There are a couple of notes you should understand before you go off in every direction: for the purposes of the Planet of the Cheaters, the Romulans share a border with the Kzintis to the northwest, the Lyrans to the northeast and the Hydrans to the east. The Klingons are south-east and the Feds south-west of the Romulans. Malachor V lies near both the Kzinti and the Lyran borders and Malachor V has been captured by the Romulans. Also, there is no more Mirak Star League because the Lyrans and the Hydrans, as well as the Romulans, have taken their share. The story itself is set in 2386. (For this reason, they are using the Feds' stardate systems.
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Riov’s log, stardate 63019.34. In our rooms of a Slice of Romulus, the senior crewmen of the Bouteina were sleeping on Malachor while Relm, being so heavy, slept on the floor. All of a sudden, the wake-up call comes and there were new orders, as well as hails coming from the front lines. Before we went to sleep, the Enriov told us that there were the survivors from the final assault on the Mirak capital world arriving shortly. And with the number of wounded that they reported, the Romulans needed to use some rooms in the Slice of Romulus so we will spend the next few nights at the Mirage instead.
Brianna: I’ll use my cheating charter to the best effects.
Subytt redshirt: Don’t cheat without me! Come on!
Annika: Our latinum reserves are low. We’d rather resupply and we will have Brianna resupply in our stead.
Brianna: Aye, aye, riov.
On Malachor V, there is a lineup of casinos along the Lagdou coast. At this time of the year, many university-level students go in casinos to play the games of chance over a mug of beer or firewine. Especially those with cheating charters, who form the backbone of the different blackjack or poker teams the local universities field. And there were Romulans who were eager to see the legendary university team, the Lagdou Ruins.
Blackjack player 1: Romulans! We can’t take any chances.
Blackjack player 2: You idiot! The Romulans are here because they were injured in battle.
Brianna: Can I see you play from the sides?
Blackjack player 3: You are the great Brianna? The one who left everything behind to serve in the Lyran Starfleet?
Brianna: I no longer serve the Lyran Starfleet. I serve the Tal Prai’ex. Don’t worry, I won’t squeal you over; I’ll swear it on my cheating charter.
Brianna is new to card counting and she is rather unfamiliar with blackjack terminology. The coach of the Lagdou Ruins has always been eager to show the ropes of the game to people outside of the blackjack teams of the university circuit. At first, Brianna was unable to count through a single deck but she still has another video device to cheat through this game for now.
Brianna: If you want to be successful outside of this planet, better not use the chartered cheaters too much.
Blackjack coach: Maybe you should become an adjunct coach, if only temporarily.
Brianna: The thing is, I serve in the Lyran Starfleet and, if they know that I’m gambling here, my link to the Lyran Starfleet will be severed. I’d be better up using a gravimetric cheating device at the roulette instead.
The gravimetric device Brianna refers to is an instrument to detect cheating rather than an instrument to cheat proper. In which case, she will wager some of the chips she was able to obtain from the ship’s latinum reserves. She has several bars’ worth of chips at hand, with the other Romulan players taking up almost all the latinum of their ship reserves, being determined by their commanders as being the best gamblers on their respective ships.
Brianna: Ready, guys? As I’m the most senior of all of you, you will obey me to the letter.
Romulan gambler 1: As you will, rekkai.
Romulan gambler 2: Roger.
Brianna: Wager everything on the 34. All-in! Everything on the 34, kunhris!
The wager was successful and all three of them have exhausted the table’s reserve of chips, earning them 15,000 strips of latinum together. But, to prevent the casinos being alerted (although Brianna showed her cheating charter beforehand) Brianna takes the decision to walk away from casino play.
Brianna: All right, kunhris, we will stop playing.
Romulan gambler 1: Erei’arrain, you are nothing but a coward! But you’re no traitor.
Romulan gambler 2: You act like a real Romulan now!
That same day, in the main campus of the Lagdou University, there is something about to happen. Although the S-144 room in the Lagdou University was meant to be used as a lecture hall, the teaching assistant herself was granted the right to use the S-144 lecture hall for tutorials at the rate of two hours weekly. Some of the students with a propensity to cheat chose to go to that particular tutorial because they were more interested in the teacher than they were in getting an education, probably because she was considered a prime target for romance among university-level students. Chartered cheaters or not, they do not know that a legitimate student was about to cause a ruckus…
Teaching assistant: It’s the fourth time I’m running the linear algebra tutorial. If you have another method for solving the problem, don’t hesitate to stop me. My only gripe is whispers; they catch me off-guard.
The linear algebra tutorial is running smoothly into the windowless lecture hall, who was at about two-fifths of its maximum capacity at the time. They run through the first questions covered in the tutorial, whose contents were pretty clear: linear equations systems, row echelon forms, reduced or not and vectorial equations. There was one question, #20 in section 1 as they say, who caused a lot of doubts, where some people did not understand that X could be any real number, but only -2 admitted an infinite number of solutions. However, about half an hour later, the disaster begins, amid a lecture hall and silent students in the lecture hall to see it happen…
Teaching assistant: Question #18. Let V = [1, 0, -2], W = [-3, 1, 8] and A = [X, -5, -3]. Find the value of X for which the vector A is in the plane characterized by the other two vectors.
Student: I solved this problem by exploiting the property that three vectors of R^3 are coplanar if and only if their mixed product is equal to 0. The answer is X = -7/2.
Teaching assistant: I forgot what a mixed product was.
Student: A mixed product is the scalar product of A with the vectorial product of B with C.
Teaching assistant: I think that it is in calculus where you do mixed products, but still, three vectors in R^3? It does make sense… However, we’d remain in our linear algebra methods.
Student: That’s inadmissible! You claim to run the linear algebra tutorial for the fourth time and yet, you have forgotten about the mixed product!
It may not have an immediate consequence, nor that anyone was troubled other than the teaching assistant herself. The student doesn’t imagine that his story gets to the student newspaper, who gets into the mainstream newspapers of the planet, would have an overnight impact. The graduate student reads the Free Campus the days after and she is devastated by the overwhelmingly negative media reception on-campus. However, in her mail, there was an application for a cheating charter.
Journalism student: Is it true that you forgot how to calculate a mixed product even if you ran the linear algebra tutorial for the fourth time?
Teaching assistant: True.
Journalist: What led you not to know what a mixed product was?
Teaching assistant: I cheated in my run-up to university. Please forgive me, it happened many years ago.
After reading the newspaper’s first page, the newspaper article that was on every major tabloid, as well as some more serious newspapers and was the object of some TV broadcasts, was about the cheating scandal that erupted around her. The article in question stated that she was given a choice by the head of the mathematics department: she would accept to take up the entire responsibility of teaching the entirety of the introductory cheating course and have her linear algebra tutorial taken up by someone else or forfeit any right to teach for the entire trimester. Here’s an excerpt from her visit to the mathematics department’s head:
Teaching assistant: That’s a painful choice.
Mathematics department head: If you feel confident that you could teach cheating as well as you would run a linear algebra tutorial
Teaching assistant: I’m an uneven cheater, to say the least… maybe I was at my prime as a cheater in the run-up for an university slot.
Mathematics department head: Uneven? We have no record of you having cheated…
Teaching assistant: In this case, I wish to choose the new person that would run the linear algebra tutorial in my stead.
Mathematics department head: You have three days to notify me of your decision.
Topic: Planet of the Cheaters (Read 2415 times)