The medical computer was already poring over and analyzing every scrap of data on the comas. McCoy sat down at his office desk and called up every report the spatial physics lab had generated on the distortions and added that to the mix. Then he added in a treatment he’d thought of: shutting their brains’ higher functions down and letting the neural stimulators take over. While theoretically possible, it was exceedingly risky.
Depending on a machine to do your job for you? Very good medicine, son. I’m glad you got that MD so you could stare at a screen.
That was not what he intended to do!
If you were any good at what you were doing, his father continued, you’d have figured this out already. Should have been a general practitioner in Georgia, like me. Do what you’re somewhat good at, not what you have to fake your way through. No McCoy ever went into space until you had to run away from everything.
His father was right. All he’d ever wanted was to be was a doctor, but if he’d stayed on Earth, he’d have been too close to Jocelyn. Too close to everything—
“Making any progress?”
McCoy raised his head to see Chapel standing at the entrance to his office. Had she slept? How long had he sat here wallowing in doubt? “Not really,” he admitted. “No physical injuries, and if they’ve been infected by a virus or bacteria that somehow only affects espers, it’s nothing we can detect.”
“So it has to be the distortions.”
“That’s the logical conclusion, as a certain pointy-eared hobgoblin might say. But that doesn’t really help us. How does a hole into another universe send someone into a coma? If only we knew more about how telepathy worked.”
“I thought it was a universal psionic field,” said Chapel, “tapped into by the brains of telepaths.”
McCoy shook his head. “That’s the Bormanis Theory, but it’s never been proven. It doesn’t explain human espers; we don’t have a paracortex like some telepathic species. There are theories about quantum consciousness, projected electrical energy… all sorts of things.”
“If we could just move the ship—” Chapel offered.
“That doesn’t seem likely,” said McCoy. “Until they come up with a way to move this ship without shaking it apart, we’ll have to solve this one ourselves.”
“You should go to auxiliary control, see if anything has changed.”
“I need to keep working here.” McCoy leaned back in his chair.
Chapel closed the distance between them, leaned forward, and said, “Go. You can’t keep yourself holed up in sickbay.”
But you’d prefer it, if it let you avoid your problems, wouldn’t you?
McCoy grabbed his medical kit. Now, he hoped Uhura was going to tell him what they were going to do.
Initially, Chekov had found the hibernating Farrezzi fascinating, but now they were beginning to unnerve him. He imagined that everyone he passed was staring at him. And how would he know? Without backs or fronts, they could see him coming from any direction. Chekov told himself they were all unconscious and had been for over a hundred years.
“How close are we?” Tra whispered. The Arkenite security man seemed completely unperturbed by the whole affair. He was staying just ahead of Chekov, phaser in hand. His uniform shirt looked almost purple in the blue light.
The ensign checked his tricorder. “One more row of pods.” He pointed in front of them. “Once we squeeze through there, we will reach the source of the life sign.”
“Can you tell what it is yet?” asked Tra.
“It is definitely not Farrezzi.” He tapped some controls. “I cannot penetrate the interference in here.”
“We need to see what it is and get back to the captain and the others.”
Chekov nodded.
Tra squeezed between two pods, and he called back sotto voce, “Clear.” Chekov came through behind him. He was getting tired of forcing himself between these things.
On the other side, he could see a small, curving row of cryopods that came to an end right in front of them. Most of the pods were empty, no blue light emanating from their interiors, all the water drained out. But the last pod was still on—and it was where the life sign was coming from. Chekov pushed past Tra, who was advancing cautiously, and almost let out a cry when he discovered who the life sign belonged to.
Fatih Yüksel was almost unrecognizable, his face frozen into a shriek of pain, his eyes open and unblinking. The Turkish exobotanist was bobbing slowly up and down in the middle of the chamber, looking tiny in the pod designed for a Farrezzi. Tubes ran from the walls of the pod into his wrists. Blood was mixing with water where they’d been attached, coloring the pod’s interior pink.
“Damn,” Chekov gasped. No wonder he hadn’t been able to get a lock on the type of life-form inside—they were keeping him alive to Farrezzi specifications, muddling the readings. Chekov didn’t know what the treatment would do to him, but there was no way it could be good.
“Can we get him out?”
Hesitating, Chekov scrutinized his readings. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We could kill him if we just try to turn this off. I need Doctor M’Benga.”
His tricorder vibrated in his hand, a silent alarm. “Farrezzi life signs approaching from the end of the chamber,” he told Tra, pointing toward where the row they’d just passed through curved out of sight. “Three or four.”
“I’ll scout them out,” Tra said. “You stay here and see what you can do for him. But if a Farrezzi comes, get out of sight.”
“Right,” said Chekov, watching Tra slip off. The ensign bent down to look at the power feeds on the cryopod. Could he cut them off? Was that even a good idea? If he came all this way only to kill Yüksel—
That machine was killing him. Slowly, but it would do it.
Chekov pored over his readings. It looked like Yüksel was in rough shape even before they’d put him in here. There was a bruise on the back of his head, and his face was scraped. They must have knocked him out and thrown him in.
