A Life Fractured

Posted on Wed Aug 2nd, 2023 @ 6:18pm by Chief Engineer Michael Burnstein

Mission: Elsewhere
Location: USS William Pilgram
Timeline: 2394
2132 words - 4.3 OF Standard Post Measure

2394 - USS William Pilgrim, Engineering

"We’ve been instructed to extract the Amberlyth shard," DeBlois stated, bringing up a holoprojection and pointed to an area barely discernable amid the temporal distortions warping the fabric of local space-time. "It’s located in space at point 7385, just above the planet’s orbit. I don’t think transporting it directly would be a wise decision. So I’ll need help manually retrieving it. Any ideas?"

"Hmm..." Burnie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Blow it up? I can put together a couple megaton chroniton/dekyon torpedoes..."

"NO." The diminutive science officer aimed a pointed glare. "For all we know that would just make hundreds of smaller fragments, all generating distortions, AND dispersed across the entire system."

The engineer frowned. She wasn't wrong, but he'd thought that by now she'd know when he was joking to ease the tension. "Fine. Serious suggestion: we rig a drone with temporal shielding and use it to retrieve the shard."

"The temporal distortions are massive and increase with proximity. I think those would interfere with controlling a drone from the ship." She paused, calculations clearly running behind a gaze fixed on the chart. "Unless we get close enough to extend the ship's temporal shields, but they're already ...stretched... to their limit."

"We could control it from a shuttlecraft, then bring it back in the hold," Reed suggested, beginning to tap parameters into a padd.

Burnie nodded, picking up her line of thought. "We'll have to enhance the shuttle's temporal shields, and build in some other back up in case they don't hold. If you can handle that, I'll get to work modifying the drone."

"Okay. And I'll go check the Voyager logs. I think I recall there was something about a chroniton serum..."
He couldn't help but smile. Her love of science history had saved them more than once. "Send it to the Doctor - she can make a dose for me and for the biogel packs. Once we've got that, I'll be set to go."

"I'm going with you."

He shook his head. "There's no need for more than one person to risk going out there."

"We're a team, Burnie." Reed set the padd down firmly. "And there is a need for more than one. You're a good pilot, but you can't operate a shuttle and a drone at the same time - especially navigating those distortions."

His lips curled inward; he did not like putting her in danger. But she had a point, and if she were the one leading this, he'd insist on coming as back-up too. "Alright," he conceded, and threw her a wry grin. "If this doesn't work, we may all go out with bang, so I guess we should go out together."

"There's the spirit." Erica put a hand on his. "But I intend to make sure you don't go out in a space-time KaBoom. You will not leave me standing at the altar, Michael Burnstein."

He smiled, looking into her eyes. "Never."

DeBlois rolled her eyes. "This is all very romantic, but we _do_ need to get that shard."

=/\= Modified shuttle =/\=

"It's no good. The drone's not responding." Burnie pushed himself out of the co-pilot's seat. "I'm going to have to EVA for it."

"I should be with you. What are you going to do if you can't get back?" Erica asked, tone carrying more worry than request for a plan.

"You are with me," Burnie replied, tapping controls. "In every way that counts. I'm going to be tethered to the shuttle and I've transferred controls to you, so if this goes sideways you'll haul me back."

"Be careful anyway."

"I always am," he said, throwing on the EVA suit. "If I weren't, I'd have blown myself up long ago."

Securing the helmet, he checked the heads-up readouts, then attached the tether and double checked the lock. Then he opened the shuttle door and paused - the space outside is literally pulsing with the distortions from the shard. Gripping the hatch frame he closed his eyes, fighting a wave of dizzy disorientation.

"Are you okay?" The concern in her voice was clear through the comm and it pushed him onward; if he waited much longer Erica would worry (more).

Taking a steadying breath, he pushed out, singing, "This is Major Tom to Ground Control / I'm stepping through the door / And I'm floating in the most peculiar way / And the stars look very different today..."

"Burnie... "

"Don't like that one? How about this..." Engaging thrusters on the suit, he belted out, "I'm a Rocket Ma-a-an!" And grinned at hearing a stifled giggle - he usually joked to ally his own nerves, but if it helped keep Erica from being too anxious that was icing on the cake.

++ The shard should be coming into view, ++ DeBlois' cut in, voice staticky over long distance comm. ++Do you see it? ++

" 'It's full of stars!' "

++ It's not. We have visual too, you know. ++

"Fine," Burnie laughed. "Actually, it's pulsing a tacky neon purple glow." He gritted teeth as he was buffeted by the distortions as he got closer. "...almost close enough to reach it..."

++ Hurry, the readings are getting more unstable. ++

"...Almost... the drone has a lock on it so I just need to grab that... " He stretched, just getting hold of the end of the drone and slapped a latch to it. "Got it! I'm heading -

ZOT!! ZWOOSH!! Waves of distortions pounded from the shard, slamming into him!


=/\= USS William Pilgrim, Medbay =/\=


"He's stable, but... I'd say comatose..." Arnason shook head, "except for these readings."

"It's as though his brain waves are jumbled, out of sync. It looks like this one starts and jumps but..." The doctor tapped commands and the image was projected holographically with views split and lines dividing seeming jumps in various brain wave patterns. "If we look at this way..." She began moving various segments around like the pieces in a sliding block puzzle, lining up sections to form more normal continuous waves.

Arnason nodded, impressed; Divash had the Orion gift for seeing patterns and solving puzzles. He wasn't sure a human would have seen it. He certainly hadn't, until now. "There's a time distortion affecting his neural patterns."

