Resolution: Synthesis

Posted on 16 Jan 2013 @ 3:33am by Crewman Athlen

3,720 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Multipurpose Laboratory
Timeline: MD -2 2000

ON:

It was back to work as usual. Liyar knew it wasn't logical to spend so much time away from his quarters, but they were hardly lived-in. He knew he should be meditating, eating, sleeping. All of those things Sekhet had outlined. He was a Vulcan. He had given his word. It was his honor. Yet he still could not find the will to return to the emptiness. It was better here, in the bright, colorful laboratories where he could feel the presences of people bustling around. The walls were covered with floor to floor touchscreen projectors, and the fereikek reh was still in service after Kiri had left, he was continuing his transposition of the golden ratio onto the engram patterns and had begun to find a distinctive set of proportions that did, in fact, manifest on a quantum level. He decided he needed a distraction. He was stalled in work, and most Vulcans would meditate on it, approach the problem another day, but Liyar wanted to power through it. "Lieutenant Liyar to Crewman Athlen. Report to multipurpose laboratory one."

"Eh? Uh, sure, okay. Be there in a sec, Lieutenant." Athlen sounded groggy, but he picked himself up off of his floor where he had fallen asleep mid-meditation. This happened far too frequently, he thought to himself. It was so nice and relaxing that he simply fell asleep. He smoothed out the wrinkles in his clothes, and dressed in his uniform before making his way down to the labs where he noticed his superior was in a frenetic stupor again, hurrying between whiteboards and holographic grids with fingertips and stylus, muttering things under his breath. By now he'd grown used to this. The lab was in disarray, PADDs and papers and half-drunk mugs of tea. Athlen collected them and put them in the reclamator.

"Liyar, you missed one here," the Rigelian greeted, knowing it would pull the man out of his head for a bit. He pointed at one of the images of the brain. True to form, Liyar shot up. Mistake? Where? "That's missing something. Terrans have something there called the," he tried to remember the name. "Well, they're like small fibers, like hairs. They help the sound travel better, so losing them is one of the reasons for hearing loss. See here, on the Vulcan one, you don't have that, you have the neural interface... here, the auditory nerve, it branches out all the way, so," he drew a line across the diagram. "Your headset would need to be placed..."

"Yes, here," Liyar agreed, circling a spot on the diagram and moving forward. "To avoid damaging the hearing," he nodded and picked up the cup he was currently using, taking a small drink.

"Has this ever even been done before?" Athlen asked curiously, walking through the room and touching his hand to a few of the spiraling images and numbers floating around. It felt surreal, like being in a holovid. "What is this?"

"The fereikek reh. A holographic synthesizer grid. There are two. This one, and an instrument. As for the psionic transceiver, I cannot say. I am developing this independently," Liyar answered, drawing another line on the design pad in the corner and tapping it in further to see the mechanics of it. Liyar picked up the beginning model on the desk, the bulky thing he'd used with Jared. It had the program in it, but he needed to condense it, and he pulled it apart, grabbing something out of the tool box and crossing the room to another part of the grid, with the calibrations on it.

Athlen watched curiously, and went over to the replicator to get himself a meal. He knew he was there as Liyar's 'distraction', the prompter, someone to bounce ideas off of, and he'd done it before to discover that when he got like that, the nights were long. When he went over to the replicator he noticed the door open. "Lieutenant Panne!" he greeted warmly, which didn't do anything to jolt Liyar out of whatever it was he was doing.

The Vulcan only noticed her come in when he turned to go back over to the codex, arching his eyebrows at her. "Lieutenant," he said, completely unaware of the veritable chaos around him.

"What's up?" Athlen asked, smiling awkwardly around the mug of apple cider in his hands.

"Gentlemen," Maenad said more as an observation than a greeting. In one of her hands was a PADD carrying data collected by the ship's sensors that needed analysing. She noted the mess of the lab and that Athlen was procuring himself a meal. She didn't care either way so long as they cleaned up whenever they finished. "I see you're both quite comfortable in here," she said, inputting the data into a console near to where Liyar was working.

Liyar shook his head, the same tracking movements he usually made happening as he observed the quads of data streaming across the grid in front of him, computing them internally and adjusting a variable here and there. He picked up the headset and began dissembling it, and then looked around the room a little as though searching for something. Finally, he realized the only answer to his trouble was right in front of him, so he held up the scanner in his hand. "Lieutenant, I require your ear. May I see it."