His communicator vibrated, disrupting his train of thought. Chekov pulled it off his belt and flipped it open, its volume low. “Sir, get out of there,” hissed Tra. “There are four coming right at you.”
Chekov could hear them. They were talking to each other in a weird multipitched way that reminded him of Mongolian throat singers. He hoped his tricorder could offer him a safe route back to Tra’s location.
“Query: not-I reason desire biped alive then?”
Chekov almost jumped out of his skin before he realized that the voice was emanating from his communicator, translating the squeaks of the approaching aliens, albeit somewhat poorly.
“Ignorance. Indifference. Nature of orders: biped transfer to capsules there.”
“Query: biped weakness, lack of size? Labor unsuitability.”
“Query stupidity! Order reason: not-labor!”
“Confusion. Query: statement not-I, ignorance indifference not-true? Possibility: Villach desire biped sale to Orions, inclusion in capsule complement.”
“Correction: Orions bipeds. Labor sufficiency among Orion abilities.”
The language left too much room for misinterpretation. However, the Farrezzi were almost certainly gathering up the cryopods to transport them somewhere, possibly under the orders of somebody named Villach, to sell them into Orion slavery. He hoped he was wrong. What kind of beings would sell their own kind into slavery?
If they took Yüksel’s pod away, the exobotanist might be lost for good, and it would be Chekov’s fault. He had to get the man out of the pod, and he couldn’t afford to waste any time. He started using the tricorder to map the power cables feeding the pod, trying to figure out a safe way to disconnect it.
“Admission: comprehension inability. Bipeds lack of size, lack of strength—”
“Sir.” The ongoing translation was cut off by Tra’s voice. “What are you doing? I can see you from here, and they’ll be on top of you in fifteen seconds. Get moving!”
“No!�
�� Chekov hissed into the communicator. “I’m getting Yüksel first. I don’t want to lose him again.”
“I’m coming to get you,” said Tra.
“No,” Chekov said. “Get back to the captain and the others and tell them what’s happened. I’m staying here, and I’m getting him out of here. That’s an order.” He flipped the communicator shut and put it on his belt.
Kneeling in front of the pod, he began examining the wires and tubes that connected to its base. It was a pity he didn’t have Commander Scott’s engineering prowess.
“Admission: surprise, not-I/I agreement. Reason: biped transfer not-labor. Reason: information extraction—”
A new voice cut in. “Explanation!”
With a sense of dread, Chekov glanced up from the machinery he was hiding behind. Four Farrezzi had just come around the bending row of cryopods and into sight. One of them was pointing a tentacle at him. The others began moving in his direction—faster than Chekov would have thought, given their size.
He stood up and aimed his phaser at them.
“Biped! Query: reason presence?”
He took a deep breath, bracing himself for what was to come. “Greetings.”
One of them started to lunge at him, and he fired—but the Farrezzi absorbed the beam as though it was nothing at all and kept on coming. The stun setting evidently wasn’t strong enough.
Before he could adjust the phaser, a Farrezzi’s tentacle whipped out and knocked it from his hand. The weapon clattered to the floor, out of reach.
The other three Farrezzi drew in around him, blocking off his possible escape routes.
Ensign Chekov swallowed, thinking of something to say. There was no other choice.
“Take me to your leader.”
EIGHT
Nineteen Years Ago
They get married after the end of their senior year. It’s a week before Jocelyn’s twenty-second birthday. She’s already agreed to go wherever he goes for medical school. They end up in Georgia, since Leonard’s been accepted at Emory.
He and Jocelyn share a small Atlanta apartment, and while he studies, she works at an interstellar shipping firm downtown. She likes the work, but it’s not very difficult—as opposed to his studies. His senior year was hard, but this is worse. Rare is the moment when he’s not thinking about something school-related. As an undergraduate, he made a point of never doing schoolwork on Saturdays; as a medical student, he doesn’t have that luxury.
He’s doing something he loves, and he’s with the woman he loves. How can that not be fantastic?
By the beginning of his second year, his exuberance over medical school has faded… as has his exuberance for Jocelyn. He loves her, but things have become strained. They don’t spend as much time together, and Leonard’s studies are to blame.
“You spend too much time studying,” Jocelyn says to him one night as she goes to bed, leaving him sitting at the computer terminal. “Plenty of your classmates get by on less.”
It’s after midnight and he’s been up since six—and he’s heard this complaint before. “I’m not my classmates,” he snaps.
It’s hard for both of them, especially when Jocelyn’s job demands so little of her, but somehow they make it work.
In his third year, Leonard is doing clinical work at Emory University Hospital, and that only makes things worse, now that he’s working long hours. The only relief he gets is when he does four weeks of off-world experience, on the colony world of Dramia II. Leonard and Jocelyn can’t talk in real time, and the messages they exchange are positive and encouraging, if a little banal. Part of Leonard wonders if he’s running away from his problems, but he resolves that when he gets back to Earth, everything will be better.
Stardate 4757.9 (2034 hours)
Auxiliary control was a small, cramped room that contained a medium-sized viewscreen and one large console with three terminals. To either side of the viewscreen, two chairless consoles were set into the walls.
