Episode 414: Insomnia, Part Four
Monday, 01 Sep 2521
Day 8
Morning comes. Things are less pleasant as we give a brief discussion to the other passengers what we’d discovered and decided during the night. Kiera be-bops to breakfast and is hit with the news that we have passengers suffering the effects of a mutant strain of a nasty disease, treated by a group of chemicals that if flipped one way make you stay up forever and flipped another way make you sleep forever.
Helluva thing to have with your cornflakes.
By our count, we have one Waker, Josh, and two Sleepers, the two Rina found. We discuss the affected passengers to the ward room to better observe and care for them. There’s a debate: is it humane medical care? Or interference in the passengers’ religion.
Joshua: I don’t think you should.
Arden: They need medical care.
Kiera is still trying to get her head around the events from last night and Arden fills her in again. Then:
Joshua: This isn’t any different from somebody who would say they didn’t’ want to be revived if they—
Nika: Wait, wait, wait. Dean is telling you that the comatose people don’t need to be moved?
Not having a definitive answer for her, Joshua goes to Dean and asks him point blank:
Joshua: Do you want medical treatment for them or do you want them there?
Dean: If there is no cure for them—
Arden: We don’t know that.
Dean: You don’t?
Arden: My knowledge of what was in those pills? This should not be a symptom.
Dean: The pills didn’t do this. The Prion treatment did it.
Arden: I have to study it more to see if that’s the case.
Dean: No one’s intentionally been given Prion disease before.
Au contraire. Shepherd Iscariot could tell you tons on that score, assuming he was still alive to tell it. He gave himself and nearly a score of victims the disease to wipe out Reavers in a weird twisted act of redemption. But that wasn’t exactly a controlled experiement …
Arden: They could die if they are not watched.
Nika: At the very least, of dehydration.
Dean: They will die anyway.
Arden: But—
Nika: (to Arden) Nope. No. Stop. So far as we are aware, they are allowing him to speak for the group. If he does not want medical care for them, then we are not forcing medical treatment on anybody.
Arden: I disagree with that statement.
Nika: Of course you do. Cuz everytime I say yes or no, you say the opposite.
Arden: I want to see a signed paper saying he has the right of consent for these people, I have no problem with it.
Right, Arden. All religious settlers pack duly signed DNRs with them. Kiera dryly remarks that this flap about paperwork is oddly reminiscent of how she and he came to meet. Then she reminds him of something a little more relevant.
Kiera: Arden, you do realize that if you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to put the medbay into quarantine.
Arden: Why? They aren’t contagious. Unless we eat their brains.
Kiera: Yes, but they’ve been infected with Prion disease. I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about them running amok. Prion disease doesn’t make sane people.
And people suffering from Sporadic Fatal Insomnia can turn dangerous.
Rina: Sleep deprivation makes you psychotic.
Arden: Does he have paper that shows he has the— (off Dean’s headshake)—Yeah. Then he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. They come into medbay, I keep an eye on them until we reach a place that can take care of them.
Joshua: How about—?
Nika: He’s technically right.
Arden: Not technically. I am right.
Nika: They are above the age of consent, they’re in their majority.
Dean: There’s no law out here.
Arden: No. But there is my conscience.
Joshua: Is there a way we can reach some sort of compromise? Where they don’t get moved out of their space, but you check on them in some regular basis?
Arden: Let me think—no.
Joshua: (hands up) Okay. I’m not the doctor.
Dean: You want to keep them artificially alive?
Arden: I didn’t say to keep them artificially alive. I’m not going to put them on a heart-lung machine, but I want to make sure that—.
Dean: You have a heart-lung machine?
Joshua: Won’t you?
Arden: No. Cuz we don’t have one.
Joshua: But if you did, wouldn’t you?
Arden: I don’t know.
Joshua: But you’ve stated you’d keep them alive, didn’t you?
Arden: I don’t know.
Joshua: O-kay.
Arden: Let’s just work with the tools we have now.
Kiera: Which is probably a need to quarantine or at least strap them down.
Arden: They’ll be quarantined if necessary, but strapping them down in their beds so they can’t get out unless they’re let out is another matter.
Nika: Quarantine is not going to be necessary. It’s not contagious.
Kiera: Well, I still just don’t want people to—
Arden: Hear me? Strapping them to their beds so they can’t get out their beds unless somebody lets them out of their beds, however, I think is appropriate.
Kiera: All right. Strap them down. I’m okay with that.
