Subconscious Solutions

Posted on 08 Jul 2021 @ 8:13pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Edited on on 08 Jul 2021 @ 8:17pm

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: OC, Recovery Ward, Rm 08
Timeline: MD 05 0130
853 words - 1.7 OF Standard Post Measure

Over tired, Calliope had let sleep elude her while immersing in analysis and research in her little hospital ward room. Her face was awash in the pale glow of layers and layers of holographic displays she had added to, restlessly searching the lesser tried avenues of inquiry for answers concerning the attack on the station.

For the umpteenth time, she checked the report she'd prepared with her early findings and sent to Zayne, requesting follow up and action. The computer showed the secure message had been received and read, but there was no reply. Calliope wanted to believe it was because he was looking into it. But realistically she suspected she was being put off.

After the visit to the memorial and lance's encouragements, Calliope had been hopeful about contributing to investigations, but it already felt as though it were an exercise in futility if her research was to resigned to a holding pattern in Zayne's inbox. Momentarily she considered going to Lance about it, but that seemed a situation bound to cause division in the leadership. She frowned as she decided she wouldn't put Lance in a position to advocate for her or her work. Maybe Winslow would seem a more neutral party... Or Hokir... Calliope felt her eyes getting heavy....

When she opened them, the floor was glass, in alternating clear and frosted squares, and was surrounded by bright, atmospheric distance below, above, and far ahead into the horizon. As Calliope shaded her eyes against the light and moved forward, a row of officers materialized on either side of her, as if a united marching front.

“Why are you moving with us, Commander?”

Turning, she found Hokir walking in lockstep with her. “Where we go, we go together.” Calliope said. “It’s Starfleet. We’re not Rangers, after all.”

“But you can move ahead. You’re the queen.”

“Not anymore. I’ve lost my position. I have no assigned role.”

“That’s even better.” Imaginary Hokir said with her characteristic optimism and pointed far above their heads. A band like a blue holograph unfurled and then resolved into another glass checkerboard. “We can move only on this plane, but *you’ve* been released. You’re free to move on more than one field now.”

Calliope searched the wide open field but couldn't see a ladder or a staircase or a lift or anything. Just checkers here and a glass ceiling of parallel checkers up there as far as the eye could see.

“But how do I get there from here? It’s impossible.” She tried to turn around to give up and go back to the beginning, but Lance side stepped into the square.

“You don’t move backwards, Cali,” a visage of Lance informed her.

“I can move in any direction I please.”

Lance folded his arms behind him, as if standing at attention for a senior officer. Which he was. “So long as it isn’t obstructed,” he said, being somehow respectful, loving, and obstinate all at once. “By an enemy or an *ally*.”

“Fine.” Calliope crossed her own arms in front of her, considering. If there was anyone that knew how to get from point A to point B when nothing conventional was going to do the trick, it was Lance, the theoretical propulsion expert. It didn’t even occur to her that dream-Lance was somehow going to be any less help despite being a figment of her own limited imagination. “Then tell me how I get there,” She pointed up, “from here.”

“It’s a simple matter of folding space—”

Calliope blinked and all of the dreamscape folded away like pages in a book that flipped by and resettled on a version of an old and treasured memory: the setting of the library of Lance’s childhood home, the day before she was to leave for her first ship assignment. Both she and Lance were now in casual clothing. They were leaning over a mahogany study desk, lacing their fingers together, the necklace Lance had made her twined around their hands.

“—With enough energy applied to subspacial differentials, you create a kind of propelling force that draws you to your destination. But if you can engage the quantum forces directly, theoretically speaking every place is potentially one quantum step away from every other, so…” He stared intensely at her with his honeyed brown eyes, “We’ll never be truly that far away. Distance is an illusion of the third dimension. Albeit a convincing one for those of us existing in it.”

“But what if…” She looked into their locked hands and then back up again, biting her lip and smiling through a kind of ache that was the anticipation of separation. “What if I want the impossible. What if I want to be in two places at once? Out there and right here. With you.”

"That, " Dream-Memory Lance said with a smirk, holding up their entwined fingers, "Is called Entanglement."

Curled into a chair, Calliope smiled in her sleep, the holographic displays surrounding her falling automatically into low power mode and dissolving into the dark.