MIRAGE

Doppelgänger-B Orbit
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.28

- 1210 hours -

Rules... regulations... the shallow pretenses that small people placed in front of themselves to pretend they still had control of their lives in a universe of uncertainty. Carol Marcus knew that kind of control was an illusion, that most people - even the most powerful - were often slaves to the whims of others, and however else the universe changed, this one constant never would. Nowhere was this more clear than on Doppelgänger, where an entire world had been fashioned from the dormant seed of another simply because someone in the universe had a craving for whale meat. Seven billion lives had been created and then horribly destroyed just for this purpose. How many more could be spared from suffering by more compassionate use of this same process?

Or so she told herself, plugging another round of new settings into the signal processor in the corner of the room. She'd been trapped in her quarters like a prisoner for a day and a half with only a palmcomp and fifty tracks of Phaserbrane to keep her company (only a handful of Phaserbrane songs actually had lyrics; Carol stuck to the heavy space-angst riffs when she was in a bad mood). But with a quarter million credits worth of lab equipment packed into what had otherwise been her living room, she hardly noticed the passage of time. Lieutenant Rand had cut off her terminal from the Enterprise's computer network, but the ASDEC unit she brought with her from the lab at Hesperia Planum - in itself, a kind of scientific swiss army knife with more functions than she could count - was more than enough for the job now. She still had the data from that Z-Band pulse, that unique pattern that had triggered such an astonishing change in Miri's genome, and in such a specific and controlled way. After days of study, Carol was convinced the transformation was intentional, maybe a form of communication, or an attempt by the planet's nanorobot swarm to prevent her from being captured by what it now interpreted as a hostile force. The only way to know for sure was to test the pattern on infected tissue and see what happened.

And for the twentieth time today, she locked in the latest round of settings to the computer and pushed another slide into the microscope slot. ASDEC was a desk-sized machine with a half dozen shoebox-sized modules arranged in racks; the module she was using now was designed to bombard tissue samples with any form of radiation from radio waves to theta rays and could even handle a few subspace frequencies if you fed it enough power. It had the right range for that recorded SZ-pattern, and relative to the size of the tissue samples she'd so expertly pilfered from the bio lab, it should have been more than powerful enough. But now, for the twentieth time today, she started up the antenna for a full three repetitions of the pulse and watched in biting disappointment as the translucent cells on the slide - in this case, liver-cell cultures from one of the Onlies - briefly turned black as coal, churned for a moment, then immediately returned to their original form as if nothing had happened to them.

"Son of a bitch..." it was the same as the other nineteen test runs. Interesting as it was, ASDEC's limited archives couldn't furnish an answer as to why this was happening, or even what was happening to the cells. She half doubted even Enterprise' computers were smart enough to figure that out, but with better equipment at least she'd have a fighting chance.

And to think that the Starfleet crews weren't even bothering to experiment with the SZ-pattern!

The sound of the door chime snapped her out of her introspection, automatically muting a chinese-language Phaserbrane song. It was one of those few sounds she'd programmed herself to respond to no matter what she was doing, sleep or awake, just in case it represented a business call and some time-sensitive matter from one of her colleagues. No such luck, now, as she plodded over to the door panel and saw Doctor Ayash's face in the small video screen next to the door. Probably not a social call, since he had his medical kit with him, so she decided against pretending to be asleep and pressed the release to open the door.

"How you are doing, Doctor Marcus?" Ayash asked in his watered down Arabic accent.

"Could be better. Just... well..." she gestured at the ASDEC set crammed into the corner of her not-exactly-spacious living room, "I'm working on that Z pattern we recorded on the surface. Unfortunately my equipment is about a hundred years old, I can't get any decent results."

Ayash nodded as he pulled a medical tricorder from his kit and tinkered with the scanner settings. "I have hearing something like that. That is Z pattern that making Miri transform?"

"Yeah. I'm convinced it's some type of alien control signal, maybe a set of command instructions to the nanomachines in Miri's body. I was thinking that if we could get a response from those machines we might be able to isolate them and study them in greater detail."

"That is not bad idea... though I am thinking it is too late for doing this."

Marcus stared at him for a moment, fearing the worst. "What's been happening out there, anyway? The guard said something about an attack."

"It is not major thing. We having exchange of fire with Klingon warship. No damage, more like sparring really. The problem is rumor I am hearing, that Captain Kirk was told by Klingon commander that this technology being used in sick experiments by group called First Federation. He is thinking now we should abandoning this investigation."

Marcus was mortified, but not completely surprised. It fit too well into Kirk's growing reputation as a knee-jerk reactionary who was probably just now discovering that he was in way over his head. "That would be a shame for Starfleet. But sooner or later, someone's going to have to keep up the chase. It might take a few years longer, but I'm not willing to give up."

