SD242004.03 - Duty Log - CO - "Old Memories"

Posted on Fri Apr 3rd, 2020 @ 6:52pm by Brigadier General Jonathan Grey

1,559 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: The Sincerest Form of Flattery
Location: Versailles
Timeline: Current

=^= Science Lab 5 =^=

Glass tinkled as it was swept, carefully, into a hand-held pan. Stepping carefully around the crewmen attempting to shift a thick beam, the Doctor carried the glass over to the recycler out of habit. She then sighed, and redirected to a cargo crate that was being used as a makeshift bin in the middle of the room.

One sharp shake emptied the pan, sending the shards in to tinkle against the pile of crushed tricorders, snapped petri dishes, and bent microscopes. Two more crates, both full to the brim, sat against the far wall. Each was filled with broken analysers, diffusers, and pieces of a console that had been smashed to pieces by falling metal from the ceiling.

The room itself was tidier than it was, the doctor mused to herself. Aside from the girder, almost all of the larger pieces had been moved into the crates. Now the only messes were the smaller things that broke on a daily basis.

As if sensing her thoughts, the lights flickered overhead, and the Doctor rolled her eyes. As one, the scientists and assistants rushed over to the space underneath the stairs leading up to the next level.

Taking shelter there, they watched with resignation as, surely enough, the flickering lights gave way to a steady rumble. Building in severity, the rumbling was accompanied by a groaning noise from the superstructure of the station.

A shattering sound from the far end of the room made one of the assistant groan. His colleague punched him gently on the arm.

"Yeah yeah, my turn." said the punched assistant, nodding his head in resignation.

As quickly as it had arrived, the rumbling faded. They all peered out from under the stairs and looked up at the ceiling. Then they turned to the one assistant carrying a working tricorder. She pushed a few buttons, watched it as it processed data for a few moments, and then nodded.

"It's clear. Ceiling integrity's stable."

With a collective sigh, the staff moved out and into the room. The doctor with the dustpan and brush made her way out into the room, and noticed shadows moving in the hallway outside the main door.

The mystery was quickly solved when a cluster of marines stomped in through the door.

The green-shouldered quartet were out of their powered armour, but still wore low-profile armour under their tunics. Two took up position next to the door, keeping watch on the outside, and the other two fell in behind a fifth man.

"Commander Tyris. You asked to see me?" said General Grey, noting the dustpan and brush.

The Doctor set the cleaning gear down and nodded. "Yes sir. We've been routing our limited power to one of the scientific arrays to try and monitor the gravitational wavefronts being emitted by the unstable singularity that has trapped our station, and we elected to rotate power between the different elements of the array, to attempt to identify any second order effects caused by the sudden increase of-"

"Commander!" barked the General, rubbing the bridge of his nose, feeling a migraine coming on. "Please. Small words?" he added, in a gentler tone.

The Commander's lips thinned to a tight line, and her eyes flashed at being shouted at. While still only a department head, her department was still large enough to crew an entire ship by itself. Several, even. As such, she enjoyed being shouted at by her boss as much as the General enjoyed the attention of the fleet admirals.

Which was to say, not at all.

"Yes sir." she said, eventually.

The General had the good graces to nod and down his eyes briefly, aknowledging the harshness of his tone, but then raised and kept his eyes on her. Call it the need for a firm leader or testosterone poisoning. Either way.

"Here." said the Commander, leading him over to the sole powered console. Much like the flight control console up in Ops, this one showed an image of the black hole at its center. This one, however, had it swamped by statistics, data points, and various mathematical equations linked to wobbly lines of varying colours in cluttered charts.

"Black holes can change time with gravity. More gravity means time passes slower for things near the middle. Do you understand?" said the Commander, in the tone of a university professor addressing an enthusiastic but rather stupid pupil.

For his part, the General simply nodded, even as the marines chuckled under their breath behind him. They were all tired, and she needed a way to bleed off the stress he'd caused her, so he let her continue without comment.

