Calling Callithumpian Chaos

Posted on Tue Nov 12th, 2024 @ 4:28pm by Lieutenant JG Toareth Rouen (née Darqa) & Captain Qa'ada MD & Commander Naois Mercy MD

3,132 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Fortuna
Location: Clinic Laboratory, Fortuna Colony
Timeline: Current

Doctor Tukuk stood at the workstation in the Fortuna Colony's Laboratory looking at details on the computer terminal. Typing on the computer's built in keyboard, the Rigelian Doctor was very curious about what he was seeing on the screen. Having been at the Fortuna Colony since it was founded, he was very proud of the colony and what it was working to accomplish. It didn't hurt that it was also frontier medicine, which so many were unaccustomed to performing.

That was why he was so surprised by what he was seeing on the screen. To think that this virus had become so dangerous, so deadly, was a truly scary thing for any doctor. It was almost beautiful though to see how a virus had so perfectly mutated to its environment, to become a perfect killer where it had never been one. He smirked at the thought of how capable it had become.

Adjusting a setting on the console, he heard the door open behind him.

"Dr. Tukuk," came a woman's voice, "I presume. Dr. Darqa, U.S.S. Britannic, United Federation of Planets."

Toareth thought to correct herself. Recently married, hence married name. She decided against taking up valuable time even for that short explanation. She needed to get on to business. "I have a hypothesis on the cause of this plague on your hands."

The Rigellian Doctor turned away from the computer console he had been working on, curious why he had been interrupted by this Doctor Tarqa of the USS Britannic. He sighed as he returned his attention to his display and typed on the panel, finally speaking, "You have me mistaken with Doctor Deveraux. She's the Mission Medical Officer. If you come to me with this before her she'll be pretty angry." He typed a sequence on the display. "Not that I'm not curious. Is it something easily fixed?"

"Easily fixed?" she repeated the end of his question. "No." Toareth had spent plenty of years gallivanting about space with much of that time in Romulan space. She was quite used to dancing around words, especially when it came to accusing someone of a crime without actually accusing any one person of said crime. "But I believe I have found a pathway forward to finding our fix. And..." she motioned with her head behind her, "it was Dr. Deveraux the told me to seek you out as she seemed pretty upset already."

"Doctor Deveraux is usually upset these days, more than she probably should be," Tukuk answered as he typed on the keyboard built into the nearby desktop. "But we're all upset with everything going on. So, why did she have you grace my doorstep anyway? Probably because she can't work a computer?"

"More like because she is knee deep in dead and dying and too strung out to think beyond the next patient. What we need is a cause. And I think I have a theory; one that is perhaps more dire than we know."

Tukuk crossed his arms and turned toward the Britannic's doctor, "I am, what's the Human expression, all ears."

Toareth had a long explanation. She hoped the man was prepared for this. "It starts with this planet. Xachara's class is survivable, but it is not Class M. It is larger than your average Class M with a similar gravitational field. That means Xachara is less dense, its core it hotter. I would guess, and I am sure our science team aboard my ship will agree, Xachara is in its Phanerozoic Eon. This planet is similar to, say, Earth about 240 million years ago. Oxygen is at a greater concentration. Xachara's sun, however, emits radiation that, when it collides with the atmosphere, produces 15C, that is a radioactive isotope of Carbon. People are exposed to it all the time on M Class planets but Xachara has a concentration of that times 4. Still not a concern. 15C does seem to have a side effect of restricting biological material from absorbing and processing oxygen, but since Oxygen is more concentrated on Xachara, that effect goes unnoticed. But this does keep the oxygen content of the atmosphere at its higher concentration. And all life, as we know it, requires oxygen. Even viral life. The more oxygen we have in the atmosphere, the more virulent diseases can become."

Toareth took a breath. "Also, with Xachara being in its Phanerozoic Eon, life forms are still emerging from deep underground. Life always evolves but it evolves with its environment. And right now, it appears that many plants and insectoids that are coming from out the ground oftentimes appear similar but are actually very different when you perform a deep scan. By that, I mean looking at chemical makeup, DNA and RNA sequencing. Even our tricorders cannot tell the two apart. I had my crewman find me two heads of kale, grown locally on Xachara. They look the same, my tricorder says they are the same, they taste the same I am sure, but under an electron microscope, these two heads of kale are very different, almost completely different species of vegetation. Some of Xachara's insects are the same. Two crickets that look the same may be completely different orders entirely. This is important because different animals, even if they appear the same, will respond differently to viral infections, even if they are immune to said virus."

