CHAPTER 3
Sisko was surprised to find how much information about Upsilon Radiation was unclassified. It was more than he expected.
Sisko opened a file called "Overview," and found the history broken into several sections: Theory and Forms of Upsilon Radiation; First Experiments with Upsilon Radiation; Malicious Use of Upsilon Radiation; The Interstellar Convention on Upsilon Radiation; Theory of Gas Giant Mapping; and The Use of Upsilon Radiation in the Gas Giant Mapping Project.
Sisko started right in on Theory and Forms of Upsilon Radiation.
The history of Upsilon Radiation extended back nearly a hundred years. Its history began, not with it being discovered, but with it being hypothesized by a physicist named Yahm. He originally called it Yahm Radiation, then later called it Upsilon Radiation. It did not escape attention that the uppercase Greek letter upsilon is the same as the uppercase letter "Y," the first letter in Yahm's name.
According to Dr. Yahm's hypothesis, Upsilon Radiation would be unlike conventional radiation, which was fundamentally based in electromagnetic or particulate phenomena, or both. Upsilon Radiation would have an electromagnetic component and a particulate component, but also a gravimetric component, a sub-dimensional component and a super-dimensional component. The components would interact with each other in complex ways.
There followed a discussion of the mathematical modeling of the theorized phenomenon. Sisko found that the theoretical models were far too complicated for him to understand, so he skipped over that material. What was clear was that, technically speaking, Upsilon Radiation was not really radiation; or rather, it was more than just radiation.
As far as Sisko could tell, the theoretical models predicted how Upsilon Radiation would be expected to behave and what properties it ought to have, but did not describe how to generate it. The literature declared that generating Upsilon Radiation was difficult to do, and that the techniques for doing it were some of the most guarded secrets in the galaxy.
Considering that Upsilon Radiation has a terrifying reputation for being extraordinarily harmful, Sisko was astonished to learn that most Upsilon Radiation is harmless. The farther a life form is from the generating source of the Upsilon Radiation, the more harmless the Upsilon Radiation is to that life form. After the Upsilon Radiation has traveled about twelve hundred to three thousand kilometers from its source, the Upsilon Radiation is called type-four, and poses no known health threat. After the Upsilon Radiation has traveled another thirty to forty thousand kilometers or so, it degenerates to type-five, which is also harmless. And after the Upsilon Radiation has traveled over a million kilometers or so, it becomes "fully decoupled" and degenerates into conventional electromagnetic and gravitational waves, where it gets lost in the background radiation of the galaxy.
Before Upsilon Radiation can become harmless, however, it assumes some forms that are very harmful to organic life. Upsilon Radiation is formed in a small explosion occurring under specialized conditions. The site of the explosion is usually called "the blast source," or more simply, "the source." The force of the blast is not very powerful in itself; most of the harmfulness comes not from the blast, but from the Upsilon Radiation that is thereby generated and radiates from it.
When Upsilon Radiation is first generated, it is called type-zero, or "fully coupled." Almost immediately, less than ten centimeters from the source, the type-zero Upsilon Radiation degenerates to type-one. Type-one radiation extends about two to four meters away from the source, where it degenerates to type-two. Then, after another twenty-five to eighty meters or so, it degenerates to type-three.
Type-three is widely regarded as the worst for living beings.
Types-zero, -one and –two are all fatal. The people inside the Probe Preparation Bay were probably blasted with type-one, and the organic material of their bodies would have been vaporized even before the force of the blast reached them. Those outside the Probe Preparation Bay would have received a dose mostly of type-two, and most of them would have died without knowing what hit them.
But those who survived almost certainly absorbed a dose of type-three.
Type-three Upsilon Radiation wreaks havoc on living systems that use ion-exchange biochemistry. Living tissue having sugar-based biochemistry for protein synthesis is especially vulnerable. Organic material is affected at the quantum, sub-atomic, atomic and molecular levels, which all add up to this: a living being receiving type-three exposure will die from that exposure, but the living being will not die immediately. Rather, the living being's various physiological systems will start to degrade irreversibly. In most Humans, the nervous system and the cardiac system were most vulnerable to Upsilon exposure, though the nervous system degrades significantly faster. As a person's nervous system degrades, the person begins to experience increasing levels of discomfort, then pain. The pain eventually turns to agony, supposedly comparable to being burned by fire or being immersed in acid. Beyond a certain level of nervous system degradation, there is no way to stop the pain, except for the person's death.