"I am not thinking Kirk would abandon the effort on a whim. He may having something right to be worried about." Ayash switched the scanner head to trace mode and started a series of slow sweeps around Marcus' shoulders and neck. There was the faint whistle of spectrometers and chemical traps and the hiss of air being pulled through the scanner, and after a few moments Ayash switched the scanner to ultrasound mode and started another sweep of her chest and stomach.

"I don't feel like I'm dying," Marcus said coyly, "Except this room feels awfully stuffy..." and now that she thought about it, "Why is it so hot in here all of a sudden?"

"I do not know, it just happening in last few minutes. Environmental malfunction, maybe?"

"Oh, so it's not just me... in that case, what are you doing here anyway?"

"Doctor McCoy's orders," Ayash said, almost apologetically, "Medical screening for everyone having beamed down to Doppelgänger."

"Screening for what? Something going on?"

Ayash sighed, "One of away team members having developed reaver malignancy. No one else seems being affected, this is just precaution."

"One of the away team...?" Marcus raised a brow, "Are you checking for chemical traces of cancer tissues or the ionic compounds of the alien nanomachines?"

"Lieutenant Onise testing positive for both, so I scanning thoroughly for both."

Marcus' eyes lit up like a pair of miniature suns. "One thing I've been thinking about here... well, the tissue samples I have here are mostly from Miri's second examination after she beamed back from the planet. And also from reaver tissue we collected earlier. I'm not getting any results from these, but I just realized... well, if the Reavers are disconnected from the constructor matrix, and if Miri's constructors have already encountered this program, we might need a fresh sample."

Ayash raised a brow.

"Lieutenant Onise hasn't been back to Doppelgänger since the away mission, right?"

"I see..." Ayash smiled, "You are thinking of duplicating Miri's transformation using Lieutenant Onise's samples."

Marcus nodded, "It could be that the transformation is just a side effect of whatever the Z-band signal really does. It probably only has that affect the first time it's sent. Kinda like fabricator licenses, right? Once you authenticate a license you can make as many copies as you want."

"Ah," Ayash smiled, "Z-band signal may being software key for constructors?"

"Could be. Or it could just be an odd coincidence. Still, if nothing else, it'll exhaust the Z-band angle and get us to look in a new direction."

"What if not working properly?"

"Probably, nothing will happen. But if you do get a reaction, we'll be able to observe the effect in a laboratory setting. We'll be able to isolate exactly how the machines work and maybe catch a few of them in the act."

Ayash smiled even brighter, "That is not bad idea... maybe we finishing this examination in sickbay, Doctor?"

Marcus almost jumped out of her skin, "You can do that? I thought I was under house arrest."

"Medical priority. You being more familiar with this than I am. But we must being quick or Captain Dunsel may object."

She didn't need to be told twice, and the idea of leaving the ship's commanding greenhorn out of the loop was somehow highly appealing. Call it karma, or divine justice, or whatever. In any case, Marcus scooped her palmcomp off the ASDEC table and darted for the door after him... but not before pausing just long enough to extract the memory tape with the hand-written label "Genesis" on the case and set it on the ASDEC table for safekeeping. It was never a good idea to keep both copies of your data in the same place, after all.

.

- 1209 hours -

As far as Miri could tell, being pigeonholed as a "runner" for the communications department had almost the same dynamics of her previous life in the slums. Run from one place to another, gathering supplies and delivering them to the people who need them most. The only difference was the supplies were easy to find, just incredibly hard to get, and required a set of social skills she had never had occasion to learn, even less so on a starship almost totally alien to her despite its Earthly origins.

She was, for example, completely unequipped to deal with Lieutenant Hobus' blithe dismissals when she arrived at the machine shop for the fourth time that day. Ayala had rejected his first excuse (blaming the planetology team) and patiently accepted the second ("We're closed down for the shift change"). The third simply didn't fly, and neither would the fourth, but Miri lacked the vocabulary or the social graces to make this clear to Hobus in a way that would grab his attention. "I know we're at alert stations, Sir, but Ensign Ayala really wants that transtator," she repeated, "She's been waiting patiently for a while."

Hobus was listening, but much of his attention was on some kind of delicate task at the large work bench in the corner of the machine shop. There were dozens of these benches around, all oriented around a central terminal that had a kind of miniature turbolift door and a conveyor that, from time to time, spat out stacks of unfinished machine parts and electronics equipment. Miri had come to understand that somewhere below the machine shop was a "fabricator," a device that used some technical magic she didn't understand but otherwise was capable of making just about anything. For some reason it couldn't make anything complicated, only parts and components, which - once manufactured - had to be assembled piecemeal by skilled machinists right here in the shop. She couldn't tell what Hobus was putting together, but whatever it was it was the size of a briefcase and required some precision work with laser-soldering iron and a magnifier in his eye. "She's been waiting," Hobus said, "But not patiently."

