Star Trek: Genesis (Chapter 4)

THEORY

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip
Stardate 2260.365

- 1120 hours -

The ground teams had setup transport sites in a convenient locale near the Rafah crossing, within short walking distance of most of the search teams and strategically close to Alpha Team's landing site. Since then the camp had mushroomed into a shanty town of collapsible aluminum huts that made up the field lab complex, the scientific mecca for the away team to pool all of their findings and samples for analysis and decontamination before shipping them back to Enterprise for more detailed study.

For an all-volunteer team, Spock found their industriousness quite gratifying. Over the last three or four days he had actually started to grow disheartened from the slow progress of his own search, but stepping into the anthropology lab/hut for the first time he was struck with the impression that someone had given the ground teams the false impression that they were collecting artifacts for the world's biggest museum. The shelves stretched from wall to wall, stacked so high the supervisors had to use stepstools to reach the top levels now, with literally thousands of items tagged and entombed in hermetically sealed containers having been scanned examined tested and tried by every instrument the athropology team had at their disposal. He could only see the closest items through the clear plastic containers: children's dolls, books, handheld video games, posters, tools, cassette tapes, compact disks, and an astonishing collection of cellular phones.

Lieutenant York was fiddling with one of those phones when Spock came in, and almost seemed startled by the Vulcan's arrival, perhaps under the impression that being caught fiddling with an ancient device like this would somehow offend Spock's sensibilities. "Commander... uh... good to see you. Welcome... and you too Doctor," he added abruptly as Doctor McCoy came into the hut behind him.

Spock excused his awkwardness and spared him the trouble of having to compose himself. "Is that a cellular handset, Lieutenant?"

York nodded and handed it over, and now it was Spock's turn to fiddle. "Actually, it's a pre-paid satellite phone. An old-world precursor to our communicators. Nobody at the time knew what a huge precedent this was." York said this almost nostalgically, as if he was secretly channeling the sensibilities of that forgotten era through his supernatural historian powers. "According to the cultural computer, Palestinian youths made extremely wide use of cell phones for social networking, as did militants, politicians, even policemen. Constant warfare with neighboring factions basically shattered their communications infrastructure and forced them all to improvise. That's lucky for us, because all of these old phones used EEPROMs to store data in a non-volatile state."

"Which means it's still readable after all this time," Spock said, remembering Earth's technical history. "Fortuitous."

"Tell me about it."

"How many of these phones do you have, Mister York?"

"So far we've collected a little over forty thousand, and about half of them we beamed back to Enterprise already. Most of it's just routing information, but the real valuable stuff is multimedia: text messages, audio and visual recordings. There's also plenty of books, journals, what looks like a virus war between rival Zionist and Jihadist websites, some doodles and sketches on paper and cardboard, and a handful of videotapes shot on old-style VHS. We also found one extreme curiosity." York gestured for Spock and McCoy to follow him to the back of the hut, through rows and rows of artifacts and objects harkening back to a long-dead culture. In one corner of the hut there sat an object sitting on a small examination table, closed off in a stasis chamber to suspend any chemical reactions in the object without the damaging effects of freezing or desiccation. "This is what I called you about, Sir," York said, gesturing to a yellowed and brittle but otherwise mostly intact newspaper, "It's dated 5 November 2001. Look at the headline."

Spock pulled out his tricorder and let the system translate from Arabic into Vulcan. But before the translation was even finished, the photograph on the cover caught his eye, and he knew what to expect before the words even came through. "Judgement Day: Repent of your Sins."

McCoy snorted, "Of all the superstitious dolts..."

"An under-developed corner of an under-developed world. What do you expect, Doctor?"

"I'd expect a little optimism, not self-recrimination. Then again I suppose when this article was written they were probably past that point."

York nodded, vaguely sympathetic to the photographer who - having somehow snapped a photograph of a reaver tearing the hood off a pickup truck to the extreme horror of its occupants - must have thought the same thing. "Based on some of the content from the cell phones, it seems that these people believed the cataclysm was a sign from God that the world was about to end. It drove the rapid formation of an apocalyptic cult who believed they would be spared if they devoted themselves to religious purity before it was too late. They became rabid isolationists, sealing their borders from the outside world and imposing a strict religious code."

Spock nodded. "If the reaver mutation is caused by a type of pathogen, then an isolationist strategy would be the most logical choice."

"If they did it for a logical reason, Spock," McCoy said, "That's just religious mania disguised as a survival strategy."

"But it didn't work," York went on, "Based on the cellular videos, the mutations continued for a number of years. The isolationists lost control pretty quickly and the community split up into a collection of small armed bands."

"What did the paper say about the international response?" McCoy asked.

"It's hard to separate fact from propaganda," York said, "One editorial blamed it on a conspiracy of Jewish scientists, two letters claimed it was an alien invasion. The main article accused the United States, pointing out the fact that the reavers were first reported in the American Northwest."

"Nothing more recent?" Spock asked.

"Well, that's just it: there are no mass media sources after 2003, just text messages forwarded around by the isolationists and some angsty teenagers with dark senses of humor. Most of that information comes from a few thousand handsets that were reconfigured to operate in a peer-to-peer mode using low-power transceivers as a relay. As near as we can tell, all the phones reconfigured to operate in that way had much later activity logs, some as late as 2014."

"I see..."

"But Commander, there's something really weird going on here."

Spock raised a brow, "Define 'weird.'"

"The field teams did standard workup on all of these artifacts, tested for age, wear, radioactivity, and so on. They found a discrepancy here. The average age of most wooden components is about three hundred years, but the average age of the electronics, the books, the posters, most of these are less than sixty years old. Now, that's consistent with our findings of these phones, based on proton resonance scans of their batteries and memory circuits. One device I profiled this morning looked like its battery had been discharged no later than twenty years ago."