Which usually follows in a matter of days.
There is no effective treatment. There is no cure.
Moving on to First Experiments with Upsilon Radiation, Sisko learned that, when Upsilon Radiation was first theorized, it was treated as a curiosity of physics. If the theoretical models were correct, Upsilon Radiation would likely be extremely hazardous close to the source of generation, but would fade to safe levels fairly quickly. There would be very few ways of generating it completely safely, assuming it could be generated at all. Nevertheless, some physicists set out to study the phenomenon, and explored ways by which it might be generated. Their work was deemed highly secret, considering the potential military applications of the phenomenon.
They succeeded in finding a way to generate Upsilon Radiation.
Their success killed them, but not before it caused them to experience unimaginable agony.
The physicists thought they had protected themselves by housing themselves in a shielded spaceship, orbiting a lifeless planet. They generated the Upsilon Radiation remotely by exploding a specially constructed device on the surface of the planet. At the time they generated the Upsilon Radiation, they were about 1,700 kilometers away.
The shielding and distance did not protect them, although it took a few days before they became aware of the effects of the exposure. When they started experiencing growing pain, they sent out frantic distress calls for medical aid. Rescuers arrived within hours, but were unable to stop the physicists' suffering and deaths.
Even more tragically, the Upsilon Radiation the physicists had generated killed not only the physicists themselves, but also others aboard the spaceship. Those others included members of their families, along with spaceship crew, research staff and support personnel. Rescuers witnessed these people suffering horribly for days, before dying. The rescuers tried numerous medications and therapies to relieve the extreme suffering, but they all failed.
Reports of the event horrified the public.
The horror amplified when it was learned that the physicists had actually constructed eight more Upsilon Radiation devices, and four of them had mysteriously gone missing.
It was with this frightening fact that the section on Malicious Use of Upsilon Radiation began.
Some years after the disaster that claims the lives of the physicists and their companions, a crazed despot used an Upsilon Radiation device to put down a rebellion. About four years after that, an unidentified spacecraft exploded as it approached the recently-declared-independent Plett Colony, irradiating 30,000 people and eventually killing everyone in the Colony. And then a few months after that, a terrorist detonated an Upsilon Radiation device near a Starfleet installation. All three incidents resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and the reports of the victims' suffering were ghastly.
Sisko skipped over some of the details of the suffering and the unsuccessful efforts to save the victims. The details were too horrifying and too sad.
It was presumed that these three incidents were caused by three of the missing devices, obtained from black marketers. There were reports that the only other missing device had been re-captured before it could be used, although these reports were greeted with skepticism. Fear of Upsilon Radiation remained high.
Sisko moved on to the next section, which discussed The Interstellar Convention on Upsilon Radiation.
The terror caused by malicious use of Upsilon Radiation moved politicians to act. In a major diplomatic initiative involving nearly every member of the United Federation of Planets, the generation of Upsilon Radiation was declared illegal. From a military standpoint, an Upsilon Radiation-based weapon would have no practical use. For one thing, despite its ability to penetrate shielding, its range was quite limited. For another thing, it would have no independent utility. An Upsilon Radiation-based device could not be used to cut inanimate matter, like a phaser could; an Upsilon Radiation-based device could not defensively interfere with other weaponry, in the way a conventional disrupter might do; an Upsilon Radiation-based device could not be used against large-scale military infrastructure or installations, in the way a torpedo could be used.
An Upsilon Radiation-based device could have only one use, namely, to torture living beings to death.
And so, by interstellar Convention, all devices that generated or used Upsilon Radiation were to be seized and destroyed. The techniques for generating Upsilon Radiation, which were already secret, were to remain secret. The use of Upsilon Radiation was banned, on the grounds that Upsilon Radiation had no known useful function.
Until someone discovered that Upsilon Radiation could actually be useful for mapping gas giant planets. So began the section on Theory of Gas Giant Mapping.
