Dirty Work "
By: Gavin McBride , Director of Alliance Intelligence , [NPC]
Ian Hunter, Commanding Officer, [PC]
Maxine Lucinda Tapert, Computer Specialist, [PC]

Stardate: 58208.11 1111

Tappert's combadge chirped, it was Captain Hunter. "Lieutenant Tappert, Please report to the Bridge Conference Room right away."

Maxine nearly fell out of her chair. Not because she wasn't hailed over the comms routinely, but definitely NOT by the Captain. And ordered to his Conference room... "Aye sir, roight away sir, I'm coming roight now!" she replied as she hopped up and made some attempt at making herself look smooth and polished.

"...and Maxine, loose the faery."

"Uhhhh...." she blinked at that and looked at Krystal.

"He means me!" the pixie hologram blinked and then frowned. "But Maxie...."

"Sssttt..." Max held her hand up to silence the hologram and then tapped her comm. badge. "Understood, sir."

"Sorry pixie," she told the sprite as she deactivated the portable holoemitters in her barrette. "Stay here," she commanded as she strode from the Computer Core and made her way to the conference room.

Hunter stood as she entered and promptly introduced the 3 officers present. "This is Director of Intelligence, Gavin McBride, Computer specialist Theodore Schapiro and Federation Technology Analyst Cynthia Shepard."

"Pleased to meet you, sirs," Maxine nodded. She tried to hide the confusion she was feeling. She offered them a hesitant smile.

"Please have a seat," said Hunter.

"Of course, sir. Thank you," Max replied as she sat at the table.

McBride spoke first, "Miss Tappert, I have reviewed your personnel file and found that you have quite a talent for working with computers."

"Yes sir.." Her voice was a little cautious sounding, but at the same time, quite intrigued.

"We're interested in the work you recently did with the Birkoff virus. What can you tell us about the virus that might not have been in your reports?"

Maxine blinked. That definitely wasn't what she expected to hear. "Y'mean besides 'im being a sly, sneaky bastard who thinks on multi-dimensional levels and codes that way?" she asked. "Uhh.. pardon the language," she added when she realized she called Birkoff a bastard.

Shapiro interjected, "To cut to the chase, could you replicate his work?"

Max didn't even hesitate. "Oh sure. I mean.. Yes, sir," she nodded.

"How much do you know about the current technology used by the Federation?" asked Shepard.

"I participated in a system analysis of a captured Federation ship just before my transfer from the Trident to here," she answered.

McBride asked the next question, "Your file also notes that you have developed a A.I.s, most recently, one for a special project."

"That's correct," Maxine nodded and glanced at Hunter, unsure how much she could, or should say. But given at least one of these guys was with Intelligence...

"What can you tell me about their capabilities?"

"I believe their capabilities are unlimited," Maxine admitted. "They begin with the capabilities I code into the, but they have an infinite ability to learn from their environment and make logical deductive decisions based on their input and directives," she went on. She loved working with the AI's, and talked about them as if they were real. "Rahw, for instance, is integrated with part of the ship's systems she's installed on and is able to run them using a sophisticated fuzzy logic program I've written...." She stopped and smiled a little cause she knew she was babbling on. "What do you *want* them to do?"

"Fascinating," answered Shapiro, "how long did it take you to code the A.I. for the Pegasus?"

"Not long," Maxine answered. "About three or four days. But that was just the basic code. It took me a little longer to get the ship's systems coded into her neural processing nodes."

McBride cleared his throat, "Okay, hypothetically speaking, could you design a worm which if released into a Federation's priority one system, could navigate to various subsystems and be made to alter and distort selected data input and output?"

Maxine blinked, opened her mouth to say something, closed it again, frowned, looked at Hunter and then back to McBride before finally nodding. "Yes."

"Do you have a problem with that Miss Tappert?" asked McBride.

"Actually... None whatsoever," she answered honestly and with a little shake of her head. "It's just the first time anyone's ever *asked* me to deliberately design a worm. Catch them, block them, stop them, and kill them, yes," she grinned a bit. "But not make one."

Shepard leaned forward to speak in turn, "Given the current state of the Federation's computer defense how do you propose to get the worm past the I/O parser to gain access to the system?"

"Hmmmm....." Maxine thought for a moment as she recalled what she'd learned from the captured Federation ship, the code literally filling her eyes as she stared a bit blankly. "I think the best way," she blinked and focused on Shepard directly since he was the one who asked the question. "Might be to simply disguise it as an I/O buffer and piggy back it onto one of the encoding converters. Once in place it would replicate itself through out the ODN until it reached the main sub processor," she answered.

"But Krystal and I would need to test it out first because that may need a bit of tweaking."

Shepard looked over at McBride and nodded.

"Miss Tappert, you will immediately go with Shepard here to receive the specifications of your assignment. You will have approximately 2 weeks to develop your program on the Zion while it is enroute to its next mission.

What ever resources you need to take with you need to be requisitioned by tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night. Aye sir," Max nodded. The code was already starting to write itself in her head. Her gaze turned to Shepard then and she smiled just a bit and then had to blink because he started to get coded into the beginnings of her Worm.

McBride stood up, "That is all, carry on then."

"Yes sir!" Maxine hurried to her feet and came to attention, waiting for Shepard.

She gathered up her things as did Shapiro and left the conference area with Max following.

McBride stood up, "We're still putting together some of the last minute details. There will be a full briefing on Friday."