When McCoy entered, Uhura was sitting in the central chair. DeSalle was hunched over the control panel on the port wall, while the chair to Uhura’s right was occupied by a man in an engineering coverall. McCoy recognized him as Lieutenant Singh, who was usually responsible for manning the room. With Padmanabhan, the excitable spatial physicist, standing next to Uhura, it was already rather crowded.
“Good to see you, Doctor McCoy,” said Uhura, cutting off the science officer. “You should hear this, Doctor. You remember Ensign Padmanabhan, from spatial physics.” She looked at the young man and gave him a nod. “Begin, please.”
Padmanabhan took a deep breath and looked back and forth between Uhura and McCoy before launching into his explanation. “The distortions in this zone of space are places where another universe’s laws are extending into ours, rewriting the way our universe works. The farther we travel, the more that other universe intrudes into ours.”
“It’s pushing into normal space,” McCoy said slowly. “That’s why the hits keep on getting bigger.”
“Yes, sir,” Padmanabhan said. “There could be distortions where our physical laws have been completely overwritten. The last one barely pushed into our universe, only twenty-five percent permeation.”
“We think that explains the computer difficulties,” began DeSalle. “Damage control says the problem is that quantum superposition ceased entirely.”
“Oh, wow.” Padmanabhan looked astounded for a moment, then began scribbling something down on his slate.
Even Uhura looked impressed. “The effects of that would be terrible.”
“Look, I’m just a simple old country doctor—” McCoy began.
You’ve got that right. Out of your depth again.
“—so I’d appreciate some help.”
Padmanabhan obliged. “Quantum superposition is when a system simultaneously exists in a combination of the states the system can potentially be observed to take—”
“Dial it back a little, Ensign,” said Uhura. “I think that’ll just confuse the doctor further.”
Heaven knows we don’t want you to be any more confused. Things here are bad enough as it is.
“Is this information even necessary?” asked DeSalle, crossing his arms in annoyance. “I don’t see how the ship’s surgeon can help with the computer systems.”
“The ship’s surgeon is standing right here, thank you very much,” said McCoy, more than a trifle annoyed. “The ship’s surgeon has also discovered that there’s a link between five patients in comas and the distortions in space, and he thinks that stopping personnel from dying is what he’s here for.”
Uhura glared at DeSalle. “Quantum superposition is when one particle occupies multiple states at the same time,” she said. “For example, in our computers, an electron can have an up-spin and a down-spin at the same time.”
Padmanabhan had been standing there impatiently, obviously unable to restrain himself. “Quantum computing is the basis of the duotronic revolution,” he burst in. “Well, technically the marriage of quantum computing and classical computing—hence duo tronic, since we use both systems. In old-style computers, each bit was either on or off—one or zero—but in quantum computing each quad is a combination of up-spin and down-spin—not just one or zero, but every fraction in between, which lets us put the same amount of data in a smaller amount of space.”
“I bet you and Spock get along famously,” said McCoy drily. “But I get the idea.”
“So,” said DeSalle, “when we hit that last distortion, the laws of this other universe didn’t let the quads exist in multiple states at the same time. The quantum waveform collapsed and was released as heat, the volume of which exploded the transtators.”
McCoy couldn’t help but wonder if this was Starship 101. There were a lot of things he wasn’t required to know.
That’s true. You could never be as good at your job as these people are.
“A universe with no quantum physics—that’s amazing,” whispered Padmanabhan, clos
e to rapture. “I don’t even see how that would work. I suppose there could be different quantum physics, ones we couldn’t recognize. Can you have your people send that information to the science labs?”
“I already did, Ensign,” the engineer said.
“Doctor, could this have any relation to what’s affecting your patients?” asked Uhura.
McCoy thought for a moment. The word “quantum” had actually been ringing a bell. “Maybe,” he said. “Lieutenant Singh, can I look something up in the library computer?”
Singh looked startled that someone had noticed his existence. “Of course, Doctor.” He hit some keys and said, “All yours.”
McCoy sat down on the empty chair to Uhura’s left and began doing searches for “telepathy.” They appeared on the main screen, replacing the sensor readings.
This is a familiar sight. He couldn’t always identify which voice was speaking, but that one was definitely Jocelyn’s. You hunched over a computer, reading intently.
What point was she trying to make? He tried to ignore her as he read an abstract of an article by a Vulcan researcher named V’v. When he realized it was primarily about touch telepathy, he moved on.
It’s basically what you did for the entirety of our marriage, isn’t it? Hunched over a computer and ignored me.
He’d been trying to survive medical school. Jocelyn should’ve been aware of that. He’d been working hard for both of them, to make sure they had a good life they could look forward to. He selected another article, the work of a Doctor Harding-Cyzewski: “The Universe Within: Neurological Quantum Effects in Telepathic Brains.” Now this looked more like it….
Well, I suppose you weren’t always hunched over a computer terminal. Sometimes you spent the entire day and night in the ward.
He was not having this fight again, he absolutely was not. He’d had it too much in reality to play it out again in the confines of his own mind.
“Anything, Doctor?” somebody asked, disrupting him. It was DeSalle, looking impatient.
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