Let's Get Experimental

Posted on Sun Oct 7th, 2018 @ 2:28am by Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Commander Sonak & Lieutenant Asa Dael

Mission: Hera v Hera
Location: USS Hera, Deck 6, Transporter Room 4
Timeline: 2395

The arrangements had been made and on the Hera’s schedule, Transporter Room 4 was officially offline until 10:00 hours today. Thus when the ship’s surgeon arrived at 09:00 sharp, they were unsurprised to find the anachronistically-uniformed first officer awaiting them, alongside the somber Vulcan scientist to whom she was wed. Observing them at a distance one would not immediately suspect their intimacy. There was no exchange between them, nor any indication that they would move time and space for one another, as both were individually absorbed in separate tasks.

Yet he eschewed his duty jacket, instead merely wearing the light blue tunic of the Science department, which made him stand out in a sea of black and charcoal uniforms. Just as she insisted on wearing the minidress uniform of a bygone sexist age. Seeing them together- her pacing as she worked, him standing stoically still as he consulted readings, one could more easily place the duo together. Both were exceptional. Both stood out from the rest of the crew. Both somehow hearkened back to a more colorful, innocent age of exploration. Which was accurate, as from such a period was from whence they had come to make their home on the Hera.

Both, on the third finger of their left hands, bore a simple polished band of blue-grey duranium. Without ever looking up, she orbited him as she paced, somehow maintaining a constant distance from him, like a pair of perfectly poised magnets. Their height was nearly identical, though in build they were a study in contrasts. He, long and lean, athletic yet economical in musculature- clearly a being built to survive a harsh and unforgiving desert planet. Whereas she was a lush collection of pulchritudinous curves, representative of the hills and valleys of her homeworld, which was home to an overabundance of life.

Looking up at precisely the same moment, in a synchronicity that some would find unnerving, they both noted the approach of the chief medical officer.

Asa approached the pair with a gulp. They had spent until the late hours of the evening carefully setting up test samples of containers containing varying amounts of stem cells harvested from Rita, and calibrating the sensors attached to each culture. Today was important to begin to understand the mystery around the first officers quantum signature, and the newly minted doctor was feeling the pressure.

"Good morning to you both. Lieutenant Commander, are you feeling well this morning? Any soreness from yesterday?" they inquired, tricorder in hand, scanning the tall blonde, while shifting a med bag with samples around awkwardly in the other hand.

"I'm fine, just anxious," Paris plead honestly. "Do you want to start out here or in there?"

"Let's start where you were when I called you yesterday, and then move in closer to the transporter room. I don't know if exposure to the area will leave any residue or excitation in your cells, and I'd like to rule that out as a possible variable. Assuming Lieutenant Sonak agrees?" They spoke calmly until the last sentence, which took on a bit of a squeaky tone. As Asa looked towards their Vulcan hero, the insecurity was plain on their face, and they feared letting down this brilliant man they greatly admired.

"This is your study, Doctor. You lead it with our full confidence behind you. But I hope you don't mind if I do some studies of my own? I find your project not only important and useful but fascinating. With your permission of course."

Sonak had brought his own tricorder, the standard model, to complement his own findings with those of the more specialized tricorder of the chief medical officer. He was himself quite curious as to this whole study and wanted to contribute if he could. Since he was unable to do it emotionally, he might as well try intellectually.

And after all and most importantly, it concerned his mate. That alone would have been enough for him.

"Chief Fingerman volunteered for this duty," the curvaceous commander offered, pointing through the wall to the transporter controls. "He says, and I quote, 'the transporters gets twitchy when you're around, and I don't like it, so if the Doc is fixing you, I'm in'. So he can activate the transporter on command, moving a matter block around for test purposes. Assuming you've got your neutral readings out here for a test base when the transporter isn't in operation."

"I would like to assist the chief in this transporter operations," Sonak offered. "I was there when Lieutenant Commander Paris was caught in her latest transporter accident. I know and studied the specific parameters involved and regarding what happened."

His tone was as deadpan as usual. But he had to use his discipline to ignore the remembrance of the accident that had sent Rita to this universe; at the time, he was the one handling the transporter.

"Yes! Sounds like a great plan!" Asa replied brightly, and with a touch of nervous manic energy behind the words.

Moving to stand next to Rita, the doctor took out four containers, similar in appearance to petri dishes of old, with a small scanning device attached to each. Out of their bag also came a small collapsible rolling tray to place the samples on to still allow free movement of the doctor’s arms.

They took quick reading on each of the samples, establishing they were at a baseline of zero excitation. A scan of Rita revealed the same thing, no quantum anomalies.

"OK, Lieutenant Commander, I am reading you at your usual baseline. Can you please confirm how you are feeling? Then please move two steps closer to the transporter bay and explain any change in physical sensation."

“Mildly anxious and confused. If the transporter isn’t in operation, I generally don’t feel anything different, and it’s inactive right now, so…” the leggy lieutenant commander took to strides toward the transporter room in the corridor and shrugged. “Same as it ever was.”

