Outbreak: Training Edition - Part 3/5

Posted on Thu Jul 10th, 2025 @ 10:20pm by Lieutenant JG Lovisa Montague & Chief Warrant Officer Alexion Wylde & Petty Officer 1st Class Ember Locksley & Civilian Verity Thorne & Lieutenant Astrid Nyx & Lieutenant Aristede Steele PsyD. & Crewman Mateo Gardel & Crewman Raine Ni-ya

2,755 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: To Boldly Go
Location: Holodeck 1
Timeline: Day 10 - after the crew board Fenrir

PREVIOUSLY:

“Lovisa,” Mateo continued, finally glancing up. “Let’s run a comparative analysis on their recent activities. Who they interacted with, where they were stationed, what they handled. If this isn’t genetic, then something external linked them. We need to find it.”

Satisfied, Mateo exhaled softly and turned his attention fully to the console, his gaze sharp and unyielding as he combed through the data. One of these systems was lying. He just had to figure out which one.

ON - CONTINUED:

Lovisa gave a short, sharp nod of acknowledgement, even if her attention was already on her control panel. She started retrieving and cross referencing any and all data she could find on the poor patients. Meal logs...comms...movement...work details...anything and everything that could possibly provide a clue. Some people might be put off by just how much could be discovered and understood about a person from analysing logs kept on the computer, but she'd always taken the view that so long as she had good intentions, she had nothing to fear from it.

As the science team worked the problem, it quickly became clear that links between the patients were few and far between. Lovisa's exploration of their data trails showed that both were exemplary officers -- the sort that made careers out of perfection. Crawling through weeks, months, and even years of data took time -- even with the computer's help matching patterns, but it started to seem likely that the two were so straight-laced it made vulcans look like party animals. But that solidity of routine was itself a pattern....

Meanwhile, nothing incredibly interesting showed itself to Raine, either. Both men had been in good health, both exercised regularly. They always came in to their required physicals on-time, and neither had ever indulged in any sort of risky substances. But then, after a couple of hours of hard work, something did show itself. Not in the medical logs proper, but in annotations made by counselors earlier in the two officer's careers that amounted to the same thing: a likely diagnosis of OCPD, though neither man had followed up on it and the diagnosis hadn't become official.

Mateo's search proved even more frustratingly cryptic than his companions... at least at first. The biofilters were working perfectly -- engineering had sent a terse memo to that effect when queried. The system gave a point-by-point molecular analysis of patient zero's beamover to the Fenrir from the Hegland with nothing noted as out of the ordinary. Of course, because of the way that the Hesineberg compensatory system worked, it was impossible to accurately analyze everything about the pattern. To analyze, would disrupt the quantum effect taking place and disperse the matter stream throughout subspace. So, there was the data from the filters themselves, which attempted to match patterns of known contagious structures at the exact point when the matterstream began to rematerialize... and it registered clean.

But then, he found something. Not in the bio filters, but in the environmental system. A brief surge of heat, moments after the transport had been completed. It would take something more to isolate the cause, however.

Mateo had been staring at the terminal so long that the interface had begun ghosting behind his eyes—spectral readouts, molecular signatures, filtered particulate analysis. All clean. Too clean. His fingers drummed absently against the console as he scrolled back through the biofilter logs, searching for an inconsistency that didn’t exist.

It wasn’t there. Engineering’s report had been irritatingly precise. No anomalous particles, no flagged pathogens, no unexpected residuals in the transporter’s compensatory buffer. The Heisenberg compensators had done their job flawlessly. Too flawlessly.

Which meant whatever had breached containment hadn’t registered as a contaminant at all.

His eyes narrowed. He switched to environmental telemetry, refining the temporal window to the precise moment Patient Zero had been transported aboard. Show me something real.

And there it was.

A thermal signature. Two, in fact.

His spine straightened slightly as he filtered out residual heat sources, isolating the spikes. One originated from the patient’s rematerialized form, which wasn’t unexpected—energy conversion during transport often resulted in localized thermal fluctuations as a byproduct of quantum reassembly. But the second?

The second was more interesting.

It had manifested at the boundary layer of the forcefield itself. A secondary heat signature, distinct from background levels, concentrated along the outermost edges of the quarantine field. Mateo’s fingers hovered over the console before keying in a more detailed spectral breakdown. Heat transference through an electromagnetic containment barrier wasn’t unheard of—but an active interaction? That was something else.

His lips parted slightly in thought before pressing into a thin line. Something had reacted upon rematerialization.

He swiped through the interface, tightening the parameters, refining the energy differentials. If it were chemical, he’d expect residue. If it were purely thermal, it wouldn’t have registered twice. But something had caused a measurable delta in emitted heat between patient and forcefield.

