Posted by Corinne Dalton (Apparation?) in R&D Lab - Previously On ‘Weird Days At Work’

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Dr. Solomon Kane (Research & Development) in R&D Lab - Previously On ‘Weird Days At Work’

Posted by Corinne Dalton (Apparation?) in R&D Lab - Previously On ‘Weird Days At Work’
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Many months ago…

The directive had been sent to his Intel encoded comm terminal in his lab; the one hidden inside a workbench inside the section of R&D that only he could access. It was simply a notification to expect a delivery. No name, no return comm… nothing. But the encrypted authorization checked out; so whomever had sent it was legit. Probably another bit of tech someone had ‘come across’ in some op that he would never hear about. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. The only oddity was that there were no instructions of where to send his assessment to. Whatever.he thought to himself. Kane shrugged and went to the shuttle bay with a hover sled to retrieve whatever piece he was supposed to analyze. When the shuttle landed, a few incoming crew stepped out, a few departing crew walked to go inside (including MacGivenson, that piece of space refuse). Kane glared one last time at the Engineer and the man quickly got inside the shuttle.

A figure stepped out. Human, male, and wearing a medical uniform with no rank indicator. He walked up to Kane carrying a small black box, no larger than small tool kit, with a handle on top. “Lieutenant Commander Kane?” Kane nodded once and the man simply handed him the case and turned and walked away. Kane looked down at the case, which weighed maybe three kilos, and then at the sled. He growled softly and then set the case on the sled and went back to the lab.

---

The case had sat unopened for almost a week. He did, after all, have other projects that had a higher priority than some box with no name. He had scanned it of course, making sur it wasn’t dangerous. It was a mass of computer tech from somewhere. He’d get to it later. And the later arrived.

It was first thing in the morning when he got to the lab that Kane opened the case… after several biometric and electronic ID confirmations. When he opened it, he said simply “Huh.” Inside was a translucent blue cube with a network of silvery filament seemingly filling almost the entirety of the object. It glowed with a soft blue light, and hundred of small motes of gold light traveled slowly around the filament network. His first impression was that it looked like an artificial neural network of some kind, but the housing was odd. He scanned it multiple times in various ways, and then he took it out of the box and set it a Faraday cage. The scans indicated it was a computer of some kind; but the nature of it was nowhere in the Federation database or even in any of the restricted databases he had access to. He put up dampening fields and shunted all access to the ship’s computer away from the device and made sure no signals could come from it, save to the area of the workbench.

He then watched it for a long time.

It did… nothing. So he began to visually inspect it. No markings were found inside or the surface of the cube; but a small tag had been hastily adhered to the base. It said only ‘C.D. Saracen’. He looked at the rest of the device for over four hours and found nothing else. He then began a search for ‘C.D. Saracen’. No one by that name existed. It wasn’t a business nor was it a place. He broadened the search to include possible numeric permutations of the letters. Nothing. “Well… the last word isn’t common. Start there.” He pulled up all entries on the word Saracen. First was an encyclopedic entry of the word, explaining at as ‘Saracen was a term used both in Greek and Latin writings between the 5th and 15th centuries (Earth History Timeframes), to refer to the people who lived in and near what was designated by the Romans as Arabia Petraea and Arabia Deserta.’ Kane thought. No way this device was that old. Hell, even the scans said it was only a couple of years old. He kept looking. There were many people form Earth history with the name, some places and corporations throughout that planet’s history with the name…

And there was a Star Fleet Vessel with the name as well.

Kane muttered “Got you.” and he pulled up the ship’s file. It was a big combat vessel with a storied history. Kane didn’t really care, but the studied anyway. Nothing jumped out at him. So he ran a search for crew with the initials ‘C’ and ‘D’. And that’s when things got interesting.

There was a previous crew member named Corinne Dalton who was listed in the Star Fleet database as ‘Missing’. Kane blinked a few times and then looked back at the cube. He stared at it for a minute and then said “You got something to do with that woman going bye-bye? Oh, I bet you do, you naughty minx. So let’s see if you can tell me anything.”

Kane retrieved and put together a completely isolated interface module, complete with a Faraday cage and a small explosive… you know, just in case. He then took a pair of tweezers and carefully removed the tag, revealing a small access port. Again making sure that no connection existed between the cube and the ship, he plugged in a diagnostic computer and began to run tests.

Kane, R&D

The air shimmered around him as the ubiquitous holoemitters activated.

Before Kane stood a Human woman with long raven hair, vivid blue eyes that were almost unnatural in colour and she was dressed in a white Grecian style gown. She took in Kane for a moment before a shriek, no a wail erupted from her and she collapsed to the deck in a heap in absolutely againy. “What have you done to me, you monster?!”

