Outbreak: Training Edition - Part 4/5
Posted on Thu Jul 10th, 2025 @ 10:41pm by Lieutenant JG Lovisa Montague & Chief Warrant Officer Alexion Wylde & Lieutenant Astrid Nyx & Crewman Mateo Gardel & Petty Officer 1st Class Leon Inaros & Crewman Raine Ni-ya
2,435 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
Prologue: To Boldly Go
Location: Holodeck 1
Timeline: Day 10 - after the crew board Fenrir
ON - CONTINUED:
Time passed as the team worked, barely speaking except to point out related data, or ask clarifying questions.
Astrid's head was beginning to hurt. Maybe the computer was doing too good of a job at this scenario. Glancing toward another panel, Astrid's expression sharpened. Mateo's data caught her attention, and she analyzed it closely. Residual particles lingered, their faint signature barely detectable yet distinct enough to trace. The rate of decay suggested secondary phenomena, subtle echoes of something profoundly invasive. Yet the trail was clear, having integrated seamlessly with the ship’s security field before transferring into Lt. Veenhold's biological energy pattern.
Mateo’s eyes sharpened as the secondary telemetry lit up across his display. There—a faint residue, barely within the sensitivity threshold, but present. The signature pattern trailed across the quarantine field’s perimeter, too organized to be ambient static. His fingers stilled over the interface. This wasn’t just decay. It was direction.
He expanded the decay curve and layered it over the moment of Veenhold’s rematerialization. The trajectory lined up. The signature didn’t originate from the patient—it had passed through the forcefield. Not passively, but amplified, as if the field hadn’t merely failed to contain it… but helped it along.
Astrid's pulse quickened slightly as her realization crystallized fully. Something had jumped from quarantine containment, leveraging the security field as a catalytic conduit immediately after transport. She turned toward Mateo, about to share her findings just as he looked up at her and both started to speak at the same time.
"The quarantine field itself acted as an amplifier--"
Mateo finished the thought, the words overlapping hers: “—And redirected the energy into Veenhold’s cortical lattice.”
Their voices fell into synchronicity, the implications landing hard between them.
"I agree." Astrid nodded. "Somehow, it must have projected whatever energy this was directly into him!"
The rest of the nearby staff looked up, catching the brief exchange.
Mateo barely registered the ripple of attention from the others. His focus tunneled back to his station, fingers moving fast now, running calculations that only confirmed what his gut already knew: the forcefield hadn’t contained the event—it had catalyzed it.
Then the alarm.
A sudden sharp beeping cut into the conversation. One of the biobed monitors. Astrid looked over -- Lt. Veenhold! He was convulsing on the table, the monitors flashing red. Medical alerts flashed urgently across Astrid’s screen: he was going into cardiac arrest.
"Alexion!" she called, trusting that he would know what to do.
Alexion was already headed for the biobed, glancing over the scrolling data as he unconsciously tugged his sleeves up. Simulations were always a strange experience for him. His Transference Talent usually gave him feedback from his patient when he touched them, whether he liked it or not. Holograms gave nothing. It really was surreal for him. He loaded the hypo with cordrazine, his hand pushing through the forcefield to press to his neck. He shook his head with a stifled curse under his breath at the lack of reaction - a puzzling anomaly in its own right - already reaching to prep the cortical stimulator.
Mateo's head snapped toward the source, the biobed lit up in panicked pulses of red. Veenhold’s vitals flatlined, then surged into chaos. Mateo stepped back instinctively as the man convulsed violently, his limbs jerking against the restraints.
But, as quickly as they came, the convulsions stopped. Suddenly, Veenhold sat bolt upright, eyes glazed.
Alexion took a single stride backwards without missing a beat, still holding the cortical stimulator as he stared at him with utter confusion...and an after taste of revulsion. If it had been surreal before, it had just gone to a whole new level. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out for a moment. He was regretting being so close to him...and his whole body remained still in an attempt not to spook this unnatural happening with any sudden movements. "Veenhold?"
Before any scans or further intervention could take place, Veenhold spoke. "Release...Us....
Mateo’s pulse kicked. Not from fear, exactly. From recognition. Something was happening—and whatever it was, it wasn’t a hallucination.
Lovisa watched on with awe, her hand reaching to squeeze Mateo's arm with excitement, her eyes filled with wonder...but no fear. Her curiosity had won over any worry that might have threatened.