Athlen coughed. "Liyar-"

Maenad looked at the Vulcan through narrowed eyes, having sat upright and turned from the data on her console. "My ear?" she asked in disbelief. "What for?"

"I," Liyar paused, ignoring the grin on Athlen's face, and held up the headset. "I require an accurate sample. The physiological database is adequate, however, there is," he blinked a few times in a row. "I do not know how to explain. There is a difference, between a visual representation and a living subject. I require to analyze an actual neural connection. This will allow me to complete the algorithmic adjustments to my transceiver." He looked as earnest as a Vulcan could probably look.

She blinked once, twice. She looked at the grin on Athlen's face, thinking that maybe he knew something that she didn't. "Alright," Maenad stood up from her chair and went to Liyar's side, careful not to touch him. "What do you want me to do?"

He held out the headset and a PADD. He had done this phase of testing with Jared, and gotten the adequate results, but this was slightly different. He had been focused on brainwaves then, and he knew that Jared's brainwaves were immensely different to begin with. Maenad would be an adequate subject, far more adequate (and decidedly better company) than Jared, he mused thoughtfully. "Place the headset over your ears. Then the node, here, goes," he waited until she put the headset on and crossed over behind her, holding his hand out and brushing her hair out of the way gently before attaching the circular black device under her ear, near the bone. It made a small, but painless sound as it adhered and then turned the PADD over. "These are two separate selections, one of them is Betazoid, this column." He pointed at it. "These are purely psionic, I require for you to listen to one of those, and then one of these," he switched columns. "They are auditory and psionic combinations from Vulcan. I should be capable of switching the variance frequencies to match the neural movement through your auditory nerve, and into the parietal lobe and temporal lobe of your brain. You should hear music," he explained it as succinctly as possible. "If this is successful, I shall be able to reverse the same codex to re-interpret," he trailed off, and crossed the room again, "To re-interpret non-psionic music to adapt to the area of a telepathic brain to compensate for the," he was tracking again, "Disparate listening mechanisms, which, I will also require your assistance testing, if you are amenable. You will be able to determine my success at transition." He pressed a button and loaded the feed wirelessly, looking at the screens intently and then up to meet her eyes, waiting on her to select an item. Athlen, meanwhile, had grown more serious, contemplative, watching them both with his head tilted.

Maenad smiled a little. She had to admit that this was pretty exciting. As Liyar walked around the room setting up his test, she looked at Athlen with her curious grin, showing her teeth. She only did that when she was truly pleased with something, but she would forever deny such a thing. When Liyar had finished with his calibrations and looked at her, his way of signalling that he was ready, she licked her lips and focused her attention on the PADD. She chose something from the Betazoid column, but didn't really know what it was that she chose. A few seconds went by before she started hearing something. Was it hearing, though? She felt her blood start to rush as she heard strange music without actually hearing anything. Was she going crazy? "I think it's working," she said, smiling. She was looking at Athlen. "I can hear it," she said, then laughed. "I can hear it!" She exclaimed to Liyar, then she laughed like a little schoolgirl and wasn't ashamed to do it. It was incredible.

Liyar alternated between gauging her reaction and adjusting the monitor in front of him with quick, furtive movements of his fingers against the typepad. He rose one of the levels slightly and noted her reaction, which he categorized immediately as joyful. It was working. He didn't seem very pleased about it in the conventional way, but anyone who knew him would be able to tell that he was, in his own way. The first part was an unmitigated success. A psi-null individual was fully capable of hearing psionic input without direct mental contact, purely from mathematical transference. He nodded, a mild look over his face that usually meant he was in a better mood. The Betazoid selection had been his first go-to choice, as most of them were calm, tranquil. The Vulcan on the other hand was more intense, so he loaded the playlist and chose the most serene selection on the list from his location across the lab. "Good. Very good," he repeated unconsciously, before hitting the button and then pause to speak again. Athlen watched them both. He didn't think he'd ever seen either of them behave this way. It was... interesting. Liyar spoke again. "This will shift, now. You should be able to hear both the music, and a facsimile of the perception of earlier. It should create a simultaneous interaction, it should not sound jarring or clashing, but it will feel different than the Betazoid. Tell me if it does clash, I will require to adjust the frequency."