"She's getting impatient..."

"She's always impatient. Seems to be an Orion trait."

Miri sighed, "If I go back up there without that transtator, she's gonna send me right back down again."

Hobus grinned without looking up, "And this concerns me why?"

"I'm getting tired."

"So?"

Miri sighed again, gritting her teeth and checking a temper she didn't realize had been fraying, "Look... I know I'm just a trainee, I know I'm nothing compared to you veterans... but see, I'm just trying to make the best of this situation, and you're not helping matters much by being difficult."

Hobus chuckled, "Look, don't start crying on me or anything. It's just some spare parts. The fabricators are already working overtime on that specialist equipment and we don't have time to assemble a transtator array right now. So unless you want to pick up a tool belt and do the work yourself, Ayala is gonna have to wait."

"That's not good enough..."

Hobus looked up at her for the first time, "You're dismissed, Ensign. Have a nice day."

"Yes, Sir." One of her very first lessons in the orientation briefing was that when a superior officer tells you to do something, you do it, period, no questions asked. In another lifetime she'd spent enough years flying F-22s in the Israeli Air Force to understand the consequences if she failed to live up to this implicit military convention...

"Wait a second, Ensign," Hobus waved her back over and then quickly finished whatever it was he was working on. Miri stepped up to the work bench as he said, "Take this to Doctor Ayash in the Isolation Lab. It's a priority job he just sent down." He closed up the outer shell of the case and handed it over to Miri.

"You have time to do rush jobs for Doctor Ayash?"

"It's just a stock part. Surgical tractor beam with a manual control input. The Isolation Lab only has automatics."

"Alright... er... Aye, Sir." She left the machining shop in a seething frustration and stepped into the turbolift at the end of the corridor. She spat her destination to the computer, and then two seconds later the door opened again to a completely different part of the Enterprise.

Miri had been to the Isolation Ward before, not long after her transcendental mutation that had granted her the knowledge and experience of an eighty five year old ace pilot and career astronaut. From that experience she understood that an Isolation Lab was usually used to quarantine highly contagious medical patients or samples of things that, if not properly handled, could contaminate the entire ship. It was not a place she preferred to go if she had a choice, but there were already rumors around the ship that one of the crew had started turning into a reaver, and her curiosity far outweighed her present anxiety.

Plus, for some inexplicable reason it was unbelievably hot on the ship today and the Isolation Lab - with its own independent life support system - was probably the coolest place on the ship right now.

Doctor Marcus was standing at a computer console to one side of the lab, partly reading a spreadsheet on the monitor but mostly watching a writhing mutated form under a stack of medical linens, something that might have once been human except for the popping veins the size of garden hoses and distended lumps of tissue sticking out of the sides of its head. Though heavily sedated, it was clear Lieutenant Onise was in a fantastic amount of pain, what Miri knew to be the late onset stages of the Caveman transformation. For some reason, she even felt responsible for what the man was going through now, as if his being exposed to her world was, somehow, her fault.

Marcus recognized Miri's approach, then recognized the object she carried, then smiled with satisfaction. "That was fast. Thank you."

Miri handed over the case and Doctor Marcus, in turn, handed it off to Doctor Ayash, who began the apparently simple process of swapping its contents with a corresponding less suitable device. The thing inside the case looked something like a fluorescent light tube, about a foot long and an inch wide, mounted on the end of a black plastic rectangle with a small control panel and screen on the side of it. The one Ayash replaced was mounted on a swingarm attached to the ceiling; unlike the new one, the old device had no control panel or screen, and Ayash discarded it with due care in a corner of the room while he attached the new device to the arm. "So how you wanting to do this?" Ayash asked, "Program Z-pattern manually?"

"I have it on file here," Marcus said, waving a memory card for him, "Just plug it in and give it a blast. Keep it simple: two sweeps on blood samples, two on bone marrow, two on liver tissue, two on cancer tissue. If there's no reaction from any of those, we'll try a sweep on the Lieutenant and see if there's a reaction."

"You should kill him," Miri said, almost chidingly despite her station on this ship. She spoke now, not just with the experience of someone who had lived through the Reaver plague on her world, but as a woman who had lived through two regional wars and a global conflict and spent more time wrestling with unknowns in space than either of them had been alive. "Get it over with now before things get complicated."

Doctor Ayash rolled his eyes, "This is not old Palestine, Miriam. We not simply disposing of people because they are inconvenience."

"Neither do we. We fought and killed our enemies. Your enemy is anyone or anything that's trying to kill you. You get them before they get you, and you get to live a little longer."

