EMH mk whatever

Posted on 19 Apr 2015 @ 7:28am by Lieutenant Elas Vonti & Lieutenant JG Tobias Todd & Civilian Capim Jothy
Edited on on 23 Apr 2015 @ 11:57pm

2,706 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: M13-B: The Big Goodbye
Location: Achilles
Timeline: En Route to DS9

-ON-

Tyce Backo had the imagination to assemble and test devices in his mind, so when a dream that followed certain technical guidelines came to him during his waking hours, it was just a matter of time before he made the breakthrough. The limitations to Holographic crewman were numerous, the mobile emitter, under lock and key, was the solution. For all his efforts he could not imagine his way to how the mobile emitter might function, and all of his theories thus far had failed.

An interesting note from the old Achilles had jogged Tyce's memory, in regards to a denial made from the lounge owners of the Poisoned Arrow for enhanced Triple stack holo-projectors. The denial was routine, but the tech was amazing. The projectors were small, bead sized, and the lounge needed at least 5600 of them in all areas to make the amazing effects they had all come to appreciate so fondly. The lounge was a pirate ship occasionally, and Tyce had even gone fishing directly from the bar. Holosuites were the same idea, just over-engineered mega projection rigs that broke often and made for delicate repairs.

He needed to follow up on this, this idea made him realize the potential for a holocrewman that would literally be able to manifest itself anywhere in the ship. Capim Jothy was returning to the Achilles, he would start there.

Capim had a resting prompt on Lt. Backo's comm profile, once Tyce activated it from his end Capim was immediately hailing. A bewildered expression greeted Capim as Tyce leered through the screen in the cramped cabin wall.

"Well Capim Jothy, I was looking for you believe it or not?"

Capim smiled a weary world travelled smile, Capim had a tendency to seek out people who were needing him, it happened so commonly as to not even warrant a cautious glance. He was glad to be speaking with Tyce, there was much he needed from the over imaginative Engineer.

"Tyce I was working with some specs for the triple stacked containment fields to operate in sync with the dissolution matrix for the Subspace buffer on the pattern synthesizer, but I cant get the interpolations correct. I know it worked on Achilles... the first one... well essentially I think I can make real animals and characters in my holodeck, That Ullian Counselor... Elas I believe, he had a few ideas about applying it to the EMH even but we never got clearance for that and the Achilles was not an ideal test bed."

Tyce took it all in stride considering he was naked and up to his chest in mud. Lisseppian Mudbaths were a secret pleasure of DS9, Morn ordinarily would never let others use this private suite, but Quark ran a tight schedule when Morn was away. He lifted his foot ouf the slop off screen delighting int he sloughing and rough feeling. The exfoliation caused a pleasant tingling, and the heat made him melt into the thick supporting goop.

"Oh yes, I remember... He went over my head with the CEO and installed a particular algorithm for psychological profiling. Removing it proved impossible without recompiling the whole damned thing, in the end I just coded it as extraneous garbage lines and the computer bypassed it. Of course that EMH and that Computer core were destroyed so we are at scratch again,

"Not so much Tyce, I happen to have made several backups of the registry, The EMH was lost, but the AI behind it still exists, so I have a neurally blank template Mk 5."

This made Tyce sit up, his therapeutic relaxation shot to hell. "You have a trinary Holographic buffer?" The Buffer was the physical brain of the holographic entity, the size of a grapefruit and usually installed inside the Computer core. Such things were generally the property of businesses or governments, there was no way Capim held one privately.

With a smile, Capim replied, "Quaternary, with custom adaptations from Starfleet Corps of Engineers." The Corps couldn't replace his equipment and the cost was incalculable, this was the compromise he had reached with them. This holographic processor was enough for three EMH programs to run concurrently, or one special one that Capim and Tyce had in mind.

Tyce was astounded, They would only need to worry about power consumption, this holographic experiment was self-educated and would not affect systems like the EMH. He considered other ramifications, like a holocrew and EMH on the same grid, but the specs of the ship wide holographic displays were very through.

"Capim, Send me the specs, I'll coordinate with... well I guess I am acting Chief of Engineering. Still I'll need Ops to sign off as well. I'll coordinate with Lt Todd to get your systems ready once the Achilles arrives at DS9. Thanks for pushing through on this, we might make a whole new type of holo-crewman."

Capim smiled at the clearly excited young Engineer, "We'd better. I could've traded a starship for this holo-matrix, don't forget the triple stacks or subspace dissolution matrix, I look forward to seeing you in person!"

