Morganstein's Monster

Posted on Wed Sep 4th, 2019 @ 4:25pm by Lieutenant Commander Calvin Morgan & Lieutenant Commander William Rogers

Calvin walked calmly but quickly back towards Sickbay, a thought process brewing in his head after his recent discovery and conversation with the Captain. "Lt Rogers," Calvin spoke after tapping his badge. "Please meet me in Sickbay at your earliest convenience." His voice was calm, but full of intrigue.

The punch bag swayed to a standstill as Bill ceased his frustrated pummelling. "Sure thing, Doc." He showered and changed from his workout clothes into his uniform before heading straight to sickbay, having just about managed to get his curiosity under control. Not enough to properly fix his hair however. Arriving at sick bay he looked around for the CMO. "What's up, Doc?"

"How much do you know about cryogenics?" He asked, gathering some information via PaDD and paper on his desk.

"Outside of being in cryo you mean?" Bill joked. "I know a pretty good amount about the cryo-systems we used during the Ranger missions. NASA wanted us to be able to maintain and repair our own pods in case something went wrong with them while we were out of communication range of Earth."

"Perfect, that was the exact answer I wanted. We have a project," Calvin responded joyfully, beckoning him to follow as they walked out of the office and towards the morgue. A few moments of silence until he stopped at the door, turning with a seriousness on his face rarely seen. "This project is classified. You're now the third to know about it," He said grimly, and a little on the quiet side.

Bill frowned, taking note of the doctor's sudden shift in mood. "You're starting to worry me now, Doc. What's this about?"

The seriousness left his face as fast as he was done making the statement, opening the door he walked into the morgue, closing it behind the pair. After checking to make sure no one was in the room with them he walked over to one of many hatches on the wall, opened it, and slid the bed slightly out of the hole it was in. With the bed came the body of Evita and a cold rush of air that was keeping the body temperature stable. The sound of vitals, a faint and slow beep came from the machine on her chest. "Did you hear about the murder in the kitchen earlier today?" He said, with a grin and twinkle in his eye.

Bill looked between the frozen terrorist/freedom fighter and the doctor. His eyebrows lifted as he mentally joined the dots. "Oh." He said slowly, before continuing with peaked curiosity. "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

A huge ass grin spread across Calvin's face. "Dunno how we are going to do it, but you got it." He slapped Rogers on the back. "Need to balance that and reversing whatever toxins and poisons are in the body. It wasn't done in any controlled fashion, so we have a lot of variables to consider. That's why you're here."

"Let's get started then." Grinning Bill turned to face Calvin and held up a warning finger. "I'm not calling you 'Master' though, and if you call me 'Igor', even once, I'm leaving."

Calvin raised an eyebrow, "Is this one of your really old culture references? Now please, walk this way," He turned and went over to the console and brought up some patient information to start working with.

"Wait, really? You don't know Frankenstein's assistant?" Bill asked, genuine surprise mixed with dawning sadness of the prospect of bring the only person alive that remembers the hunchback in his voice. He followed Calvin to the monitor. "Any idea what the poison is?"

Calvin shook his head. "Not specifically. Computer is running it with known posions as we speak." He swiped the screen to the chemical makeup. "It's nothing fancy, I have a short list of antidotes I'm pretty sure will work. Just need to narrow it down. The ones I have will work quick, and shouldn't be affected by the temperature fluctuations."

After some quick typing of notes, Calvin brought up another screen and stepped to the side, with all the patient information up in focus. "So how do we bring her back to the proper temperature?"

Bill stared at the patient information, trying to make sense of some of the medical data. "This," he indicated the data with a wave of his hand, "is similar to what we called a 'Twelve-oh-two Alarm': which is failure of a cryo unit during the reanimation cycle. We've got an uneven freeze, so first thing we'll have to do is balance that out or Evita here risks thermal shock fractures."

Calvin nodded. "I've dealt with thermal damage in hypothermic patients, but nothing to this level. There is adequate perfusion still going on inside her body for the moment, so whatever speed you want to do this is fine by me." He moved over to another console, which finally isolated the poison. Moving with a purpose, he grabbed several hyposprays, mixing some drugs together before administering the antidote. "She'll need another round or two most likely, but that should stave off any initial damage the poison tries to do."

Bill folded his arms while he thought it over. He wasn't sure what 'perfusion' was, but it definitely sounded like something you wanted an adequate amount of. "With a 12-0-2, we'd probably transfer the patient to a new unit, refreeze and then re-run the reanimation cycle. Don't think lowering the temp is wise here though: Evita hasn't had the same anti-freeze supplements they gave us prior to a mission."

"Agreed. I'd rather not freeze her anymore than we have to," He looked at Evita, his brain trying to grasp a lot of variables at once. "If we can target warm critical areas and the colder areas to balance it out, then slowly bring her the rest of the way?" Calvin asked.

Bill nodded. "Differential heating. We'd have used a thermal regulating gel to help even things out, but current technology is far more capable for monitoring and adjusting than anything I had to work with. Can we adjust the uh.." he waved in the direction of the hatches, "...corpse cupboards, up do body temp?"

Calvin chuckled. "Corpse cupboards, I like it," He chuckled again as he thought about it, going back to the console Bill was by and bringing up some information. "Spit balling here. The corpse cupboards aren't designed to raise temperature. But we can keep any part of the body from getting too uneven by controlling the cupboard. We could reverse the atmospheric system to introduce spurts of warmer air controlled by atmospheric forcefields to hit targeted areas. That way we can warm areas at a time, and keep a steady supply of livable air on the inside."

Bill mulled over the suggestion. "Might work. Just have to ensure that when we start the more deeply frozen parts off we don't set them going so fast they'll outpace the rest of her."

"Never said it would be easy," Calvin said with a smile. "Besides, what fun would that be?"