RAPID AGING

Doppelgänger-B Orbit
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.24

- 2055 hours -

"Wait, that's Miri?" Kirk asked of the withered figure under the hospital blanket on the biobed. He'd been merely curious when he walked into sickbay and saw a mysterious woman in her mid seventies lying there in the infirmary section, but that curiosity had grown into near panic when McCoy told him the woman's name. "You can't be serious!"

"Serious as a heart attack," McCoy said, "We did another genetic screening a minute ago. The DNA is a perfect match to Miri's pattern. Besides, she looks exactly like Miranda Anderson in her interviews in the 2070s"

"But the thing that materialized on the transporter..."

"She didn't stay that way for long. When we tried to take her to sickbay she..." McCoy shook his head in disbelief, "I don't know how to explain this, but we were carrying her - what she'd become - on a stretcher, and suddenly there was a flash of light and she as gone. There was this thing on the gurney the size of a baseball, this malformed lump of flesh... if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a fetus."

"A fetus..." Spock pondered this for a moment, but didn't comment further.

Kirk looked at the withered figure again, vaguely resembling the Miri he knew, but aged into a woman maybe a century old. "She transformed into these things?"

"She did it right in front of us. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen." And just in case there was any doubt, Bones walked to a computer console next to the biobed and replayed the security video from sickbay during the Gorn attack. The malformed lump of flesh that had been Miriam Hallab had already collected itself into something of a distorted toddler form, the kinematics of a premature baby with the size and girth of a three year old. At the first touch of the hypo, the poor child steadied and then seemed to inflate itself, rapidly into that of the elderly woman on the biobed now.

"I'll be..."

"Fascinating," Spock folded his arms, "Do you have any theory on how to account for this phenomenon?"

"I have a few, none of them good. I figure it has something to do with that weird duplicate planet she came from. And on Doctor Marcus' theory that the planet was recreated using some kind of nanotechnology, I did an electron microgram of a blood sample just before you two came in."

Kirk asked, "What did you find?"

Bones shrugged, "There's something weird in her blood plasma. A chemical trace. Something complicated like I've never seen before. My tricorder picked up a trace of it when I examined her a month ago. Reads like an explosive compound but it could also be something with some flimsy electron bonds... whatever it is, it's in abundance now. Her blood and muscle tissues are saturated with it."

"Could it have been caused by the transporter beam?" Kirk asked, "We know our sensors can have an effect on the planet's variable aging cycle."

"If that's what triggered it, she would have gone through this the first time we beamed her up. It's got to be something else."

"The Gorn weapons perhaps? Or emotional stress?"

Spock stirred suddenly as something occurred to him, "They had to momentarily lower the deflectors in order to beam us aboard. The subspace distortion may have-"

There was a crackling/scratching sound from behind them, and all three turned just in time to see the wrinkled old woman change forms again, like a timelapse of a person aging in reverse. In a handful of heartbeats she again became Ensign Miriam Hallab, exactly as she had been when she beamed down; the newly restored youth sat up on the biobed and looked around perplexed, then looked at her hands and the tatters of her uniform and - finding them all relatively normal - asked plaintively, "Bones... What the hell is going on?"

Kirk stepped forward from the group and put his hand on her shoulder, "How much do you remember?"

Miri took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, "That's a bigger question than you realize, Captain. I guess it depends on how much of it was real."

"What if all of it was real?"

"Then I remember all of it, Sir. But it couldn't all be real."

"Why not?"

"Because I remember..." she hesitated at this point, not wanting to give away something that might either incriminate her or convince her newfound crew of her loss of sanity, "I remember things that couldn't possibly... couldn't logically have really happened."

Kirk looked at McCoy helplessly.

"Miri," the Doctor said tenderly, "you underwent some kind of transformation. We don't know how or why, but we think it might have something to do with the use of our deflector shields. Do you remember any feelings or sensations that went with the transformations?"

Miri shook her head. "When we were beaming up, I remember feeling that we were finally going home. Then I looked at myself and my body was all..." she shuddered, "It was strange. It looked like I'd been burnt in a fire, but I felt cold."

"Cold?"