Kiera might be fine with it but Joshua clearly isn’t.
Nika: I’m sorry Joshua, but I have to go with the doctor on that.
Joshua: That’s fine. I really don’t care at this point—
Arden: Obviously you do care.
Joshua: I do care but what difference does it make?
Arden: Let’s talk about this someplace else.
Joshua: Sure. Why not? Let’s go.
Nika:(sourly) Oh, good. They’re whippin’ them out.
Rina cuts an eye roll, pulls her tape measure from her pocket, and whips out about 9 inches. Holds it up at arm's length, squints. Nika announces she’s not getting involved in the contest about to follow. Kiera announces that she’s had enough excitement and is off for her container where there’s some peace and quiet and aromatherapy to be had. Joshua strides out of the room. Arden goes with. When they’re out of earshot of Dean and the passengers, Joshua rounds on Arden.
Joshua: No, no. I don’t have the right to speak. You’re the doctor. These people, as he’s explained to me, are going through a religious spiritual experience. And not just from him. When I’ve talked to them, they’re going through this religious experience. This trip is a part of it. It’s like a pilgrimage to Miranda.
Arden: The fact that they’re on a religious pilgrimage doesn’t mean that it—let’s refer back to Jim Jones. The Ayatollah Kohmeni.
Joshua: I know. It just seems really inconsistent sometimes about how we choose to pick who we’re going to care about killing or not killing, living or not living. These people seem to have made a choice to come along, to put themselves in this disease and …and we’re … It’s just hard to … I mean … We’re strapping them down and we’re basically gonna to … (sighs) I don’t know, I don’t know. This is not my place, Arden. I’m—
Arden: It’s as much your place is mine.
Joshua: No, no. Actually in this case, it’s not. You’re the doctor. I would draw the line on what my job on this ship is and where I have the right to speak. You have the same right and more so when it comes to the health of the passengers and the crew.
And that’s all Joshua wants to say on it. For his part, all Arden wants at this point is proof that the passengers willingly took on the trip with the full-on knowledge of the consequences. If they willingly consented to take their risks and have made peace with the possibility they might die en route, Arden has no further problem with it. But how to prove that? He goes to Marcus Dean to ask.
Dean: Have you heard of Armageddon?
Arden: It’s a ship that’s in … (off Dean’s look) … I guess not.
Dean: It’s where Jesus will come back and stand against—
Nika: Stop. Stop, because you’re not going to get him to be able to follow the religious doctrine.
Dean: Have you heard of Jesus?
Arden: I know who he is, yes.
Dean: Armageddon is a battle between good and evil.
Arden: Yeah. Whatever that is. But that’s beside the point. The point is these people want to live their life in a certain way. No problem. However, are they satisfied with whatever happens to them on that journey, whether or not it can be prevented or not?
Nika and Rina together: Ask them. (points to the 2nd class containers)
Arden: (Can’t!) Because they’re comatose.
Nika: NO. The rest of the passengers are not and they are all of the same mindset or they wouldn’t be travelling together.
Rina: B’duh.
Arden: Okay. I disagree with that but okay.
Dean: I can’t speak for them but I—
Arden: But do you have any documentation that shows that they have given their lives into your hands?
Dean: Other than the fact that we are here, I have no legal proof of that. They’re free to leave.
Arden: In my observation over the last, how many days now? Seven days?
Joshua: Eight.
Arden: Eight days. Do they seem content to letting Marcus leading them and tell them what to do and when to do it?
Yeah. Pretty much.
Arden: All right. I have no problem with them, you know, wasting away and dying.
Dean: You have no problem with it.
Arden: I have a problem with it. Obviously. But it seems to be what they have decided their life will be.
Dean: Well then. we’re all in the clear. (tongue in cheek?) Everybody’s happy.
Nika: I wouldn’t go that far.
Joshua: Ehh-heh. I still like here ought to be some compromise point where they’re in their space but you can at least check on them.
Um, but didn’t we agree to do that already?
Arden: We’re going to check on them daily because there was one guy who was crazy and crawling around in engineering.
Joshua: Right.
Arden: We can’t have that.
Joshua: No, but what I mean—yeah. Never mind.
Arden: So we are going to check on them once per day. At the very least.
