Working past barriers

Posted on Wed Feb 16th, 2022 @ 1:45am by Lieutenant Samantha Leyton & Ensign Nuna Lepine

Mission: Mission 5 - Babel
Location: Bridge; NX At;lantis
Timeline: Day 280 16:15 Hours
1206 words - 2.4 OF Standard Post Measure

Samantha nodded as she stood and moved to the rear of the bridge where Lupine was seated. "Ensign, do you understand Spanish?" she asked, speaking the only other language she knew.

"No habla español," Nuna answered, using one of only three phrases she knew in Spanish (the other two being asking for another beer and the location of the bathroom). Centuries ago, Europeans, and people of European descent, through the process of colonization and assimilation, had almost eliminated Nuna's native language. Over the last couple of centuries, a number of developments, including the restoration project run by her parents, had revived Lakota as a living language. Ironically, this now made it impossible for the sole non-European on the bridge to communicate with her fellow crewmembers.

Beth glanced over and frowned as she realised they would not be able to communicate. "She does not. Italian. Let me translate for you both for a moment until I can find someone else." She knew quite a few of the European enlisted were onboard so it would not be hard to find someone who spoke both. It was not quite as a connection as Italian and French like people who came from Corsica and Sardinia but she was sure that it could be achieved easily. It was a few moments of back and forth until she spotted someone who would be helpful.

"Crewman... you speak Italian and Spanish right?" She demanded of the crewman who had come onto the bridge just as Gerhard had left to replace him on the armoury console. The man nodded. "Good you are now a translator for these two," Beth said in Spanish as the man joined the pair. Beth let out a deep breath that was one issue less and she could focus on the communication console and that issue.

Nuna grimaced as the translator was assigned to work with her and Lieutenant Leyton. If Nuna had been fluent in Latin, she could have probably muddled through with an Italian speak. As it was, Nuna's ability to speak Latin derived from the fact that the Oxford faculty thought her precollegiate education had been woefully lacking in Latin Classics, and had striven to help Nuna overcome her "shortcomings." As it was, Nuna was well versed in taxonomical terminology, and could muddle through Virgil if she had a dictionary at hand. But discussing an unknown scientific phenomenon was going to be an altogether different phenomenon.

"Lahcaka sunjsunjikapisan," Nuna muttered, obviously frustrated, before turning to Lieutenant Leyton. "Do you speak Greek?" Nuna asked in Attic Greek that was only marginally better than her Latin.

Leyton shook her head not understanding before a crewman sent by the captain approached the two to help translate. Smantha looked up at the crewman. "Tell Ensign Lupine we need to find out what is preventing the Atlantis from moving," she spoke to the crewman in Spanish.

The crewman nodded in understanding before turning to the ensign and relaying the instructions in Italian.

It took two tries for the crewman to convey what the Lieutenant wanted her to do.

"Khinacha unspa wasichu thogtiyapi," Nanu muttered to herself as she made entries into her console. Her eyebrows furrowed as she studied the results of her scan. She turned to the crewman to relay what she had discovered and then paused. This Latin/Italian/Spanish pidgin was fine for simple concepts, but there was no way Nuna could explain the change to the causal structure of the local spacetime emanating from the planet. Then an idea came to her. She spoke her limited Latin to the crewman, who nodded then turned to Lieutenant Leyton.

"She wants to know how advanced your understanding of mathematics is," the crewman told her

"Likely not as good as yours," Samantha replied in Spanish to the crewman who relayed the message. She knew the basic physics used in flight and geometry and Advanced Algebra needed but that was the full extent of her knowledge.

Nuna grimaced when the crewman conveyed the Lieutenant's answer, but she decided she would try to explain her theory anyway. She made an entry into her console, and a four-by-four matrix of numbers and symbols appeared. She made another entry, and the matrix become a four by four-by-four cube of additional numbers. More cubes of numbers appeared, as the original cube expanded into a three-dimensional representation of a tesseract.

Nuna and the crewman talked for a little while, each becoming more frustrated by their inability to fully communicate with the other. Finally, the crewman turned to Lieutenant Leyton.

"I'm not one hundred percent sure I understand what the Ensign is saying," the crewman began in Spanish, "But I believe that..." the crewman gestured to the numerical tesseract "...is a mathematical model of what's happening. I think she's trying to tell me that the purple glow changed the local spacetime, and that's why we're stuck. I think she's also trying to tell me how our brain structure got changed. I'm not sure, though. I'm talking Italian, and she's talking Latin. And not very good Latin either."

As Nuna watched the Lieutenant and the Crewman talk, she made a silent promise to learn a European language when this was all over. She was definitely feeling like the odd woman out right now.

"I see..." Leyton paused in thought. Something was holding the ship in place which she couldn't imagine such a device doing to a Warp 5 ship like the Atlantis. "Alright, is there anyway the Atlantis can break free of this changed spacetime?" she asked the crewman, who in turn relayed the message to Luna.

Nuna grimaced and rubbed her chin after the crewman was finally able to convey the Lieutenant's question. And that was the question, how to break free of whatever was coming from the planet.

Nuna remembered reading about a technology used by a race encountered four years ago, the Malurians, that used attenuated linear graviton beams to move crates. Nuna thought the Vulcan High Command had similar technology on their starships, but the physics behind that technology wasn't her bailiwick. Nuna knew enough to know that there was a big difference between moving objects in Newtonian space and keeping a ship like the Atlantis from going into warp. What was being emanated from the planet acted as if it were shifting the local cosmological constant. If it were simply a hyped-up version of Malurian technology, it would be behaving differently, and having more noticeable effects on the Atlantis.

If this was just a more powerful version of Malurian/Vulcan attraction technology, it still didn't explain what was affecting the ability of the crew to communicate in Standard. Maybe she should focus on that aspect instead.

And maybe she should have studied non-dead languages Nuna thought wryly.

Nuna said something to the crewman, with the words 'Tamil Nadu' being repeated.

"She says she has an idea, but she has to see if there's a record of a paper from a physicist from India on board," the crewman advised. "There were a couple of other words in there as well, Lieutenant, but I couldn't quite understand what she said," he added apologetically.

"Understood. Keep working on it," she replied, hoping the ensign's theory was correct.

 

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