"This should be constant, the flow of time. We can fudge the gravity, but the time flow should be close to the flow outside. Precisely. You can't mess with time...or we can't usually."

At this, the Commander gave the General a very frank look.

"Sir, our time sensors say that time isn't flowing properly inside the station."

*That* got the General's attention.

"Well, damn. How bad is it?" he asked.

"Not bad. A millisecond here or there. It's more a temporal scar than a wound. It appears to be the after-effect of a...well...how much do you know about temporal retroactive continuity?"

"Is that when people dress up in clockwork goggles and steam-powered hats?"

"No, sir. I'm referring to a large, sudden temporal event here on the station within the last few years. There's nothing on official records, but we were involved. The black hole's gravity is highlighting it."

"So, what, time experiments on the station?"

"We can't tell where it happened, but something big ties the event and this station. Maybe there were materials or people on the station that were removed from time. We've seen it before, when significant people are cut out of time. Their timelines leave...traces. Even after they never happened."

"I know enough about temporal mechanics to know I hate it." the General groused. "I have enough trouble remembering daylight savings."

"Then you'll hate this." promised the Commander, "From what we can tell, the effects of the temporal event changed reality on a wide scale. However, the effect is thinnest inside our hull, and even thinner in living minds. We've even seen signs of neural bleed."

"Neural...our brains are *leaking*?"

"No, sir." she reassured him, "the effects should be surface-only. Our minds will simply...remember what we remembered before, alongside our existing memories."

"So remembering missing people, furniture, silverware."

"Yes. Anyone whose timelines intersected significantly with ours."

"Well, fantastic. We'll all be remembering things that never happened, or only sort of happened. Great. Your advice?"

"It should settle fairly quickly. These are our own memories, after all, just different ones. First of all, you should notify the CO. I'm sure Admiral Cerywyn will want to know about, uh. Huh." mumbled the Commander, suddenly puzzled.

"Admiral who?" asked the General, equally confused. "Commander, I'm the CO. I'm positive about it. I've been the CO for two years, ever since Old Carrot left."

"Yes sir, I'm sorry sir."

"...I think there *might* have been a Cerywyn several years back, before Old Carrot." Grey offered, racking his brains. "Only here for a few months. Short and sweet. Way before my time though."

"Yes, I remember that." said the Commander, slowly, as if teasing a thread out of cotton. "I remember Cerywyn was here briefly, then Commodore Kraat'Loss for several years, and then you were promoted two years ago. But...I also remember that Kraat'Loss never came here, and that it was Admiral Cerywyn for many years before you."

"Also remember?" asked the General, aware that something similar was niggling at the back of his own mind.

"Yes sir. I'm beginning to recall two timelines. The old one, where Cerywyn was out CO for many years, and the new one, where we barely know her."

The general sighed, and leaned against the edge of the console.

"As if the situation wasn't complicated enough."


=^= End of Log =^=

Brigadier General Jonathan Grey
Commanding Officer
Starbase Versailles


OOC: Those of you who knew Cerywyn when her character was on the station can feel free to have some or all of those memories return. If you don't recall, Cerywyn ended her time as CO of this sim two years ago by doing a complex thing with time, stopping the bad guys and also erasing much of her history with us. At this time, her space in our memories was replaced by a timeline where a Commodore Kraat'Loss was the CO of Versailles.

Right now the timelines kinda exist in parallel in our minds. They branched a few months or so after Cerywyn first joined us, and merged shortly before I became CO 2 years ago. Feel free to get a headache over remembering two sets of memories for the same time period.

Also, if anyone wants to know when the temporal thing first affected our minds, see this log here:

http://versailles.5thfleet.net/index.php/sim/viewpost/24

This will not be a major factor of the main plot going forwards, nor will OMEGA (the evil group that Cery stopped with her temporal business) be returning. This log is intended to simply restore memories and few photographs, so that Cerywyn can feel free to visit if she should choose to.

Have a pleasant evening. :)

 

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