And that’s what we do. With check-ups, Arden discovers that a third of the people are fine. Stressed but, like Arden, not abnormal. Another third reports mild insomnia, having trouble getting to sleep and aren’t hungry, both of which are not good symptoms. The remaining third are reporting they are very tired, drowsy a lot. And it’s difficult because they aren’t drinking coffee to keep themselves awake, but they’re muddling along as best they can to keep themselves awake. There isn’t a lot to do aboard the ship, so it’s easy to get bored and sleepy. They’ve been trying to be very strict about not sleeping more than 8 hours a day but some have drifted off despite. They show evidence of particularly low heart rate and blood pressure.
No sign of psychotic breaks. Yet. Arden tells the crew what he’s found.
Arden: Only seven seem to be suffering from insomnia.
Rina: Not good.
Kiera: So nobody’s showing low thyroid? Showing any lower overall chemical panels?
Arden: I wasn’t planning on running chemical panels on all of them.
Kiera: Although we probably could. All it takes is a centrifuge and medical supplies.
Hm. That’s not a bad idea actually. However, we don’t have enough supplies aboard to do everybody. Maybe we could do the seven new cases and Josh but … Nika asks if the seven have been awake as long as Josh has been. Have the symptoms manifested at the same time across all eight people? Well, not awake per se. The seven are having trouble sleeping, unlike Josh who was unable to sleep. As for Josh, there’s no asking him: he’s incoherent at this point. Asking his friends about Josh’s trouble sleeping the answer comes back that no one knew he was even having problems sleeping. Arden tries using biofeedback techniques and equipment to help the sleep-troubled find some rest and the passengers apparently have trained in biofeedback. And Kiera inquires as to the timeline of the symptoms—did they all manifest after they boarded our ship or were they pre-existing?
The two doctors tackle the puzzle from their different angles and gifts and the ship flies on.
Thursday, 04 Sep 2521
Day 11
As we consume supplies on our journey, space is slowly opening up on our ship. Which is fortunate because we have five comatose people to accommodate now, not just two, and the wardroom is getting full. Even so, it’s not as bad as the four sleepless we’ve got to take care of. They aren’t violent and they don’t want to be strapped down. So we ride herd on them. We escort them to the gym below decks to let them work off some of their nervous energy. They’re agitated but they aren’t violent, they’re not breaking pieces off our ship, and absent the means to tie the whole lot of them down even if they were doing these things, we carry on as best we can as things stand. We’re not doing all the caretaking alone: the other passengers are helping take care of them as well, keeping them occupied. But we’re all on pins and needles waiting for any one of the sleepless to break and go psychotic.
All this and we still have ten days more to our journey before we can touch down anywhere.
Friday, 05 Sep 2521
Day 12
Arden’s been working 15-14 hour days keeping track of ten patients and the grind is wearing him down. He’s tired, very tired, and even though he’s able to get Kiera to spell him for some downtime he can’t stop thinking on the medical situation. He’s the Verse’s expert on the Prion disease, he should be able to come up with some sort of breakthrough. And his thoughts spiral down one path after another. In one, he wonders if the bruise on Josh’s forehead that first night had any Prion on it or in the seeping from it. Prions would sometimes leach out in bodily fluids and—
Arden quits his bunk to seek out Kiera.
It doesn’t take him long to tell her what his worry is: he may have contracted the Prion disease the patients have. While casual contact is generally not sufficient to spread a normal disease, this is a mutated disease and all it would take is one strand of protein to successfully transmit to another victim.
It looks like the Verse’s foremost expert on Prion disease might have the disease himself.
Wonderful. Of course, Kiera’s no dummy. She’s been walking around Arden with a surgical mask on. For all she knows, the damned Prions have aerosol capabilities. And the more Arden thinks on it, the more instances he can pinpoint possible exposure. Rava took brain tissue samples from him, in an environment where stitches might have also passed through … Never mind that hospitals are scrupulously sterile, Arden’s a doc and knows the inside scoop on cross-contamination in such places. And there’s no way for him to determine if he’s infected or not—he doesn’t have the right supplies on board. All he can do at this point is put Kiera in charge of the patients and limit his exposure to the rest of the crew and passengers. He keeps to medbay and wardroom and though the space is tight with all the patients lodged within, Arden sticks to the medical spaces of the ship. On the occasions he actually seeks his own bunk, he insists on being locked in from the outside.
Kiera: Why are you self-quarantining yourself now, oh my god.
Arden: Because I’m the one affected.
Kiera: Because the other ones’re—Fine.
And she gives up. Which is how most arguments with Arden end—you either bludgeon him senseless with your logic or you’re rendered senseless with the lack of his. As it is, she really sympathizes with Josh’s head-banging. Trying to argue with Arden in this state just makes her want to do it, too.
