Star Trek: Orders of Magnitude

CHAPTER FOUR

As soon as he saw the lines snag, Lieutenant Marc Daniels started reeling in Riker's tether. It didn't take much. Once the collision had played itself out, Perrim and Riker were adrift in space. After the first tug on the line, they floated toward him, so much dead weight, tumbling through the void in a morbid embrace. He reeled in the line as efficiently as a sailor.

He prayed they weren't dead. Each was special to him in their own way. Daniels had been on the Enterprise-E a relatively short time, taking over the tactical position once held by Worf, the first Klingon to serve in Starfleet. He had large shoes to fill. Riker had been instrumental in helping Daniels feel wanted, making sure the crew saw him as his own man and not in the impossible role of replacing their friend.

His friendship with Perrim was even closer. As the two newest members of the bridge crew, they had bonded, trying to find their places as newcomers among the legendary officers of the Enterprise. The crew had been through so much together, carving out a place in the annals of history. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying to work alongside a figure like Picard, Riker, or Data.

Although Perrim had joined the crew after Daniels, she had assimilated far more easily than he had, and he'd learned a lot from her.

He hoped he would have a chance to learn more.

They were within arm's reach now, but when Daniels tried to pull their unmoving bodies into the airlock, the tether ran out. So much of the line was snarled between the two of them that Perrim's line wouldn't reach. He needed another meter to get them inside to safety.

And there was no time. Daniels sized up the situation swiftly, the blood on Perrim's faceplate, the crack in Riker's. He had to get them inside now. He climbed out onto the hull so that he could maneuver better. Carefully, he unhooked Perrim's tether where it connected to her suit. But Riker's was tangled too badly to remove. The suits contained simple cutting lasers, but without power...

Then he remembered. He rotated the intertwined pair as gently as he could, and breathed a sigh of relief. The satchel was still securely affixed to Perrim's suit. He unzipped it, taking great care to keep the contents from floating free, and retrieved one of the phasers. Rezipping the satchel, he turned his attention to the tether. Setting the phaser to its lowest cutting intensity, he fired.

The line disintegrated and came loose. Daniels reeled for a moment as their combined mass swelled against him, his balance failing. One of his hands held the phaser; the other grasped Perrim's arm. Daniels managed to snag a handhold on the ship's hull before they all drifted away, but he lost his grip on the phaser.

No time to work it out. Dragging Riker and Perrim with him, he crawled back to the airlock. Once they were safely inside, he began cranking the outer hatch shut, a process that seemed to take forever. Finally, through his gloves, he felt the last safety latch snap into place. It took a moment to steer around his comatose colleagues and begin opening the inner hatch.

He tried to guess at how long it had been since he saw Riker slam into Perrim. Starfleet trained its officers to cope with loss of atmosphere for brief periods. In a vacuum, it was impossible to hold a lungful of breath. The absolute lack of pressure made such an act nearly suicidal. But how long had Riker been losing air?

How many minutes of oxygen deprivation until brain damage set in? Daniels couldn't remember.

As soon as Daniels started to open the inner airlock door, he felt the crewmen on the other side start cranking as well. With three sets of arms working the valve-like mechanism, the door opened much faster than the outer door had.

As soon as the hatch slid open enough to let air from the ship into the lock, Daniels stopped working the crank, and turned to his fallen comrades. He removed Perrim's helmet first; droplets of blood floated out from her suit like a cloud, beading into tiny scarlet spheres in the null-gravity.

Her face was badly bruised; her nose and mouth seemed to be the source of the blood. He scrambled to free Riker's helmet, as he shouted through the opening hatch: "I have two wounded here." He wasn't sure if they could hear him through his own helmet.

Riker looked blue and his eyes were puffy. Daniels grabbed his shoulders, pulled Riker's face up to his. A small whisper of condensation formed on Daniel's faceplate. The commander was breathing.

