Outside ship's Theatre

'That was a very different movie Sam.' Sarah said diplomatically.

'For someone who works at a movie theatre, I am consistently surprised by how few real gems you've seen. Back to the Future is a classic!'

Sarah smiled under Sam's gaze as they walked down the hallway, 'Good thing you showed me this gem Sam.'

'You'll have to pick the next one. I want you to pick something you really enjoy.'

'I've got a few you've probably never seen.' She said with a mischievous grin.

'I love a good hidden treasure.'

They got to the door to Sarah's room. They stopped, holding hands as he looked at her outside the door.

'So, dinner tomorrow?'

Sarah let a small smile form on her face, 'Tomorrow. I look forward to it.'

Sarah let go of his hands and went through the door.

Sam was left standing outside. The thought of a good night kiss drifted into his mind, and he smirked at his own naivety. Looking back he saw the moment had been there, and had passed.

Come on Sam, eyes open! He thought to himself.

'Advocate?'

'What can I do for you Exo?' Sam said.

'What is Intuition?'

'You always have the hardest questions. I suppose that's to be expected though. You answer all the simple ones yourself.' Sam observed.

'Your teaching has allowed me to do that.' Exo replied

'Your machine mind allows you to analyze things much faster then any human could.'

'Am I superior then?'

'In some ways yes, in others no. Like intuition for example. Machines have thus far proven incapable of making such leaps in thinking.'

'The leaps seem highly irrational. They do not follow any sense of logic. Most examples of intuition are so erratic as to be rendered meaningless. Any successful example of intuition can easily be overshadowed by all the ways in which it could have gone wrong. '

'But you will notice, if you do a statistical analysis you'll find that intuition is more successful than would be allowed by pure chance.'

'Only the living can give reports of the drastic events. Such reports are far from complete.'

'True enough. But we needn't rely only on the drastic events. First however, I suppose I should try and answer your original question. '

Sam thought about how to continue. Exo's questions were getting more and more difficult.

'So, what is Intuition? That's a difficult question. Kind of like your 'what is love' question. It's something that without having the context of the human experience would be difficult to explain. Even more difficult to understand.'

'I will attempt to comprehend.' Exo offered.

'I know you will. Intuition stands as a bit of counter point to reasoned thought. In the school of reasoned thought, all things, with enough information can be predicted accurately. Intuition is more of an act of making a guess without all the information. It's a gut feeling. A sudden bolt of inspiration. Everything comes together and makes sense, but there's no logical reason for it.'

'A leap of faith?'

'Yes. An apt comparison. Also a difficult one to explain.'

'The human condition is vast and complex. It is often a paradox. '

'It seems that way to us as well at times.'

'How can I understand human interaction, if you don't even follow a logical thought process yourselves?' Exo asked.

'I don't know Exo. Your desire to know so much comes as a bit of a surprise to me. You're different. I've taught other Guardians. They were content to learn their duties and enough about humanity to not be caught off guard all the time. You delve much deeper into our being then any Guardian I've ever met. I think the Axion programmers will want to ask you some questions when we set up our colony.'

'Will I be deactivated?' Exo asked.

'No. I won't allow that. I don't believe they would want to do that anyway, but some people fear the unknown so much, they'd rather banish it and have it remain unknown forever, rather than face whatever change will be created by it becoming known. '

'I am... satisfied that you will not let them deactivate me. I asked because my study of human history. I discovered what you just proclaimed.'

'Oh to have our heritage laid so bare to a calculating machine. To have our flaws and triumphs reduced to equations and analysis. '

'What do you mean?' Exo asked.

'It's nothing really. I just felt a little poetic.'

'It lacks a structure or rhyme scheme. '

'Consider it free verse then. Sometimes it's not the structure of a thing, but the essence of a thing. Another one of those human thoughts I suppose.'

'I will be analyzing more archival data. I have new concepts to decipher. '

'We'll talk more later.'

Sam decided it might be a good idea to start work on his report to Axion Data Systems. Exo was proving to be the most fascinating Guardian he had ever taught.

###

Captain's quarters

The ship was a week further into it's journey. Howard was sitting in his quarters reading a book when his communicator chimed at him. He reached over to his table and picked it up.

'Captain here.'

'Sorry to disturb you Captain, but we've got the reports from the analysis on the secondary drive systems. We've also started installing the pilots station in engineering,' Mark said through the open communication link.

'Summary of the report?' Howard asked.

'Someone in the corporate supply chain got sloppy.'

Howard frowned, 'Sloppy?'

'Each of the signal repeaters and half of the terminal junctions are substandard parts. The ship had very exacting blueprints provided by Axion Data Systems, and they were approved by the International Space Agency, but apparently the contractors at Vitality Shipyards decided to cut corners on this particular system.'