"Terrible, terrible cold. So cold it was painful."

"Then what?"

"I remember... I remembering being small, not being able to move, then..." she decided to skip some of the details. Seventy five years worth of details, to be exact, and summarized it all as, "There was a jumble of crap that makes no sense at all, and then I think I passed out."

"You seemed to undergo an entire human lifecycle in the span of a few minutes," Spock pointed out, "Beginning from the moment of conception before leaping rapidly to old age."

"Just like the planet, come to think of it," Kirk said, "This is... worrisome."

"Tell me about it," Miri hung her head, "You don't know why this happened to me?"

McCoy sighed, "We've never seen anything even remotely like this. I don't have the first clue what caused it."

"What would you need in order to find out?"

"I'd have to take some tissue samples, run a few tests. It'll take some time. Meanwhile," McCoy looked at Miri, "Take a few days medical leave. After that, if you feel fit to return to duty..."

"Bones, I know how this is going to sound, but right now the last thing I need is to be sitting around, left to my own devices, with plenty of chances to scare the hell out of myself. I want to go back on duty as soon as possible. I still have a lot of training to do..."

"I understand that. But until I know for sure your condition is stable, I'm ordering you to take the day off from your normal duties. If you must occupy yourself, I suggest you study up on your cadet's service manual for next month's exams."

Reluctantly, Miri nodded in agreement. "You know where to find me..."

"Right down the hall to the left of the armed guards and the cluster bombs." McCoy winked at her, "Stay put for a big longer. I want to run a few more scans to make sure you're not going to turn into a dinosaur or something, and then you'll be free to go."

Slightly embarrassed, but feigning ignorance, Miri nodded and laid back on the bed.

McCoy slid back the privacy curtain around her biobed, then he lead the Captain and Science officer to his office across the medical bay. Once he was sure they were out of earshot he said, "You know, McCahil wanted those kids disarmed. He was worried they might try some ill-advised takeover of the compartment..."

"I have spoken with the one called Peter the Rabbit," Spock said, "He denied any knowledge of the subject, of course, but he insisted - hypothetically - that any visitor to the Enterprise would take such prudent measures as long as the reavers were aboard. I also agreed to his... er... hypothetical scenario."

Kirk grinned, "I've been hearing about that kid. Some kind of junior philosopher of the group..."

"Despite his unusual moniker, the boy is blessed with an almost professorial intellect. Though I have not been able to locate his original, I suspect he may have been well regarded in his adult years."

"Speaking of the reavers," McCoy said, "When Miri went through that trans-"

"Lemme stop you for a minute..." Kirk raised his hand in a "halt" gesture, "those two reavers are still on board, right? What do you want to do with them?"

McCoy folded his arms, "If it was up to me, I'd send them back where they came from. But Ramsi's against it, and I almost agree. With the rapid aging effect on that planet, it's basically a death sentence. Then again, they're not much better off with us. Alive, yes, but not much else."

Spock nodded in agreement, "Despite our efforts to stimulate what may remain of their sapient background, the two reaver specimens have demonstrated no higher cognitive function beyond expression of basic instinct. After murdering the lone caveman we recovered, their main activities have been reduced to sleeping, consuming food and copulating, and they seem capable of little else."

"Wait. The female reavers are having sex with each other?" Kirk raised a brow, "Damn, I don't know if that's disgusting or kinky."

"Are you finished being an idiot, Jim? This could be serious."

"Sorry, Bones. Go ahead."

McCoy sighed, and continued his earlier interrupted thought, "When Miri went through that transformation, I got a good look at the tissues and body structures involved. It wasn't just the mutilated flesh of a transporter accident. It transformed her into a completely different kind of organism. She changed into a fetus pretty quick, but the transformation did leave a bit of residue on the gurney from the original form. I had the lab put the scraps under a microscope, just in case."

"What did they find?"

"They found this." McCoy tapped an icon on one of the monitor screens and a micrograph report came up on the screen. "The exobiology lab thinks it's some kind of acidophile tissue from complex, multi-cellular life form. High proton mobility, probably all-around kinetic-acid stability. Also alot of crystalized carbon in the cell membranes."