Most of the insomniacs spend most of their awake time praying. It’s not loud but it’s a small ship and it’s been 12 days and after a while that sort of thing is hard to miss. And like all such folk crammed in a small space with nowhere to escape, the danger of cabin fever turning into something ugly looms ever closer. No Prions need apply. As soon as it’s possible, we shuffle the supplies around to create more floor space for them to gather for their prayer sessions. The gym below decks is the likeliest place for it and we start muscling crates around. It’s just more grunt work on top of everything we’re already doing and of course it isn’t without some snarking.
Rina: Just so long as these people aren’t making a fortress for themselves in the corner of the room somewhere out of the boxes and refusing to come out and lobbing cans of peaches at us, we’re fine.
Arden: If they’re lobbing cans of peaches I’ll be happy, cuz I didn’t think we had peaches.
Joshua: Actually, Rina, we have peaches. How can we not have peaches? (off her look) You don’t trust me.
Kiera: Great. Now who’s paranoid? I can just hear him going, “Captain? Can I gas down the ship and let you lock down the bridge and just gas everybody and—?”
Rina: I’m rubbing off on him.
Arden: No, I know what you’re rubbing off on him.
Rina shoots him a dirty look. Arden laughs. We get that space cleared.
The seven who are laid up are using less resources are lessening the strain on life support and related systems. At this point the people still up and about and still fine are the crew, about eight of the passengers. Nika orders all others quarantined to their containers. Joshua points out that the insomniacs won’t take well to captivity and they might do themselves and us harm. After all, do we want any of their brain matter getting circulated through our atmo system? Is there any likelihood that we all aren’t already infected? Given the numbers crammed aboard our ship and the strain on the atmo systems since the day we started, it’s too late now to wonder if we’ve all got it. Arden allows that he might be overreacting and there actually is nothing wrong with him. Kiera snarks that she could just show up in a revealing tank top and while he ogles her, she could slap him with a sedative patch. If he goes into cardiac arrest, it’s proof he’s got the same disease as the others. If he doesn’t, no harm done. Either way, she’ll be on hand to revive him.
There really is nothing we can do except push on. Hell, if getting out and pushing our girl would get us there any faster we would.
And still Arden keeps working away at the medical quandary. Knowing what he knows now of the particular Prion disease and how it’s affecting the people on the ship, knowing the chemical composition of the pills they’ve been taking, he starts writing up what needs to be done to get tested once we reach a place with the proper facilities to do so. He puts in a lot of hours in front of his computer and despite his fatigue at times gets amazing bursts of insight.
Oh, it’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of this before? Perhaps this is affecting my mental abilities and ...
And it’s frustrating because he’s not able to write it down or express it very well. Very much an I-know-this-formula-I-know-I-can-do-this frustration, that maddening feeling that if you were in better condition, you could tackle this without any trouble. He’s also hampered by an impatience in writing it all down. He dares not write it all out in a beginning-to-end, methodical way because he’s afraid he won’t be able to get to the really important stuff before the inspiration fades. Starting with the important stuff first and working backward from there, however, isn’t as successful as he’d hoped and in the end, Arden is not feeling he’s actually accomplished to save anything. Add to this the fact that Arden is off his appetite and his head is definitely not working as it should.
In fact, all the sleepless aren’t able to eat much and the lack of food takes a tremendous toll on their energy. Where they would normally keep themselves busy with physical activity and chores, they aren’t strong enough to pursue them and so are just listlessly existing. Kiera opines that as long as they’re frustrated but weak, they’ll pass out sooner and we can move them off the list of those we have to ride herd on.
Nika: But the point is, with the Fatal Insomnia thing, they’ll pass out and die.
Kiera: Yeah, but the thing is I can’t do anything about it. We don’t have anything.
Arden: (sourly) Gee. We could be delivering toys.
All kidding aside, Kiera has it right. There is nothing we can do for the sleepless. They aren’t eating. Religious considerations aside on the matter of intervention, they can’t even sit still long enough to be hooked to an IV of fluids to avoid dying of dehydration and starvation. Joshua arranges to make their meals from the food harvested from the botany bay. At least that way whatever they manage to get down them is nutritious and nutrient dense—better than what the rest of us are eating. And he’ll try to come up with entertainment that doesn’t require much effort from them to enjoy.
