Reading the charts

Posted on 08 Oct 2014 @ 1:14pm by Lieutenant Tuula Voutilainen M.D. & Lieutenant Olsam Mott

968 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 06 - Legend of Souls
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 3, Sickbay
Timeline: MD 10 - 0800 hrs

[ON]

Tuula rubbed her eyes. She didn't know how long she had been staring at these charts and images from the cortical scanner, and with the replicators down, she didn't have the advantage of espresso. She was starting to seriously wonder what kind of person would design emegency ration packs without including coffee. Lack of coffee is an emergency.

"Dr. Mott, can you come look at these charts?" asked Tuula, as she saw the blue man walk by the door to the office.

Olsam brought himself to a quick halt just outside the office, a considerable triumph over the momentum built up from his ample mass and velocity, and whirled around to stick his head just inside the doorway.

"Charts, you say?" he asked, looking more than a little delighted as he shuffled into the room to hover over her. There were fewer things in the universe that Olsam loved more than charts - all of them were food items, of course, with the notable exception of a good debate. Every Bolian loved a good debate. "What sort of charts? Has someone finally gotten an enterohemorrhagic infection? These wretched Starfleet rations are certainly enough to induce one. I was in the waste extraction unit for 20 minutes this morning after eating a few of the Ktarian egg-flavored ones!"

"Don't get me started on those things. I tried to heat some up because I figured inedible garbage might taste better warm, and wound up starting a fire in my quarters." Tuula passed the large PADD containing the results of Tyrion's scan to Mott. "I did a brain scan of Ensign Faye when he came in for his physical. He mentioned memory loss surrounding the murder of his partner, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't a symptom of something worse. But these charts don't seem to make sense."

Olsam took the PADD and after only the briefest moment of review his brow furrowed. He entered a few commands into the PADD to change the display of the scans, bringing up various bits of data and shaking his head the entire time.

"No. No, they don't at all. You'd assume if there's memory loss around the time of the murder then there'd be some indication of situation-specific psychogenic amnesia. There's no evidence of that in the limbic system or any indication of past fluctuations of glucocorticoids or mineralcorticoids in that region of the brain, although..." Olsam frowned and brought up one of the highly detailed electroencephalographic scans then crouched down so he was on the same level as Tuula. He motioned to the neocortex. "What do you make of that? Something's not adding up there."

"That is strange," said Tuula. "I thought that the memory loss was caused by severe trauma. After all, this was surrounding the death of his lover. I'm not a neuroscientist, but this looks more like something in his brain was tampered with. But how? And why?"

"Good question," Olsam said, moving over to the computer console so they could pull up more data.

He searched through a few databases for several very long minutes until he finally found what he was looking for - an old case he happened to remember studying in a neuropathology class during his med school days. He'd remembered it because of the bizarre circumstances that had surrounded it The patient had been a low-ranking member of the Orion syndicate who had seen something he shouldn't; ordinarily, the kind of person you found floating in space but he had a unique and highly valued skillset that complicated the process. The Syndicate had taken him somewhere that was redacted from the case study where he'd undergone a procedure to induce retrograde amnesia, wiping away all the memories associated with "the incident." Sadly, the procedure had been botched and drove the man slowly into insanity...

"Look at the neocortex here, and then look at the patterns in Ensign Faye," Olsam finally said, pulling up the electroencephalographic scans side-by-side. There were enough similarities to make Olsam suspicious. "This is an old case. Memory tampering. Unsuccessful memory tampering, but there are still enough markers in common... It looks like these neuronal pathways were beginning to perform a connection, but now they're...well, not. And it's so systematic. There's a pattern. See? There, and there. Some here and there, too. It's very thorough, complete. All these encoded engrams have been scattered and the synaptic patterns are disrupted. It looks like someone or something has interrupted the consolidation process for the engrams associated with the time period around the murder."

"So, you're saying someone tried to erase his memory of the murder?" asked Tuula, putting a detective hat on for the moment. "Can we recover the memories?"

"Yes, and it seems like they were successful," Olsam said, leaning back from the computer console with a thoughtful look on his face. Betazoid brains were famously complicated, so memory retrieval could be...difficult. "We could try a synaptic induction procedure, but that's going to take quite a while. We'll have to map everything out precisely; there's enough to take into account with a standard humanoid brain, but a Betazoid brain just makes it all the worse. It could take weeks." Suddenly, he smiled and clapped Tuula on the shoulder. "But it's good training, eh? You never know when you need to perform a synaptic induction to recover the memories surrounding a ghastly murder." He stood up and smoothed out his uniform. "I've had to do it, like, three times. At least!"

"You mean..." a smile appeared on Tuula's face. "I'm going to get to do my first real brain surgery!"

[OFF]

Lieutenant (J.G.) Tuula Voutilainen, M.D.
Medical Officer
USS Galileo

&

Lieutenant Olsam Mott, M.D.
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

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