Daniels ripped his own helmet off, and returned to the airlock crank, putting his weight into it. "I have wounded," he shouted.

"We heard you. Medics are on the way," someone replied from the other side.

* * *

The light from the planet was dimming as the Enterprise's orbit approached the terminator line -- the place where night became day. Staring out the window, Picard tried to guess when they would lose the light. An hour? Two?

Beverly Crusher floated up behind him, touched his arm.

"They're going to be all right," she said.

"Good," Picard said. "How is Commander Riker?"

"He'll be a bit hoarse, and he's got two black eyes from the depressurization, but he's fine otherwise. When he realized he was losing air, he took a deep breath and tried to time his exhalation to the rate at which his suit pressure was dropping. It was a good idea. If he'd done it perfectly, he wouldn't even have the sore throat. But he tried to hold on to his last gasp of air when the pressure hit zero, and the expulsion was pretty rough."

"Is he fit for duty?"

"He looks worse than he probably feels. Under the circumstances, I'm not going to put up an argument," Crusher said with a wan smile. "The best thing we can do for his health is get sickbay working again."

"What about Perrim?" Picard asked.

Crusher frowned. "Ensign Perrim has a broken nose, a few broken ribs, a bit lip. She was very lucky. If she'd been any closer to the ship, she could have been pulverized by the impact."

"Is she in much pain?" Picard asked.

"She's not conscious yet. I have a roomful of injured people here. I have to be extremely careful about rationing the supplies we have. Especially since we could have more casualties ahead of us."

"Understood."

"Perrim could be facing other complications," the doctor said. "The medical scanner she brought back seems to be malfunctioning. I can get simple readings like body-temperature, but I can't pick up any biosigns on anyone."

"Damn. I hope the rest of the equipment is in working order," Picard said. "I'd hate to have gone through all this for nothing."

"I want to examine Perrim's symbiont," Crusher said. "With the scanner malfunctioning, I can only take simple readings like temperature and broken bones. I see no immediate signs that the symbiont has been injured, but I'd like to be sure."

Alya Perrim was a joined Trill. The Trills were a race that lived in cooperation with a wormlike species. A joined Trill consisted of a host body, Alya in this case, and a symbiont, Perrim. The Perrim symbiont had a lifespan that could last hundreds of years. Barring mischance, Alya Perrim would live out a normal humanoid lifespan of about 100 years. Perrim had lived for 170 standard years; Alya, just 25 years old, was Perrim's third host. When Alya died, Perrim would continue, transplanted into a new host body, creating another unique composite being who had the memories of Alya Perrim and the previous two hosts.

But the close relationship between host and symbiont presented a special set of medical problems. If the symbiont was injured or killed, the host invariably died. If the host was killed, the symbiont had to be transplanted into a new host within a matter of days, or it too would die.

"Thank you, Beverly," Picard said. "I know this is a trying situation. Hopefully, LaForge and Barclay have come up with a plan to get our power back online."

"There's another matter, Jean-Luc. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's getting colder in here. I can't see my breath yet, but if this blackout continues much longer, we're going to have to start moving people toward the center of the ship, or anywhere it might be warmer."

"It's a toss-up as to whether we'll freeze to death or suffocate," Picard said grimly. "Once we cross the terminator, it's going to get colder and darker. And the more candles we burn, the faster we spend oxygen. Either way, we've got to get our systems back online. We're running out of time on every front."

* * *

Perrim stirred, shifting uneasily into wakefulness. The first thing she realized was that she had been restrained. The second thing she realized, as her muscles instinctively tensed to free her limbs, was that every inch of her body hurt.

Only then, she remembered.

Space. The ship heaving beneath her. Blackness.

She opened her eyes. In the dim light, she could barely see.

"The bag!" she said, coughing at the roughness in her throat.

"It's OK," came a voice. "You did it."

In the fading planetary twilight, she could just make out the outline of Doctor Crusher.

"How are you feeling?"

