Codes and Flukes, No. 1
Posted on February 21st, 2021 by D'bryn Zoë

Zoë lay on her front in bed, rereading Zen and the Art of Warp Core Maintenance for her nightly soporific. Always took three or four instances of falling asleep in this position and waking up with her forehead on the PADD screen before she gave in and turned off the light, but tonight was an exception. She knew she was doomed when she finished a chapter of Zen then started another one. Maybe she had eaten something that gave her an unexpected store of energy; maybe it was the excitement of being en route to rendezvous with the Atlantis for her assignment. Either way, sleep was going to escape her tonight.

Out of bed. ‘Lights at ten percent.’

Replicator. ‘Tea blend: three parts chamomile, two parts lavender, one part cacao nibs, one part cinnamon chips. Hot, steeped for four minutes, five milliliters of honey.’ ¹

Music. ‘Computer, play the first track of the album Sunfolds by Ernestine Gerig, volume at twenty percent.’

Light yoga. 

Breathing exercises. 

Meditation.

Tea gone, limbs stretched, thirty-minute ambient Gerig track complete, Zoë checked in with her body and found herself a little more at peace. She said, ‘Lights and music off,’ returned to bed, tucked in, closed her eyes—and her eyelids snapped right back open. 

‘Okay, lights back at ten percent again.’

The pendant lay on her nightstand, its delicate chain dangling off the front edge. Zoë grabbed it, held it above her face. Though it was a replication, the pendant was designed by her friend Ishani, from Academy, who had taken up jewelry in her spare time away from micro-xenobiology. Sterling silver, spherical, engraved with dark swirls of Ishani’s artistic penchant, and fitted with a tightly clasping latch on the front. 

Zoë thumbed the latch, tilting the sphere just so, and let the Light roll out into her palm. 

A breath.

The warmth.

Another breath.

The lightness.

A third breath.

Full warmth radiation.

The final breath.

And—

=Λ=

She is a young Betazoid man.

She sits at the console on the research station.

The research station [as she now remembers] is an orbital installation around the gas giant Thesim VI, tasked with studying the weather patterns of this rare class of world. She is a mathematician. [The math this person knows floods into her head the way a tsunami floods a bathtub. It is a holistic discomfort.] The ten-person crew has been orbiting Thesim VI for 716 days. 

She is in a moment of conscious contentedness. Others on the station yearn for the physical closeness of the loved ones back home, taking no fewer than two weekly sessions with the onboard Mental Health Hologram to cope with the isolation. But she is fine.

Her name is Asil Garad. She is the second-born of four, and the eldest living.

Mother and father are both dead. 

Asil grew up lonely. Asil is used to it. Asil is content in a detached bitterness.

In the corner of her console she sees the stardate: 71955.5.

She stands up from the console and goes to the restroom. [This makes two out of four total experiences so far where Zoë learned far more than she liked about the person whose memories she is borrowing.] She zips up, washes up, returns to her console. 

A console lights up at the barely-attended comms console across the room. Birin checks it, says there are three inbound vessels. This is unannounced. [Before the memory fades,] there is an atmosphere of panicked mystery. 

=Λ=

As if consciousness had not paused, as if time had gone along its usual meter, as if those memories had been like any other memory and not a waking dream, Zoë came to with the Light shimmering in her palm: no more than the luminescent pearl it pretended to be.

For the last time she rolled out of bed, went to her cabin’s console, gave a play-by-play of the memory to a personal log. She sighed, let the recorder continue. ‘This time it was more distinct at the end. Something happens. No clue as to what. Something about the ships that were… I wanna say it’s war but none of the memories I’ve run into feel like that. It’s more like… God, it’s more like the center of the galaxy is going supernova and everyone knows the shockwave is gonna hit em sooner or later.’ Another sigh. ‘Oh, hold on. Forgot to…’

Zoë looked up Asil Garad. 

‘Yeah. Just like the other three. Alive and well. Looks like he transferred out of that gig and onto another research station on the frontier. Not sure if that’s an upgrade.’

Time was 0343 hours. It was all but official now: there was a high possibility of no sleep tonight. High stimulant intake tomorrow. Lots of brain-activating busywork. Maybe a stop-off in Sickbay to see about some kind of sleep med for the following night. 

Asil Garad from Betazed. Karig from Qo’noS. Fennian Gerlicher from Omaha, Earth. Reddic Bartu from Metriaga. Four disparate memories so far, linked by nothing else but the sense of doom at the end. If the end was the important factor, why was there no information about it that she could gather about it? There hadn’t been such a Quadrantwide crisis since the Borg invasion of ’85, and the timeline didn’t match up for that. Two of her ‘memory hosts’ were kids when that happened, and one wasn’t born yet. 

The pieces were still coming out of the box, and Zoë had no idea how big the puzzle could be. 

=Λ=

 

^{1 – This real blend, once offered on the menu of the now-defunct Townshend’s Teahouse, comes with this writer’s strong recommendation.}