Arden suggests a burlesque show. Kiera threatens to shut him up with a sedative, but that would risk killing him. Arden shoots back that it’s not his trouble if it did. He’d just like to get some sleep.
Kiera: I could hit you over the head and knock you out.
Rina: I’ll get my shovel.
Arden: Whatever works. Seriously.
Because if he isn’t sleeping, things are only going to get worse for him. He’s in medbay, trying to gather his thoughts to add to his notes when he starts looking around the room and his eyes are drawn to the medical cabinet where the dangerous stuff is locked up. Arden opens it up and does a quick inventory. Here are Joshua’s Flomoxipan doses, over here are … the Chempliance rounds. Now what did they do to him again? They sped him up superfast and kept him awake and then knocked him unconscious.
Unconscious.
And Arden really really really wants to get some sleep. Under normal non-mutated circumstances, Prion disease is untreatable. But these aren’t normal, non-mutated circumstances. The Chempliant might speed Arden’s system up enough to burn out the Prions infecting him. Or it might not, exactly.
Arden looks at the other patients and sees what’s waiting for him. His first patient Josh is already too far gone—wailing in delirium, on the fast track to dying. The other patients are comatose but dying too. Given the inevitable, is there any logical reason NOT to try the Chempliant?
After all, Chempliant is derived from Pax and the treatment and pills the passengers took was designed to counteract the Pax. Perhaps the Chempliant will act as a pharmaceutical rock-paper-scissors on the disease, cancel it out. Arden duly writes this down and hopes the act of writing will allow his subconscious come to the fore strongly enough to tell him what he needs to know. And it starts to work, actually. He intuits what he needs to do and breaks into the Chempliant. He does a rudimentary chem analysis of the Chempliant and also takes a few tissue samples from the patients. In the end, he’s fairly certain that this isn’t a cure, but it might be a treatment. He does his best to write it all down. The equations aren’t coming out to zero. More like … X + 74 = rainbows + butterflies.
He tests the Chempliant on the tissue samples first. It causes a reaction. The Prions seem to freak out and then dissolve, but it’s not perfectly clear what would happen if this took place inside a living body. All he needs now is someone to experiment on. Arden hates the idea of human experiments but that’s what it’s come down to and he can’t afford to experiment on himself. Not yet.
He chooses the comatose patient that’s been under the longest, the one closer to death. There’s a moment when he has to figure out the delivery vehicle. Injection into the blood stream runs into the blood/brain barrier. He could bypass that by injecting it into the spinal fluid, but he hasn’t the supplies for a spinal tap. Is there another method that he doesn’t know of? Well, there is injection directly into the brain, either through the nasal passages or through the head. Like trepanning, only … not. And so it goes, with Arden coming up with one option after another. The clock tips over into the next day and Arden works on.
Saturday, 06 Sep 2521
Day 13
A little while later, Joshua is making his watch rounds through the ship. He gains the forward lounge and hears banging sounds from the medbay. Sighing, he goes forward to investigate.
He sees a feverish looking Arden nebulizing something. Joshua also spies several items that look suspiciously like a shotgun shell lying opened up on the counter. Arden doesn’t look up at Joshua’s arrival but keeps on working.
Joshua: Arden?
Arden: Yeah?
Joshua: Maybe I’m wrong but—
Arden: I’m working on this great idea. First you take Chempliant and you break it down this way and then you put it into the nebulizer and then it affects the brain in such a way that the Prions will be totally unwrapped and then they’ll be able to be removed from the bloodstreamandnormaland—
And his words devolve into a stream of incomprehensible blah-blah-blah.
Joshua: First, I didn’t understand a single word you said.
Joshua steps closer.
Joshua: Second—except for the Chempliant part—second, you’re not supposed to be working, right? Are you working? I thought Kiera was Dr.-Arden-on-call.
Joshua steps closer again. Arden looks up and points to his work.
Arden: She wasn’t here. I had the idea. It had to be worked on.
Joshua steps closer still.
Joshua: So, the Chempliant idea, you think it’s a cure? A treatment—?
Arden: No, no, no. It’s not a cure, but it is definitely a treatment. It’ll do something.
Joshua: Yeah. Something. What are you planning to test this treatment on? Before using it on somebody?
Arden: That’s what I’m doing right now.
Joshua draws even with him.
Joshua: On the comatose patient?
Arden: Right.
Joshua: Never having ever actually taken any medical boards myself or really gotten into the medical ethics of things but I don’t know. It seems a bit extreme to—
Arden: But all on test animals.