"Oh, just great," she said. "The bag. What happened?"

"We got it," came another voice. Daniels. He softly recounted what had happened after she lost consciousness as Crusher ran the medscanner over Perrim's midsection.

"I wish I could have seen it," she said weakly. "Sounds amazing."

"I hope I never see anything like it again," Daniels said. "I thought I was going to lose both of you."

"Can't get rid of me that easy," she said.

"She needs to rest," said the doctor, interrupting gently.

Daniels nodded. "I have to go coordinate a shift change for the runners anyway," he said. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

"See if you can get the lights on by then," Perrim said. "I could use a sandwich once you get the replicators working."

"You could use more than a sandwich," Crusher said, not bothering to hide the concern in her voice. "Can you feel your symbiont?"

"We're both OK," Perrim said unconvincingly. She was feeling hazy and the sound of the doctor's voice seemed to echo at her from a distance. "I'll be fine. The captain needs me. Can you give me something to get me back on my feet?"

"Even if that was a good idea, and it's not, there is no gravity to keep you on your feet anyway," Crusher said. "You're not going back on duty until after I have a working sickbay. Until then, I don't even know how badly you've been injured."

"They need me," Perrim said.

"You should try to sleep," Crusher replied, not ungently. "That's an order, Ensign."

"I'll keep them honest until you're back, Alya," Daniels said, touching her shoulder.

"Yeah, but who's gonna keep an eye on you?" Perrim asked, as she faded back into unconsciousness.

* * *

By the time Picard reached him, Riker was already freeing himself from the restraints that kept him from floating off his impromptu hospital bed, the Ten-Forward bar.

"Are you fit for duty, Number One?" Picard asked skeptically.

"Ready, willing and able," Riker rasped. His eyes were ringed with purple bruises,

Picard clapped a hand on his shoulder.

"Good work out there, Will."

Riker smiled.

"Could've been better," he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Perrim is the one who deserves the credit. Without her, we wouldn't have those instruments."

"Both of you were instrumental," Picard said, "as well as Lieutenant Daniels. He actually submitted himself for a reprimand because he lost one of the phasers. I told him he was due for a commendation."

Riker managed a weak grin as they entered the conference room. At the table, Barclay and LaForge were each equipped with one of the shielded tricorders. Their voices were raised as they discussed their findings.

"It's impossible, Reg!" LaForge said heatedly. "I just can't accept that."

"But that's what it says!" Barclay stammered. "Um, well, I could be wrong, but I, uh, I just..."

"What's impossible?" Riker said hoarsely. "Aside from the obvious?"

LaForge and Barclay turned toward the commanding officers as they realized they were not alone. Picard and Riker climbed into chairs and gripped the table to anchor themselves.

"What have you discovered?" Picard said.

Riker reached over and took a tricorder from Barclay. He fiddled with the controls. Geordi sighed.

"Sir, the readings Commander Barclay is describing to me sound like a violation of the basic laws of physics. We had already deduced that something was interfering with quantum level phenomena. According to our preliminary scans, it sounds an awful lot like the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle is no longer in effect on this ship."

"How can that be?" Picard asked. "What are the ramifications of such a thing? It's almost unimaginable."

"How do we fix it?" Riker said, looking up from the tricorder.

"Fix it?" LaForge asked incredulously. "Fix it? Commander, the laws of physics aren't working. This isn't just the ship malfunctioning. It's like saying the universe itself is broken."

"Enough," Picard said, cutting off the exchange before it could become heated. "Commander LaForge, explain the problem for us as best you can."

"Yes, sir," LaForge said, quelling his emotional reaction. "Here's the situation as far as we can tell. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of the most basic laws of quantum physics. It states that you can't precisely measure both the position and the movement of a subatomic particle. When you're attempting to measure something that precise, there is an uncertainty, there's something elusive, and it's in that elusive space that things actually happen. Quantum particles don't follow strict laws of cause and effect the way things do at our level of reality, the macro level.