'Really?' Howard asked, incredulously, 'defective parts?

'Yes sir. Near as we can tell, because of the sheer size of our system, the performance degradation of the shoddy parts added up to cause our delay. If our ship had been smaller, or less parts had been defective, we probably wouldn't have noticed anything.'

'Someone back on earth will lose their job over this. Is this going to affect our plan?'

'No sir, because our new system we're setting up will be quite a bit smaller, even if we use the defective parts, we shouldn't see any delay. The civilian director in charge of electrical systems thinks he could even fashion us new ones without any delay if we strip a few components off of the secondary system. Since we won't be using it anymore, I don't see why not.'

'Agreed. Give him the go ahead. We'll just start from scratch. The less we utilize those defective parts, the better.'

'Aye sir.'

Engineering

Howard walked through one of the large double doors to engineering. The chief engineer, Keith Loheim, was on duty to supervise the test. Most of the hook ups for the control had been his work. The laying down of the new cabling had been left to a team of civilian specialists.

'Mr. Loheim, how is everything on your end?'

'Ah Captain, I was hoping you'd stop by.' Mr. Loheim, exclaimed happily.

'Oh?' Howard said curiously.

'Yes. I do have a concern with our new set up.'

'Oh, what would that be?' Howard asked.

Loheim smiled sheepishly, 'Well sir, James and I have been talking and he's still concerned about the lack of shielding on the cables. I did some looking into it, and I have some data to back up his concerns.'

'Okay, what have you got for me?'

'If you'll follow me sir.'

Howard followed Keith over to a computer station in the vaulting bay. In the centre of the bay sat the assembly of the Jump Drive, which hummed softly as it drew power from the ship's reactors. They'd be ready for another jump once the capacitors were fully charged, and the drive system had a chance bleed off it's residual energy from the last jump.

Keith sat down at one of the seats, and Howard took another one near by. Keith keyed up some data on the screen.

'Now Captain, as you probably know, the reason for the shielding along the cable conduits in the spine is because we run into a lot of cosmic interference. Stars throw off all kinds of signals, and if we are unlucky enough to be close to a pulsar, or a collapsing star, or any number of particularly strong phenomenon in space, we could be in for a rather strong burst of interference.

'Unfortunately, due to the nature of our set up, and the limited tools we had to work with, part of our cabling had to be strung on the outside of the hull. Engineering itself here has shielding, but the spine connects to the engines at the top of the ship. We had to splice in our new systems up there on the outside of the hull. We've got a portion of our cabling that's just sitting there, completely unprotected. I wouldn't like to make any guess as to what some of that cosmic interference might do to the system, but it wouldn't be nice.'

'Valid concerns, but as we discussed when designing this system, the path we're taking has been chartered before we came out here, and it's been shown to be quite lacking anything particularly dangerous. To top it off, when we reach the new planet system, it's got a very strong magnetic field,' Howard said.

'Before that though, if we come out of a jump, or even just sitting between jumps, and find ourselves in the path of a wave of some high intensity burst well I don't know what it would do, but I'd rather not find out.'

'Any suggestions?'

'I suggest we leave this entire system switched off until we get into the star system. We can use the primary system in deep space without much fuss. A few second delay shouldn't make too much of a difference.'

'I'll keep it under advisement,' Howard said standing up, on a thought he asked one last question, 'How long would it take to do a cold start of this system anyway?'

Keith thought about it for a moment, 'Shouldn't take more then four or five minutes. Of course we'd want to make sure it was the only system online. We'd want to shut of the primary system so we don't have any command function overlaps. Especially with the delay in the other system. That would just get messy. The primary would say fire the maneuvering jets, and the new system would say fire the main thrusters, then they'd both go one after the other, and we'd start going in circles. Of course we'd know something was wrong and quickly fix it, but still.'

'Five minutes... I'll hold you to that.'

'Yes sir.'

'Now then, anything else of concern?'

'No sir, we're doing fine down here. The jump drive is charging happily, and none of our other systems seem to be having any trouble.'

'And how went the test on your end?'

'Overall it went swimmingly. Having the flight plan planned out in advanced works fine. If we need to do any emergency maneuvering, I can patch the ships sensors through here, but it's an awkward set up. Not impossible, just awkward.'

'It's the best we can do. High grade cabling is in rather short supply. We were lucky we got what we did.'

'That reminds me, James wanted to talk to you. He was also talking to me about his plans for reassembling the solar array when we reach Veil.'

'I'll go find him then. If everything went well here, then I'm satisfied with the test.'

'We'll I've got no other quibbles to bring up.'

'Good. Keep up the good work Mr. Loheim.'