What Does Not Kill Us- Chapter 15

What Does Not Kill Us

by Thalia Drogna

Rating: R
Genre: Action/Adventury, Angst, Hurt/Comfort

Disclaimer: I don’t own these characters, I’m just borrowing them

~~~

Chapter 15

Archer was intrigued. He had gone down to Engineering for a status report from Lieutenant Hess to find her getting together sound modulation equipment to take to Commander Tucker’s quarters. She had detailed a crewman to take it to Trip and set it up but Archer volunteered to do it instead. Now he found himself watching Trip as he scribbled equations on a piece of paper, wondering what his Chief Engineer had planned.

Phlox sat at Trip’s computer terminal going over his scans of the nanoprobes. When Trip had described his plan to the doctor, Phlox had been a little sceptical but he hadn’t come up with any reason not to let the engineer try it yet.

“Trip, are you going to explain this to me or do I have to try to read your hand writing,” said Archer, picking up one of Trip’s discarded note pads.

“Sorry, Captain, just give me a moment to finish these calculations and then I’ll explain,” said Trip.

The door buzzer sounded and Trip shouted for the visitor to enter. It was Hoshi.

“Hi Hoshi,” said Trip, barely looking up from his mathematics.

“I see Lieutenant Hess got your equipment together,” said Hoshi.

“Yeah, the Captain brought it up for me,” replied Trip. “Okay, I think we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be.”

“Would someone please tell me what is going on?” said Archer.

“I think I may have worked out how to reprogram the nanoprobes. I’ve been studying the schematics and I don’t pretend to have it all worked out but I think we can use high frequencies to give the nanoprobes instructions. The main problem is, I don’t speak their language, so that’s why I’ve asked Hoshi to help us,” said Trip.

“And the equipment is to generate the high frequencies?” said Archer.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Trip. “The only problem is that we don’t know what frequencies to use, so we’re going to perform some experiments and see what happens. T’Pol modified a scanner so we can detect any changes in the nanoprobes.”

“Don’t you think this is a bit dangerous? You don’t know what those nanoprobes might do to you if you hit the wrong frequency. For all you know they might start attacking your body,” said Archer.

“Phlox and I have discussed it,” said Trip, matter of factly, “I can’t think of any other way to test this out. I’ve done all the stuff on paper I can and I think I’ve been able to isolate the frequencies that they’ll respond to, but that’s it. I’ve gone as far as I can with the theory, and I’m the only test subject we have.”

“If you’re sure that you want to go ahead with this, then, I guess we should get started,” said Archer.

“Don’t worry, Captain, I will be on hand to monitor Mr Tucker’s condition. Right let’s have you lying down on the bed, Commander,” said Phlox. Trip had been sitting in an armchair with a table in front of him, so Archer helped him to hop to the bed on his good leg. The bio monitors were still set up and Phlox briefly checked that they were reading correctly. Hoshi positioned the speakers for the sound modulation equipment so that they pointed at the bed.

“Okay, Hoshi, let’s give it a go,” said Trip when he was settled and everything was in place. Phlox picked up the modified scanner and started to monitor the nanoprobes.

“Okay, Commander, I’ll start with the lower end of the range and incorporate a basic modulation,” said Hoshi. Trip nodded.

“I can’t hear anything,” said Archer.

“The frequencies we’re using are too high for humans to hear. Hell, even Porthos wouldn’t be able to hear this,” said Trip.

“There is a definite reaction,” said Phlox. “Their internal structure seems to be rearranging itself.”

“At least we know the theory works. Try another frequency, Hoshi. One of them has got to be the off button,” said Trip. “This could take a while, Captain, you don’t have to hang around.”

“I’ll stay, if you don’t mind,” replied Archer.

Two hours later they had gone through most of the range that Trip had identified. Hoshi was making progress with working out what the combinations and modulations of the frequencies did to the nanoprobes but so far they hadn’t found the one that disabled them.

“Okay, try the next one Hoshi,” said Trip.

“Yes, sir,” said Hoshi and cycled the frequency. Trip’s body jerked and his eyes closed. An alarm on the bio monitors sounded.

“Trip!” shouted Archer. Phlox rapidly prepared a hypospray as Trip went into convulsions. He pressed it to Trip’s neck.

“Hoshi, go back to the previous one,” said Archer urgently as he held Trip down so that Phlox could work. Hoshi pressed buttons on the console in front of her quickly, her face registering only shock.

