Chapter 17 - Emergency Cooling
The purpose of Control Chairs had been to act as a master control that would allow a single person to run everything the Control Chair was connected to.
That job unfortunately required a lot more than just the standard neural interface, because even his people hadn't been capable of splitting their consciousness hundreds of different ways at once. So the chair's hardware contained a large number of subsystems solely dedicated to offloading a large portion of what would otherwise be tasks requiring direct micromanaging by the user.
Hardware subsystems which extended down into the platform the chairs were situated on in such a way that left Eventus continuing to wonder to this day, just how the SGC had moved the one in Antarctica outpost to Area 51 without rendering it completely useless for anything more then being what was likely the world's most comfortable chair.
Even among control chairs however all weren't considered equal, Atlantis's for example was top of the line multi purpose, and Eventus had gotten to use it a grand total once to optimize the city's maintenance drones repair work after
Queen Death had attempted an alpha strike on the city and knocked out a good eighty percent of the population with some sort of psionic weapon.
Taranis's control chair on the other hand was a bare bones model optimized for facilities control and maintenance work. But that was perfectly okay with him since facilities control and maintenance work was really the only thing he wanted out of it.
Twitching a finger in the gel interface, he brought up a holographic wireframe of the drydock facility, as he mentally began reconfiguring the shield generators for what he needed to do to keep the whole place from going up.
Using the internal sensors, he added each of the two hundred thirty seven Taranians to the wireframe before using the internal systems to project a holographic screen in each of the rooms they were occupying with a video feed of currently hazard suitless self sitting in the control chair.
"Hi. I'm Eventus. Your local Ancient slash Ancestor slash Lantean who just woke up from a ten thousand year nap on Atlantis and is about to save your lives. This is going to involve a series of moderately strong groundquakes that will begin in roughly thirty seconds, so please brace yourselves."
With that warning given he set the hologram to begin a countdown as he pumped up the facility's inertial dampening generators to minimize the shaking as much as possible. And then, once the timer hit zero, redirected the facilities shield so it was being projected directly into the caldera's magma chamber.
The results were instant as the low near subsonic rumble of moving earth began echoing through the facility, moments after which the seismic sensors showed the actual tremors starting to hit.
Watching the magma chamber's temperature slowly inch down, Eventus visibly cringed as the over-worked and under-maintained shield generators began to inch into overload territory as they were pressed to both absorb the magma's heat and project their energy through all the solid ground beneath them.
He hadn't wanted to do this first thing, since it would impact the general levels of power the facility had to utilize on repair efforts. But the shield generators had been in worse condition then he had hoped, so even a week or two delay could have meant the difference between a partially burned out shield and a fully burned out one.
It took nearly a full hour for the magma chamber to reach a more stable temperature. During which time he isolated the primary drydock from the transport network, began the process of generating a fresh supply of repair nanites, initiated the startup sequence for the bay's gantry arms, brought online the maintenance drones, and ran through the spare parts inventory to see what he had to work with.
"I really should see if I can find a blank
Companion when I get back to Atlantis." He muttered to himself as he considered the conversational utility of having one of those artificial intelligences around. "Or maybe grow an assistant in one of the gene-labs."
Checking the status of the facilities shield emitters, he was pleasantly surprised to find he'd managed to limit burnout to slightly above sixty percent. They wouldn't be able to survive a siege or anything, but with the facility's anti orbital pulse weapons still moderately operational they would likely be able to fight off a hive-ship without getting blasted to bits if one showed up.
Not that he thought that particularly likely, as a check of the facility's sensor logs showed the Wraith had never visited the world once during the past ten thousand years. Which cast some even heavier doubt on the story he remembered the Taranian's telling the Atlantis expedition about discovering it by following a tremor revealed passage.
Directing the chair back into an upright position, he got up to stretch and pulled one of the granola bars he'd grabbed from the cafeteria out of his pocket to snack on.
"Excuse me! Hello!" A somewhat muffled voice called out from the other side of the door as he was halfway done and debating with himself whether to chance the room's drink dispenser. "I don't know if you can hear me in there! But I'm kind of stuck!"
Staring in bemusement at the door for a moment, Eventus walked over and tapped the crystal to open the door.
The door slid open without issue, revealing the glow of multiple active security force-fields, which looked to have been triggered when the
attractive blond woman within attempted to override the door lock.
"You know." He began as the woman shot him an embarrassed look. "Normally I'd be moderately annoyed about the obvious fact someone ordered you to break into the control chair chamber after the show I put on earlier. But I have multiple days of work ahead of me and a sudden realization that I've been using the presence of others to keep from falling into a moross about the fact that everyone I knew and cared about has been dead for thousands of years.
Self understanding was a pendulum that swung both ways after all.
"So congratulations." He continued as he gave her a grin. "You've just volunteered yourself to be my adjunct."
A look of panic flashed across the woman's face as she looked between him and the open door control. "That's not… I was just… Everything went dead, and then the lights and ventilation stopped working, so the Chancellor ordered me to try and get in so we could restore control."
He frowned at that, because if the lights and ventilation had gone out when he'd locked them out of the system that was at least somewhat his fault for not running a full error check before starting on his work. Worse, it had probably made the resulting string of quakes an absolute nightmare to live through.
So he could at least understand why the Chancellor might have tried to push his luck and ordered whatever her name was to try and override the lock and get to him. Not that it really changed anything about what he'd decided to do with her, but it did mean he wouldn't hold it against the Chancellor.
"Probably a system fault." He finally told her as he gave the woman an apologetic shrug. "I only meant to lock your people out of the control systems so you wouldn't do something stupid that would mess up my saving you from the super-volcano that was maybe a year away from exploding."
"Anyways, your name? Because just calling you woman all the time would be moderately rude."
"Norina… Norina Pero…" She said, eyeing the force fields boxing her in not unlike a trapped house-cat faced with someone trying to give it a bath.
"Well, Norina." Eventus said, testing the name out in a way that made her cringe slightly. "I'm currently on my lunch break, so how about I begin by explaining why running this place on full power for an extended period of time was a bad idea."
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Author's Notes: Really, she's just lucky that Eventus likes having people around to talk to while he does things. Otherwise he would have left her there for the rest of the day as an abject lesson on using the doorbell first.