The contact startled him. Lovisa’s hand on his arm was light, even gentle, but to Mateo it landed like static across raw nerve endings. His breath hitched—a small, reflexive sound—and the muscles beneath her fingers tensed, locked in a quiet, instinctive protest. He didn’t flinch away, not sharply, but his body shifted with practiced precision, a smooth pivot back toward the console that neatly dislodged her touch without calling attention to it. He kept his eyes on the screen, jaw clenched just enough to feel the weight of it in his teeth, using the motion of data to ground himself. The contact lingered in his skin, too much too soon, even if she hadn’t meant harm. “Don’t… do that,” he murmured, low but controlled, then added a quieter, more deliberate, “Please.” His fingers resumed their movements, slower now, more deliberate, as if reclaiming rhythm restored order.
Nurse Inaros' eyes had widened at hearing it, looking over at the others. Confused. Unsure. Not like he could wave a dermal regenerator over this one.
Astrid caught the expressions of shock, confusion, curiosity from the assembled team. Her mind was working furiously. The Lt. might have just had a total psychotic break of some sort, true. But the information that Mateo and the science team had begun to uncover pointed a different direction and, coupled with what Aristede and Verity had already discovered about the personality changes in Veenhold, a sudden thought was blooming in Astrid's mind. She glanced over at Lt. Steel and caught the chief counselor's eye. "Counselor? I think we'll need your support on this."
Aristede wasn't a fan of holodeck scenarios; from a psychological perspective, patients were limited to a script embedded into the programming. They lacked complexity. Depth. Still, needs must so he approached the biobed and bent over, so that he was speaking gently and near enough to be heard. "Lieutenant Veenhold," Aristede said, "you're in Sickbay. And you're safe. Do you hear me?"
"Huh ... huh ... hear," Veenhold whispered, the voice sliding past his unmoving lips as though escaping a badly constructed trap which was ... interesting.
"Good, good," Aristede said quietly. "Don't try to move. Just relax. I have some questions for you."
"Tuh ... tuh ... try," Veenhold said, his eyes unblinking, staring straight ahead. The words were strangled somewhat, hampered by the way his lips didn't move when he spoke.
"Do you remember anything before being in Sickbay, "Aristede said. "Anything at all?"
"Yuh ... yuh ... yooh," Veenhold said and then again, "yooh."
"He's repeating," Aristede said as he looked up at the doctor across the biobed from him. "Latches onto a word and tries to repeat it but without any real movement. It's like the act of speaking is something he doesn't understand. No lip movement. No eye movement. Nothing."
As the CMO and Aristede spoke with Veenhold, a new piece of data appeared on Mateo's screen and the device made a beep, catching his attention. The results from the scan he'd been running before Veenhold's condition worsened. A small thing. The data on the neural pathways created by the man's undiagnosed OCD over the course of his life -- those same pathways were suddenly rewritten, the neural activity along those patterns flaring with more electrical energy than should be possible -- or could be safe.
A soft tone interrupted Mateo's thoughts. Another update from the scan he’d been running moments before the commotion. He turned back to the terminal and froze.
Neural flare. Massive. Concentrated. Targeted. The pathways that had once governed Veenhold’s compulsive regulation—the OCD loops built over a lifetime—had been overwritten. The brain’s electrical activity surged through those channels like a neural backdraft, lit up with energy far exceeding safe voltages for organic tissue.
Mateo blinked once, then again, and called out, flatly: “We’ve got a neuroelectric spike in the prefrontal circuitry. The obsessive-compulsive patterns weren’t suppressed—they were hijacked. Rewritten at the structural level. Something used them like a framework. Like scaffolding.”
Astrid nodded, stepping away from the strange conversation Veenhold and Aristede were having. She looked at Mateo.
"What is it?"
Mateo leaned slightly away from the console, brow furrowed. “His compulsions built a predictable pathway—one so deeply embedded, it became ideal for parasitic routing. Whatever this thing is, it’s using pattern fidelity to move through the brain. It’s not just damaging him—it’s occupying him. These aren’t random degenerative effects. They’re purposeful. Organized.” He hesitated, a flicker of disbelief in his voice. “It’s... reconfiguring the brain like it’s colonizing it.”
He glanced back at the readings, one more time to be sure.
“This isn’t a disorder. It’s a design.”
The last word left his mouth just as his thoughts converged with the same gravity that had gathered behind Doctor Nyx’s eyes. His gaze flicked toward Veenhold—sitting upright, glassy-eyed, speaking in a voice that didn’t belong to him.