Letting that sink in a moment, Toareth continued. "The vaccine to combat this outbreak was produced with live virus so that it could mutate depending on the lifeform it gets into. Essentially, your vaccine is designed to mutate itself into another vaccine should the viral outbreak also mutate. It is a genius idea. The problem, however, is this. If 2 people were to eat 2 different heads of kale, both people are sick with this viral outbreak, but have gotten your vaccine, the person who has eaten one type of kale has a 50% chance of the vaccine mutating benevolently and they are fine. They get better. The other person who ate the other head of kale, has a 50% chance of the vaccine mutating malignantly and thus making them sicker, even killing them. So, the vaccine is doing what it was designed to do. Only no one expected two very similarly appearing heads of kale to be so vastly different as to mutate the vaccine into an extremely deadly disease itself. This means that every...thing...that is native...on this planet...is giving everyone a 50/50 chance at getting better or sicker and dying should they get the vaccine. It took hours just to determine which head of kale is safe to eat. Both are perfectly nutritious but one adversely effects the vaccine. So someone can eat the right kale but the wrong chicken. Dead. Right kale, right chicken, but wrong snake tale. Dead."

Again she paused. Toareth was finally getting to the real crisis. "All this can be fixed if we went back to replicating an earlier version of your vaccine, one where the virus was dead and immutable. That would fix all your problems. Only, all earlier versions of the vaccine have been deleted from the replication matrix. And we cannot synthesize what we do not have in the replication matrix. We can only start again. And it took dozens of years just to get your original vaccine. And that is not all. The deletion logs have also been deleted. There is no way I can tell who deleted these records. All we can replicate right now is more of your current vaccine, which is like playing a game of roulette depending on what the people eat."

Toareth breathed and breathed. She breathed as though out of breath herself. She looked at Tukuk, hoping he heard and understood all that.

Tukuk shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he tried to understand everything that was being said to him. His species, Rigelian, were descended from the Vulcans and they possessed many of the same traits for investigation and discovery as their ancestors. Being a doctor he was no slouch in understanding the scientific aspects of the galaxy, but this was a little more than he was anticipating. The possibility that the medication would adapt to the environment as it had was a frightening prospect, but the unpredictable nature of who would be affected by the food interactions was even scarier.

Doctor Tukuk looked at the reports, "Only a handful of people have access to the genetic matrix of the medications. Myself, Doctor Devereaux, and Doctor Cysox. To think one of them could have done this, eliminated a vaccine, its unfathomable."

Toareth thought back to her time when she infiltrated Nokron's outfit. He had thought it unfathomable for her to use the life support system of his own ship to spread a disease, infecting everyone aboard, just to disable him and him alone. Yet she had done exactly that. But her reason was to bring down a Romulan warlord. "Unfathomable?" she asked. "Maybe. But look in the computer yourself, your backups, your secondary backups, tertiary if you have them. Previous versions of this vaccine are not there. And the deletion records have even been expunged. And I only have access to view; not make any changes." She thought to throw in that last bit as a means to keep her name from being implicated in any way. "Do you have security personnel or engineers, operations personnel even, who could have gone in to alter records? Genetic matrix is one thing. Only medication professionals should have access. But the records, the files themselves?" She could only imagine the number of people who possibly had access or who could circumvent certain lockouts. "We are not just dealing with a plague. We are also dealing with someone who wants to see the world burn."

Toareth stepped closer to his desk, closing the distance between them. "Allow me to be transparent with you. I have dealt with individuals such as this. I have not always been Starfleet. I have seen the lengths people take to get what they want, even if it means their own health and/or death. By my guess, if someone is responsible for this, they carried out their actions just before this plague started. This would give them that much time to get as far away from here as they can. They could also still be here, risking their own health, wanting to see the damage they have wrought. Either way, I believe you may have an idea of who all could have access to your computer core. I would also recommend getting my husband involved in your search. Rene is the head of Security aboard my ship. And he is proficient in sniffing out criminals."

"Any help that can be offered I'm certain would be appreciated," the Rigellian answered as he closed out the computer terminal he had been working on and handed it over to the Medical Officer. "The system is highly limited though, and only a handful of people have access to be able to change or alter the access logs. Doctor Deveraux has access, our Operations Managers, and the Colony Director. They've been mostly locked out though because of the quarantine. The Colony Director passed away last night, so if it was him then it picked a really bad time to make any changes."

"Seeing how viruses mutate," Toareth started, "anyone who had access to the computer core within that past month may be suspect. I will make contact with Rene and will continue doing what I can."

Rising from his desk, the alien doctor looked at the door, "I really have to be getting to my rounds, doctor. Thank you for your efforts. I have to be going though."

The Rigelian rose from his chair and walked through the exit, leaving the Chief Medical Officer alone in his lab.

Toareth stepped to the side as the man passed her by. She turned likewise and watched him leave.

"Feel free to look about the place," she said while poorly mimicking his voice.

"Don't mind if I do," she said to herself in reply.

Toareth looked about the place, looked at the PADD in her hand, and slowly started toward the doctor's desk, looking at all the items spread out atop.

