Posted by Lieutenant Commander Dr. Solomon Kane (Research & Development) in R&D Office- Between Then and Now

Posted by Lieutenant Corinne Dalton (Scientist) in R&D Office- Between Then and Now

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Dr. Solomon Kane (Research & Development) in R&D Office- Between Then and Now
Posted by… suppressed (14) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

Kane laughed and shook his head, his hair falling all over before he swept it back with a hand. “You aren’t a pawn of jack and-or s#!t. If they wanted you, for whatever reason, they sure as hell wouldn’t have allowed you to walk all over the ship and let everyone see you. Naw… you’d have been plucked form us the second you woke up after the transfer. Add to that that your name and pic is all over the Star Fleet database now and that hasn’t triggered a visit form the boys in gray and black. And they have had ample opportunity. And again… I’m the guy they would have called to bring you in, and they didn’t. Granted, I probably would have said ‘F^<k off’ and they know it, but still. That’s what they use me for. And no one has gone snooping in your file. I know because Lex and I are watching to see who is paying attention. And right now? Most of the inquiries are personnel staff or individuals from your academy class. Oh, and a few from the Saracen. But that’s it.” He shrugged at her and said “Sorry, Dalton… you just aren’t that special anymore.” and he smirked and turned around and began messing with something.

Kane

That wasn’t it at all and yet the barb stung. “So you think that’s it, it’s truly over? Do you really think I can actually just live my life?” All the bite had vanished, replaced by timidness. Cori thought he was wrong that if someone had wanted to investigate by now they would have. It hadn’t been that long and it takes time to travel space no matter how fast you can go. You can push your engines only so far.

~Corinne Dalton

Kane turned around and held out his hand. In it was a comm badge. “Here. If you are so worried, take this. Standard comm badge keyed to your ID. Does everything yours now does, but also has an emergency transponder that tags you if you go off the ship without telling me. Also has a built-in transporter protocol. If you are transported by any system other than the Ogawa without prior notice, you are brought right back here. Here as in my lab. And before you materialize wherever you were being taken.” He tossed the badge next to her on a table. “I made that for Lex, but I’ll make her another. But you won’t need it. Like I said… your use to the ones who would do shit like that ran out when you weren’t a co.puter anymore. And going after you now would reveal them… if there is a them to reveal anyway. Seriously, Dalton. You gotta learn to enjoy what you have..” and he grew very serious.. “Trust me. I know probably better than you do what it means to change lives.”

Kane

She glared slightly. “Don’t presume that because you know details on a file and forced me to walk you through the essentials of my existence under duress that you know what I’m going through. Maybe you have had something similar, but don’t diminish my experience. This isn’t a contest. It’s been hard as hell to hold on to anything. It constantly is ripped away from me or slips through my fingers. So yeah, it’s hard to trust any of this yet.”

~Corinne Dalton

Kane laughed dismissively. “Lady, you can go soak your head. I didn’t diminish anything… but you just sure as hell did.” He turned around and began working on something else. “You wanna go through the rest of your life with a chip on your shoulder because of what happened to you before, go ahead. I mean, it’s easy as f#<k to do it. Path of least resistance and all that. But it’s a waste. All you do is dwell and become bitter. And then you just miss so much.” He turned around holding… something… that glowed with a soft blue light and lit his face as he scowled at it and he worked at it with a screwdriver. “Also, I know more about you than you think. See…” and he took a deep breath. “I ain’t from around here.”

“Oh?” Cori said, folding her arms across her chest.

He set the device aside and went to another cluttered table and picked up a PaDD. He tapped on it for a few moments and then rossed the PaDD on the table next to her. He picked up the glowing device and said “And I know it’s not a contest. Never said it was. But Im not talking out my ass, either.” He turned around and didn’t say anything further.

On the PaDD was a personnel file… his. And the number of Security warnings scrolling across the top of the dispaly indicated it wasn’t a normal file.

Kane

She pulled the PADD over and looked over what was there. Her eyes widened at more than one point. “Huh,” she said eventually. Cori kept reading and it was clear she could take in information quite quickly.

Setting the Padd on the table, she was lost in thought until she finally looked up at him, her vivid blue eyes taking him in with curiosity, yes, but also understanding. Or probably more accurately, compassion. “So how have you made any of this work? How do you stand being here?”

