After clambering down the access hatch in the middle of the floor, Kelly is left more or less alone with all of Hale's processors, memory banks, and backups. One of the robots follows Kelly down and immediately goes to check the status of the electrical system.
At a glance, everything looks intact, save for the fact that one of the primary memory modules is missing.
"Well that's interesting. Hale, who has come down here aside from myself since this mission began? Can you access that information?"
Dracos
"This room has been accessed on multiple occasions throughout the course of the mission," Hale replies. "Complete logs are maintained, with the exception of downtime due to the outage."
"Is their any record of a primary memory module being removed?"
Kelly went over near the computers, logging in and beginning to look around.
Dracos
"Negative," Hale replies almost instantly. A moment later he adds, "However, processing is down to a level that indicates this is a possibility. One section of memory is known to be either damaged, missing, or protected from access."
"Hale, check your file table index. What general data was stored on primary memory module H?" Kelly said reading off the slot where the module had been.
Dracos
Hale thinks about this for a minute, and eventually replies, "Confidential information regarding the mission and all primary crew bios are located on that sector, as well as the main communications drivers for integrated systems operands: Mindie and Hale."
This would explain why Hale's communication center needed to be recompiled by hand.
"So, if your lifesign scanners are working correctly, who is everyone currently not in ice sleep on the ship? If they aren't, is there any chance your scanners can hunt down the current position of any and all memory modules on this ship not contained within this room."
Dracos
"Captain Albert has just left the bridge, and is en route to Captain Kim's quarters. Crewman Eric is in the port workshop. Crewman Finn is currently at the port airlock. Crewman Kelly is in the computer core. Crewman Kieran has just entered the bridge. No other live-signs detected," Hale replies. After a moment, he adds, "I am unable to detect the presence of any memory modules outside of this room."
"Hum. Hale, are there any standing orders given to you that may in any vague or specific sense threaten the current crew?"
Dracos
"Safety is priority number one," he answers immediately.
After a minute of considering the question, he adds, "There are currently no standing orders from the First Crew."
"Can you do a rundown of all ship equipment with your scanners and compare the data with the initial ship manifest?"
Dracos
This ends up taking Hale quite a while. Once he's done, it takes Kelly judicious filtering to find a list of discrepancies that seem worth noticing:
One of the probes and two vaccuum suits are missing, along with one of the EVA toolkits. Beyond that, everything is still on the ship as far as Hale can tell ... though, he can't monitor most of the Eidolon, currently. Just the Prometheus.
For what it's worth, Hale does report that two of the damaged repair bots have been fixed and are currently working on clearing out the dust. A third reports having power but not being operational yet.
"Hale, can you bring up the technical administrative log of deleted or editted files?"
If Hale can, Kelly reviews them, mentally cataloguing only any specific instances that look particularly odd to him and creating a brief minirecord of only these instances, organized by the authority level of the person who made them.
Dracos
Hale doesn't have the deleted data, but he does have records of what was deleted. Almost all of what was deleted were messages between the crew, from the crew back to Congress, and from Congresss to the crew. Generally, a message can be deleted simply by the recipient. In the case of a message to the whole crew, only the captain can delete it.
The only other notable deletions were by the other programmer, and while the filenames could be intentionally deceptive, it looks like he was just trying to code a better interface for the comm system right up until the moment that everyone died.
Outside of that, it all appears to be routine file management.
Kelly ignores all of the programmer notes reaching the conclusion it was probably legitimate. Checking the deletion logs, he sees if the captain deleted any large set of messages within the last few months in close proximity.
Dracos
The captain didn't seem to delete any messages on a set schedule, but started doing it a few days after the ship left the Congressional Sphere of Influence, as far as the logs reflect. There is a trend of increasingly frequent deletions as time goes on, though. Nearly half of all communications that were for the entire crew were deleted, by the time that everyone died.
"Hum...Hey hale, let's see how good our data recovery tools are, shall we?" Kelly got to work trying to recover anything that could be recovered from the deleted captain's logs, knowing it'd take a long time but figuring it was worth the attempt.
Dracos
Normally, deleted data is just marked to be overwritten, not deleted. But the truth of the matter is that for archival purposes, deleted data isn't backed up. Since Hale's database was restored from a backup, there's no retrievable files ... only the entries that the captain either didn't know to delete, or didn't care about.
Kelly shook his head and decided to check how bad the damage was on Hale from here since he couldn't think of anything much more productive to do on that note. He tried to calculate a general time frame it'd take to get Hale from where he was now to complete functionality.
Dracos
All in all, Hale is surprisingly complicated, as AIs are not really solid state. They only really exist in holistic or holographic memory, as they're usually terrabytes in size. Currently, of the allocated total memory of the system, Hale uses about 3.6%. 1.5% is used by everything else, including the code that Hale was compiled from.
Mindie was compiled from the same information, but obviously in a better environment, and (after checking) without about 400,000 lines of code missing. Luckily, AIs are built with multiple fail-safes, fail-overs, and redundancies, but not parity. Whatever's missing, is missing. And it's so missing that Hale can't figure out what it is. Finding out could take weeks, at the very least days, with luck.
Unless the module could be recovered, of course. But there would be no way to integrate the missing code into Hale; a new AI would need to be compiled. This is probably why Hale suggested that he should be deleted when he was asked about the ship's status.
Using the rod-logic records instead of working through Hale will go much faster -- the missing information could be identified in hours instead of days or weeks. Additionally, the rod-logic records are built with parity, so the most important code should be recoverable, probably over half of whatever was gone, at least. Implimenting it, of course, will still require recompiling the AI.
Kelly shook his head and got cracking on those rod-logic files, figuring the sooner they had that info, the better.
Dracos
The rod logic is all intact, but arrayed in a much more complicated system than normally utilized for backup system. This is partially due to the parity checks, which is good, and partially do to whoever set this backup up showing off, which is not as good. The entire job looks like it's going to take about twelve hours.
While Kelly is studying the rod logic, the bot finishes its examinations of the room, and clambers up the ladder, leaving the access hatch open.
Some hours later, Kelly has given up on manually decoding the rod logic, and instead created a new program that does it automatically. The system of encryption and parity used by the former coder is sadistic at its deepest levels of complexity ... but ultimately, about 60% of the missing data can be recompiled onto a new module.
The automated program itself is still going to need about another twelve hours to finish.
Kelly, brushing his forehead and standing up, decides to get some sleep while it's working, heading back to his quarters and muttering about overfancy parity systems. Once he gets there, he gets some rest.
Dracos
Kelly's path to his quarters takes him first, to the bridge.
Kelly now returns to Sifting Through the Ashes (http://www.pishoque.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=45601#45601).