Astrid listened, nodded. The evidence coalesced quickly: neural scans from the affected individuals showed unmistakable uniformity, degeneration cascading precisely along pathways associated with obsessive-compulsive disorders. The data echoed what the counselor and chaplain had suggested—this degeneration wasn't random; it was deliberate, exploiting existing neural vulnerabilities to accelerate deterioration. She glanced over at Veenhold. Her train of earlier thought coalesced. But, again, Mateo was there at the same moment. Even as she thought, It's a lifeform!, he spoke up.
Mateo exhaled slowly.
“It’s a lifeform.”
"What?" Raine came over and looked, a slight frown coming to her, followed by a blankness. "Great. Now how do we get it out of him?" she said, looking over at the others.
"Can we replicate the catalyst that lured it through in the first place? Lead it into a safe and contained environment?" Lovisa asked softly as she leant closer to the screen to take a closer look at what they'd discovered about its journey to its new host. "This could technically be a first contact scenario, we should avoid potentially hostile actions."
Mateo didn’t answer right away. His eyes stayed fixed on the neural map, the residual flare pattern still pulsing faintly on the screen like an echo caught mid-spike. Raine’s question hung in the air—sharp, urgent—but the answer didn’t come easily. Nothing about this felt clean. Nothing about it felt solvable in a way that wouldn’t cost something.
“I don’t think it wants to leave,” he said eventually, his voice quiet, as though the data might rearrange itself if he spoke too loudly. “It’s not just… inside him. It’s interacting. The way it patterned itself through his cognition—it’s not random. It’s targeted.”
He brought up the flare signature again, magnifying it into three dimensions, letting the others see how it had woven through Veenhold’s prefrontal cortex, latching onto long-established behavioral pathways like scaffolding. “This isn’t just parasitic,” he continued, slower now. “It might be symbiotic. Or something close. It’s not feeding on him—it’s using him. And if it’s that embedded, trying to pull it out directly might cause more damage than it fixes.”
He hesitated. Then, glancing briefly at Lovisa, added, “But maybe… if we replicated the conditions that drew it in—the heat spike, the field’s energy signature—there’s a chance we could recreate the transfer. Not force it out, just… offer it something else. A cleaner host. Preferably not a person.”
He paused, carefully not looking at anyone in particular. “That’s just one possibility,” he said. “I could be wrong. But if it responds to energy, to structure, maybe it can be drawn out the same way it was pulled in.”
Then, quieter, almost to himself: “We just have to give it a reason to move.”
"What if we killed the host?" Alexion suggested gruffly, the bluntness of his words echoed in the tone of his voice. There was the underlying sound of a shrug in the way he said it, even if it didn't quite reach his shoulders. He had surreptitiously shuffled a few steps back, to regain a more preferable distance from the unnatural occurrences. "And be ready to resuscitate once it's moved on, of course..." he added, in case it hadn't been clear and they thought him an entirely heartless monster.
Astrid stared at him for a moment. Her mind flashed to her brief experiences with the man so-far. He was smart. Capable. And, as she turned the comment over in her mind, it started to make sense.
"We're going to do it." She nodded to Alexion and Inaros. "Give it a good reason to leave without hurting it." And hopefully keep it from hurting its host on the way out. There was a certain irony in the plan. To save their officer, they needed to end his life.
Alexion gave a short, sharp nod, already moving to start putting a tray together...hyposprays with vials to induce clinical death, a cortical stimulator to then resuscitate him. If the idea of what they were about to do bothered him, it didn't show as he watched on matter of factly and moved with methodic calm.
"Science team!" Astrid called. "We're going to catalyze a holographic energy matrix. Take a hologram and use the transporation system to solidify the pattern enough so that it reads like living tissue. Then, as soon as this thing leaves Veenhold we'll pull the whole construct into the pattern buffer. That'll give us time to analyze it in greater detail. Maybe even find a way to communicate with it." Or finish beaming it into space, if we have to, she added silently.
TBC:
Lieutenant Astrid Nyx
Chief Medical Officer
USS Fenrir
Crewman Mateo Gardel
Medical Science Specialist
USS Fenrir
Dr. Alexion Wylde
Medical
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)
Lieutenant JG Lovisa Montague
Science Officer
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Blake)
PO1 Leon Inaros
Nurse
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Hanlon)
Lieutenant Aristede Steele
Chief Counsellor
USS Fenrir
Crewman Raine Ni-ya
Science
USS Fenrir
(PNPC - Hanlon)
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