"Alright, the samples and your readings are all baseline too. Lieutenant Sonak, will you please take this sample," they asked, handing over a sample container labeled 1A, "into the transporter room and place directly inside the door. I will monitor this identical sample and Lieutenant Commander Paris here. If you would be so kind as to activate the transporter also please. Let's keep comms open also please. Ma'am, I need you to describe any change in sensation throughout this entire process please. Ready all?"

"Acknowledged," the Vulcan answered, taking the sample with him into the transporter room as indicated.Then he went to the console beside the transporter chief.

"Ready to implement your instructions, Doctor."

Taking a deep breath, Rita Paris balled up her fists and raised her chin. This was, far and away, her least favorite command in her Starfleet lexicon. But given that whatever her propensity for transporter accidents was, the syndrome certainly wasn’t getting better, and if she wanted answers and wanted it to stop, she had to face it. Facing fear is part of the job, little lady, the voice of her father, dead for decades and dimensions away echoed in her head.

While her lip quivered slightly before she spoke, when she did so her voice was calm and commanding. “Energize.”

Sonak nodded to Fingerman and, as the technician activated the transporter to dematerialize and rematerialize the test object, the Vulcan activated his tricorder while looking at what the console's monitor was indicating.

The portly mustachioed senior chief operating the transporter beamed the .5 kilo block of stored matter from transporter pad 2 to transporter pad 4. he took his time, enabling the less complicated transport buffer for cargo. Transporters on live beings required more complex buffer options for the assembly into energy for beaming. This was Chief Fingerman basically playing replicator with the transporter.

While in the corridor outside, Rita Paris' quantum field stretched away from her person ever so slightly, reaching for the beam. As the transport cycle completed, the extradimensional explorer's kirlian aura settled back where it belonged.

Sonak's tricorder chirped at him to call his attention from what he was already noticing on the transporter signal.His eyebrow went straight up.

"Fascinating. This is the exact same quantum fluctuation I recorded during her last accident; and here again the Heisenberg compensator was 0.05347th of a microsecond behind and ahead of the actual deatomization process at the same time."

He looked at Rita.

"When your last accident occured, I had hypothesized that this was a random fluctuation caused by the ion storm on the annular confinement beam frequency of our 23rd century duotronic technology. I even used this fluctuation and artificially reproduced it with a red giant's solar flare emissions to replicate the effect and help bring me here, in this time and quantum reality that is now ours. I was apprently in error. This result with this much more advanced gel pack technology would seem to suggest that this is a feature of your own specific quantum nature, not a technical malfunction; a discrepancy that, under a certain set of variables, would disrupt the normal process of transport, just as a random mutation of the genome would produce a new trait or remove an old one under the pressure of a certain set of natural selection variables."

He turned towards Dael.

"A hypothesis; this might be in fact what is at play here. Did you find anything relevant or peculiar on your part, Doctor? Something biological or biochemical perhaps that could account for this?"

"Yes, it's small, but her bio-electrical signals increase slightly, and about .05% of her type 3-aminopropyl-functionalized magnesium phyllosilicate nanoparticle are changing from their standard positive charge to neutral, although there is no increase in electrons in the body. Also her cortisol and adrenal levels are off the chart, but I can't know if that is entirely caused by the phenomenon with the transporter. Apologies ma'am," Asa replied, looking pained at the last sentence, but they knew the Vulcan scientist needed all information.

Sonak's eyebrow again went up.

"Fascinating. Doctor, can we hypothesize here the first recorded case of... for lack of a better term... transporter allergy?"

“It would certainly seem so. Lieutenant Commander, can you please describe the physical sensations experienced, if any?” the doctor replied in a carefully calm tone, filled with concern for their patient.

“Out here? I didn’t feel anything. If I get too close I feel something, but at this range, all the way out here with a shielded bulkhead between us, nothing to report,” the subject of the experiment explained. “And don’t worry about talking over my head or commentary on the experiment that you think might hurt my feelings, Doc. You’ll break it down in layman’s terms when you need to explain things to me- meanwhile, your experiment takes precedence, so please proceed.”

While her tone was calm, Paris did raise a valid point- the transporter rooms were all shielded to help prevent accidental influence by other exotic energies that sometimes occurred on starships. Even out here, her quantum field had reacted to transport despite the shielding.

Nodding in understanding, Asa moved directly inside the transporter room with their sample cart in tow. “Would you please join us here? Directly inside the door, but no further please. Shoot!” Asa trailed off, obviously talking to themselves for the last word and jotting outside the door, narrowly avoiding the buxom blonde, to place the sample from the last experiment in the hallway.

Upon re-entering the transporter room they explained “Gotta test for quantum entanglement too. I seriously doubt every cell in the body was ‘misfiring’ so to speak during the Lieutenant Commander’s prior transporter mishaps, but if her quantum entanglement is not corresponding to transporter protocol, which would cause the whole body to shift instead of the few errant cells. It is entirely possible this type of thing happens all the time to a few cells in a body, but the transporter normalizes the quantum signature and replicates the minuscule amount of missing cells. OK, anyone have thoughts, suggestions, or comments before we commence?” Asa concluded, somewhat breathlessly.