"Yes. His brain waves are jumbled and out of sync, which is why he appears comatose - there's not enough coherent continuity to form reactions." She frowned. "But I have no idea how to treat it. Given the source of injury we've tried all of the protocols for treating temporal disorders. He hasn't responded to any of them." The doctor sighed. "Which I suppose isn't surprising since they weren't developed or designed for anything like this."

"It almost looks like wave interference..." Now that he looking at it properly, an idea was forming, but he was a nurse, not a physicist, and the little temporal mechanics he'd had to take at the Academy had only provided a month's worth of headaches. "Maybe we should bring in DeBlois."

----- later -----

The medical team, plus DeBlois, manned stations surrounding a biobed as equipment began to hum and a warm blue light surrounded Burnie's still form.

He started to stir - arms twitching and rapid eye movement evident beneath his lids.

"Good, good... his brain patterns are starting to look more like waves..." The doctor waited several several beats, looking back and forth between patient and readings. "He should be coming around though." Pulling up a series of screens, she rescanned and then pointed. "There! A break, here to here. A 'blip' interrupting coherent patterns."

"I'm picking up anomalies here - frontal cortex," Dr. Gable reported. "He can't get back to consciousness without that."

"Drat. Attempting to compensate." DeBlois' fingers dance over her console.

Burnie suddenly spasmed - head whipping side to side!

"He's seizing!" Arnason hurried to hold him down as Gable tapped commands on the neural transducer, but he continued to thrash. Divash grabbed a hypo and applied it, causing hm to finally still, head lolling to the side.

DeBlois exaled shakily. "No idea what that did to him, but I think his waves have smoothed out. Mostly."

Sensing slight movement in the shoulders he was holding down, Arnason gently patted Burnie's cheek. "Come on, show us you're still in there..."

Burnie blinked. Then groaned. "Wha... erg, Wha... happened? Feel like..." his brows drew down, and he winced, "...UGH."

"That sounds about right," Divash agreed, checking the bioscans and monitors. "Neural signatures look back to normal." She smirked down at the engineer. "Or as normal as you ever were. But I'm going to have to check some responses before I give you anything for 'Ugh'."

Burnie sighed, but nodded weakly. It was not the first time he'd come to and a doctor standing over him; everything else might be hazy right now, but he knew the drill.

"What's your name?"

Easy one. He swallowed, cleared a throat that felt like he'd gargled with reactor waste. "Burnie."

"Good. How many fingers am I holding up?"

He squinted, hoping it would make his eyes hurt less. He could see each digit clearly. One. two... there was a word for the next number... His brows drew down. It was like it was on the tip of his tongue... He opened his mouth, feeling for it... And started coughing.

Arnason quickly produced a glass of water, and Burnie held up three fingers in response as he gulped it down. The test was for vision, so that counted, right?

The doctor nodded and made a note on her padd. "Okay. Now, do you know where you are?"

He glanced around. Clean, white, biomonitors everywhere...pretty obvious really. "In... in..." he stammered, and paused. He knew where he was. It was the place where nurses yelled at him for taking stuff apart when he got bored because they wouldn't let him get out of bed. But there was a word for it. Simple word... starts with m... like medtech, but not that... "...medical," he finally managed.

A black eyebrow rose, answered by a blonde one, as the medical officers standing over him exchanged a concerned look. The doctor picked up a scanner, adjusting for finer readings. Inclined to a more patient-centered approach, Arnason was more direct. "Something is obviously wrong, Burnie. What is it?"

"Words..." He made a rolling gesture with his hand, as if trying to reel them out. "...won't come."

Divash nodded, his response aligning with what she was seeing in the readings. "You seem to have a form of aphasia," she explained. "To put it in terms you might understand there's a glitch in the processor that retrieves words for concepts and delivers them to your speech center. It's not unusual after a stroke or brain injury, and most of the time we can resolve it with therapy. But given that your brain was pretty scrambled and in a rather unusual way, treatment might not be as clear cut as with most patients." She loaded a hypo and administered analgesic. At least she could make the next part less painful. "I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you."

He expelled a breath, not quite a sigh - part relief as analgesic kicked in, part resignation. "At least feel less like ...hit by..." he concentrated, the word was... an image came back with it and he shot up, eyes open in alarm. "Shuttle! Erica!"

Another look passed between the doctor and nurse. Divash's face was doctor's mask, a sympathetic one, but a mask all the same. Arnason dropped his head, looking to the side and down, but Burnie caught his expression.

He shot up, shaking his head in vehement denial. "No!" He barely registering being caught by two sets of hands, but pushed back onto the bed, he looked from one to the other. His brain might not be firing on all cylinders, but he knew what he saw there. "No..." He covered his face with a hand, trying to shut everything else out - pain, disbelief, the blackness threatening to overwhelm him. It can't be. I'd know. I'd REMEMBER But he didn't. There was nothing - just flashes, jumbles of disjointed impressions, half of it couldn't even be real...

Finally, he swallowed and took a shaky breath. "...How?"

"When the artifact destabilized, it hit you with something," DeBlois explained softly. "Reed tried to reel you back, but it was secured to your tether, so she did the only thing she could: she threw every bit of shielding she had around it. Even with that, we had to divert everything. We barely had a lock on you when..." She paused, swallowed past her own sorrow at the loss. "...it went critical. Burnie, I'm so sorry..."

 

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