Lieutenant V’rea stood on one side of the work desk with a partly dismantled holoemitter resting upon it. Across from the Vulcan officer were two holographic Andorians, both in unranked Operations uniforms. One was a typical Andorian blue, the other, however, was a blue, black, and green plaid.

The corridor door is open. “Well, it is not something in this holoemitter, Hologram Operations-Seven. Once we took it offline, your . . . patterning remained. It must be a programming glitch.”

Storrok arrives at the Chief Operations Officer’s Office having recently reported his arrival to the Captain. After taking a moment to center himself and prepare to make the best first impression he can he pushes the door chime.

“Enter,” said V’rea, barely sparring a glance. “Thank you for reporting in, Cadet Storrok.” She gestured to the plaid-appearing hologram. “What do you make of this?”

Storrok entered and looked hard at the hologram then at the desk, “I assume you have ruled out hardware malfunction so… buffer overflow overwriting the memory location for the skin texture?”

V’rea handed Storrok a datapad. “Good thought. See if you can confirm it.”

She looked to the properly colored Andorian hologram. “Hologram Operation-Two, reinstall this holoemitted unit.”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied the hologram and picked up the unit, moving over to the space in the wall where it obviously came from. She then turned back to Sturrok. “Have you found anything yet?”

Storrok flicks through the program to find where pulling the data for the skin textures and colouration “This looks like the memory address being used for the texture, now to find out what happens around this area” Storrok mutters to himself before being asked for a status update.

“I think I have found the memory address of where the texture should be just looking for the code that writes to memory nearby. What was it doing before it became plaid?”

Hologram Operations-Seven stepped forward. “Checking on the hydroponic water recovery system in the garden.”

V’rea glanced to a datapad. “We recently received some thistle-cane from the New Hebrides colony. There were concerns that their roots might infiltrate the system.”

“Had they infiltrated it?” Storrok asked, while getting the datapad in front of him to start comparing the memory of the faulty hologram with the working one in the areas he had identified.

“No, Cadet, the prepared barriers were sufficient,” replied the hologram. “Though there were a considerable number of AR tags attached to the thistle-cane containers.”

Storroks ears twitched hearing that last statement, “And let me guess, standard operating procedures are to scan each of those AR tags?”

“Yes, as per Starfleet Informational Regulations, section 84.1.7.30,” replied Operations-Seven. “No viruses or malicious code were detected during the scans.”

“Anything unusual with these tags, abnormally long data streams, redundant data or padding, unusual characters?” Storrok suggested frowning at the datapad in front of him.

“There were a considerable number of information uploads,” replies Operations-Seven. “From previous experience, four point two one would be expected. This one had thirty-three.”

“Thirty three, interesting, by the book I believe the fix for this might be to do a factory reset on the holograms programming to reset the texture data along with anything else corrupted. It might also be worth the effort involved in investigating these larger AR tags and see if any malicious intent or payload was involved.” Storrok stated, turning to Lieutenant V’rea.

V’rea nodded. There is a backup of Operations-Seven from 18,2 hours ago,” she says. “You can reset to that version so that valuable learning is not lost.”

“That is appreciated, Lieutenant,” said Operations-Seven. “I can perform my tasks more efficiently with expanded context.”

“While you do that, Cadet, I will institute a full system scan for anomalous code,” V’rea added. “Then we can get you assigned into the work rotations.”

Storrok starts the backup restore before pausing, “Ah yes, Lieutenant, that was what I came here for, Cadet Storrok Reporting for duty.”