Patient Zero

Posted on 27 Feb 2019 @ 10:27am by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Alexion Wylde & EMH Mark X-C "Shirley" & Elegy Reiko & Verity Thorne & LuAnn Lovegood PhD

2,801 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 17 - Crystal of Life
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 3, Sickbay
Timeline: MD 01, 0317 hrs

Previously, on That We Might See...

"How--" the patient started to ask, but he became distracted when he squinted at Allyndra and then squinted at the overhead. Holding one thought in his head at a time was feeling difficult enough, let alone juggling two or three. Utterly confused by his surroundings, he finally asked, "How'd you get in m'escape pod?"

The captain's voice came over the comm and interrupted the chatter among the medical team. "Sickbay, bridge. Report. Do you have the survivor? Are they alive?"

Allyndra walked away for a moment but before she did she looked to Wylde and LoveGood. "See what you can get from him on how he came in this state and what happened. " She then went a distance away and answered the call.

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

Sickbay’s only patient had been laid out on the surgical biobed, with his arms crossed awkwardly over his chest. For a moment, he looked to be shifting his weight to lay on his back, but that small movement pained him. He grit his teeth hard. Even through his dark, scraggly beard, the wince on his lips was visible. Not only that, every smear of dirty, every speck of his own blood, was visible on his jumpsuit —only the height of Federation privilege had designed such a worker’s jumpsuit in ivory white with silver bands — but no amount of fashion could have hidden the rips in the back of his jumpsuit. Protruding from each of those tears were contaminants — amber-coloured lesions growing out of his dark skin in splotches behind his shoulder blades and down his spine.

LuAnn walked over to the bed and smiled at the patient. "Hello. My name is LuAnn. What's yours?"

Staring up at the slender face of LuAnn Lovegood, the patient opened his mouth to answer her question, and yet his silence lingered. His eye-lids drooped and a shiver ran down his body. He crossed his arms over his chest more tightly. "Elle," the patient said; even saying that much, his tongue felt thick in his mouth. "Elle? That'a name? No one t'talk in v'ry long..." --His expression crumpled into a question. The dark curls of his hair had become unruly and they hung down over the cortical stimulators on his forehead along with his mismatched eyes, one hazel and one amber-- "Who's you?" he said the question aloud.

"I'm a counselor. My job is to help you. Do you remember anything of what happened?" Even if she couldn't get information, she could help comfort the man.

Allyndra nodded to LuAnn as she tried to engage the patient. For her part, Allyndra was more concentrating on trying to keep the patient alive which was not a sure thing. Exposure, dehydration, the sort of things that a normal biology would have problems with, but the fact of the matter was that there was in her mind a war going on within. Two completely alien biochemistries were trying to compete.

On the biobed, the patient took one deep breath and he took another. He appeared to be loosing a battle against heavy eye-lids and then he shocked awake, his eyes wide. He set his jaw and he stared back at LuAnn, his brows knit in consternation. "Cap'n made an announcement," the patient said, breathlessly. "Told all to evacuate th' ship. My-- my-- my pod launched the sec I stepped in. There was still... behind me... there was still..." Trailing off, the patient let out a heavy breath. He practically groaned at what it felt like to let it out. The knit in his brow furrowed deeper. He practically glared at LuAnn now, when he asked, "How many-- how many years was I there?"

"We're not sure. We just got here," she said, her tone soft and soothing. "We found you in your pod. "Your name is Elle?" she asked again. "How do you feel?"

When LuAnn asked the patient about his name, the man's expression offered no acknowledgement of the question. His shoulders had sagged against the biobed and his facial features took on a mien of defeat, when LuAnn admitted she didn't know much about what had happened to him. The patient's whole world had been that tiny escape pod. All those days and days and days alone with his thoughts, and his pain, had felt like a whole 'nother lifetime after the one he'd already been living. It had to have been years he'd spent on that escape pod, the patient assumed.

While the patient stewed over LuAnn's statements, Shirley moved around the biobed to lay her hands on the large LCARS panel set into the bulkhead. Swiping the interface with her fingertips, she moved aside the current sensor readings and changed the focus of the overhead sensor cluster. Expanding the sensor results for the rest of the medical staff to see, Shirley began a Y-chromosome analysis, a polymerase chain reaction analysis, and short tandem repeats analysis of the patient. These results, Shirley knew, would provide them with a DNA fingerprint they could compare against the patient's Starfleet or Federation medical records, whichever the case may be.