Joshua: The fact that you just said that makes me wonder if we get Kiera in here and ask her opinion on this. You can have a second doctor’s opinion before you … like … you … how are you—?
Arden: My notes are right over there on the computer.
Joshua puts a ginger hand on Arden’s elbow.
Joshua: Why don’t you come with me and we’ll go find her?
Arden: I got to watch the treatment and I’m taking notes on what’s happening.
Joshua: So you’ve already given it to him?
Arden: Yeah. I’ve already given it to him.
Joshua: Why don’t we go and find Kiera.
Arden: It was either me or him.
Joshua: (firmly) Come with me, Arden. Come with me.
At which point Joshua puts Arden into an arm lock and drags him away from the counter. Arden resists. Both men know martial arts, but Arden is fatigued and clearly not at the top of his game. Joshua is better rested but doesn’t want to hurt his friend. Arden protests.
Arden: But, but! This is reasonable! Trust me!
Joshua: Oh, I trust you. (readjusts his grip) I just want Kiera’s opinion.
Arden: Well, then go get her!
Joshua: You’re coming with me. I can’t explain it myself so I need you to come with me and explain it to Kiera. Because otherwise, I’m not going to be able to explain it—
Arden: My notes are right there on the computer.
Joshua: But see I can’t really make heads or tails of it.
Joshua has Arden in a submission hold but isn’t making much progress for the medbay door.
Joshua: So you need to come with me and—
Arden: I thought you were the Reader.
Joshua: I’m not going into that, privately.
Arden: You did it before.
They wrestle some more.
Joshua: Look. Five minutes.
Arden: (heavy sigh) All right. Five minutes.
Joshua: See? See how easy it is?
And Arden tries to break free. Joshua counters his move with one of his own and holds Arden fast.
Arden: But I’m so close!
Arden has the dose of the experimental treatment loaded into an epipen in his hand. Faced with getting dragged away from his work, Arden slams the injector into his own leg … and crumples in Joshua’s grasp, stunned but still conscious.
Joshua: Come with me.
And Joshua drags Arden over to the door. Arden shoves Joshua. Joshua lets Arden’s force pass through him in an Aikido move but something goes weird and Arden actually manages to push him out the medbay door. Momentum carries Arden out into the hallway with him, however. Joshua grabs Arden again, they grapple. Arden tries to win free to dash into the medbay and lock Joshua out. It fails. Arden tries a distraction.
Arden: Rina! What are you doing here? Naked?
Joshua: (Oh please) I’ve seen it.
Arden: Ow, that’s harsh.
Joshua: Yeah.
They grapple some more. And as they grapple, the fog lifts away from Arden’s mind and he goes utterly cogent, the fatigue disappears and leaves him feeling well-rested. He stops fighting Joshua, stands fast, and raises a hand: Stop. Joshua senses the shift in tension.
Johsua: Arden?
Arden: You going to let me go?
Joshua: Uhn…
Arden: Something odd just happened here. I feel much better than I did before.
He sounds quite sane and pulled together, actually.
Joshua: If that’s true—
Arden: Have I ever lied to you?
Joshua: Let’s not go there. You haven’t. I’m not saying you have but this is probably not the time or place to discuss that. What I’d like to do is just take you down to Kiera.
Arden: You’re not kidding?
Joshua: I’m not kidding. I’d like to take you down to Kiera. Let her have a look at you
.
Arden: Okay.
Joshua: Great.
Arden: Why don’t you just call her up on the comm and ask her to come up here?
Joshua doesn’t have one on him and Arden gives in. They go down. Knock on Kiera’s door. She calls through the door: Hold on. It opens and reveals a tousled Kiera rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.
Kiera: Mornin’.
Joshua: Yeah.
Kiera: Well, hi. You look bright-eyed and bushy tailed.
Arden: I feel much better.
Kiera: Really.
Arden: Mm-hm.
Joshua: Yeah. He dosed himself with some sort of chemical. A Chempliant compilation. His notes are upstairs. Would you mind taking a look at him? And the notes?
Kiera: (intrigued) Sure. Come on up.
Joshua: Thank you.
Arden: I don’t know how much longer this good feeling will last but …
Kiera: No, let’s take advantage of the good feeling.