"It's that inconsistency and volatility that lies at the heart of energetic reactions, like the antimatter explosion that powers our warp engines, the atomic fusion for our auxiliary systems, or the deuterium reactions that power the impulse engines.

"Even the battery systems work at a quantum level. About 20 years ago, we switched to bilithium batteries. They're based on a derivative of dilithium, and they hold their charge at a quantum level, giving them an incredibly high storage capacity. That's why they're so reliable."

"Normally," Riker said grimly.

"Well, this situation is anything but normal," LaForge said. "Using the tricorders, we determined that the quantum fields on the ship, the fields that really define our existence, were not behaving with their normal volatility. Our biosigns, for instance. The tricorders normally scan a living creature's quantum matrix. Except there aren't any quantum matrices on the ship."

Picard felt chilled. Riker was quiet, and Barclay looked decidedly unhappy. The quantum matrix was as close as science had ever come to discovering the existence of a human soul. It wasn't the same thing, of course, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he had somehow just been damned.

"Commander Barclay was able to run some more precise scans. We decided to scan for quarks, a key component of a biomatrix. Barclay was able take a reading of a quark's position and momentum at the same time. The quarks were still there, but they aren't operating their normal state of flux. They're moving in precise, measurable patterns. There's no more uncertainty.

"We ran through a few more scans looking at other particles. The readings were consistent. I find it hard to believe, but at this moment, I cannot give you any other explanation. As far as we can determine, the Uncertainty Principle is not in effect anywhere on the ship. I would have to say it's quite likely that it's not in effect outside the ship either. Because this is an entirely unknown phenomenon, it is impossible to say how widespread the effects are."

"It could be systemwide," Riker said.

"Or sectorwide, or galaxywide, or universewide," Geordi said. "If it's happening everywhere, it would be an unprecedented disaster. And there's more."

"Great," Riker muttered.

"The effect began at the lowest quantum level, but it's moving up the hierarchy. If we can't reverse this soon, the biochemical electrical impulses in our nervous systems will stop functioning."

"At some point, our brains could simply stop," Picard said grimly. "We must find a way to reverse this effect. I sincerely hope you have some ideas."

Barclay spoke up for the first time. "Uh, well, the phasers are working. A phaser beam agitates particles at the quantum level, normally acting to disrupt their normal fields. It's possible that a sustained low-level phaser burst on a modulating frequency would stimulate quantum activity, and thus the Uncertainty Effect, within the range of the beam."

"That helps, but only on a small scale," LaForge said. "We have three working phasers. Most of our vital systems are so complex that they're spread out over a wide area. It's not enough to get engines or communications working."

"But we could cover Commander Data in a phaser beam set for wide dispersal," Picard said.

"Yes!" LaForge said, showing his first real excitement since the discussion began. "It could work. If we kept it on its lowest setting, it wouldn't do any serious damage to his systems. I'd recommend it, Captain. If anyone can help us figure a way out of this, it's Data."

"Make it so," Picard said.

* * *

A long tunnel stretched out before Data. In the far-off distance, a bright light seemed to beckon to him.

"Fascinating," Data said.

He looked down at himself and was mildly surprised to see that he was naked. The light apparently had some sort of gravitational pull, because he found himself drifting toward it. He noted a sensation of moving "up," even though the direction of the nearest source of detectable gravity automatically qualified as "down."

He examined the tunnel walls. They were composed of an unknown substance that seemed to flicker with light. Working from general parameters, Data estimated the pattern was based on an unknown fractal algorithm. That suggested the tunnel was some sort of natural phenomenon, although it could be a highly sophisticated simulation of an existing phenomenon. He reached out and attempted to touch the surface, but it was just out of his reach.

"Come into the light, Data..." a voice called eerily.

"Greetings," Data said. "You seem to have the advantage of me. What is your name? Can you explain my presence here?"