Tyce cut the channel, very pleased now that he had a problem to work in his mind. The triple stack could show images within images, and with high resolution matter replication from a subspace imprinting matrix you could project virtually any real image onto a real canvas. The energy demands were a problem, creating matter at that level that it was basically living tissue was exponentially harder than a simulacrum of living tissue. Capim's former equipment drew a great deal of power from subspace pressures, but it was lost along with the original Achilles. Tyce found himself daydreaming into an actual stupor, the bubbles of the mud releasing fragrant gases to ease his tensions.

***

Tyce opened the comm channel, he needed Tobias's input on how to integrate into the ships systems. Even though neither of them had yet to step foot on the ship yet, the specs were made available for their study.

=/\= Tyce to Lt Todd, please respond.

Tobias had spent the last 5 hours reviewing experiments various personal throughout Starfleet had proposed for the mission. Long time exposure and psychology were of particular interest, but several engineering departments were not far behind. While no on was saying it outright, everyone seemed to wonder if the crew or the ship would start to fail first. After a while, even Tobias got a little depressed by the proposed effects of the journey from various experts. The call from Lieutenant Tyce came as a very welcome distraction, which we would never admit of course.

=/\= This is Lt Todd, what can I do for you Lt Tyce?

"Lieutenant, thanks... I was wondering if you'd like to help me install a sentient holomatrix? I've never done one this complex before, makes Felix look like a hobbyist to be frank."

Tyce sent the specs along with his message, a breakdown of what the installation demanded along with problems with existing interfaces. Triple stack imagine was great, but resolution errors were frequent, high resolution matter replication to create realistic flesh required sophisticated programs and memory demands despite the Quaternary Holo-Matrix. Also the technology for a subspace imprinting matrix so you could project any image onto any canvas, even "subdermally" didn't exist yet. The energy demands were a problem, creating matter at that level that it was basically living tissue was exponentially harder than a simulacrum of living tissue. Power was pulled from subspace, but ultimately they had to limit his effects to the lounge for sheer power demands. There were other issues, but this was why Tyce reached out in the first place.

"The goal... is to have a real body for the Holo-crewman to assume. Not trying to replicate living matter, but rather warm flesh, and tactile sensation. Got a state of the art Holo-Matrix that we can install separately from the mains, but what do you think?"

At the mentioning of holo matrix, Tobias' attention focused instantly on the attached files. Simultaneously, he called up one of his pet project titled Omega-7. His eyes narrowing as the information flashed before his eyes, faster than anyone should have a right to read them. He had tagged is as mostly theoretical until Starfleet released the relevant reports and system specs from the Voyager files. He saw a similar access to the relevant files from Lt Tyce so the man covered at least his bases.

"A fully functional, hard light bio facsimile with free access to the ship is beyond the current technology if you ignore the portable transmitter from Voyager and I see you exhausted that route already. However, I think your project focus is misguided. Creating the holographic body is comparatively simple, if computer and energy intensive, but the main problem with holographic emergency programs is the AI component."

There was a strange reluctance to share his personal projects with anyone at this stage but he stamped it out as soon as it arose.

"Are you familiar with the work of Dr Ira Graves?"

"Familiar... I've read the length of his coding every weekend for as long as I can remember. This was a human intelligence translated to positronic data encoding I mean how terrific is that? The digital storage of memory engrams lead to the EMH model even becoming possible. Zimmerman based the majority of his work based on the revelation of digital equivalence to physical genetic encoding.... But how is the AI preventing resolution of proper matter?"

Tyce answered his own question as it fell from his mouth. Emergent AI were like a gas expanding to fill a volume, but were limited by the constraints of their container. Once so matured and forced into a stunted growth...no wonder they were so often cranky and emotionally unstable... Tobias was suggesting a bypass of this inherent limitation, as important a breakthrough as realizing relativity was in fact relative to the speed of light and the object moving. In his mind he rebuilt the quaternary matrix in a split second, reconfiguring it so that it would interface with ships holographic systems while still pulling practically nothing off of the main computer. This would give the AI the freedom to roam in a realm bigger than itself.