They all tromp back upstairs to medbay. Kiera looks over Arden’s notes. Neurology isn’t her specialty but even she can see that something’s not right. Arden looks over her shoulder at the data he’d typed in and agrees, there’s something not right. But in a burst of clarity, he intuits that on one side of the equation is himself with a genetically modified brain with an extra pineal gland. On the other are people with a genetically modified disease. But in principle, there are some things that are the same between the two. Genetic modification, for one. Resistance to Pax, for another. So … if the Prions are working in a similar way, modifying their blood chemistry to match Arden’s might at least mitigate their symptoms.
Kiera: Arden. How much of the Chempliant did you take to achieve this effect?
They take stock. We had four shotgun shells of Chempliance plus the four doses ready-made he keeps on hand for his own use. Scratch the one shotgun shell he’d dismantled for the current dose, we’ve 3 shells and 4 ready-mades left.
Kiera: So, not enough for everybody.
Arden: I have seven doses left.
Kiera: And it’s taken you a full dose to bring you back to this.
Arden: And who knows how long it’ll last.
Kiera: Well … Hell. But I think you’re on to something.
Arden: Ehhnn….
Kiera: (poke!) Okay, Mr. Prion Expert.
Arden: Well, all right. I don’t know if I am or not, but it does bear more investigation.
Kiera: How many more days out are we?
Joshua: Another five.
Kiera: I wanna keep you going. Cuz the thing is I wanna reserve it to see if this is a cure. Or not.
Arden: So while I’m cogent—which means coherent—
Kiera: (see there?) Yeah. He’s fine.
Arden: I want you to quiz me as much as you can and take as much notes as you can as to what I’m thinking or not thinking.
Kiera: Yeah, cuz some of your notes just aren’t making sense.
Joshua leaves Kiera to pick Arden’s brain before the solution is lost while he goes to Nika to deliver news of this latest development. The blonde captain listens to the evidence and opines that maybe the entire downward spiral started because the pilgrims were treating themselves against the Pax and without the Pax for the drugs to counteract, it backfired on them. As a theory it works as well as anything else we’ve put out there. We’ll just have to wait and see how close hers comes to the truth.
Meanwhile, Arden and Kiera work for several hours and crunch the math numbers. Arden lets her do the heavy lifting. Kiera makes him lie down in the med bay bed. Because it would be good for him. He resists wasting his lucid window laying down. Kiera watches him closely for signs of degeneration. She has him take his own vitals every five minutes and record them, and she watches whether he gets more frenetic or less frenetic as time passes. After some time he starts feeling tired again. It’s the sort of tired one gets having pulled an all-nighter doing mentally taxing stuff. At which point he’s willing to lie down to see if he gets worse or better.
Kiera’s also made the calculations and finds there really isn’t enough of the Chempliant to treat everybody. But they both think it would work. Before Arden actually goes to sleep, they decide to test it on one of each of the affected patients—a sleeper and a sleepless. Joshua steps in to check on their progress and hearing this says:
Joshua: I’ll bring you one.
Arden: Oh, now it’s okay to do it.
Joshua: If they’re willing.
Kiera: Yeah and we already got a sleeper in here.
Arden decides to give each patient a half dose. The lower dosage might actually work, considering Arden used an entire shotgun shell’s worth on himself and the shells are designed to carry enough to subdue people in a crowd. He and Kiera start divvying up the doses. Arden’s feeling tired now, the normal sort of tired one gets from staying up late but he’s staving off sleep in the normal way one does when you want to stay up to read just one more chapter. He’s not hungry yet, but he’s sleepy. He takes this as a good sign. He and Kiera administer a dose to one of each type of patient and observe the results.
Over the course of the next few hours, the comatose patient’s vitals start changing. The EKG, heart rate, blood pressure—they all start climbing back toward normal, closer to normal sleep. It’s not recovery but it is an improvement. Some of the effects are definitely reversing. The reverse is true for the insomniac. He is coming down a bit, talks about being hungry, thinking about lying down. He’s not jumping into bed but he’s definitely improving. It looks like Arden’s solution is working.
There just isn’t enough of it to go around.
Arden suggests getting more when we reach Meridian. He knows how much fun it was getting the last batch but …
Arden: In any case, I want to go lie down now and sleep.
Kiera says she’ll watch over him and keep track of his vitals. Arden tells her to wake him in four hours, at which point he’ll decide whether it’s safe to go back to sleep or not. Kiera lets him do that, locks down the medbay, and checks with Nika if she’s willing to give up the doses that Arden had made up for himself to cover the passengers. He’s Nika’s crew, Nika’s doctor for the entire ship, and Kiera knows the call is Nika’s to make.
