Dark Thoughts

"Awwwe Shit!" proclaimed Andrew Jensen in a wide american drawl typical of a resident of the southern states. "The whole board's lit up like a christmas tree. It looks like the whole array has gone down. What should we do Chuck?"

Before Charles Delvin, Andrew's quiet estudious superior, could reply every telephone in the station began to ring, and the switchboard added it's luminosity to the already impressive display from the control panels surrounding Jensen's terminal.
Charles shouted over the sudden din of alarms and telephone ring tones, "Just get it back up again or heads are going to roll. For the whole array to be offline there must be a problem with main transmission trunk somewhere. It can't be the power because each transmitter has it's own triple redundant generators. Try routing the signal through the secondary trunks."

Charles was reaching for the most important of the incoming phone lines. The one with the rude red light impressing the anger of the man that Charles knew was on the other end when Jensen shot back "Have you got a cabinet key? I don't know where mine is!"

Diverting his right hand from it's journey to the rude phone, Charles snatched his set of cabinet keys off his belt loop where they had lived for every one of the twelve hours or every shift for the last 42 years he had worked with the Information Defence Syndicate, and lobbed them across the equipment loaded desks that seperated them. "Get that array back up, and then you are spending the next week redoing your induction. You know the importance of keeping your tools with you at all times."

Catching the keys in midflight, Jensen moved fluidly to unlock the impressive door to Cabinet 3B where the main signal routing switch was kept. Grabbing the heavy wooden handle from the door he inserted it into the switch mechanism and pulled down with a mighty heave as the 1 megawatt pre-amplified signal was re-routed to the secondary trunk. The satisfying thump of the switch re-energising immediately silenced half a dozen alarm sirens and blacked out all priority 1 alarms indicators leaving only the fetch and acknowledge alarm lights flashing on his board. A dim smell of ozone emanated from Cabinet 3B, a remnant of the arc created as the air was ionized when the switch contacts neared their physical caress.

"It was definately a problem with the primary trunk otherwise I wouldn't have been able to throw the switch" retorted Jensen as he turned his head back to his superior. Charles ignored the report focussing his attention on the white hot heat of anger from Ben Frankston, the presidential aide responsible for the Information Defence Syndicate program.

"Tell me this was an alarm fault Delvin!"

"Unfortunately it was an outage Sir." responded Charles "We lost the main trunk"

"Oh Christ! How much downtime did we have?"

"Twelve seconds sir. We switched over to the secondary trunks as quickly as we could, but it took a little time to open the cabinet and throw the switch"

"Twelve seconds is bad Delvin! Didn't we automate the trunk switch a couple of years back?"

"No. The contactor that the Powertrans guys brought with them couldn't handle the current, and their larger one was going to filter too much of the high frequency content of the signal. They were to report back to you, and I filed a report on the incident through the normal channels and heard nothing more about it."

"Well that report never made it to MY desk. I'm going to investigate this personally, and when I find out who lost that paperwork I'll nail him to the primary trunk. I dearly hope the blame doesn't rest with you Delvin."

"No sir"

"In the meantime, find out what happened to the primary trunk, and have a report to me in the morning. What's the status on the teriary and quarternary trunks?"

Puting his trembling hand over the receiver of the telephone, Charles focussed his attention back on the Jensen, who was in the process of acknowledging the fetch alarms and noting them down in the logs. "What's the current status of the Tertiary and Quarternary Trunks Jensen?"

"They were fine at last check" responded a nervous Jensen

"I don't care what they were 15 minutes ago - What is their status NOW?" Delvin enquired in an uncharacteristically raised voice.

Dropping his pen onto the logbook Jensen turned to the status panel on his left and examined the second row of displays. "Tertiary Trunk is reading OK, Quarternary is also Fine. The phone network reads as congested, but we can use the bypasses on the exchanges if we need to route the unamplified signal that way. The sat-link is up and the laser line to control station 2 is online."

Turning his attention back to the phone Charles relayed the information back to Commander Frankston.

"I'm not happy about this incident Delvin. You know how important this project is. We can't afford to have outages ever! I hope for all of our sakes that there are no ramifications from the break in transmission. I've got to go and talk to the monitoring stations now, though we won't know the effect of this for a few days when the data has returned from the sats. There is going to be fallout from this Delvin, make no mistake."

"Yes sir. I'll get cracking on finding the cause Sir."

"Bring it up to DC personally. I want you in my office with the report by oh nine hundred tomorrow."

"Yes Sir".