It had long been known that some gas giants could produce storms that generated subspace resonance. The storms themselves were usually localized and short-lived, but the subspace resonance generated by the storms could seriously interfere with navigation and interstellar travel. Few gas giants generated storms, but those that did could disrupt transportation throughout their solar systems and well beyond.
A few decades ago, a team of planetary scientists proposed a model that would explain why some gas giants generated storms and some did not. The model further offered a method for prediction when the storms would appear and how severe they would be. There was a practical problem, however: gas giants showed considerable variety, and in order to apply the model to a particular planet, it would necessary to obtain data about the planetary interior while the planet was undergoing a process called "deep inversion." With scans of the planet's interior during deep inversion, it would be possible to use that data in the model to predict how this particular planet would behave.
Conventional scans could not penetrate planetary interiors during periods of deep inversion, so getting the data needed for the model was difficult. Conventional scans could determine that a deep inversion was occurring, but could not reliably determine what was happening inside of that deep inversion.
Then someone proposed using Upsilon Radiation to make the scans. In theory, types-four and –five were sufficiently penetrative and their resonance signatures would carry the needed data. And types-four and –five Upsilon Radiation were non-lethal.
But the only known way to generate types-four and –five was to generate all the lethal forms of Upsilon Radiation first. And doing so was contrary to the Convention.
After some political maneuvering, the Gas Giant Mapping Project was proposed. In this Project, a specialized Starfleet science vessel would use Upsilon Radiation-based probes to make measurements of gas giants undergoing deep inversion. The science vessel would launch a probe into the gas giant's atmosphere. The science vessel would then position itself so that the planetary interior was between itself and the probe. When the probe detonated, Upsilon Radiation would be generated, and this Upsilon Radiation would be detected by the science vessel. All of the detected radiation would be type-four or type-five, which would be safe to living things.
It was estimated that typically between twenty and fifty such detonations would have to take place in order to map the interior of a typical gas giant.
The mapping would have to occur during deep inversion, however, and the time window in which deep inversion occurred was sometimes quite brief.
Sisko saw he was coming to the end of the "Overview" file. The only remaining topic was The Use of Upsilon Radiation in the Gas Giant Mapping Project.
The Gas Giant Mapping Project received extraordinary praise when it was first proposed, but also received some damning criticism. The most serious objections pertained to how the Project would be in violation of the intergalactic Convention prohibiting the generation of Upsilon Radiation.
Under the terms of the Convention, no one was allowed to generate Upsilon Radiation at all, under any circumstances. Those favoring the Gas Giant Mapping Project responded that this prohibition assumed that all such generations were harmful and of no social or scientific value. Mapping gas giants, they argued, was a valuable use of Upsilon Radiation and ought not to be included in the prohibition.
Some objectors argued that there might be multi-cellular sentient life living in the atmospheres of the gas giants. Using Upsilon Radiation to map an inhabited planet, they argued, might result in mass murder. Those in favor of the Gas Giant Mapping Project responded that so far no one had ever discovered a gas giant in which such life forms were known to exist. And in any event, a gas giant having such life could simply be left alone.
A much greater concern was that terrorists or despots other bad actors might hijack probes and use them as instruments of terror or intimidation or coercion, as had been done in the past. Or there might simply be accidents, which would in their nature be horrid. Proponents of the Project argued that it ought to be possible to secure against piracy and against unauthorized detonations, whether intentional or accidental.
The Commission was created to determine whether these concerns could be satisfactorily addressed.
The Commission brought its challenge to the legendary Vulcan designer of safety systems, known as Stoan. If Stoan could design a system that would prevent all unauthorized detonations of the probes, and that could protect all sentient living things from exposure, then perhaps the Project would be allowed to go forward.
Stoan worked on his design for nearly a year, refining it and accounting for every variable that he could imagine. He consulted with numerous experts about potential hazards, and made certain his system could handle every single one. His final system was elaborate, but very thorough. He created a simulation to demonstrate his safety systems to the Commission, and invited the Commission to try to defeat his systems in any way they could. Stoan also devised a computerized simulator that would try to defeat his systems.
No one, not being nor machine, could cause a probe to detonate anywhere except in the interior of a gas giant.
It was on the strength of Stoan's safety system that the Gas Giant Mapping Project was approved. To monitor the Project and to assure the robustness of his designs, Stoan was appointed to the Commission, though he rejected the title of Commissioner.
