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“Three hours ago his mind began a surge in activity – mostly meaningless signals,” the doctor said to Verena.
“We’ve seen this before,” she replied.
“This time it’s different. The signals coalesced. We’re able to discern specific concepts and even images from the neural activity.” The man stopped, his face pale.
Verena understood the signs on him; he was frightened. Disturbed, even.
Dr. Genson was one of her top doctors in the field of Medical Krahteology, a man with a reputation for being hard to rattle. But he was due for burnout, she thought – few lasted more than ten years in the field, and he was nearing his eigth. But this still had to be severe to be disturbing him so clearly.
“Show me the images.”
The man hesitated. “With respects, Doctor-Admiral, after . . . reviewing the mind-scans, I don’t recommend-“
“Show me,” she ordered.
Genson nodded, just barely tilting his head, and stepped into the side office.
“I gave strict orders for no one else to review them,” he said. “There are only these print-outs – the digital records had worrying data signatures according to the watchdog AI, so I had them deleted.”
It was a common and frustrating occurrence; data of certain kinds in their field tended to corrupt themselves when stored digitally. There was no accounting for it, but keeping even the corrupted data had been known to cause para-psychological issues in AIs that had access to them.
They had numerous ‘watchdog’ simulated AIs whose sole purpose was to be exposed to potentially dangerous data and then monitored for corruption.
It made them more akin to the parakeets that miners used to take with them into tunnels than watchdogs, she mused.
Genson took a folder and offered it to her. He turned away.
Opening it, she looked at the images discerned from Michal Denso’s brain.
They were, at first glance, merely geometric shapes in various colors; it was common for preliminary mind-scans to give such results, but the time stamps showed these were from well past the point they should have been formulating as proper images.
Unless these were proper images. The longer she looked at them, the more she began to see the detail that she had at first glance glossed over.
The shapes were wrong. Viewing them was causing her heart rate to rise, even though she felt no fear. There was a depth to the image, as if it was not two-dimensional, but deeper than that.
It was all in her mind, of course.
Or . . . was it?
Sometimes she had had cause to think on the changes to her mind, to wonder if the alterations to her brain had affected her in ways beyond mere damage.
Was she seeing more than others?
Because the image no longer looked like an image. It was like a portal into a deeper space, three-dimensional when logic and reality said it was incapable of being that.
And it looked like . . . a place. A ship.
A corridor.
It was on a ship, for certain, but nothing about it was right; wherever she looked at it, it seemed nearly normal, with just some hint of being off, but in the margins of her visions everything seemed to shift, to move in ways that were a mockery of reality.
She moved to the next image. This one was in shades that brought to mind congealing blood; yet even in the parts that were all the same shade there was detail, images hidden in ways that she could not have described.
Something deeper, something further in. She focused harder on it, knowing it was unwise, but lacking the ability to be afraid.
This was not a corridor. No, this . . . it was a room.
A berth on a starship.
Perhaps on the Sunspot?
She struggled to tear her eyes off it, but while she could no longer fear she still knew that she had to continue her work.
There was one last image, and she hesitated before looking at it. A voice in her mind reminded her that there was danger here; very real, and not imagined.
Verena looked at the last image.
This one was not at all like the others; it was as clear as a photograph, clearer than any image she’d ever seen scanned from a mind.
It was a Dessei. Its body was dessicated, as if it had died in the vacuum of space and been exposed to the radiation of a star for an era.
Its eyes were hollow sockets, massive holes that dipped down into the depths of its skull. Its mouth had been detached entirely, leaving just a third empty gaping hole.
“What is this last image?” she asked.
“We . . . we don’t know, ma’am,” Dr. Genson said. “I’ve never seen an image so clear, and we have no idea why this in particular would appear in his mind-“
“Has Denso said anything?” she asked. “Or have we detected any mental audio?”
The man swallowed. “No psychic audibles, but he spoke out loud when this incident began.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that ‘we don’t belong here’. No one was actually in with him at the time, so we assumed it was simply an old memory.”
Verena said nothing, and stuck the photos back into the folder. “Seal these and store them under my authorization.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Giving the folder to him, she went back into the other room.
“Has there been any change in his mass?” she asked.
“Yes, doctor,” one nurse said. “An increase of 371.4% since this incident occurred; still within structural safety for the room.”
She looked at the data herself. The man’s body had no apparent change in weight or density, yet gravimetric detectors noted that the mass present in the area he occupied had increased to nearly ten tons.
That much change, in three hours.
“Measure krahteon activity,” she ordered.
There was a silence.
“Doctor? We don’t have that equipment in here . . .”
“Then bring it,” she said.
“With respects, doctor, altered patients have never been known to cause krahteonic emissions . . .” Genson began.
“Be quiet,” she told him. “Have you ordered it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the nurse said. “We have a drone with basic krahteon scanners being sent here from the external sensor suite.”
Verena did not reply, merely watching Denso. The man was not moving on his bed, his eyes closed. If not for the sensors that said he still lived, she could have taken him to be a corpse.
Perhaps he was, in reality.
The drone arrived.
In silence, it was sent into the room.
“Beginning sensor feed, doctor. Okay, we’re getting- oh my god.”
The sensor suite on the drone was simplistic, but reliable. It was, in essence, a micro-grid of artificially-created neurons and sensory cells akin to those in human eyes, skin, and nostrils.
The grid functioned by detecting alterations in the artifical cells.
Small amounts of krahteons functioning almost like a cancer; affecting cells that . . . changed.
The effect was typically subtle, but now . . .
Now they were watching the changes in real time.
“Emissions are over 20KR . . .” the nurse said, panic in her voice.
20 KR. Forty times the safety threshold for personnel.
“Everyone, calmly leave the chamber,” she ordered. “Send all data to a remote station and take shifts of no more than fifteen minutes observing the feed.”
The nurses and doctors almost stumbled over each other to get out of the room, and Verena went last.
Dr. Genson was waiting for her outside, his eyes wide, his face blanched nearly white.
“I want all staff who have been near the patient in the last three hours to get full safety tests,” she told him.
“And what about Denso? My god, this is the first time I’ve seen . . .”
“Focus, Doctor,” she chided. “Seal the area. No one goes in without my permission after this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the man said.
Verena headed for the door.
“Doctor Urle – where are you going?” Genson asked.
Turning deliberately, she stared at the doctor.
“I must to speak to Captain Brooks,” she said.
Emotions roiled across the man’s face, panic foremost among them.
She found herself disappointed. The man’s emotions were running him, and she no longer had tolerance for that.
“Dr. Genson, focus. Are you capable of carrying out my instructions?” she demanded.
The man saw no pity on her face, and took a moment, forcing himself to calm. Fear was still in his eyes, but he managed to compose his other features.
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her.
“Good. Don’t disappoint me, doctor.”
She left without another word.
Other Terrestrial 