Kirk looked at Spock, wondering - and hoping - that his science officer knew what McCoy was talking about.

Spock did, but not to the point of its relevance. "This would suggest an organism adapted to a highly acidic environment."

"And extremely high temperatures at that," McCoy added, "Or so the exolab thinks. Lieutenant Collins says it's the sort of thing that would be comfortable on Venus."

Kirk flinched, "Wait a minute. We beamed back to the Enterprise only fifteen minutes ago? When did you have time to send tissue samples to the exolab?"

McCoy frowned, "I didn't. I took some tissue samples from the Reaver specimen Ensign Riley recovered. The malignant samples underwent a drastic morphological change just a couple of days after removal, so I turned them over to exobiology for culturing and analysis. Their preliminary analysis revealed this," he gestures at the images on the monitor, "Which turns out to be an exact match to the residue on Miri's gurney."

"So if you were to strip the Reavers of all their malignant tissues..."

"...they would start to revert into whatever organism this," McCoy pointed at the monitor, "belongs to."

Spock nodded slowly, finally comprehending. "So you're saying the form that beamed back to the Enterprise was a form indigenous to this planet."

"More than that, Jim," McCoy said, "It's Miri's form. It's what she really is."

Spock nodded as he understood McCoy's implications, "When we look at Miri and the children, we're looking at a human pattern that has been superimposed on an alien form of life. Circumstances suggest this is one-to-one conversion of one organism into another."

"And the reavers," McCoy was thinking out loud, "It must be... A hybridization of some kind. Maybe a transitional state between the human pattern and the original."

Kirk got a mental flash of the thing that had materialized in the transporter room wearing Miri's uniform. He hadn't noticed it until it started screaming; it didn't start screaming until it looked at its hands... "It's not just their physical form, Bones. They think they're human. They don't remember being anything else."

Spock stood a little taller, as if inflated from within by a sudden explosion of ideas. "It stands to reason that the humanoid form of these creatures is being sustained artificially, in which case the Reaver transformation commences immediately following the cessation of external controls. There may be an identifiable mechanism at work here."

"Something that not only transformed them into a completely different life form, but it's actively keeping them that way," McCoy said, folding his arms, "What the hell kind of technology could even do that?"

Spock only half registered the question. He was already on his way out of sickbay when he composed an answer, almost as an afterthought, "When I have an answer, Doctor, you will be the first to know."

.

- 2204 hours -

Samir and Michael stirred at the sound of the turbolift. Not that they expected an alien invader would travel through the ship by turbolift, but there was always a need to seem innocent and - most importantly - unarmed whenever Starfleet officers came through this part of the ship. Though unscheduled visits were rare, ship's business came in many shapes and sizes, and reports of a bunch of squirrelly kids wandering around with sub machinepistols would create complications that the Onlies did not need.

Both boys briefly pretended to have absolutely nothing to do, Michael leaning nonchalantly against the corridor wall and Samir suddenly paying very close attention to the screen of an iPod that hadn't worked in years. The turbolift stopped at the deck below, and then footfalls sounded from the ladder well down the corridor as someone began to climb. When Miri emerged into the corridor, they relaxed a little, but kept up their charade of nonchalance until she was close enough to talk in just-above-a-whisper, "Where's everyone?"

"Talking to Peter," Samir said, without looking up from the screen. He didn't need to look up, over the years he'd sharpened his peripheral vision into an almost radar-like precision, "Everyone's all jumpy. What's going on out there? Where have you been?"

"Come on, I'll tell you all about it."

"Shouldn't we stay here on guard? What if the monsters get loose?"

"Just come on. You'll want to hear this. All of you."

As it stood, everyone else was gathered in the corridor begging Peter the Rabbit for answers anyway. He was by no means the wisest or most experienced of the group, but he had the most confidence of them all and a knack for pulling up wild guesses that just happened to be correct, and this made him valuable in a crisis of impotence. Miri remembered from a year ago that Peter the Rabbit had managed to whip the entire crew back into working order after a storm had killed the diesel on their fishing boat; while Miri got together an ad hoc engineering team to make repairs, Peter single handedly sequestered the crew in the wardroom and bombarded the lot of them with such artful rhetoric that would have made Malcolm X look like Alan Colmes.