~??

Kane looked at the figure a moment and then said “Huh. Okay then…” and turned to the diagnostic module. The cube was self-powered and housed a truly astonishing artificial network of some kind. Kane had never seen anything linked it. “Wow, okay… let’s see what happens when we adjust a couple of things.” he said to himself and then tapped a few commands and the emitters went off-line. He then accessed a subroutine and turned the volume down by half. Oddly, he couldn’t access the core system. The only thing he could was adjust how the program was seen and heard. “Weird. But OK, I can play along.” He looked at the cube and said “So what exactly are you?”

Kane, R&D

The woman’s whimpers turned into half-chocked sobs and it seemed not to matter that he couldn’t see her anymore. The pain was rather real. It was like someone had chopped off her limbs and left her in a dark place (again), where time had no meaning. “Who…” she said, trying to cathc her breath. “Where am I? Who are you? What the hell did you do to me?”

~??

Kane shook his head, sending hair falling over his face. “Nope. I ask questions and you give answers. So first up, what are you? What is your primary purpose and who created you? You answer those questions, and maybe you get a question of your own.”

Kane, R&D

Struggling to gather her composure, there was several long moments before she responded, her voice etched with fatigue. So many times she had done this before, having to defend her existence. “It told you, not what, who. No one created me. I am Corinne Dalton, Lieutenant Corinne Dalton.” She was swimming in a pain she couldn’t even quite articulate, but it was beyond anything physical.

~Corinne Dalton

Kane looked at the cube and said “Uh… huh. Hang on a sec.” He stood up and walked out of the lab to his office and pulled up the personnel file for one Lieutenant Corinne Dalton. The first thing he got was a falg saying the officer was in a missing status. The second thing he got was a clamp slammed down on the file so hard it almost made his chair shake. Kane glared and entered his Intel credentials and the clamp, with what Kane assumed was a rude gesture and a huffing noise, went away. He read… then re-read… the re-read again… the file of the missing Lieutenant. It wasn’t that the file was amazing or remarkable in and of itself… it was the peripheral actions around the file that interested him. First, the file said she was dead. Then, after a while, there is a request for the file from a figure Kane knew personally saying she was alive and well. Then there was a FedSec lock placed on it as she was suspected of having been murdered. But she wasn’t, because the file indicated she had quarters assigned to her on board the Saracen months after she was ‘killed’. And then… poof, she was gone. And since then… nothing. Kane leaned back and stared for a moment, and then got up and went back into the lab.

“Ok. Let’s start form the beginning. You, according to you, are a dead-then-alive-then-maybe murdered-then alive-then disappeared Star Fleet officer named Corrine Dalton. Okay… so first up you look nothing like your file pic, just sayin’. And second, and I’ll play along a bit here, just exactly how or why should I believe that?”

Kane, R&D

His skepticism was warranted, sure. Her story was so unbelievable as to be impossible, and yet here she was. “I remember the moment I was shot on the holodeck so vividly. When time moves different for you, everything feels so visceral. The bullet ripped though my body as I tried to run away. I was then lying on the ground in this sandy desert program, bleeding out in an alley. I died. I remember telling Levi that I was sorry. We were supposed to be married, but what I didn’t know then was that it was all a ploy. That he had some stupid bet with someone else and this was all an accident. It wasn’t supposed to be me in this gods-forsaken program. I was supposed to be next door getting engaged. Instead I died… but then I wasn’t. I woke up in Sickbay but the blood wasn’t real anymore. I tried to leave Sickbay, but that’s as far as the holoemitters went. I vanished and found myself drifting in a void. It took me so long to understand that everything I was was stored in the Saracen’s computer systems and that I had become integrated. There was no way to remove me. We looked at all sorts of ways, even to the point of considered transfer to an Android body, despite it being illegal, but it was too risky. No one could guarantee my whole consciousness would go with me. Like right now. Something is wrong! Please! Help me. I don’t know where I am. The last thing I remember was being in my quarters with Royal and then… nothing. I don’t remember anything until now. But it hurts. Worse than anything I used to feel when the Saracen was damaged.”

~Corinne Dalton

And there it is. he thought. “Royal? Who is Royal? And thats a grand story but right now a bit hard to swallow. I mean…” and he looked around, his eyes landing on a piece of rigid mylar. He picked it up and held it front of the cube so it was reflected in it. “That’s you. Thats what I am talking to right now. So you are gonna have to explain how a Star Fleet Lieutenant got crammed into a glowing blue box.”

Kane, R&D