"In twenty third century, we having more evolved sensibility. We holding all forms of life in high regard, respect for all things' right to exist."

Miri grinned, "Heard that before... but as Jabez used to say, continued existence is a desire, not a right. The desire to exist is something worth respecting. But this man is becoming a reaver..."

"The caveman types are sedentary," Marcus said offhand, "They don't really do anything except sit around and wait for the females to copulate with them. Then, of course, the females eat them afterwards."

"Yeah, there's a reason for that. After they mate, if the females don't kill them fast enough, the males turn into something a lot worse. We used to call them Chickenheads."

Ayash looked up anxiously, "Chickenheads?"

"Because of the way they moved their heads. Like giant chickens pecking at the ground. They're funny looking, but they're bad news. Even the reavers were scared of them."

"Then it's a good thing Lieutenant Onise hasn't mated with any of the reavers," Marcus said, extracting a bone marrow sample from his left arm using a medical core drill, "And if this experiment succeeds, he never will."

"You have no idea what you're getting yourselves into..."

"Let's get started." Ayash pushed the memory card into a reader slot on the side of the tractor beam and moved its swingarm over to an examination table in the corner. Doctor Marcus joined him after a moment with a tricorder and three small vials of tissue samples she'd just extracted from Onise's body: one blood, one of bone marrow and one taken from deep in his distended abdomen where part of the reaver-tumor had pushed three of his ribs half a foot out of his chest like a mountain of meat and bone. "We should know right away if there's any effect," Marcus said, "Program for Z-band modulation. We'll do the reaver tissue first."

"If you don't mind," Miri moved towards the door, "I've got an obsessive compulsive Orion girl to deal with. I'll see you in a f-" she froze as the doors opened in front of her, partly in shock from the blast of warm humid air that filtered into the room even through the double-layered quarantine field leading to the rest of the ship. It felt like stepping out of a refrigerator into a sauna.

The feeling of heat had made her stop and pause, but someone who hadn't been expecting the pause bumped into her from behind on his way through the door. Miri didn't give it much thought for the first instant, but in rapid succession she suddenly realized that there was no one else in the Iso-Lab except for Ayash and Marcus and both of them were on the opposite side of the room. More out of curiosity than anything else she whirled around to see who exactly had bumped her, and out of the corner of her eyes saw something move past her that wasn't completely there.

It was just a ripple, almost a man-shaped mirage moving casually through the air, like the way a man might stroll through a park or a market looking for nothing in particular. She wasn't even sure she was really seeing it at all - perhaps it was just a heat shimmer from cold dry air mixing with warm humid air? - until she remembered seeing this exact same pattern once before, down on the surface of her duplicate world. Then, as now, she'd thought it was merely a mirage, but even Spock had confirmed that something had been there, something that didn't fully register on their sensors. Something possibly hostile that was monitoring their progress from under concealment...

The 2089 biography of Miriam Hallab pointed out that her instinct for self-preservation frequently overwhelmed her sense of discretion, and this time was no different. The instant she perceived the image as a threat, she drew her hand phaser out of her belt, dialed it up to its highest setting and fired at the middle of what she imagined was this thing's chest. In doing so, the "mirage" in front of her suddenly flickered into the shape of a perfectly visible person, who instantly folded over backwards as the phaser burned a fist-sized hole in his chest. The newly-dead intruder was wearing some kind of body armor, with a large bulbous helmet and camouflage colors that otherwise might be mistaken for twenty first century battle dress... except for the icon of the bright green raptor painted on the top of the helmet, and the fact that the wearer was now lying in a pool of dark green blood.

Three other "mirages" that Miri hadn't noticed until now made sudden ducking motions, drawing unseen weapons from unseen holsters. Instinctively, she dove back through the doorway as the three fired their phasers directly over her head. A salvo of speeding fireballs sliced through the air like tracer bullets, each carrying with them the energy of a hand grenade. Several of them exploded against the far bulkhead of the isolation lab, blasting furniture and lab equipment about the room like a chain of grenades. One of the equipment racks in their path exploded in a shower of sparks and tumbled a few feet until it knocked Doctor Marcus' legs out from under her and sent her spinning to the deck. Marcus reached for the nearest thing in range to stop her fall, which unfortunately turned out to be the surgical tractor beam on its swing arm; the arm rebounded and swung itself back to its default position, and the newly-modulated energy beam snapped into action directly into the middle of Lieutenant Onise's chest.

Half a second later, the Isolation Lab flared up as if a bucket of firecrackers had been setoff on the examination table. Sounds of confusion were heard in at least four distinct languages, overlapping phonemes in Romulan, Arabic, English and Hesperian. Lastly came something that was neither a voice nor a language, just a primal scream of rage and power from the creature that used to be Lieutenant Kenbi Onise.