Presently he was in the middle of a long speech about how their indomitable spirit had carried them through far greater trials than this when Miri entered the passage and stole the stage by default. Peter the Rabbit seamlessly transitioned from speaker to audience as all eyes turned to her.

The first words she spoke were the most pertinent, even if they weren't most relevant to what the Onlies were worried about. "Guys, the dreams aren't dreams. They're real."

Everyone looked at her confused for a moment. Forest-Forest-Gump was the first to ask, "What dreams?"

"The dreams that Jasmine and Leila and Nabi and... and..."

"Samir and Louis and Khan and Horace," Miri finished as Peter stepped back into obscurity, "We all had the same dreams. We all thought they were premonitions. But they're not premonitions. They're memories."

"Memories?" Samir asked.

"Memories of the people we were meant to be. I think whatever created our planet wanted to be able to rewind and fast forward to different points in history. It gave us all the memories we would need along that continuum, but we couldn't use those memories until the right time. Like the second moon. None of us remember there ever being two moons on Earth, right? The time when we first noticed it, I'm sure that's as far back as our real memories go. Everything before that is just copied data."

A stir went through the assembled group. Not panic or disturbance, just a bit of incredulity and anxious acceptance of what half of them had already begun to suspect.

Peter the Rabbit was the first to ask, "So what are we? Walking VCRs?"

Miri remembered materializing in the transporter room, the feeling of terrible cold, the way the air burned her skin, the disfigurement of her hands. The reflection of herself - the thing she had become - on the console's radiation shield. What we really are... "Sort of," she began, but that didn't seem right. Whoever had bothered to get this information also found a need to give it expression in living, thinking, talking bodies. More to the point, it had stopped the playback at a specific moment and allowed part of those stored memories to be overwritten with new ones. Obviously, the old memories were still intact somehow... "I don't think it matters though. We were allowed to come aboard this ship with these people, so I think that for whatever purpose we were made, we've fulfilled that purpose and now we can do as we wish."

"Or maybe we're just not needed right now?" asked The Other Jasmine, "You know, I'm not religious like Pete, but I was just thinking, what if this is all part of God's plan?"

From somewhere deep within a memory that Miri had recently had the horrifying pleasure of experiencing, she asked, "Define God."

"Um... the creator of the world... and everything..."

"Same difference. Whatever created our world - let's call it God, for simplicity - whatever it is, it had a purpose for us. It must have been a very specific purpose because we all have a lifetime of memories stored inside of us somewhere..."

"How do you know this all of a sudden?" Asked Leila, neatly interrupting her brother who was about to ask the same question, "What's happened out there anyway?"

Miri summarized: "They needed me for a mission on the planet. We all beamed down to stonehenge in England. Except it wasn't stonehenge... it wasn't the stonehenge of the Other Earth. It was some kind of alien machine that extends all the way to the center of the Earth. The Gorn - the other aliens - landed there too, and we ended up in a gunfight."

"Whoa!"

"You got shot at by aliens?"

"Did you kill anyway?"

"What'd they look like?"

"Did they have acid for blood?!"

"Did they have two heads?"

"Was it scary?"

"Shut up!" Miri snapped her fingers, and the corridor became silent again, "Mister Spock beamed us back aboard right when their starship attacked us. The Captain fought them off, but we've had to change orbits now so we're much farther from Earth than before. The weirdest thing is, when the transporter brought me aboard... well first it turned me into an alien, and then I turned into a baby and aged into an old lady all in a few minutes. And all the time I had all my memories of my whole entire life. It was exactly like my brain was being fast-forwarded."

"But you're okay now?" asked The Other Jasmine, "You look pretty normal."

"I'm fine. Better than fine... well... sort of fine. I feel like I just woke up from one hell of a crazy dream, and for some reason there's alot of new things that I know about..."

"What about the monsters?" Nabi asked, "The battle didn't... like... loosen their cage or anything, did it?"

"No, they're all safely locked away. I heard them talking before I left. They're doing some experiments on the monsters to see if they can turn them back into their original forms."