Tobias frowned slightly at the distant expression on the Lieutenants face. "Actually, Lieutenant, I was referring to his later work. Most prominently his attempts to transfer an organic conscience into a computer system as detailed in the reports from the Enterprise." Hesitant to touch on the next logical step, he briefly looked away from the screen. "Our mission is of such a nature that we may require life extension or preservation. To get to the point, I propose to attempt integrating a human consciousness into the holo matrix. The AI would serve as a rough template which is complimented by human or non-human parameters. This should cut back on processing power significantly and would allow us to ... preserve the crew in extreme situations."

Tyce knew the ambitious feeling that accompanied invention, of the thrill of chasing down an idea and pinning it down, making it work. This matter of fact statement astounded him to hear put so bluntly. However this passed in a split second as the other portions of his brain kicked into overdrive,

"Yes... like in the Jenolan's log data that La Forge extrapolated after that Dyson sphere thing... the transporter buffer as the download method... An isloated matrix..."

Tyce had rebuilt the necessary device a third time in his mind. A Consciousness could be digitized, at this point it was almost a rite of passage amongst deep space crews. This was going to require a lab to pull of in the initial set up, but once they could make their hypothesis proven, history was made.

"So the physical brain is de-materialized, we use Dr. Graves techniques to record the data, the buffer retains the physical pattern, the matrix is isolated and can maintain the program free from interruption... All that's left is a brain to beam up."

He looked excitedly at the scientist for a second opinion, not trusting his wild imagination to accurately tell him if this was possible.

Tobias could practically see what ran behind the eyes of the rather excitable Lieutenant and couldn't suppress a heavy sigh. He had run the much the same calculations in his minds hundreds of times in the last few weeks.

"I'm afraid it is more complicated than that. You are correct, of course, in your basic assessment of the steps necessary, but actual reports are isolated incidents with little follow up research on the consequences to the computer systems and the long time effect on a biological consciousness. Furthermore, most incidents only represent only a single step in the process I propose ... never realise it to it's full extent. My most encouraging models predict a decay of the consciousness of up to 73% in the first year and fluctuations in the required processing power memory demands of up to 239% and 158% respectively. Admittedly, these were worst case scenarios but the implications are ... concerning.

Another problem is the pool of suitable test subjects, which consists of exactly one person. Me. As you may or may not be aware my own consciousness is partly integrated into a computer matrix to prevent cerebral decay, which makes me the the perfect test subject and supremely biased simultaneously."

Another heavy sigh escaped, Tobias had been awake for too long and the frustration was building.

"All things considered, we have to pull the work of at least 3 scientists who have nothing to do with each other and were prone to wild improvisation and more than 5 technologies who are only barely on speaking terms together to test it to test it on an extremely limited subject pool. And I haven't even begun with the ethical and moral considerations of which I could send you sever dozen volumes of legislation, guidelines and precedents to make the whole thing a grey area at best."

This lengthy speech, at least for Tobias, drained him for a moment he took to gather his wits about him.

"Lieutenant, despite all hopeful signs, this research is highly theoretical but in my opinion one of the most promising and vital technologies for our journey I have screened so far. If you want to assist me in my research I would be glad to have your expertise but I have to warn you. I do not anticipate any significant advances for at least a decade and even then may the ethical considerations make further research ... undesirable."

His gaze was intense as he regarded the man on the screen. To Tobias he seemed somewhat flighty and easily distracted and he had little patience for that. A vision had begun to form in his head and he was not yet sure where that would take him.

Tyce had little patience for Ethical discussions. Right and wrong were purely speculative, If Tobias wished to pursue this, Tyce would brave the frontier and do everything to keep him safe. The holo-matrix was his solution, but it lacked true intelligence, Tobias supplied that, together this device and his programming would create a new race. Ethics be damned, Tyce knew he was no God, just a Starfleet Engineer.

"I have no ethical qualms with pushing the advances of holographic intelligence and Sentient Intelligence. I have worked for years to achieve this goal, for a computer AI to have a flesh and blood body would be revolutionary to so many fields. True freedom, biological interaction... The ability to create more. Admiral Data certainly has no qualms in his pursuit of positronic android freedom and intelligent expression, Doctor Joseph of Voyager certainly re-defined Synthetic Intelligent and emergent machine ethics, so if you are willing to do this, I will be there with you, and we will do it safely.... as we can.


"Excellent, I will reserve science lab 3 solely for that purpose. Report at your earliest convenience so we can set up initial modeling ." Tobias' mind made already notes what they would need initially to start off. Everything else they would need to acquire as necessary.

-End-

Lieutenant JG Tobias Todd
Chief Science Officer

Tyce Backo
Assistant Chief Engineer

 

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