Aviophobia (Leonard McCoy)

3. USS Enterprise

Kate followed behind Spock as he headed to his office in the main Star Fleet building.  Though he wasn't showing it, she could tell that he was furious about whatever Jim had done to pass the Kobayashi Maru test.  The years of being around him let her in on a few of his emotional tells that no one else would really pick up on.  Whenever Spock was upset, he stood up straighter and held his shoulders up more than normal to put on an air of confidence.  He also walked more quickly, which was saying something as he always walked quickly, so Kate was having trouble keeping up with him.

As he opened the door to his office, Spock turned to face her for the first time since leaving the observation room and said, "Dr. Kirk, I'm not sure it is appropriate to have you assist in determining what happened during Cadet Kirk's test today."

Kate raised her eyebrows at Spock and crossed her arms and said, "You're sending me away?  Hell no.  If my idiot of a brother did something to cheat his way through this test, I am helping you figure it out.  Believe me, I will not try to cover Jim's mistakes for him."

Spock paused for a moment, but it was long enough for her to slip by him into his office and take a seat at the computers he had in there.  She clicked the icon on the screen so that she could start writing a program to help determine what, if anything, Jim had done to the code of the test.  She couldn't see Spock's reaction to what she had done, as she was occupied with the computer, but she heard him say, "I will be monitoring what you do as you help me, Katelyn."

She rolled her eyes at his use of her full name and turned around to look at Spock as she said, "In the entire time you have known me, what have I done to give you any indication that I would ever be academically dishonest?"

Spock shook his head once and said, "Nothing."

Kate shrugged and said, "Then you don't have to worry about me starting now," then turned back to the computer and saw that the computer was ready.  She crossed her arms and chewed on her lip for a moment to think about what she could do to see if Jim had managed to hack the code.  If he had hacked the code, there would be changes from Spock's original programming, so searching for any changes would be the first step in knowing if Jim had somehow gotten access to the test code.  If there were changes, then they would be able to see what he had done to change the parameters of the test to allow him to pass.

She quickly began typing a program that would take in two different files and compare the two files line-by-line.  The program would make comparisons until it found the first line where the two programs had a difference.  It would return the location of the first difference, if there was a difference, and if there was no difference it would return that they were identical.  It wasn't a hard program to write, so she finished it quickly and called Spock over to look through her code to see if it would be sufficient for wht they needed to do.

Spock pulled his chair over to sit beside her and read through it quickly before saying, "You're having it do a line-by-line comparison of my original code and the code used for Cadet Kirk's test today."

Kate nodded and said, "It seemed like the best way to find where we needed to start.  Your code for this test is thousands of lines long.  I didn't want to compare them by myself."  Then she paused for a moment before asked, "Does it seem like it will work?"

Spock nodded once and said, "I would probably be able to find the differences myself since I know the code so well, but this will give us a starting location much more quickly."

At this point, Spock took over the computer and uploaded the two files of code into the program to begin running the comparison.  As the comparison began, he said, "You really are an excellent programmer, Kate.  You should have taken more courses for it."