Peter the Rabbit nodded sagely, "That would be a nice change of pace. Maybe we could save some of the people who-"

"You know something? Mister Spock thinks the monsters only change when they're close to Earth. I think he's wrong. I think if Bones tries to undo whatever's been done to us, it'll only make things worse. Starfleet is dealing with forces they can't understand. They're doing their best, but they're missing key pieces of the puzzle."

"Like what?"

"For one thing, their transporter device transformed me into all sorts of different things. They don't even know why."

"God alone knows why," said Peter the Rabbit, "But do you want to know my theory?"

His theories were getting more interesting every day. Miri shrugged, "Go ahead."

"I think it was a message."

"A message?"

Peter the Rabbit nodded.

"From who? From God?"

"Maybe... but I think, a message from the planet."

Miri put her hands on her hips and stared at him angrily. This was not one of Peter the Rabbit's better theories. "The planet sent us a message?"

"It sent you a message."

"Really?"

"It's a pretty smart planet. I must have realized you were training to become an member of the crew, so it gave you some information it thought you might need. That is what happened, isn't it?"

Miri nodded slowly, "It gave me the memories my... Well... Of my duplicate's future. The space program and the Eugenics Wars and the Calypso's mission. I remember it all like it actually happened to me. Which is weird, right?"

"Not so much. The planet was giving you the memories you would need to properly fit in to your new environment. It wants you to fit in and be comfortable no matter where you are."

Miri sighed, "If you say so..."

"I found a movie in the Enterprise's computer. An old American movie. About these guys at the bottom of the sea, they find a space ship with a big golden ball in the middle of it. One of the scientist guys thinks the ball is alive, because it has a reflective surface, but it doesn't reflect everything. Like, it doesn't reflect their suits and their lights, for example. It chooses what it will and will not reflect."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, think about it. We came from a planet that's, like, basically a mirror image of another planet. It had everything on it that the old one have, but the one thing it didn't have was humpback whales."

Miri remembered the summary report Mister Spock had given her to review, mainly on the assumption that she might want to add something form her own unique perspective. She had added quite a few notes and confirmations and cleared up a few confusions of details, but for her, the report had raised more questions than it answered. "Mister Spock thinks that whoever created this planet created it just to harvest those whales for some purpose."

"That could be, but I doubt it."

"How would you know? Spock's a genius."

"But he doesn't know this planet," Peter the Rabbit rhetorically dismissed him with a wave of the hand, "And he doesn't know us. And besides, he's one of those smart guys who makes big stupid assumptions without realizing the obvious. Like the religious teachers we used to have. He just assumes that somebody out there must have created this planet, just like the religious teachers always assumed that God created the Earth. Well you know and I know that this planet created itself."

"We know that?"

"I know that."

"How do you know that?"

"I just do."

Miri rolled her eyes.

"But we just recently found out that this planet was created in the image of another planet. Which means..."

Leila smiled brightly, finally catching on, "Wait... the planet created itself... but it created itself in an intelligent way... I get it! That means it's a smart planet!"

"Exactly."

"Smart planet..." Miri thought about this, and in a way it was beginning to make more and more sense. Certainly the one question Spock's report had raised for her was the matter of how an alien intelligence could have gathered that much information about Earth and its people without being noticed. Quite probably, it didn't have to: it simply looked across the cosmos and reflected what it saw there, duplicated it without really knowing what it was duplicating. Smart planet indeed, but with the question in mind, "Why wouldn't it copy those whales?"

"Maybe it just doesn't like whales?"

Miri thought about this for a long moment. But since they were on the subject of old American science fiction anyway, another idea occurred to her from a half-remembered (but oh-so-cherished) novel she once read in that shattered library in Haifa, years before all the books had decomposed, "Maybe it doesn't need to copy whales?"

"Why wouldn't it need to copy whales?"

"Why would it need to copy humans? To learn more about them and how they live, right? And they let the world go crazy as part of an experiment. Maybe testing humanity's tolerances to extreme forces."

"But they don't care about whales, though?"

"If I had to guess," Miri said, "It's because they already know about the whales."