Symbol Unknown

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 2907

Torres brought up the main diagnostics display and then began working on restoring warp power. After nearly an hour of silent labor the warp core cylinder hummed and shined with its normal blue iridescence. Torres grinned and wiped the sweat off her cheeks. And then the thing went dead again. "What?!" Torres barked. She ran to the diagnostics screen and to her amazement it read exactly as it had an hour ago. All of her work had mysteriously been undone!

She slammed her fist down in frustration on the console and the display flickered and disappeared. "Oh great!" she steamed, "so when did the console become so delicate? I've slammed it a million times!" And then to her surprise and consternation the console lit up again, but not with any of the control and command sequence keys that should have been there. Instead what she saw was an unknown symbol. A kind of circle with a curved loop behind one side. Torres furrowed her brows. "Computer," she said, "identify the symbol on the main engineering console." "Symbol unknown," was the computer's reply. Torres thought for a moment and then asked, "Computer, compare the symbol with all known written and pictographic language systems. Does anything come up that's even similar?"

"Four hundred and thirty seven like-representations with a congruence of plus/minus two percent are in my data base," the computer answered. Torres nodded to herself, now she was getting somewhere. The engineer then said, "Computer, give me a breakdown of the conceptual significance of the symbols." In answer the computer recited, "There are seven predominant concepts related to the representations: sleep, dream, desire, wish, fantasy, falsehood and danger." Torres took a deep breath. The strange symbol was obviously a sign or message that had something to do with the disappearance of her crewmates. But if the symbol meant anything similar to the others in the Federation cross-cultural linguistics databank, then whatever was going on was a lot more complicated then just a simple case of an enemy attack. Or at least, the kind of enemy she was used to dealing with. She needed to know more. "Computer, do the symbol sub-sets have any specific connotation of attack, and if so is there any indication of who the attacker is?" Torres asked. The computer's reply was unexpectedly terse.

"Nod."

"And what is Nod?" Torres asked.

"Unknown," was the computer's answer.

  1. What does Torres do now?

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WolfRun

12/26/1999 2:32:57 PM

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