Gel Tests

Posted on Tue Apr 14th, 2009 @ 4:08pm by

1,879 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: In The Dark
Location: USS Archimedes
Timeline: Current

Kevin Larkin entered one of the Archimedes' general purpose labs; a small pouch of blue liquid was stuffed under his right arm. After placing the gel-pack down on one of the lab's tables, he quickly began to gather a few pieces of equipment and tapped his communicator in the process. "Larkin to Lieutenant Mabren."

Mabren was sitting in his office, with a killer headache. Turoc's controller had turned out to be a disaster of epic proportions, but at least nothing was permanent. As he was typing away at this desktop computer, the comm came alive, tapping his comm badge he replied, "Mabren here, go ahead."

"Doctor, I realize that you may be busy, but could you join me in Lab 2 when you have some time to spare? I need your help with a project for Commander Lane." As he spoke, he was in the process of using a hypospray to remove a sample of the gel from the pack that he'd removed from one of the redundant sections of the system that had been active during the power failure.

"I'll be there shortly," Mabren answered before tapping his comm badge to close the channel. Typing in a last few words, he logged off the computer and stood up and walked into sickbay. "Carla, I'll be in Lab 2 if you need me with Lieutenant Larkin, you have sickbay until I return."

"Yes, Doctor," Carla answered without really looking up from what she was doing.

With a quick swish of the doors, Mabren was out of sickbay and heading to the turbolift. After a very short ride, he was on the appropriate deck and heading for the lab.

Having extracted a suitable sample of the gel, he placed it into the lab's spectrometer. Larkin realized that, in his haze after the incident in the Jeffries Tube, he'd forgotten to get a spare pack from storage, but a quick trip down to a storage bay on Deck 5 rectified the situation. It would serve as an excellent control, as it hadn't been connected to the system at the time of the power incident. He was about to set up a makeshift neural circuit to hook up the pack when Doctor Mabren entered the room.

"Doctor, thank you from coming. I hope I didn't pull you away from anything too important?"

"Just some paperwork, always fun," Mabren answered, sliding his hands into the pockets of his smock. "What can I help you with, Lieutenant?" he asked, stealing a glance at the blue-green bio-neural gel pack.

"Well, I'll explain what we're doing here," Larkin had already shifted into what his friends at the Academy had affectionately referred to as 'science mode.' Some of his usual social awkwardness died away, as he was much more comfortable with the topic at hand. "I'm sure you recognize this as one of the Arch's neural gel-packs. Don't worry, I took it from a system that shouldn't miss it while we're doing this. Computer, display the gel-pack power systems readings for the time surrounding our recent power failure."

A nearby terminal flashed the UFP logo for a moment, then it quickly became a graph of the requested power readings. "I noticed by accident that this graph closely resembles one I saw back at the Academy when I was running some experiments on gel-pack systems to improve efficiency. All of my efforts resulted in the system having some kind of massive failure. Now, we might be on what my ancestors would have called a 'wild goose chase,' but Commander Lane would like us to run some tests on the system to see if this reading is somehow tied to the power failure we experienced earlier. I'm already running a spectral analysis on the gel. Being a much greater expert with organic systems, the Commander and I were hoping that you'd have some ideas on what to look at or for."

Before Mabren said anything he had to take a deep breath. He started to feel that the Captain's feeling about something amiss on the ship was more than just stress induced paranoia, and providing an answer to this, might answer the other questions that the higher ups had. "The best thing to do would be to remove a sample of the neural tissue and run an analysis. Do you have a pack from storage here?"

"I'm a step ahead of you, Doctor," Larkin said, smiling warmly, while pointing to the fresh pack with which he had just returned. "Unless you need some assistance with your analysis, I was just thinking that I would rig up a small neural circuit to give our friend here that was connected to the system during the incident a work out. It might be good to approach this separately, for the time being. Our respective specialties give us unique perspectives on this, which is something that we should exploit. I say we pursue our own ideas for a time, and compare notes in a while or when one of us feels that he'd found something."

"Of course, if I need anything, I'll ask," Mabren said with a smile, before the pair parted their ways to solve this newest mystery. Grabbing up the suspect pack, Mabren took a small sample of the gel and neural tissue. Walking over to Larkin, he asked, "Could I take a quick sample? Or will that mess up what you've started?"

"Oh, no, by all means, Doctor. Take whatever you need."