"I hurt inside," the patient said to answer LuAnn's last question. His eyelids were drooping again and he shifted his weight from side to side, unable to get comfortable on the biobed because of the crystalline protrusions from his back. He shivered again when he said, "S'not on th' surface. It-- it-- it's underneath. Hidden from me. Like under a duvet. But I can't ignore it."

Alexion watched on with a frown, frustration etched into his features and violet eyes. He wanted to get his hands on him. Actually *on* him. Skin to skin. Without barrier. To see the other man's thoughts and feelings, things beyond his broken speech. The quarantine was necessary, but deeply frustrating to him. He glanced to the vitals, seeing the erratic nature of the readings. It was like nothing he'd seen before. And that disturbed him. In the kind of way that set the hairs on the back of his neck on end, and his two hearts beating just a touch faster.

Verity was standing as close as he could without being in the medics' way. He watched on with pain for the other man's distress, but his eyes and features remained calm. "No, you can't," he said softly, shaking his head. "So try and accept it, breathe with it, move with it, but focus on us. We're here, and we're not going anywhere. We're not going to leave you."

Whatever was happening to the patient seemed to be spreading now from the spinal core area and up into the cortical areas. Allyndra made a motion out of view of the patient to LuAnn. A sort of rolling motion with the hands trying to indicate to speed up. The Twins alone only knew what would happen to memories or neural structure if the silicone invaded enough tissue.

LuAnn caught the doctor's gesture and took the patient's hand. "Tell me what you remember, what you heard."

Elle rolled his head from side to side on the biobed's pillow. All the while, he hissed out a couple of sighs. His face scrunched up in a pained expression and his eyes welled up with a hint of tears. "I don' know," he said. He spat the words out, defensively, although the cause of his frustration was elusive even to his own self. It may have been the questions, or the numbness in his lips and tongue, or the fact he felt barely held together by staples and a dream. "They wouldn't tell us what... We were in a cargo bay. The told us we would be safe." His voice went deeper, when he echoed, "Safe. Heh."

Holding position by the LCARS display, Shirley kept one eye on the patient's vital signs. He appeared mostly stable after their cortical stimulation therapy, and the use of several analgesics, but his condition wasn't particularly improving. Speaking to the gathered medical officers, Shirley offered, "The ship's Computer can't match his DNA fingerprint against any active-service Starfleet officers. Continuing our search in Federation citizenship databases..."

"Who told you you'd be safe?" LuAnn asked. "The people on the ship? Were they evacuating you?"

Nodding vaguely, Elle said, "Franconia." This word came easily from the patient. He had certainly read the word hundreds, if not thousands of times, printed as it was all over the escape pod that had served as his last home. For a time, it had been his entire universe. The patient widened his eyes and he gripped the surgical support frame with his left hand. Breathing deeper than the shallow breaths he'd been displaying, he seemed to be focusing his mind on LuAnn and her questions. Focusing his mind forcefully.

"The fleeters," Elle explained, "rescued us from the rec centre. Doctors," --and he pointed at them-- "they brought doctors, and they took us to Franconia. Told us we were safe."

LuAnn nodded, understanding what he told her. "Thank you." She smiled encouragingly. "So personnel from the Franconia rescued you from the rec center. Why did you need to be rescued? What happened to the colony? Do you remember why the eruption happened?"

"There were... tremors?" Elle said. There remained a halting quality to his speech pattern, but he was picking up momentum as he spoke. His teeth chattered and then he said, "Se-security reported earthquake fissures on main street and the clock tower... fell. But I'm-- no geologist. Didn't you come to save us?"

Several paces behind the patient, Shirley squealed out a, "Got 'im!" She waved a hand at the LCARS panel, explaining, "The computer identified our patient as--" But she couldn't say anything more. First, the holographic form of Shirley winked out of existence while her lips were moving, mid-sentence. In the next moment, the patient's personal identification file blanked off the display. In it's place, the emblem of the United Federation of Planets appeared on the screen in a harsh shade of green; rotating over the logo was an invading double-helix DNA strand.

The lights flickered as did the biobed readouts and then the sickbay went dark for a moment before the backup power kicked in. Thankfully the quarantine forcefiled remained steady. "By the Twins!" Allyndra exclaimed. The screens flickered on but with a strange symbol.

=^= Engineering, sickbay here we are getting some sort of interference on the monitors with a critical patient! =^= she called. There was no response. =^=Bridge, sickbay,=^= she tried with as little luck raising anyone.

As a dance of wind and wave she knew something was off, the odd vibrations were missing. She could only wonder what had happened. Emergency was on but it seemed communications were out. They would lose the patient for sure if they had any more problems. The EMH had vanished as well and that was not good either at least for a moment before Shirley came back online. She had felt no impacts or anything that would indicate the ship had been struck.

