<snip>

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?”

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.

Each chime and alarm had Grahams head flicking from one side of sickbay to another. The knee jerk reaction of responding immediately, a trait valuable on a normal day when a patient suddenly went into issues was now a hindrance when they were all going off at one and they all had their hands full with their patients with their own alarms ringing.

One of the nurses he could see in particular was struggling with the stimulation, if his memory served him she was the youngest and new to the job. He couldn’t blame her. Her breath was speeding up and she looked like she was about to have the beginning of a panic attack. Turning from the patient he’d just finished treating in front of him, he walked past her and tapped her on the shoulder. “Take a break,” he said quietly to her, “Put your head between your knees and count your breathing until your heart slows. I know this is overwhelming but just focus on one patient at a time.”

Then movement caught his eye and he was moving away before she could respond. He would have liked to have gone with her to sit down and made sure she was settled but he couldn’t afford that. He was the CMO and he had to be on the ball and keep the Sickbay going. The fact offsets were lengthening was scaring him, but there was a bonus, now the data was slowly becoming clearer. He could observe the shifts better and get a better reading on how they were affecting the brains of his patients.

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.

“I know,” Graham said administrating some pain relief to the crewman, and pulled his scanner out to take a read, looking over his shoulder to make sure there was someone coming to treat the vomiting patient, wincing a little at the motion. Once he was sure that patient was going to be sorted he turned around to look at the scanner again.

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.

Grahams took a deep breath, then let it out slowly through his mouth. The words not good, ran through his mind. He took another breath and pushed it from his mind. He needed to focus. One more breath and he turned to the medical staff. “Take levetiracetam and vocretamine for any one with seizure or pre-seizure symptoms, failing that administer neuro suppressants, put the worst patients stasis if you have to.”

He was taking a risk, he had no idea of what could possibly be the outcome of switching treatments, and knew that even if it did work the way he was hoping it would only buy a little more time.

The desynchronising was not something he could change, but the neural activity he could. The brains that were working in overdrive to try and keep up with processing the distorting and confusing information being fed to them was fatiguing the brains. So far until now the medical staff had been treating the brains trying to help them keep up but now he wanted to flip that. His theory being that if he could slow the activity of the brain instead it would slow the processing the information and stimuli that was flooding the brain. Hopefully bring it to a level that would make the absorption of information easier.

There would be no more skipping of the electric circuits in the brain that caused the spikes as it tried to cut corners to keep up. It would take the fatigue away from the brain as it would no longer be running a marathon so to speak, but do the opposite. It would make the crew sleepy, even dopey but if it brought them an extra minute longer, than that was an extra minute that him, or somebody else could come up with something to save them.

Of course it might not work, it could exasperate symptoms instead but as he saw it Sickbay was already overwhelmed. If he didn’t try something different than it wouldn’t matter anyway.

He looked back across his patients, his staff that were working to make them comfortable, working to stop this never ending tide. They had seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes before this temporal affect over took them all.

It was time to alert bridge. =^= Sickbay to bridge, we’ve got an increasing number of patients coming in with neurological symptoms, scans are reading that their neuro-activity is spiking and showing signs of desynchronising.=^= Graham took a deep breath =^= Captain, if my readings are correct then we only have seventeen minutes before we start to suffer total neural collapse. =^=

Merely an acknowledgement from the Captain. It seemed that he had more pressing troubles at the moment; the situation in Sickbay was just one symptom of the ship’s overall condition.

And with bad news delivered Dr Grahams returned to his patients, hoping against hope that this new tactic of his could stave things off for just a little bit longer.

Grahams’ orders moved through Sickbay like a controlled shockwave. Not panic. Not chaos. But urgency sharpened into action. Nurses and medical officers shifted immediately, hyposprays and neuro-suppressants drawn and administered with practiced precision. The first patients to receive the new treatment reacted within seconds—muscle tension easing, breathing slowing, neural spikes dipping just enough to register on the monitors. For a moment—it worked.

Across Sickbay, the alarms did not cease—but they changed. Where once they had screamed instability, they now pulsed in tight, rhythmic intervals. Neural activity, though still desynchronized, began to compress, the amplitude of the spikes lowering as brain activity slowed under the suppressants. The effect was visible.
Patients who had been clutching their heads, eyes wide with disorientation, now sagged slightly where they sat or lay. Speech slowed. Reactions dulled. The overwhelming cascade of dual perceptions blunted. But not gone.

Grahams’ scanner updated again, pulling in real-time comparisons.

NEURAL LOAD: REDUCED
PHASE VARIANCE: UNCHANGED

The distinction was critical. He wasn’t stopping the desynchronization. He was buying the brain time to survive it. Then the first complication hit.
At the far biobed, a patient’s neural readings dropped too far. Not into stability but into lag.

Their responses delayed by nearly a full second behind real-time input. The body moved, but only after the moment had already passed.
A nurse called out, “Doctor—over-suppression on Bed Six!”

As his team jumped back into action, Grahams went back to work. He purposefully selected the easier to treat patients the ones, not out of laziness but because they gave him an ability to observe his staff easier and see how his suggestion was panning out. It also meant that when the nurse called out he was already moving in her direction.

He knew there was a chance of complications happening when he made the call. Knew it wasn’t a no-fail solution. It still didn’t make it easier to see. “See if you can administer some stimulant, but just a small dose, we don’t want to completely reverse the treatment, just balance it out” he instructed.