Maenad was still smiling as Liyar changed the parameters of the test. The last experience was absolutely amazing; she had never experienced anything so clearly in her entire life. The music from a moment ago was replaced with music she immediately recognised as Vulcan, but the experience was different from before. It wasn't quite as clear, and that was because she knew that she was relying on her ears this time. Yes, there was definitely music playing through the headphones, but there was supplementary sound entering her head too. The clash of sound that Liyar had described for her was definitely happening, and it made her feel a little nauseous and dizzy. "I can still hear it," she told him, "But it's not as clear and it seems... out of sync," she explained as best she could. "It's definitely clashing."

Liyar tensed his hand slightly. Again! There was something different about Vulcan neurology, something he couldn't, he exhaled and studied the numbers again, using the status bar at the side to adjust one of the main frequencies and bringing up the scans with the proportioned ratios. Immediately the screen began turning red, which on most devices would be a bad sign, but on Vulcan devices signified that something positive was definitely happening. He looked at his wrists for a moment and ripped off the cuffs, placing them at the side and then turning back to the screen. He could feel what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to channel the harmonic vibrations. There. He pulled the status bar downward and looked up again. "I believe..." he started, tilting his head, "Is this clearer?" he switched the unit to unpause.

Waiting patiently, Maenad sat attentively watching Liyar make his adjustments. She wasn't sure how this experiment did what it did, but she heard the music more clearly than she had ever head anything before in her life. It was.... The music started up again, the same as the piece that played a combination of sound and psionic... waves? She wasn't sure what to call it. But now it was just as precisely heard as the fisrt time. She smiled again, being immersed in the music and actually meaning it was truly wonderful. "This is incredible," she beamed. "It is clear to me!" She took her eyes off of Liyar and looked at Athlen and mouthed the word wow to him, still giddy.

Athlen leaned forward, watching the random numbers showing up on the grid. He couldn't hear it, but he was able to see the effect it had on Maenad and smiled empathetically. "I didn't even know this was possible," the Rigelian said, looking at the dual sets of brain waves appearing in front of Liyar's grid section. "How?" Athlen boggled.

Liyar blinked upward, uncertain how to put it into proper words, and pulled out the other headset he'd developed, placing one transceiver in his ear and hooking the other up to the terminal outlet in the fereikek reh. "It is a matter of neural compensation," the Vulcan answered while he switched the input/output matrix to reverse the codex and begin affecting his own auditory systems instead. He pulled up the small area devoted to harmonics on this device. "The more difficult part is to try and transcribe a non-psionic piece to a psi-native individual. The way that we learn to hear as children, it is very different from what for example a Terran uses as a harmonic oscillation. They are, to a degree, universal. But the perception, it loses something. The essence, the way it is meant to be heard, we cannot hear that, without the correct..." he gestured vaguely, "Translator." With that, he played a small tune with movements of his fingers over the musical perception area on the grid in front of him. "Can you hear?" he asked again.

"I do hear it, yes," Maenad said, still smiling. Whatever it was, it wasn't her type of music. She had never heard it before, but because of the way she was hearing it, it was one the most lovely pieces of music she had ever heard. She closed her eyes, trying to to be entirely focused on the sound. "Liyar," she said, forgetting that she had dropped the mister prefix, "I don't know if hearing is the right word for this. What is happening to me?" She looked at Athlen. "I don't know if this is sound at all; it doesn't feel like sound, if I am making any sense at all." She was still impressed, and she was still potently excited about this new experience. Maybe she was psionic somehow too, she even thought, despite truthfully knowing that was impossible. Or, maybe Liyar was helping her realise senses she didn't even know she had. He had touched her thoughts before with own, maybe he had found something in her head previously unknown? She was all smiles, absolutely thrilled at the whole thing.

"Resonance," the Vulcan answered enigmatically. "I believe the experiment has been successful," he said, hitting the last note with a closed fist over the top of the grid.