~Corinne Dalton

Kane kept working and said “I accept that I don’t have a choice.” he said flatly, his face highlighted by the glowing blue from the device. “Where I am from, nobody really had a shot. Shit sucked and that was life. So… I made the best of what I could control- myself. So I took what I had, who I was, and I made the best ‘me’ I could. And then… then I was un-made at the atomic level and spent eternity or an instant in whatever was between there and here.” The device whirred and soon was floating in the air. Kane ignored it, picking up something else and fidgeting with it. “And then I was here. I didn’t ask to be. I didn’t want to be. And I will never exactly fit here. It’s like I told Lex a while back… I live in the Uncanny Valley now.” He looked up at Dalton and said “You know the term?”

Kane

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of it.” But Cori was listening carefully, taking in all he was saying.

~Corinne Dalton

“It’s an old expression from Earth… at least my Earth.” he said, and looked back down. “It means that something artificial looks so real that it’s unnerving. Like it’s almost malevolent. Somewhere in the great mists of time past something my humans encountered that looked so human but was so evil that it made an impression on our very DNA warning us to be very wary of things like that.” The second device started glowing red. “Now for me, all of my reality is like that. Everywhere I look, everything is just oh-so-slightly ‘off’. Like someone is trying to fake it and is doing it so well I can’t help but see it as some kind of facade.”

Kane

She nodded slowly. “I can see how it would be that way for you. What little we know of other universes is that the variations can be very small or very striking, but proximity tends to show less drastic differences.” She gestured with her chin to the objects in his hands. “What are you working on?”

~Corinne Dalton

“Mass Casulaty Field Triage Scanner.” he said and then the glowing red device started hovering next to the blue one. “Basically a deployable tricorder on steroids. If it works, it will move over a mascas area scanning every I fividual involved, transmit the data the response team’s tricorders and set who is in most need without waiting for individual scans.” He wa5ched the two devices circle each other slowly, then his eyes snapped to Dalton. “You can’t control anything but you, Dalton. And the only thing that you have total dominion over is how you react and how you choose to respond to the inevitable chaos that is living in this other any other universe.”

Kane

She was silent for a long while. What could she say to that? Cori knew she was struggling and she was doing her best to work through it. She shrugged. “I’m doing my best to work through everything and it’s not perfect. I know that. There are things I never got to properly process from before. I’m doing that now. Otherwise, there’s no point to any of this. Besides, it would be a waste of a perfectly perfect stolen body, right?”

~Corinne Dalton

Kane nodded once. “Right. And it’d be a real shame if you just waste all your time and make me repossess that body.” He tapped a command and the two devices shot forward and around the room, pausing a few seconds over Dalton and then over him. A tricorder on the table chirped and Kane picked it up. “You’re perfectly health, go figure. I need vitamins and rest. Ha, like that’s gonna happen.” He looked at Dalton. “Two full scans in less than ten seconds. That’ll work.”

Kane, R&D

She moved around the table and eyed the device. “As you know, I have an unusual brain”-she smirked like it was an inside joke-” and I have all sort of info in my head that I didn’t when I was actually working as a scientist. Tell me about the modifications? I’m curious how it isolates the biosigns so quickly in order to give an accurate assessment.”

~Corinne Dalton

“A hundred micro-vid processors in each drone using an integrated visual analysis suite with all biosigns attached to a still of the patient. Basically, it takes a picture and then scans.” Kane said. “Just really fast. It also has a built in vomm system so it can tie into an orbiting ship’s computer for comparison data.”

Kane, R&D

“How does it prevent confusion between two patients if there isn’t as much distance between say you and I right now? In a mass casualty situation you could have several people in a group. If it’s scanning overhead that fast, couldn’t it confuse two people if there was little separation between them?” She was just thinking aloud, but also trying to work through the potential problems in her head.

~Corinne Dalton

“Both drones talk to one another, so they compare the vid, spatial coordinates, and biosigns to make sure each is accurate. Triple redundancy.” Kane replied. “They can also track movements of up to fifty casualties at a time, so if they get moved they don’t have to be re-scanned. Between the two of them, they can cover around a hundred meter radius. But I’m working on networking them with additional drones so the area they can cover will increase with each additional unit.” He looked at her grinned. “I may try and work in a cloaking system so they could be used for battlefield triage without getting shot down.”

Kane, R&D

“That’s a really awesome system, though maybe build in a recall system for the drones in case the control mechanism is interfered with? If they are cloaked and the operator loses control over them… you can’t see them,” she said with a chuckle.

~Corinne Dalton