Posted by Lieutenant Dr Kahu Grahams (Chief Medical Officer) in Main Sim: Sickbay
In Sickbay, Dr Grahams patted the NE on the back, “All good to go there mate. Try not to come back too soon,” he said stepping back so the young fella could stand up. “Thanks doc,” The NE replied jumping back off the bio-bed. Dr Grahams nodded a goodbye and turned to look over the patients that were still waiting for a bed. Today it seemed endless. First injuries and now headaches, nausea, vomiting and the medical alarms piping up just when he thought things were under control. All followed by the next group of patients who all seemed to be suffering more than the first group that had come in.

Every neural reading showed the exact same thing. Readings that ran as wild as the deer, darting in and out, neural pathways splitting and resynching. It was putting pressure on people’s brains. No wonder they were showing so many symptoms similar to a concussion or radiation. How long, he wondered, before the symptoms themselves evolved into seizures or strokes. Or even something more serious than that. Because if these fluctuations and strain kept coming the symptoms would only escalate and even the ones who were feeling alright now, would be affected. He sure hoped the team on bridge knew what they were doing because he had no clue how long their bodies would be able to handle all these continuous shifts.

“Right,” he turned to his next patient, ready to do another neurological scan hoping with all the data he was accumulating he might find something better than him putting a plaster on the symptom. “What do we have here?”

Lt. Grahams CMO

OOC: Hope this is alright.

OOC: Absolutely beautiful!

Sickbay did not quiet. It layered.

The moment Lt. Grahams turned to his next patient, the low hum of biobeds, scanners, and medical alarms seemed to double, then subtly fall out of sync. Not louder. Not chaotic. Just misaligned. For a fraction of a second, the patient in front of him appeared to inhale twice—once shallow, once deeper—before resolving into a single, stable breath. The biobed behind them chimed, then chimed again a half-second earlier.

Medical readouts across the ward began to shift. Not failing. Not spiking uncontrollably. But duplicating. Neural scans displayed overlapping pathways—two sets of synaptic activity occupying the same brain, slightly offset in timing. One leading. One lagging. Both real. The diagnostic display attempted to reconcile the data and failed. A medical alert appeared: neural phase variance detected, temporal offset 0.31 seconds and increasing.

A crewman seated upright on a nearby biobed winced, clutching the side of his head. “Doc… it’s like—” he stopped, blinking hard. “—like I already heard myself say that.” Across from him, another patient retched suddenly, but the motion stuttered, repeating in a fractured sequence before completing fully, the body attempting to follow two neurological instructions at once.

Grahams’ scanner updated again in his hand. The wild neural readings he had been tracking were no longer random. They were patterned. Synaptic pathways branched, then rejoined, then branched again, each iteration slightly more unstable than the last.

At the far end of Sickbay, a biobed monitor flatlined, then immediately corrected itself. The patient gasped—a breath taken before the alarm had registered. Another alert followed: coherence band narrowing.

The system began to extrapolate. Not standard Starfleet protocol. Not a programmed function. But something in the ship’s integrated systems was now sharing data across departments, projecting outcomes. A new line appeared across multiple displays: projected neural failure threshold, seventeen minutes.

Grahams’ next patient sat down, then for a fraction of a second sat down again, the same motion overlaying itself before settling. The scanner in Grahams’ hand flickered and then stabilized long enough to deliver a clearer picture. The crew were not suffering from trauma, poisoning, or radiation. They were desynchronizing.

The brain—human, Vulcan, Caitian, Andorian alike—was attempting to process multiple temporal inputs simultaneously. Two streams of perception. Two sequences of cause and effect. Trying to reconcile them into one. And failing.

At one of the central consoles, a nurse called out, “Doctor—neural spikes increasing across all patients!” Another voice followed, tighter now, “We’re seeing micro-seizure activity in early-stage cases—repeat—early-stage—”

The alarms shifted in tone, not louder but sharper, more urgent. A new alert appeared: synaptic overload imminent, neural stabilization required.

But there was no known treatment for this. No hypospray. No cortical stimulator calibrated for time itself.

Grahams’ scanner updated one final time, pulling in external data from the ship—from Science, from Engineering, from the bridge. And the connection became clear. The fluctuations in the crew were not the cause. They were the symptom.

The Merrimack’s multi-phasic state, the harmonic interference, the weakening coherence of the anchor—it was all feeding directly into the crew’s nervous systems.

Another projection appeared, brief and unstable but unmistakable. Anchor stabilized: neural activity returns to single-stream processing, symptoms subside. Anchor collapses: neural pathways fail to reconcile, cognitive fragmentation follows.

And then the most troubling line of all appeared: time to irreversible neural decoherence decreasing.

Around him, Sickbay continued to fill. Patients still walking in. Still talking. Still functioning—for now. But the pattern was accelerating. The intervals between desync events were shrinking. The brain could compensate—until it couldn’t.

For the first time since the crisis began, Sickbay had a clock.

And it was running out.

GM Nosferatu
Your Darkest Nightmare