Just a little bug.

Posted on Fri May 31st, 2024 @ 6:31pm by Lieutenant Vivienne Erebos & Ensign Selise de la Sera

1,472 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Junichi Koyama
Location: Computer control.
Timeline: During the attack, phaser malfunction

The computer control room was one of many places that during the battle had erupted in alarms of every kind. When you are responsible for controlling the computers, and an override for the weapon system comes in from an outside source it tends to set off the failsafe alarms.

All of them were well aware of the sophisticated signal that they were being sent, none of them were able to circumvent it in time to stop the great ship from firing on the planet. That said, these signals that was being sent from the planet hadn't stopped when initially, the phasers had been deactivated.

Turning her attention to the signal, Selise got a rather nasty idea. Growing up where she had she had dabbled in computer viruses, and other nasty consequences for those who would dare to enter somebody's computer system uninvited. These kinds of failsafes were like booby traps for the computer system. Like they were children's games, the lab she'd lived in for her childhood had been little more than a torture chamber for the children that didn't protect themselves. Privacy being their most prized possession, they played many games around getting into and staying in places they weren't supposed to be, and noticing when
someone had been there . Selise was more than a little adept at both writing and editing existing viruses, especially trackers. She turned to a screen and pulled up the signal bandwidth that was still being sent to the Myogi's computers and began to separate it into component elements. She took away the processing signal, and edited out the tracer that was supposed to make it so they could not trace it back to where it was coming from. That wasn't necessary for her now, but later....later she would do things unimaginable to those that sabotaged her ship.


They would regret that choice.


Saving that information on a map of the planet was a momentary distraction but something she figured would be important later. She had several programs in mind that she'd used growing up when people had tapped into her relay. One of them was a bug, a bug that crawled through computer systems with lightning speed, transmitting information mostly classified information into the hands of a receiver. It was convenient enough that she had a receiver design for this program though she'd never used it since she entered Starfleet.

However, once a hacker always a hacker.Selise was not going to stand dly by when she could do something to provide information or inconvenience those that were attacking her ship.
And. Not or. And

In a few hours she could see what her little bug had eaten through and it's travels through the computer system that was attacking them. Then the beauty of this particular computer virus became apparent, it was a metamorphic virus. As it consumed the data that was in the computer system that originated the signal, it would start to cause little inconvenient problems. Power surges and fluctuations to start with from the first computer that had sent a signal outward. It was possible for this particular section of the book to get so big and out of control that it caused rolling blackouts.

Those pesky blackouts will aid me here.
That was actually how Starfleet had traced it to her, as she had caused one during the occupation of her planet, and have drawn attention to herself from the computer gurus at Starfleet. They've thrown around terms like gifted and savant, but the quiet young woman had simply absorbed all that there was to absorb from the engineering computing department. They had assumed that she would go right into programming things like the Enterprise mainframe without a second thought, however that was not where her interests were. She wanted adventure far more than she wanted to desk and a computer, and accepting a minor relatively position a board of starship would offer her both the ability to contribute to the programming of major computer systems and the ability to venture away from the core worlds.

There was a signal, it was a signal that she could trace and utilize send her little package back to the people that were attacking them. Logically, there was no reason for a planet to broadcast to a ship The command codes of one of the senior officers of that trip. Especially not when that ship at its weapons trained on a facility that had no value to them. Strategy was another one of her strong points though, she didn't make a point of letting people know that.

Selise knew there was a lot going on that she wasn't privy to, but hearing the scuttle but around the captain, her behavior and the handful ofl dignitaries they were transporting to who knows where. She knew enough to put the pieces together.

At least one person in the computer control room was looking at her, she made eye contact with them. It was the Lieutenant on duty and said softly "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission in a situation like this".

He nodded rapidly, having been on the receiving end of a prank of hers that had been very sophisticated. He knew that in a situation like this whatever she was planning was probably going to be helpful. Even if she didn't have permission to do it."what do you need?"

"Just a piggyback on that signal that sent us the command access codes, the one that activated the phasers."

"Oh right, I've been studying it. It's a clever setup, a tri-band signal coming from three different places but being organized by a central location. So that the three sets of signal come together as one into a functional group."

"That is clever.". Selise was forced to acknowledge their opponents was clever in one way at least. They wouldn't have, couldn't have banked on the ship having someone like her.

"I take it you have something more clever in mind?".

"Not exactly more clever, just information gathering, and a bit of payback in the form of confusion and discomfort if I've read the situation correctly.".

The man shrugged, offering nothing more than a little smile, he figured that she was reading the situation correctly and probably had grasped more of it from the small amount of information available then anyone else in the room would have done.

Knowing that she was running out of time, she put the package together, tied it up neatly with a digital string that would decompose so quickly out of the code that it might not even be traceable back to them. It would activate its own failsafe to transmit back to her when she activated another section of the code. That would be a sending that she'd have to make later. It would be worth it. It had to be worth it, there was no other choice. Hopefully, this worked enough that she didn't lose her standing in her field. A reprimand, she can handle. She knew she might get one of those anyway, but she pressed the flashing green button on the console she was working on and the tiny packet of information disappeared from the computer.

A tiny blip indicated that it was sent and then all record of it was erased from the terminal that she was working on.

"So what was that, exactly? " The Lieutenant asked quietly

"Do you remember that film we watched a few months back called Independence Day? "

"Oh sure "he enthused "Where the geeky scientist and the and the soldier went up to the mothership and gave them a virus and then blew them up with a nuke? That was great I remember that scene. ". Rubbing his hands together, he was delighted to put the pieces together as to what she was thinking.

"Well the first time I saw that movie was just after I went to the academy. It struck me as something that I'd done as a child. A game we used to play with each other's tech consoles, where we would send information packets to the other computers, and change one thing about it. Sometimes it was just a pixel, or a tiny starburst pattern in the corner of the screen. But if the other kids didn't notice that it was there, that pixel would become a day to breach. I was pretty good at getting sensitive information out of places where I shouldn't have had access at all. This isn't really any different. I combined the two into I guess what would be a computer virus, but...". She paused trying to figure out exactly how to explain what she had done and shrugged. "My little bug will give us plenty of dirt on our....friends...".

Three copies, one for each signal repeater.

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