With all of the biobed's carefully calibrated controls blanked by the symbol of the UFP vandalized by double-helix DNA strand, the medical equipment no longer offered its patient pain-management, nor clarity of cognition. In no time, the patient crossed his arms over his abdomen and curled back into a fetal position. His softly slurred words turned to groans, and soon his groans turned to pained screams.

"What the hell is going on..." Alexion exclaimed with all the frustration and indignant disbelief of a doctor who had been in his profession for far too long. He shook his head with a deep frown, swearing in his own language under his breath as he moved quickly to administer pain relief manually with the access point in the barrier. Whatever was going on with the computers wasn't his job to fix...he just hoped the people whose job it was got it sorted out quickly.

"What happened?" LuAnn asked. "What does the symbol mean?"

"Nothing good," Alexion muttered, shaking his head with an irritable frown as he administered the relaxant after the pain relief to try and ease the patient's state.

Allyndra had to agree but she was also intrigued what the brief lock down of systems and the symbol. "Doctor Wylde," she said looking at the monitor over the biobed, "try to make our patient as comfortable as possible. I would like to do a bit of research."

"We're getting there," Alexion nodded firmly, finishing off administering the last dose he was willing to give him. He was having to rely on instinct, not even being able to lay his hand on his skin without the interference of the barrier. "Stay strong now," he said quietly to the afflicted man. "Eyes on the horizon...."

The patient's groans continued for not very much longer. The analgesic eased the worst of his pain, which meant his groans and burblings resolved into quiet breathing. His breathing pattern was shallow, far too shallow, and his arms remained clutched tight around his own body. At the sound of Alexion's voice, the patient's eyes began to flutter. His pupils wouldn't quite focus on anything yet, but his eyes were opening again.

The thrumming of a heartbeat monitor was the first indication that the patient's vital signs had returned to the biofunction monitor behind his biobed. His pulse was audibly weak for human norms. As with every LCARS panel in Sickbay, operational controls rest to their default conditions around the patient's biobed. To the side, the uniformed Emergency Medical Hologram winked into reality, as if she'd never been gone in the first place. Picking up where she left off --sharing the DNA-confirmed identify of the patient-- Shirley announced, "Elegy Reiko. Records say he's an architect and urban planner for the Latari B III colony."

"Oh, good," LuAnn murmured with a heart-felt sigh when his eyes opened. "Elegy, that's a very nice name," she said to the patient. "And an architect. I've always been fascinated by architecture."

Allyndra tried to get an idea of what all that was about the computer was not forthcoming. She found that disappointing but it seemed a temporary glitch as everything came back on. They could go back to attending to the patient. The patient seemed in good hands and so she turned her attention to doing research on what little was known about silicon based lifeforms which in the database was not much.

Verity took the chance to move over to Allyndra, frowning with concern for the man who was clearly in so much distress. "Surely you have enough information now," he said softly to her, shaking his head with worry. "It must be time to let him rest..."

Allyndra looked over at the patient and nodded in agreement. "Yes, at this point let's do what we can to lessen the pain. I need to try to figure out what is going on exactly. Hopefully the biopsies we took might shed some light once the laboratory analysis is done and I need to brush up on silicone style life forms."

So a silicon-based life form was trying to take over. LuAnn felt sorry for the poor man.

As Alexion worked on the patient, his keen Vaeron hearing allowed him to keep track of the conversation going on between Allyndra and the Chaplain. When he caught her agreement with allowing the patient to rest, he quickly moved to adjust his medication, relieved at being able to put the man out of his misery. "You did well," he said quietly to the patient, shaking his head with a frown as he watched his face, seeing the change in him as the medication worked to let him sleep. "Get some rest, I'll see you when you wake."

For the patient, for the man, Ellegy Reiko, sleep came easily. Thanks to the ministrations of the Galileo's medical officers, his pain was abated for what felt to him like the first time in weeks, or maybe months. And thanks to the strange intervention of the symbols on the computer interfaces, the questions had silenced too. For a while --for just a little while-- he could forget about everything else. He could simply be, whatever he would be.

[OFF]

--

Cmdr Allyndra illm Warraquim
Second and Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo-A

Shirley (aka Mark X-C)
Emergency Medical Hologram
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC ir-Llantrisant]

Elegy Reiko
Patient Zero
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC ir-Llantrisant]

LuAnn Lovegood
Counselor
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Sandoval]

CWO3 Alexion Wylde
Doctor
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Blake]

Verity Thorne
Chaplain
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Blake]

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