I’m just going to pretend that’s one of the researchers from Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.
I’m just going to pretend that’s one of the researchers from Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.
If they’re really lucky, they’ll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.
Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.
I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.
Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.
Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.
Some ships do have emergency antimatter generators per the TNG Technical Manual, but they’re hideously energy-intensive to run–something like a 10:1 ratio of deuterium used for each unit of antimatter. They only make sense to run in the rare situation you absolutely need to warp to safety when you somehow have deuterium and a warp core but no antimatter.
But holodecks apparently have their own infinite power supply incompatible with any other Starfleet technology, so perhaps Voyager used the holodeck replicators to generate deuterium to run their antimatter generator whenever the Doctor isn’t practicing his sermons.
Efficiency would be abysmal even by the normal standards of this process, but it beats walking back to the Alpha Quadrant.