“Well, I’ve always maintained that not all of me makes it back, so if I understood that correctly then I’d go along with it,” Paris stepped over to the transporter control panel, where the burly transporter chief was working side by side with Sonak. “Your thoughts, Lieutenant?”

"Now that we have established data to study, the next step is to introduce variables to the same experiment in order to attempt to isolate and determine what is exactly at play. That being said, I have come prepared."

He showed Rita and Dael a small tube with a single red button on top which he affixed to his wife's left wrist.

"This is a portable emergency transporter device, first introduced during the Shinzon Incident a few years back. I have keyed it specifically for our current quantum signature with a subatomic autotimer. You can activate it yourself by pressing this activator, or it will activate itself exactly five point three seconds after it detects a shift in the quantum frequency of your body. It works only once before the power source is depleted but, this way, we can still proceed unimpeded with the experiments; and if you destabilize, you will be able to reintegrate this spacetime frame by yourself."

His grey eyes now fixed hers.

"And I will still be monitoring."

“Y-yeah, okay,” the transporter-phobic officer stammered, eyeing the device on her wrist dubiously. As perspiration dotted her brow and her heartrate doubled, the pit of fear yawned in her stomach. But Paris looked up, taking some strength from the solemn gaze of the science officer. “So what’s, ah, what’s the next experiment?”

“Wow, um, that’s great, Lieutenant.” Asa stammered, forcing themself to focus on the here-and-now and not all the what-if scenarios that rapidly flew through their mind.

“Up next, second verse, same as the first, so to speak. We transport a cube through the room with our illustrious XO standing on this side of the door,” Asa was speaking at about 90 miles a minute, but paused to offer a reassuring smile to Rita.

“I monitor her bio-signs while the Lieutenant monitors quantum signatures. I will also check the signals on our identical samples to see how identical they remain after closer exposure to a transporter. We will need to repeat this one more time at a different distance to gather enough data points to extrapolate any trends, so I suggest that upon conclusion of the test on the inside of the door we immediately conduct the same test with the Commander standing two steps off the pad. Get the hard stuff done all at once, right? But of course, if anyone needs to stop, of course we can, just speak up?” they concluded hopefully surveying the room.

Taking a few long strides to stand beside the door, the cadet who’d graduated 32nd in her Starfleet Academy class of 2255 stood beside the door. Fear would not stop her, and Rita Paris was nothing if not determination in a short skirt. Those blonde brows furrowed as she mopped away the sweat on her forehead, running her slick fingers through her tomboy-short blonde shock of hair and ordered, “Energize.”

Even before the transporter engaged, Rita Paris flinched, despite her conscious attempt not to do so. Which, given that her quantum signature immediately expanded and reached for the transporter beam, was not surprising.

“Beam’s not solidifying like it should,” muttered the transporter chief quietly, not loudly enough for the test subject to hear but plainly evident to the scientist and physician in attendance. “S’minor, but I’m having to adjust the compensators, just like every time she’s in here. And it slows down the transport time too- even with her over there we’re off by .576 seconds rematerializing.”

The tricorder was whirring as Asa frantically scanned Rita, needing to see the readings to trust the brave first commander was in fact, whole. They noticed the flinch, and a spike in readings that corresponded with it. Of course Rita’s cortisol and adrenal levels were sky-high, but they had been since entering the transporter room.

“Her extracellular matrix is becoming positively charged- electrons are just….gone. Chronoton particles are being drawn into her body also, and the naturally occurring anyon particles are disappearing, which is impacting the cell adhesion molecules in her connective tissues and nervous system. It’s not alarming….yet…but this is not anything I have encountered before. Commander, how are you feeling?”

The doctor's normally chipper voice was strained with concern as they stopped scanning once the transporter disengaged, seeking Rita’s state of mind in her eyes.

The subject on question was breathing a bit fast and as she mopped the perspiration from her brow, she nodded. “I’m okay, just… uneasy,” Paris reported, vastly understating her emotional state. Part of her was kicking herself for overreacting in front of people. But part of her, and it was the part she listened to that tended to save her life, was telling her to run, to get away from here. But that wouldn’t help, and she was damned if she wouldn’t see this through. You’re a Starfleet officer, and as First Officer you set an example. Calm down and do the job, Rita.

“Let’s just move on to the next experiment, shall we?” Hoping that her voice sounded more confident than she felt, it took nearly every bit of willpower she had to step up next to the transporter platform and about-face.

“One sec!” Asa replied, forcing cheerfulness in their voice, and running into the corridor to take readings. “OK, well that sample is still at baseline, no changes to report. The sample in this room underwent the same cellular changes, but of course not the changes to the connective tissues, as stem cells are, ya know, not connective tissues. I’m ready if you are everyone,” they concluded with a shrug and an awkward smile.

Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, Rita Paris steeled herself before uttering the command, “Energize.”

Which was when things went a little haywire in Transporter Room 4.