zack makes a face — a slight wrinkle of his nose, deeper creased brows — as he stops and thinks that maybe giving ‘robots are cool’ as a response in an interview wasn’t a good idea. but hey at least he got it out of his system now, rather than during his dissertation defense. the commander has already put up with some of his odd quirks, and he figures that if he’s still sitting here talking to her, he’s doing alright.
“it’s not the only reason,” he does add, somewhat hurriedly. “in the case of mass excavations, for example, the technology could do a lot of the complex initial work for us. that way, we can focus on the details. so there are uses, in theory.”
he’s a little bit embarrassed. this is the kind of thing he wanted to avoid. something he’d thought he’d unlearned on vulcan, but perhaps not.
at least she returns the focus of the conversation quickly to the original subject. “obviously, identification of remains is only as accurate as the information we have on a species. it’s one thing to teach a computer what every race’s skeletal structure looks like — it’s another to have it draw conclusions when we don’t know the species. also, ideally, this technology would be able to do the skeletal reconstruction, but that also has flaws. namely, teaching it to ascertain when a bone is fragile and adjusting its settings accordingly to ask to not further damage it.” his expression brightens — a real smile. “but i’m close! we’re making progress every day. we’ve only been running simulations for now, but i’m hoping to test it on actual remains soon.”
Una caught, as she so often did, on a single facet of his explanation. It was not that the rest washed over her unregistered; she heard and recognized every word, and could have paraphrased back to him the full explanation he had offered if pressed to do so. Only rarely did she allow herself to become so distracted that she missed part of what she was told.
❛ You say it’s hard to teach a computer to draw conclusions when faced with an unknown species, ❜ she remarked. ❛ If you were to join the crew of Enterprise, you’d find yourself faced with that very conundrum more often than you might expect. ❜ The advantage of serving aboard the flagship of the Federation, she supposed, was that they were at the forefront of exploration. When they weren’t running diplomats from place to place, at any rate. Una had lost track years before of the new species they had encountered — both extinct and living. ❛ How do you draw conclusions without prior familiarity? ❜
It’s less a weighted question than it might seem. Her tone carried no accusation, no doubt. Merely her familiar, neutral curiosity. But if he was to find his time on Enterprise productive, he’d need to be prepared to work as much with the unknown as with the familiar; though she knew his biological mind offered the problem solving and critical thinking skills necessary to accomplish an evaluation of the unknown, she did not wish to leave the matter unaddressed. He should know what to expect.