Many times Toareth had dealt with shady people. She had been one herself even. An entire Romulan cruiser was brought to its knees as she had used its life support system to make everyone sick, just to get one man. Nokron was a badguy of course but she was fully aware that everyone would look upon others as the villain. There was always another perspective. And no one was entirely innocent. Tukuk, perhaps, had some skeletons he did not want out. Though Toareth was far from suspecting him of causing this level of sickness and death, maybe there was something he overlooked, a corner he cut, something that he ignored or neglected that exacerbated this situation.

There did not seem to be anything of much interest upon his desk. Toareth turned to the computer system to the right, right beside a worktable with various experiments that seemed to have been running.

Accessing the computer system, she saw many various simulations running and churning away. One was folding proteins, another was analyzing possible mutations of viruses. Nothing out of the ordinary. Toareth had programs of her own running aboard the Britannic. One was trying to rediscover her breakthrough into unlocking human longevity. Having had a love many decades ago, Toareth attempted to grant him longer life so the two could grow old together. She, of course, knew that augmentation was illegal but she researched it anyway and finally stumbled upon an answer. Being caught and imprisoned, along with her research destroyed, Toareth never gave up the endeavor. She would simply have to start over...and be more secretive this time. Hence her safety lockouts on the Britannic.

Dr. Tukuk did not appear to have any safety lockouts and Toareth was able to peruse his entire library of researches and simulations without denial. Everything he was performing was within Starfleet law.

"Pity," she said. "Breakthroughs never came to anyone who did not skirt the legal line."

Toareth did however notice an active sustainment within the transporter buffer as she was doing a surface skim of other running programs, about to give up. But, there it was, taking up computational resources, something in the transporter buffer. Toareth tapped into the program to see if she could find out more.

As the Chief Medical Officer accessed the Transporter buffer a system subroutine engaged that began the rematerialization sequence. On the Medical Lab's transporter the remains of Doctor Tukuk appeared and collapsed upon the deck, a large wound in the center of his chest with the char of an energy weapon set on high levels surrounding the damage.

Toareth rushed upon him, already fearing the worst. She was simultaneously pulling, from her satchel, both her tricorder and medical tricorder. The tricorder started beeping as she started a preset sequence. Placing it to the side, she paid it no further mind as it was continuously scanning for any movement approaching her location. With her medical tricorder, Toareth started scanning the body.

As she had already surmised from visual inspection, the body was lifeless and, from the size and scope of the wound, no amount of CPR, defibrillation, or miracle was going to bring this one back to life. Continuing her scan, Toareth saw some residual heat remaining behind. The body was not yet cold. But being held in transporter stasis could do that, and really throw off the time of death. Additionally, seeing as how the system was not locked out, "He killed you only a few minutes ago didn't he?" she asked the dead man. She knelt back and pondered shortly.

"Ok," she said to herself, "so I was just in the room, speaking to a murdered and prime suspect to this plague it seems." It would not have been the first time she was in the same room as a notorious killer. But she had already known of suspected all the ones before. Not this one, not faux-Tukuk. Toareth also realized she did not read anything from him with her empathy. Not that she was trying to. This could mean that faux-Tukuk was either good at holding his emotions in check or he was of a race El-Aurians were unable to read at all. Changelings came to mind immediately and...before she could lose herself in more pondering, Toareth got up and retrieved her equipment. She hurried back to the computer terminal and activated the transport sequence.

"Sorry about this doctor." The teleporter powered up and the body started dematerializing. Toareth did not program a destination but rerouted the transport date back into the buffer, sending the dead body of Dr. Tukuk, back into the transport buffer. "But I need time to plan how to move forward."

Seeing how this was suddenly becoming a deadly plague happening in tandem with a murder mystery, something that would certainly take more than her working alone to figure out, Toareth had to buy her time as well as built a team to help combat the situation.

Just then, her comm badge sprang to life. "Doctor Rouen, what is your status?" came the voice of the ship's first officer, Did you talk to Doctor Tukuk? I saw him enter the hospital earlier, but was unable to follow him."

"My team is set up, sir," she said in reply. "We are performing scans, experimentations, and developing theories still. Additionally, we are helping the medical staff with the influx of patients." She removed her attention from the transporter and went to some of the other running experiments, whether they were computer simulations or bubbling concoctions upon the countertop. "I did speak with Dr. Tukuk regarding a theory I am still working on. He seemed intrigued but had to set out to perform his rounds. I will be back in touch with him in a few hours. I will continue running tests in the meantime." She hoped that was a satisfactory status update. "How are things on your end?"

"I am with Lieutenant Fox, I found her in a state of panic. I am trying to get a straight answer from her. Something is going on doctor, I need you to keep your eyes open; something is not right, and we need to find out what."

Something was not right alright. Plague, vaccine killing people, suddenly a murder mystery, and now this. Everything was far from right. This was turning into a total frelling storm of faex. "I am on my way to your position," she said. "Darqa out."

 

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