“His heart has gone into fibrillation,” said Phlox. The convulsions had subsided but Trip’s chest was fluttering in an unusual rhythm. Phlox loaded another hypospray from his kit and injected it directly into Trip’s chest. He picked up the scanner and checked Trip’s vital signs. Phlox breathed a sigh of relief, “he’s stabilised.”

Archer sat down on the end of the bed. “I think that’s the end of the experiment for today,” he said.

“Is he going to be okay?” asked Hoshi, looking very worried.

“He will be fine, Ensign,” said Phlox, “I expect he may have a few bruises but apart from that he should have no ill effects.”

“What caused this?” asked Archer.

“According to my data, the nanoprobes started sending out electrical signals. It confused his body and disrupted the rhythm of his heart. The anti-arrhythmic that I gave him settled his heart back into sinus rhythm and the nanoprobes have returned to their previous state,” said Phlox.

“Will it happen again?” asked Archer.

“Not as long as we avoid that particular combination of frequencies,” said Phlox.

Archer nodded. Trip stirred slightly and groaned. He opened his eyes, blinked at the light and closed them again. He put his left arm over his eyes and sighed.

“We hit a bum note, huh?” said Trip in a weak voice.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” said Archer. “How do you feel?”

“Like I just went ten rounds with King Kong and lost,” said Trip, uncovering his eyes to look at his commanding officer. Archer smiled. Only Trip could have a brush with death and make a joke afterwards about it.

“What happened?” asked Trip. Phlox explained and Trip nodded. “I wonder what the point of that mode is,” he said. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense to kill the host.”

“I think we should leave the Commander to get some rest,” said Phlox. “We can resume our tests tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty beat,” said Trip. “You collate your data for me and we’ll go over it tomorrow before we start again.”

“No problem, Commander,” said Hoshi, she packed up the equipment and collected up her data padd and left Trip to rest. Phlox and Archer both left soon after Hoshi. It wasn’t long before Trip gave up trying to read his book, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Trip dreamt. At first it was the usual stuff that had been the main preoccupation of his dreams for the past few weeks, being tortured by the Xindi, and then the dark, cold, metal place. He looked for a way out but couldn’t find it. But then the cold metal place took on a different feeling, someone or something was whispering to him.

“1110010100 10001 01010 10001110 00010010 01100 1000011110 10000111100101010 011100,” said the voice. It was hard for him to hear it, the whispering was so quiet, but it was there. “1011 001010 1000100111 10101 11101 011101 011 011100101010001010”

“Hey, stop it, I’m not a computer,” he said. Binary code, he thought, what computers speak to each other. The whispering continued though, always the string of ones and zeros and as it continued Trip realised that it wasn’t just ones and zeros to him anymore, he was beginning to understand some of it. Finally he knew what it meant, the nanoprobes were talking to him in his sleep.

****

Trip woke with a start. Surely it had been a dream. His friends in the academy had joked that he could read the thoughts of machines, he was just so good at fixing them it had really seemed that way sometimes. They’d even made up a word for it, saying Tucker was tech-pathic. He hadn’t ever thought that he’d wake up one day with a whole load of binary code running around in his head and know what it meant without having to run it through a computer first. It must have been a dream, the human brain just didn’t work that way.

It was still there though, if he concentrated really hard he could hear it. It hadn’t been a dream. The nanoprobes were telling him things. They were telling him their population numbers, their die off rate, their current configuration, their programming and a hundred other things that they monitored constantly. He quickly asked the computer to turn the lights on, awkwardly stood on his good foot and then grabbed his schematics of the nanoprobes from his desk. As he sat on the bed again, he knew that the schematic that he had on the piece of paper in front of him was not what the nanoprobes looked like now, those simple nanoprobes had turned into something else. He’d been right, sabotage was not the nanoprobes’ primary function. The Xindi had jumped at the chance to use them as a weapon against Enterprise but that isn’t what they had been designed to do. They were considerably more sophisticated than T’Pol and Phlox had originally thought, it was obvious now that what T’Pol had seen on her scans was just one of their many configurations.

He grabbed his pad and pencil from the desk and immediately began to redraw the diagrams. He looked over at the chronometer, it was oh four hundred, early morning and well before he’d usually be up. He couldn’t go back to sleep though, not with a new problem to solve. What had caused the nanoprobes to start talking to him and how come he could hear what they had to say. More to the point what did this new configuration do? It could easily be that the nanoprobes had now been programmed to kill people or eat plastic or something else that would be equally horrific. He’d think this through before he tried any more practical experiments, especially after last night’s “shocking” experience. He smiled at his own pun and got down to work.