"It reminds me of one of the old psi-stones, we used to use," Athlen nodded curiously. "Storing the experience, letting it," he gestured a little vaguely, "Resonate is probably the best word, we called them psionic resonators," he agreed. "The first ones were weapons, but later we developed them to be instructional tools, medicinal devices. The ones on my planet could not be used by psi-nulls, but Betazoid psi-stones, they can. They can be used by psi-null individuals because the way they operate affects the neurons in your mind. I think Liyar," he looked at the transceiver, "Must have replicated this in such a way that it is usable for things like music," the sociologist tried to put it into words as best as he could. "The Vulcan-to-Terran translation, though, that is new. Like you were able to listen to the Betazoid element, yet the Vulcan element took much more work."

"The ability to transpose the harmonic waves that rely on these engrams, katric engrams, to an individual that does not possess them was the focus of my experiment," Liyar agreed. "I had not found similar results elsewhere, the only sources were..."

"Bonds," Athlen filled in. "Because it's possible to bond with other species, it's theoretically possible that it's possible to translate other psionic experiences as well."

Liyar looked down at the transceiver, and then at Maenad. "Not theoretical any longer." He picked up the PADD with the Betazoid selection from before and the smaller, more portable transceiver and laid them on the desk where Maenad was working. "If you wish, you may keep this. You appeared to enjoy it. The algorithm is still loaded into the device, so you require only to play it back."

A little disappointed that it was over, Maenad took off the headset. "Yes, please," she said back to him. "I would really like that." She moved her fingers to the device behind her ear, where it fixed to the bone. She didn't know how to take it off. "Can you help me?" she asked, standing up and walking toward the Vulcan. She was blushing a little, not knowing why, and she felt somewhat embarrassed all of a sudden, which frazzled her mind from thinking clearly because she didn't know what was wrong with her. "I don't want to hurt myself," she smiled, and even made a silent laugh while looking at him, but looking away when he looked back at her.

Crossing over behind her, Liyar peered down at her curiously. "The mechanism is very simple," he assured her quietly. Athlen apparently ceased to exist, which he rolled his eyes at while Liyar carefully brushed his fingers over the back of her neck, pulling the adhesive away from her skin. "It is a medical grade adherent," he said, holding it up. He placed his hand directly over the spot where it was. "You merely place it here, and stick it on. It connects to this port here." He held up the transceiver, where a plug-in jack was located. "And then this goes over your ears, like so. The recording is embedded here, and can be accessed by this PADD. There are several other records that have been transcribed as well. The dual psionic-auditory component is here, though I have only translated one piece." He stepped away from her and held out the objects.

Maenad tilted her head so he could take it off, still smiling. His touch ran that tingle through her shoulders and neck, down her spine, in the same way that it had when Lirha had played with her hair. That pleasant sort of tickle she got from intimacy. But that couldn't be, she thought. That was impossible. "Oh," she laughed, hiding her eyes. "I didn't realise that it was just an adhesive," but she should have. She was lying to herself. "I thought, maybe..." she shook her head, now feeling thoroughly ridiculous. She had to get out of there. How far was the door? She put the device in her pocket and took the headphones off that Liyar had replaced during his example, so that they hung around her neck. She grabbed the PADD she had brought.

"Since this is a first, you should name the device after yourself, Li-" she closed her eyes and quickly changed her misspeaking into a throat clearing. "Mister Liyar," she finished, touching her neck. "Maybe publish it in a journal. I would be happy to help you with that, or proofread your article. I would be interested in that very much." She took a step back, noticed the expression on Athlen's face, and quickly looked away from him. Still blushing. "Well, I should be going as it is quite late. Thank you again, Mister Liyar, this was an, uh, a most enjoyable experience," she was pressing her lips together and chewing on their insides now. "Good night, gentlemen," she stepped back even further, held Liyar's eyes for a brief few seconds, and left the lab as quickly as she could.

Athlen and Liyar both exchanged equally confused looks as Maenad hurriedly and haphazardly made her escape. Athlen blinked. "What was that?" he asked, frowning a little.

Liyar arched his eyebrows in a shrug. "I do not know," he said shaking his head, remaining curiously quiet while he finished calibrating the rest of the mathematical algorithms. He had given Maenad the best transceiver he'd created, leaving himself with the bulky one. He could build another, if he had to. The point of the experiment had been a success, and Maenad had seemed rather happy with the experience of it, so he found he couldn't care too much about it.

OFF:

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer, SSC
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

Crewman Athlen
Sociologist, SSC
USS Galileo

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