise far beyond what a human ear could comprehend.

“Anika?”

She released she’d reached Arnaud, from tech division.

“We just dropped two dozen nodes,” she repeated.

“Aw shit.”

“And one of them’s the main transceiver.”

“Aw shit.”

“It started in 42-34, are you near?”

“I’m on the Mezzanine.”

“Damn.”

People could tolerate a power cut, or a fault with the water system, or a few late deliveries - but losing the network would start a revolution in minutes. Her fingers tapped on the console on front of her.

With no other option, she flashed the same

42-34? Jet was a minute away. And getting more irritated by the second.

They’d gone up the chain to complain that their desperate calls weren’t being answered. Memes were going unshared. They were already seconds behind the system on all important news, and losing ground with every passing moment.

A message followed through the station’s All-Call a moment later.

“We’re working on the network issue. Thanks for letting me know.”

Problems on Frigga had a habit of going straight to the top. If only Jet knew - it'd get sorted. Of course, she made it worse by solving them. Anika tapped her finger, watching error messages crawl across screens as process after process tried to access nodes that’d left the network.

Not a problem compared to losing all off-world communications. Everything else had dropped itself to level 2 or level 3 - various levels of local control. The reactors and turbines had their own governors. Water supply would run on pressure. Air supply would run on global, rather than demand. An archipelago of islands, rather than one whole system. It'd keep working, just not integrated.

Anika began to wonder how she’d get them all to resync. A message from Jet interrupted her thought process.

The fucking cunt’s bollocksed.

Thanks to RT comms Anika understood exactly what’d gone wrong from those four words - even if she would’ve preferred more.

A flange on a water line had leaked. A gasket had split. Someone tried to patch it with gobbets of sealant - most of which hadn’t cured right. A slow drip of water had drowned the server beneath. Its death-throes poisoned a node with corrupt data and it all toppled from there.

I’ll fix the bloody thing.

The tone of the message carried far more determination than something that simple needed. Of course she didn’t have to do it. Basic maintenance was beneath the office of Baron Frigga. Things like that were supposed to be delegated.

Anika pinged a quick reminder to Jet.

Jet answered with absolute insistence.

Behind that one concept of insistence hid a pressure cooker of frustration, boiling and whistling, begging for an excuse to pop, mingling with despairing sense that, despite the best efforts of the MAGI system, it still seemed like half of Frigga was being strapped together with duct-tape and twine.

Anika couldn’t help but notice that - despite the best efforts of the Magi - two of the three striplights over her head were missing at least one tube. A dozen KPI’s and metrics assured anyone who cared to look that things were getting better. Breakdowns were getting less frequent. Failures were getting repaired. Even maintenance had begun to catch up.

Things didn’t feel that way.

Already, there were noises on public fora from those who could still dial out.

Anika tried to ignore them, focusing on getting the network back in sync, untangling the mess and rejoining the archipelago of networks into one - without causing a further collapse. It was little different from trying to rebuild a ship’s engine - while it was still running.

She’d done it before.

It just took a little creative editing of some of the live process variables in working memory - nothing too risky.

The phone on her desk warbled once more - begging for her attention. She did her best to ignore it and wait it out.

“Anika?”

Kelly, from the Operations room

“Yeah sorry, I’m busy right now.”

“But two Messengers of Mercury just arrived,” Kelly said, in a conspiratorial tone more suited to a juicy fragment of gossip. “There’s one for you.”

Obviously, Kelly hoped Anika would know why. Kelly could be the first to know - the very first link in the gossip chain.

Anika dashed her hopes.

“Huh?”

There was an audible sigh of disappointment. “You know where Jet is?”

“Somewhere near cabinet 42-34.Why?”

“One for her too.”

Kelly hung up, leaving Anika alone wondering just what the hell she’d done wrong to have a Messenger of Mercury sent for her - Officially messengers of the Court of Venus, they normally carried summonses to a court of inquiry for those suspected of conduct contrary to the principals of Love and Justice.

What could both herself and Jet have been involved in to get summonsed.

Aside from the one big thing that hadn’t really been a thing in years. Technically, the Knight Sabers had been a criminal group of mercenaries. But they’d also been operating under warrant.

Her mind whirled with possibilities - most worse than the previous.

When the knock on the door came, it took her completely by surprise. Her body spasmed in shock.

It opened a moment later. The messenger stepped in.

She found it hard to believe the woman’s uniform had survived the journey all the way out to Frigga in such immaculate condition. Her boots had been polished to a mirror gloss. deeper than space itself. The pleats on her skirt had been crisply pressed, almost rigid. Her Leotard has been bleached a bright snow-white - still freshly pressed and wrinkle-free like she’d only put it on ten minutes prior. Gold braid on her collar shone in the overhead lights. The brasswork on her Tiara had been polished to a lustrous shine. Her blonde hair had been combed bolt-straight, falling down behind her to the small of her back.

Even her makeup looked fresh - tasteful and clean, without being over the top.

Anika wondered how she did it.

“Anika Daini?”, asked.

“Yes?”

“By personal request of Her Majesty Queen Serenity the Second. You are hereby summoned to the Order of the Celestial Star.”

From her satchel, the messenger removed a single envelope, offering it to Anika with both hands. Anika felt herself blinked, her mind stuck in spinlock as she tried to process what exactly that meant. A gold-foil envelope, with the royal seal in golden wax. She held the envelope in her hands, looking down at her own distorted reflection.

She looked so bad, after hours at work.

“Congratulations” said the messenger with a smile, and a deep bow.

Anika sat in her chair, watching her leave. The envelope remained in her hands. It took her far too long to work up the courage to br

Heavy paper, inlaid with gold. The message had been handwritten in meticulous illuminated calligraphy. It took a moment for her to read it.

“Eh…” She read it again to be sure. “Eh?”

There was one other reason a Messenger of Mercury might have to seek someone out. It happened so rarely, she hadn’t even thought it possible.



---

Jet stood, scratching at the belly of an Exocomp,. The machine responded with electronic chirps and burrs, the machine’s manipulators twitching in time with each scratch. Like a giant, hovering puppy. it basked in the attention.

Jet’s own antennae twitched in turn, suggesting more than just a scratch was being shared.

“It’s the last survivor of the first ten we bought.” Jet said, wearing a sad smile. “All the others broke down.”

Anika found herself wondering what sort of news Jet’d received. She still clutched her own envelope in her hand

“I’ve been nominated for Sailor Frigga, Jet.” It burst from her mouth. She held the letter up as proof. It wasn’t a joke, or a prank - there it was in ink and gold. “They nominated me for the reactor. Why’d they come for you?”

There couldn’t be two named Sailors on a settlement, could there. A Sailor Smash, and a Sailor Cute?

Jet looked away for a moment, taking a breath. Obviously not.

“I’ve a date with Judge Skippy. For the same reason.” She kept her smile.“Congratulations Anika, you really deserve this.”

---

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
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RE: [Situation Vacant] Reactor Chief Engineer - by Dartz - 05-02-2020, 08:24 PM

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