Oddly the constant whispering in his head was comforting rather than disconcerting. He had quickly discovered that the nanoprobes were happy to help him with his mathematics. He had been doing sums in his head and with the help of his beloved slide rule when one of the voices in his head had become louder than the other and told him the answer to the equation he was doing. He didn’t accept it at first, how could they be helping him with the equations, but when he’d worked it through he discovered that the voice had been right.

He got the shock of his life when the nanoprobes gave him the answer to another equation and, without thinking, he’d mentally said “thank you”, only to receive the machine equivalent of “don’t mention it” back. His surprised reaction was to make use of some of his more colourful vocabulary. This was getting way too weird, he had to be going mad, it was the only explanation. He’d been under a lot of stress recently, and he wouldn’t be the first person to be a little disturbed after a period of imprisonment. It was one thing for the nanoprobes to act as a glorified calculator, but it was quite another for them to be polite with it.

Hess had set up the com in his quarters to use voice activation once they’d discovered that he wouldn’t be able to touch anything electronic until the nanoprobe problem was solved. “Activate com,” he said, a soft beep told him the com was active. “Tucker to Phlox.”

“Go ahead Commander,” replied Phlox, his voice calm and reassuring. Phlox’s monitor’s in sick bay had told him that the Commander had had a bad dream and was now awake. They were also telling him that the Commander was now scared about something, his heart and pulse rate were up. It wasn’t the readings of a panic attack though, this was a more measured response. He wondered what was going on to make the Commander call him in the early hours of the morning when he should have been asleep. Denobulans needed very little sleep but humans needed eight hours a day or, to borrow Commander Tucker’s phrase, they got “cranky”.

“Doc, I think you’d better come to my quarters. Something weird is going on, I think… I think I’m hearing voices,” Trip said. Even as he said it, he wished he hadn’t.

“I’m on my way, Commander,” replied Phlox, his voice still calm as before. Trip guessed that he must be used to panicky calls from sick people, he flopped back on the bed and tried to block out the incessant chatter that he knew he shouldn’t be hearing. Why does this always have to happen to me, he thought as he closed his eyes.

Phlox arrived at Trip’s quarters with T’Pol’s modified scanner. Trip sat on the edge of the bed and explained what had happened, the dream and then the voices in his head.

“I swear, Doc, I really think I must be going mad. I mean it’s just not possible,” said Trip.

“You should know by now, Commander, that out here very little is impossible,” said Phlox. “I believe you humans have a phrase ‘there are more things in heaven and earth’, hmmm?”

“Yeah, Shakespeare, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.” quoted Trip. “They were talking about ghosts though, not nanoprobes.”

“But the concept still applies,” said Phlox as he took more scans.

“It’s just the idea of a machine being able to communicate with something biological. I mean it’s not a new concept, Star Fleet’s been trying to get some sort of thought controlled interface together for years but it isn’t anything like what’s going on in my head. It’s like they understand what I’m thinking and they reply. I didn’t even ask them to help with the equations, they just did it. If it was basic commands, do this, do that and I really had to think about it, that I could believe, but this is just… amazing. And kind of scary.”

“Well, Commander, I don’t think that you’re going mad. All your readings are normal, taking into account that you are still recovering from the injuries that you sustained,” said Phlox. “You’re also holding a perfectly rational conversation with me.”

“So you mean this is real?” said Trip in disbelief.

“As far as I can tell, yes,” replied Phlox.

“Oh great, this is all I need, as if my head wasn’t cluttered enough. I guess I’d better get used to it,” said Trip, holding his head in his hands.

“Perhaps you should try to go back to sleep, Commander. I don’t think there is anymore that we can do about this until we have analysed the data from yesterday’s experiments,” said Phlox.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right. Perhaps I can persuade the nanoprobes to shut up so I can get some sleep,” he said to the doctor and in his head he thought at the nanoprobes “You hear me? I’d like some peace and quiet, okay?” It surprised him when suddenly the voices stopped. “Hey, I think they heard me,” he said to Phlox.

“Really? How fascinating,” said Phlox.

He thought back at the nanoprobes, “you are still there right?” and they replied, sending him information again. “Okay, I was just testing. I really would like to get some sleep now.” The flow of data stopped and his head felt oddly quiet.

“I’ll return tomorrow when you are properly rested and we can resume our investigations,” said Phlox and he bid the Commander good night. Trip settled down and eventually fell back asleep.

His last thought before he fell asleep was “what the hell is the Captain going to think of this?”

Continue to Chapter 16

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