by Josh Karnes
Chapter 17
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
4Two years ago
“What the…” Cindy began under her breath, as the monitor in front of her displayed a glitch and the computer completely froze. Less than a second later, a beeping alarm began to come from outside the control room, and she heard Kyle Martin almost shouting.
“Laurie, I am seeing a big spike in gravity indicated at—” Kyle said.
“Kyle! I have lost control of the gravium control servo. It seems to be frozen,” Laurie said, frantically scanning her workstation.
“Guys!” Cindy said. “I think the server froze.”
“What?” Kyle replied wide-eyed. “Shut it down!” he commanded but Laurie was already moving to the emergency cut-off button.
Larry Duncan burst in just then, “What the hell just happened?”
“Looks like the server crashed. We had to hit the ECO,” Kyle said.
In these early tests of Daedalus, they were struggling to get control over the micro black holes in order to create the necessary focused gravitational fields that Larry and Kyle had theorized. This was one of the first full-power test runs, and they had been making progress, very slowly, up until then. A dead server would be a frustrating setback.
“Get the IT guys over here to check it out, right now. We can’t afford the downtime. Laurie? We do have a current backup, don’t we?” Duncan ordered.
“Yes. We have a complete backup from last night. We haven’t made changes to the control server since the backup was made. We should be able to get it right back up where it was in an hour.”
“Make it half an hour. We need this working like yesterday.”
“Right. Cindy? Make sure that server is shut down. I’ll call IT down here right now to check it out.”
Laurie called their IT tech and had them rush to the control room. The tech checked the MD5, which is sort of like a data signature, of the server’s hard drive, comparing it to the MD5 of the most recent backup. They were not a match, leading the tech to conclude the hard drive had crashed. He replaced the hard drive with a spare he had brought with him, and then kicked off a restore from the backup. It was just a matter of minutes before they would be back up and running, just like they were before. Nobody would be able to tell the hard drive had been replaced.
While the tech was working, Duncan approached Kyle Martin and spoke quietly enough that the rest of the team would not overhear. “Kyle, when this crashed, did it do any permanent damage?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. We are toying around with manipulating space-time here. When a server crashes and we lose control of our own system, the very thing we are using to control gravity… I don’t know, I just wonder if we might be overlooking something. Maybe we can break things that are hard to fix.”
Kyle conceded, “Sure. That’s possible. The thing is, Larry, we don’t have any way of knowing. If we broke something, we won’t know until we see the effects of it. We just have to keep on experimenting and note any anomalies, make sure we chase down any pattern that comes up.”
“Okay, Kyle. Just checking.”
“This is new ground. We don’t know what to expect. Nobody does. Nobody’s tried this before. Some failures are to be expected. We are learning as we are going here.”
“Thanks, Kyle. Let me know when this gets back up and running. I’ll be in my office.” Larry Duncan went to his office to take some notes about this broken server. Maybe that information would be useful sometime once they started to collect real data.
Tuesday