Nika’s been keeping up with the developments. How long do the comatose patients have? Can they make it to Meridian before they need another dose? We might have the ability to save one of them, but not both. Kiera starts shuffling the dosages. The insomniacs, walking around and a danger to themselves and others—they will get the full doses coming to them. However, the comatose patients are running on low, as it were, and it may be possible to keep them going on ¼ doses til we arrive at Meridian…. but the math just won’t support it. No matter how much she tries, it never quite works out. Not if she isn’t willing to lose anyone. There are enough if she’s willing to let some of the patients die. The two comatose patients are already unconscious and unaware and will quietly pass away. The insomniacs who are awake, however, will have to be dealt with one way or the other.
It’s up to Nika as Captain and Marcus Dean as leader of the group. So Kiera tells Nika in her briefing and Nika agrees to get Dean up to speed on what’s happening and see if they can’t come up with the answer.
Dean supposes that this is a sign that they aren’t meant to be cured. That had they, they would have had enough time. Nika suggests that the trick in all of this is not so much a matter of time rather than the combination of an anti-Pax illness that had no Pax to fight. The illness was supposed to be exposed to the Pax on Miranda and then level it off. Right?
Right.
So, the fact that they’ve given themselves the illness and it’s been months and months, it’s built up in their systems and now they NEED the Pax to survive.
Dean: Okay …
But we don’t have enough of the treatment Arden devised to go around to everyone, keeping them alive until they can breathe Miranda’s atmo.
Nika: We have enough to save some of your people. Not all of them.
Rina: Captain. You’re forgetting something. We stashed 12 barrels of the stuff down a marked mine shaft on Haven.
Nika: But that’s still four days away and we don’t have enough for all of them til then.
Rina: Crap.
Kiera: Yeah. We’re still gonna lose two. That’s set in stone.
Nika: But we think we can level off everyone. Well, almost everyone. We’re going to lose people no matter what.
It’s a matter of time versus dosage. The dosage is fixed at Y-amount. No matter how you slice it, there is only a finite amount of doses. The time to Meridian is X-amount, but the time it takes to get there is a matter of speed. And the ship’s speed can be altered. Rina crunches the numbers and finds out that even if she manages to coax more speed out of our girl’s engines, X will still come up a couple of days short. Try as we might, we’re still going to lose. We only have enough to get everyone one and half to two days further along before we run out. Merdian or Haven with their supply of Chempliant are still too far away for us to reach them.
Rina suggests putting out a distress call to Decatur and tell them we need their Chempliant. Meet us halfway, Nika thinks aloud. But we have no idea if Decatur is even in the vicinity. The last time we were at Meridian, she was no longer there. Joshua asks after Lagniappe—can she make the trip and back? She’s faster. No. Lagniappe is faster but her range is shorter. For that matter, for all that Decatur is a big beefy ship, she’s not very fast, either. Sending out a distress call might actually reach her but depending on her distance from us she still may not reach us in time.
Still… if we put out a mayday, a ship faster than speed class 5 could get to us in time. And all we need to come to our rescue is a ship carrying Chempliant. That includes more than just Decatur. Any law or security enforcement vehicle is likely carrying what we need. Nika firmly insists that we keep our mayday to just the plain facts: we are in need of Chempliant; here is our speed and vector. Come save us. If the message is not sufficient to draw us aid, we’re technically no worse off than we are now.
We send the signal.
Monday, 08 Sep 2521
Day 15
A ship answers us. A PDF ship hails us on the 8th of September as we’re a day and a half out from Meridian. There’s some confusion from the hailing ship: did you really say you want Chempliant? There’s a lot of talk back and forth to confirm that yes, we did say we want Chempliant, send some over please. Arden’s still zonked from his stint with insomnia, so Kiera and Nika explain the best they can. There’s a tricky moment flying when we have to synch the two ships so the PDF vessel can connect to us, but Nika manages it with her usual skill and style. The airlocks meet, the PDF personnel come on board and they hand over what we need.
Thank you.
We get enough Chempliant to make enough doses to save everyone. One and a half days later, we arrive at Meridian on the 10th. They will not let us land, seeing as we have a strange disease aboard, but they will let us park in orbit and refuel and restock in space. They also put a pinger on our girl to the effect that we are a plague ship. It will take landing at a port somewhere in order to take it off again and given Meridian won’t let us land dirtside, we’ll just have to wait until we touch down on Miranda to take it off. We suffer the indignity without complaint, grateful to refuel and restock.
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