"Come into the light, Data..."

The android realized that he could not identify the language in which the words were being spoken, although he understood them quite clearly. He was uncertain if the words were even truly audible; he estimated a 74 percent chance that the "sound" was actually bypassing his ears and being fed directly into his audio-processing circuits. Data initiated a self-diagnostic routine. He attempted to make conversation while he waited for its results.

"Your voice sounds 'familiar' to me, but I cannot find a voiceprint match in my memory data banks," Data said. "Can you explain this discrepancy?"

"Come into the light, Data..."

The self-diagnostic routine finished running. According to the result, all of Data's systems were offline. This presented an interesting problem in logic, since the self-diagnostic was in itself one of his systems. If all his systems were offline, then the self-diagnostic should be offline as well. For that matter, Data reflected, his "consciousness" should not be functioning either.

Data scanned his extensive memory for information that correlated to his present circumstances. After examining and discarding several possibilities, he formulated a theory that seemed to cover his current conditions.

"Is this what humans call a 'near-death experience'?" he asked. "I have run a comparative analysis of anecdotal information from 237 Terran cultural references, and my current surroundings to conform to the general parameters described by humans who are near death. Interestingly, the same general conditions are described in Bajoran and Andorian characterizations of near-death experiences, but Klingons report a completely different perception of the..."

"Will you just come into the damn light, boy!" the voice snapped, interrupting him.

From the "tone" of the voice, Data concluded it would be wise to refrain from any further questions at this time. However, he was very curious about the fact that the voice suddenly reminded him distinctly of his creator, his "father," Doctor Noonien Soong.

Data was uncertain exactly how to propel himself into the light, but as soon as he resolved to do so, he started moving more quickly. It was exhilarating, he realized, feeling a lightness and joy that he had never before known. The light grew brighter and seemed to envelop him in flickering shapes and sensations. A beautiful precision and order suffused the patterns, as if the environment had been perfectly tailored to complement his computer mind. Tears of joy formed in his android eyes.

Data felt, incongruously, that he was finally going home. Although a measure of sadness overcame him at the thought of leaving his friends behind, even the sorrow felt right and appropriate. In the pain of parting, still he could sense the joy of something new beginning, of a whole new world that seemed to be taking shape around him.

"In the beginning, there was nothing," the voice said, and Data sensed these words were of great importance.

"Is it working?" Captain Picard asked.

Data frowned, and craned his head to look back down the tunnel, in the direction from whence he came. It was dark on the other end, and somehow he got a sensation of cold. Picard's voice seemed to reverberate from somewhere in those depths.

"I, uh, I don't know, sir. I think so. Uh, the readings seem to indicate that his quantum matrix is stabilizing." It was the voice of Commander Barclay.

Data frowned. None of his analyses of potential afterlife scenarios could logically be extended to include Reginald Barclay's presence. Data noted that his momentum toward the light had ceased. He looked back "up" and saw the beauty there. He willed himself toward it, but the pull of gravity had reversed itself and he was sinking back into the darkness, accelerating with every moment.

"Wait, I'm getting something," the voice of William Riker resonated. "He's coming around."

Data grasped futilely in the direction of the light. "Wait!" he cried. "Stop!"

* * *

The bridge was lit by the soft glow of the phaser beam that enveloped Commander Data where he sat at his bridge station. His limbs, which had been locked rigidly in their last waking last position, seemed suddenly to come unglued and Data slumped forward onto the console.

He looked up. Geordi LaForge, Riker, Barclay and Picard were standing around him, attentively.

"Data, can you hear me? Are you functioning?" LaForge asked.

"Yes, I can hear you, Geordi," Data replied in a strange tone.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Data," Picard said warmly.

Seeming disoriented, Data looked around, stopping to consider each of their faces, and then slumped once more.

"Send me back!" the android wailed, bursting into bitter tears. He buried his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably, while his friends looked on in uncomprehending horror.