He didn’t look up when he finally spoke. “Forget the biofilters—something triggered an anomalous heat event inside the containment field.” His voice was low, threaded with sharp-edged focus, curiosity laced with irritation at the lack of immediate answers. “One from the patient’s rematerialization, which tracks. But the second? The forcefield itself. It wasn’t just dissipating energy—it was reacting.”

His gaze flicked toward the holographic patient behind the shimmering containment field, then back to the console, where the heat signature lingered on the screen.

Something had interacted with the quarantine field. And whatever it was, it hadn’t left a trace.

“I want to know what that reaction was.”

Raine tilted her head at the words, clearly considering it for a long moment as she watched the screen. "Heisenberg compensators would mitigate most things. Unless they were faulty, which...would have a host of problems," she said, but more to herself than anyone else. Theorising. She wasn't really aware of those around her as she moved a gloved finger to tap her own chin.

"Could always been have something piggybacked during rematerialisation. Measurable energy is only measurable for what we know and can measure. There's theories of other waves and energies we aren't able to track, some which might even be sentient..." Raine turned away and went back to a console to work. "Energy is neither created or destroyed. Whatever caused the reaction, the...heat surge...is still somewhere. Absorbed into the forcefield could be a possibility, which might mean it could spread to anyone here."

Mateo’s eyes flicked toward Raine as she spoke, watching the way her thoughts spooled outward, spiraling toward theoretical edges. He wasn’t one to dismiss a theory outright—especially not one that aligned with observable data—but his mind gravitated toward the measurable, the testable.

“Something piggybacked during rematerialization,” he echoed, his tone neutral, more dissecting the concept than agreeing with it outright. His fingers hovered over his console before keying in a fresh series of parameters. “If it’s still somewhere, it left an imprint. We just need to find it before we start assuming it can spread.”

His focus sharpened, narrowing to the interface in front of him. “If the forcefield absorbed energy, there should be a decay curve. Containment fields don’t just hold matter; they regulate electromagnetic interactions. The energy had to go somewhere—it didn’t just vanish.”

A slight furrow in his brow. “Unless it did.”

That was what gnawed at him. The transporter logs had no residual contamination. The forcefield itself shouldn’t have registered a second heat spike. Energy didn’t simply disappear—but if it had transferred somewhere else, they needed to figure out where before it started playing by new rules.

He tapped a command into the console, isolating spectral fluctuations within the forcefield’s logs, looking for any anomaly—any ripple—left behind in the containment system.

“Let’s confirm the decay rate first,” he said, glancing toward Raine. “If we’re dealing with something that transferred into the field, we should be able to see an energy dissipation pattern. If we’re not?” His lips pressed together. “Then we need a new hypothesis.”

Astrid studied the biological data from the science team that was scrolling steadily across her screen, a quiet urgency flickering in her belly. At the same time as she was proud of the work her team was doing, and impressed by the scenario the computer had generated for them, she felt herself caught up in the puzzle and tension of the moment as if this were all real.


Aristede returned from his examination of Veenhold's quarters and private journal; he walked over to Lieutenant Nyx and waited to be recognized. It took Astrid a moment to realize that the psychologist had returned. The computer was doing a damn good job at this scenario. She had been analyzing medical information for the better part of the day and nothing had clarified itself yet. So she was sending along information to her teams and orchestrating the search process in-between further attempts at research. After all, this was a test for her ability to command as much as it was for anything else.

She blinked at Aristede and put down the PADD she had been staring at. "Doctor? Did you find something?"

"Veenhold was obsessive about order," Aristede reported. "Everything in quarters is precisely put away, hangars are equidistant, everything is folded, everything has a place. Until recently. Understand that obsessives can't let go of an obsession easily, if at all. It's important to their well-being, the patterns they develop. So, it was surprising to me to see that recently, Veenhold changed almost completely. Dirty clothes on the floor. His journal tossed aside with no recent entries. It's as though he suddenly became a different person, one who no longer felt the obsessive compulsion."

"Well, that could just be the symptoms taking hold. But..." there was something there. "But I guess I'd have expected someone with that intense of a compulsive personality to... check in with sickbay if they felt that something was off. Or am I reading too much into the mental state, here?"

"Agreed. He wouldn't be able to let go of these behaviors so easily. Going to Sickbay if he felt ill would be in keeping with his need for order. And yet," Aristede said with a slight shake of his head, "he did none of that. It's as though he suddenly became someone else for wont of a better way of expressing it. But a personality disorder of that magnitude would have shown up in our testing. There would be indicators to watch out for."

Verity nodded in agreement with his assessment, the analysis making sense from what they'd seen. Even if this was just a simulation, it had still felt strange rifling through someone's personal life. It was necessary of course, but it didn't stop the slight wave of embarrassment he felt from it. "He also hadn't eaten for a day before he was taken ill," he offered in case it was of use. "Either he had no appetite, or it wasn't important."