"Awesome," Mabren said, as he leaned over and took a sample. "This will take some time to run a full comparison between the samples." After he got the other sample, Mabren took the hypospray over to a area where there was a electronic microscope so he could get a visual look at the neurons.

At first, Mabren looked at the control sample and noticed how tiny it looked. Which was expected considering that it had never been in use. After taking a picture of it, he had it display on the monitor. And then had a look at the sample from the suspect pack and noticed how over-grown it was. Dismissing that fact as just growth of the pathways from use. Mabren thought of getting a sample from one of the packs in use in the lab. Before he could get far with that thought, he heard Larkin say something.

Larkin was quite intelligent, but he'd always had a bit of a short coming at direct application of his knowledge. He was by no means bad at the more experimental aspects of science, but it sometimes took him longer to realize his ideas in this respect; the makeshift neural circuit was no exception. He first connected the pack from storage to his system, in an attempt to set a baseline for his measurements. A few minutes later, he'd connected the pack in question, and he was in the process of examining various aspects of the packs functionality. "That's, interesting," he finally commented. "There's a much faster current running through here than there was with the control. It's almost as if this gel-pack is working harder than the other one. What could cause that?"

After looking up from the console he was working at, Mabren answered, "There could be a couple of things. Their could be a contaminate in the pack." Getting up from the stool he was using, mabren walked across the room to look at the console. "Or almost a dozen other things, that's organic systems for you. Run an analysis of the gel, to see if their is anything in it. I'll run a comparison of the DNA, to see if anything is wrong there."

A soft chime from the other side of the room indicated that the spectrometer had finished the scan Larkin began before Mabren had arrived. The CSO smiled wryly, "Your wish is my command. The spectrometer readings should give us a good idea of any compounds in the gel."

As Larkin moved off to check the results from the spectrometer, Mabren went back to his samples and moved the dishes from the microscope to a analysis unit. Once he had placed both dishes in the unit, Mabren said, "Computer, run an DNA comparison between the two samples."

"Confirmed," the computer stated, "Analysis will take approximately fifteen minutes to complete."

Nodding his acknowledgment of the computers statement, Mabren moved back to the microscope.

The CSO left Mabren to run his DNA analysis, while he brought up the results of the spectrogram on one of the labs monitors. "Alright, computer, compare the scans of the experimental pack and the control pack. Remove and display any differences." A moment later, a graph was displayed on the screen. "What the?" Larkin was actually rather shocked. He hadn't expected to find much, but the graph showed numerous peaks, each indicating a different compound which was present in the pack from the cargobay but not the one from storage. "Doctor, I'm not sure what it is yet, but there is definitely a foreign compound in the gel."

Looking back from his work, Mabren crossed back over to look at what was displayed on the monitor. Looking at the various compounds, Mabren was confused. Walking up to the console, he started to type a string of commands. A moment later, the screen changed to a short list of five things.

Reading over the list, Mabren said aloud, "That can't be right. Computer, re-run the analysis on the gel."

After a chirp, the computer said, "Acknowledged." And within a few seconds, the same results appeared on the screen. "Crap. We have a problem. These," he pointed at the list that was displayed, "Stimulants should not be there. Something is wrong."

Larkin was about to ask the Doctor what he meant by 'stimulants,' when an sharp, loud siren pierced the air of the lab. The two men were momentarily phased by the interruption, but the CSO had the good fortune to glance over at the readings of the gel-pack, which was still hooked up to his make-shift neural circuit, while attempting to cover his ears. Instinctively knowing that the numbers were the cause of the sound, he practically leaped over to the console and shut his experiment down. A lump built in his throat as he examined the data. "While we were analyzing the gel, the pack's power requirements were growing exponentially. If I hadn't shut it down when I did, it would have completely blown the power buffer assembly."

"Obviously, it would take a lot more time for this to be a problem in the Arch's systems, rather than just this little circuit, but," Larkin didn't finish the thought. "I realize this isn't very scientific of me, but would you concur that this was probably caused by your stimulants?"

Mabren was stunned, standing there staring at the gel pack and the circuit. "It's possible," he finally said. "But my concern is how they got there. They shouldn't even be secreted by these neurons."

"We should," Larkin began, but he was cut off by the ship's comm system.

=A= All senior officer's report to the briefing room for a departmental breakdown. Come prepared. =A=

The two officers looked at each other, and then, without speaking another word, headed for conference room.

 

RSS Feed