According to the Commission's charter, the Commission was responsible for oversight of the Project in general, as well as all facilities for assembling and transporting the probes. All technology related to the generation of Upsilon Radiation would continue to be top secret. Probes would be handled according to the strictest procedures. In addition, any Starfleet personnel who would work with the probes would be subject to the highest scrutiny and would have to be up to the highest standards and all would personally have to be approved by the Commission.
Eventually it was decided to commission two science vessels to map the planets. The Surveyor was commissioned first, and immediately went to work confirming that gas giants could indeed be mapped using Upsilon Radiation. It turned out that the probes worked almost exactly as the physical theories said they were supposed to work, and the mappings indeed could be done. In a major test of the techniques, a particularly troublesome gas giant in the Tullis star system was successfully mapped, and its storms became predictable with astonishing accuracy. The subspace resonance events thereby became predictable as well, and readily avoidable. The viability of the Gas Giant Mapping Project was proven.
The Observer was commissioned shortly thereafter.
With no shortage of gas giants in the galaxy, both ships went to work mapping gas giants that showed signs of undergoing deep inversion.
In the years that followed, there had been thousands of uses of Upsilon Radiation to map gas giants, without a single recorded fatality of any advanced species. No probe had ever exploded anywhere except deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant. There had never been any unintentional or accidental or unauthorized detonation of any probe anywhere else.
Until now, Sisko thought.
Sisko reached the end of the "Overview" file and paused before starting a new file. He tried to let the information settle into his head. Not long after the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant had been discovered, Observer had been dispatched to map a gas giant on the far side of the wormhole. Curiously, Surveyor had actually been in closer proximity to Deep Space Nine than was Observer, but Observer got the assignment anyway. Somehow, in the Gamma Quadrant, one of Observer's probes had detonated while still inside the ship. This was not supposed to happen, and the most accomplished safety expert in the galaxy had designed systems so that it wouldn't happen. But it had happened all the same.
The information Sisko had just read was useful as background information, but it didn't really help answer any of the questions he really wanted to know. How did this vaunted safety system actually work? He'd need to know that, if he had any hope of understanding how it might have failed.
Also missing from the material were the routine details about probe-related procedures, as well as information about Observer's previous missions. He'd need to know those things as well, if he was going to understand what had gone wrong on this particular mission in the Gamma Quadrant.
Sisko opened the next file and found a shortened version of what he had just read. There was nothing new in that file. The next file was about the mathematical models used to predict the behavior of gas giants, and a highly technical explanation of what happened to a gas giant during deep inversion; it included no information about the probes. The next file was likewise unhelpful. Sisko frowned. There were a few other files there, but they were unclassified as well, and their titles suggested that they weren't all that pertinent. He doubted there would be anything in there that would help with his investigation. In order to make progress, he'd have to delve into the classified materials that the Commission had sent him.
But right now, he was just too tired. He decided to get some sleep.
At his meeting with Dax and O'Brien eight hours later, he mentioned that he hadn't been able to figure out any of the details of the safety systems designed by this Stoan fellow.
"Really?" O'Brien was surprised. "Didn't you see the demonstration file? It showed a lot of the details of the safety features."
It was Sisko's turn to be surprised. "I must have missed that one."
"I missed it, too," Dax said.
O'Brien chuckled. "I almost missed it myself. It was entitled 'Summary' or something like that. Except it isn't a summary, it's a demonstration of the safety features, presumably to show everyone in the universe how safe these probes supposedly are. You get to see how to prepare a probe for launch. It's hard to see what's going on with a small display, though. It would probably be easier if we ran it as simulation on one of Quark's holosuites."
"Out of the question. The holosuites are not secure enough for a matter at this level of confidentiality."
O'Brien chuckled again. "Well, number one, I can make them secure enough, so that Quark wouldn't be able to record or snoop or interfere. And number two, the demonstration is not classified, so we don't need to worry about confidentiality, at least not yet."
Sisko's eyebrows went up. He had thought all detailed information about probe preparation would surely be classified. "Chief," Sisko said, "make a holosuite secure. When it's secure, let's have a demonstration about what should have happened inside that Probe Prep Bay."