Moving towards the scientific huddle, Alexion snapped his gloves off, a general look of 'unimpressed' settling on his features. To be fair, it was his resting work face. "I have worked through a new batch of testing, the results have been sent to your stations," he confirmed with a terse nod towards their consoles. He settled his now ungloved hands onto his hips, his tall frame settling his presence in beyond his taciturn nature. "I found very little to add from the first batch though. There are no signs of bacterial or viral infection. What we can see is that the deterioration speeds up the longer the patient remains comatose."

Ember drifted over from checking the vitals and treating the patients, glancing over the scientists' shoulder to glance at the controls. In her previous life before being a counsellor, she'd been a medical doctor, her expertise being in exotic diseases, given her past experience. But he was right...the results scrolling dispassionately across the screen showed no such organic sign of infection.

Mateo barely registered the shifting movement around him as more data filtered through his interface. He was locked in, eyes tracking every fluctuating readout with sharp, unyielding focus. The numbers told a story—one that didn’t align with anything conventional.

The microbiological screenings were pristine. No viral sequences, no bacterial invaders, no foreign pathogens lurking in the bloodstream or cerebrospinal fluid. Not even an anomalous protein misfolding that might indicate prion disease. And yet, the neural deterioration was accelerating. The longer the patient remained comatose, the faster the breakdown. Not random, not static. Progressive.

His jaw tensed slightly as he toggled between data streams. A degenerative process without an identifiable agent? That meant one of two things—either they were dealing with a completely unknown class of pathogen, or this wasn’t a disease at all.

Then there was Veenhold.

OCPD wasn’t a condition that simply… stopped. Compulsions were engrained through years of reinforced neural pathways, strengthened by repetitive dopamine-serotonin feedback loops. Even with severe illness, those behaviors should have persisted. He should have stacked his boots before collapsing, should have folded his uniform even as his body shut down. The fact that he hadn’t suggested something far more invasive than simple neurological distress.

His fingers hesitated for a fraction of a second before continuing their rapid, fluid motions over the console. The heat signature. That was the anomaly.

One surge from the patient himself. Expected—transport energy conversion often resulted in localized thermal fluctuations upon rematerialization. But the second? The second had manifested at the precise moment the forcefield engaged.

Mateo pulled up the energy dispersal logs and cross-referenced them with known forcefield interactions. The numbers didn’t add up. This wasn’t passive heat dissipation. This was a reaction.

Something had happened in that instant—something that shouldn’t have been possible.

"Alright," he murmured, voice low, edged with quiet intensity. "If this isn’t microbial, then we need to start looking at energy-based neurophysiology. The brain isn’t just a biological system—it’s electrochemical. If something altered its oscillatory patterns, disrupted ion channels, or interfered with neural entrainment, we wouldn’t see immune activation. We’d just see—" He gestured vaguely at the screen, at the data that wasn’t adding up.

He inhaled through his nose, steady and measured, before exhaling again.

"The heat event. If it carried an electromagnetic component, it could have altered synaptic conductivity, maybe even triggered cortical disinhibition. That would explain the personality shift before symptoms even manifested. If the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate pathways were compromised, impulse control, compulsive regulation—hell, even identity stability—could be affected without any biochemical markers."

His fingers moved again, pulling up a new analysis—tracking residual electromagnetic variance inside the quarantine zone.

“If that forcefield interaction carried a spectral signature, we need to isolate it. Charge distribution, ionization potential, coherence fluctuations—whatever hit the system left an imprint.” He exhaled sharply, pressing his tongue briefly against the back of his teeth.

He could see three possibilities, none of them comforting.

One: An undetectable exotic particle interaction. Something that had slipped past the biofilters not because it wasn’t there, but because Starfleet’s scanning matrices weren’t calibrated to recognize it.

Two: A low-frequency neurodisruptive waveform. Electromagnetic interference at the wrong amplitude could act like a cognitive disruptor, subtly eroding higher-brain functions before physical symptoms appeared.

Three: The most disturbing thought—something self-propagating. If this wasn’t biological, if it wasn’t a toxin, then it was possible that the event itself was the contagion.

He leaned slightly forward, scanning the incoming results.

"If this thing left a signal, we’ll find it."

And if it hadn’t?

Then they were dealing with something they weren’t equipped to see.

TBC:


Crewman Mateo Gardel
Medical Science Specialist
USS Fenrir

Lieutenant JG Lovisa Montague
Science Officer
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)

Crewman Raine Ni-ya
Science
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Hanlon)

Lieutenant Astrid Nyx
Chief Medical Officer
USS Fenrir

Lieutenant Aristede Steele
Chief Counsellor
USS Fenrir

Verity Thorne
Chaplain
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)

Dr. Alexion Wylde
Medical
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)

Dr. Ember Locksley
Counsellor
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)

 

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