Almost simultaneously, another patient—less affected by the medication—spiked again, their neural pathways flaring violently as their brain attempted to compensate for the dampened input. The balance was razor thin.

Across the ward, the pattern emerged. Those treated aggressively slowed—risking temporal lag. Those under-treated continued to spike—risking overload. There was no perfect dosage. Only a narrowing margin between two different kinds of failure.

The ship responded.

From Science and Engineering, new data began feeding directly into Sickbay systems—automatically, continuously. Harmonic frequency shifts, anchor stability metrics, phase variance fluctuations—all integrating into medical projections. The clock updated.

TIME TO IRREVERSIBLE NEURAL DECOHERENCE: 15 MINUTES

The change was subtle. But it was there. Grahams’ intervention had done something important. Not a cure. Not even a solution. But a delay.
Elsewhere in Sickbay, the young nurse he had sent to rest steadied herself, her breathing slowing as instructed. Around her, the environment still flickered—still doubled—but now she could process it, even if only barely.

The cost became clearer with each passing second. Crew across Sickbay were no longer fighting the experience. They were enduring it. Slowed. Dampened.
Held just below the threshold where the brain would tear itself apart trying to understand.

On the main medical display, the projection shifted again.Not two outcomes this time—but three.

ANCHOR STABILIZED:
Neural coherence restored. Full recovery possible.

CURRENT STATE (SUPPRESSED):
Neural function maintained under load. Cognitive impairment increasing over time.

ANCHOR FAILURE:
Rapid neural decoherence. Irreversible fragmentation.

The middle option flickered. Unstable. Temporary. Sickbay had not solved the problem. But it had done something just as important. It had bought the ship time.
As Grahams’ message reached the bridge, the implications were immediate and unavoidable. The situation was no longer theoretical. No longer contained to sensors and projections. The cost of inaction was now measured—in minds. And the countdown had already begun.

Bent over yet another patient, administering the neural suppressants and carefully supervising to make sure he got the balance right. Knowing from the earlier treatments that the desynchronisation made it much more niggly than normal. It had to be just right. One point too much or too little could tip the balance too far into directions he didn’t want it to go.

But, it was working. Sickbay may be starting to look like an opium den but it was buying them time. Time that they could use. The medical display was saying that there was a state where the anchor could be stabilised. Someone, himself, bridge, an NE, somebody, anybody could use that time to pull them into that stabilised state.

Making sure his now sleepy patient was secure and not going to fall, he left them to sit, eyes glazed over, pain gone from their face and moved to the next. Adjusting his dose for seize, weight, species, and every other little detail he could compensate for.

=/\= All Decks! Prepare for… err… prepare for synchronisation! =/\= Captain Glen announced to the ship, though no one knew quite what that would mean, even the Captain himself.

Suddenly there was a sudden shift of reality and everything stopped. The machines quit chiming, bodies quit phasing…silence filled sickbay. Every patient who had been sedated suddenly fell into a deep coma like state. Their minds were at rest.

For Grahams and the rest of the sickbay staff for just a heartbeat it was like time had paused for a moment. It didn’t register to him immediately, instead his heart sank, the silence feeling like death to him.

Then he saw the chest of the patient in front of him move in a slow but steady rhythm and it brought him back into focus. They weren’t dead, only in a coma. The machines hadn’t stopped for the complete desynchronisation that he had been expecting but for stabilisation. Something had indeed changed and he was hopeful that it was for the better.

=^= Sickbay to Bridge: We have signs of stabilisation amongst the crew. I will keep them here for close monitoring until I am confident they will remain stable but I am optimistic, =^=

=/\= Thank you Doctor Grahams =/\= Captain Glen replied from the Bridge.

Then he turned to his staff and the patients alike, “You all heard me. Nobody is allowed to leave Sickbay until I am satisfied that all neurological pathways are stable and side affects are completely gone,” He locked eyes with one particular Security NE “I don’t care how much better you feel, I am not taking any chances.”

“Nurses I want you to monitor the patients that are in coma’s, keep them stable but I don’t want any more medical interference than necessary until I say otherwise. A few minutes more of nap time isn’t going to hurt them, they probably need it, but if they show signs of waking up on their own notify me. The rest of my staff I want you to continue to triage, treat and monitor the patients, like we normally would. Be thorough and if you see any sign of temporal dissonance send them to me.”

He flicked his head subtly signalling his team to return back to work and happily noting that the nurse he’d sent to rest before had returned and was looking a markedly better colour than before. It seemed that now the phasing had stopped people were starting to look like they were feeling better.

They probably were, but although brains were plastic and could flex and adapt, they still had their limits and many of the patients in sickbay had been on the brink of that. He suspected that the most recent arrivals showing the least symptoms would be fine and he would probably be able to send them back to work. He imagined the second group’s symptoms would have disappeared as well but their scans would show signs of slight fatigue from the stress, nothing that a quick nap wouldn’t fix.

From the ones who had been suffering the worst of the temporal effects he expected there would still be some residue symptoms from the intensities their brains had had to endure. Those symptoms could be anything from severe fatigue to headaches, nausea and vertigo, it all depended on how much pressure their brains had had to suffer. Hopefully nothing too severe. He wanted to be sure before he started letting patients go that a) they would suffer no more effects and b) the temporal change he was seeing wasn’t a temporary fluctuation.

In the mean time he would continue to treat his patients and record data until he was certain. And later when all this was over and he had the chance to have his own rest he could review all the data from when the neural shifts began until now and examine it.

Lt. Grahams, CMO