"Fascinating." Spock looked at the newspaper again and let the tricorder translate the rest of the front page. Then it occurred to him that the field teams had probably already done this, so he turned to York again, "Have you scanned a transcript into the library computer?"

"Of course, Sir. Should be available through the Enterprise. By the way, we've had to beam down another twenty specialists to keep up with the load. That puts us at two hundred and sixty on site."

"Your point Lieutenant?"

"Well..." York looked down and studied his feet for a moment, then glanced up at Spock sheepishly, "Aren't you worried about the evacuation limit, Sir? I mean, two hundred and sixty would just barely fit into the shuttles..."

"The evacuation limit for this mission, Ensign, including evacuation transport capacity, is three hundred and ninety. There are also twelve un-used shuttlecraft still aboard the ship."

York nodded, "Still... don't you think it's kind of reckless to have almost a third of the crew planetside with that Gorn ship in orbit?"

McCoy raised a brow. "Stop being coy, Lieutenant, and say what's on your damn mind."

York sighed, "I just think someone... perhaps you, Sir... should mention it to the Captain. You know, just in case."

"Just in case the Captain is unaware that having a third of his crew on an away mission with an alien ship in co-local space is potentially hazardous?" Spock asked, stone faced.

"Well..."

"I believe, Lieutenant, that Captain Kirk may anticipate and mitigate potential hazards just as effectively without the benefit of your valuable command experience."

"Yes, Sir," York sagged and pretended to have something really important to do with his tricorder, "I'll have that transcript available for you if you need it, Sir."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Spock stepped around McCoy and strode out of the tent like a tropical storm passing through an island chain. McCoy followed, rudderless, not sure where Spock was going and not really caring except for that nagging sensation that had consumed him for the past hour or more than somebody needed to keep on eye on that green-blooded hobgoblin before he volunteered the away team for something even more irritating than an extended ground mission.

"Spock!" McCoy caught up with him just beyond the doorway and sidled up to his elbow in a hushed voice, "You hear that back there?"

Spock nodded. "The discrepancy bothers me. Radiometric dating should be consistent with all-"

"I'm not talking about the damn analysis. I'm talking about a pattern of morale. It's not just Lieutenant York, there's talk all over this camp and back on the ship."

"I have always noticed a certain abundance of irrelevancy in human speech..."

"It's more than just chatter," McCoy's voice raised a little in irritation, "We've got officers questioning the Captain's abilities, questioning his experience, questioning his judgement, hell even questioning his dedication to the fleet. A while ago I had to treat a petty officer for a snake bite; he commented that he wasn't worried about dying, because he's sure they'd just give his son command of a starship right out of high school."

Spock slowed his pace and glared at the doctor, "General disdain for an authority figure is neither unprecedented or unhealthy, especially among humans. In fact, it seems to be one of Captain Kirk's most useful traits."

"You may be right. But disdain for authority can lead to an outright challenge. A captain on a starship sometimes needs to make difficult decisions. Now what happens if Jim Kirk has to order a hundred men to their deaths to save the ship?"

"Your concern is logical, Doctor," Spock paused a moment and faced him, "For the time being, if you would keep me informed of any further deviations from what you theorize to be 'normal' morale conditions..."

"What I theorize?"

"It bears mentioning, Doctor, that your experience on a starship is as limited as the Captain's. Having said that, no sarship in history has ever attempted a deep space mission of such long duration before. We may both find the next five years to be... Enlightening."

Several huts down, Spock found his way to the forensic field lab, the largest compound in the camp with four tents adjacent to one another through sealed tubes reinforced with force fields. The main tent that held the entrance had the same chaotic arrangement of specimens, except in this case most of the containers were filled with old body parts - bones, tissue samples, hair, teeth - along with collection slides, fragments of clothing, utensils, shoes, bottles and food containers. Spock didn't meet anyone here, the DNA and tissue analysis was being fed directly to the library computer to be collated into something coherent for the final report. Instead, he made his way straight through the building to the door on the opposite side and stepped into the next hut, a kind of triage area that had been setup for living samples - preferably sapient life forms - but had been otherwise completely un-used until this morning.

Doctor Ramsi Ayash held vigil here by himself, along with a single enlisted officer with a phaser, half asleep on a folding chair. The Reaver was sedated and restrained in a tractor field in the middle of the room, hovering some two and a half feet above an examination table that in the mean time held a small wedge-shaped device that made intermittent high pitched clicking sounds. This was Doctor McCoy's arena, and so Spock let him do the honors. "Morning, Ramsi," McCoy said as he took his place in front of Spock.

Ayash answered with his thin Arabic accent, "Have I got a patient for you! That navigator... what is name... Chekov, no? I have scored point for his theory."

McCoy smiled, "You confirmed this is female?"

"Double X chromosome, it is female. And I am just finishing photosection now. Those enormous shoulders there," Ayash pointed to the gigantic mounds that formed the base of this creature's equally gigantic arms, "They are deformed pectoral formations. You see this?" he pointed to something on the top corner of the "shoulders," something that Ensign Sulu had once compared to the horns on a samurai's shoulder armor. "This is mamary gland. Full functional, not vestigial or malformed. It having merged with shoulder muscles into single massive formation."

Spock said, "Would these creatures classify as true mammals?"

"It classify is true humans. This polymorphism is genetic mutation of some sort. This," he pointed to the shoulders again, "And this," to the arms and the long fingers, "and even this," to the squashed head and distorted remnant of a face, "this tissue is all malignancy, all the way to bone structure. I estimate seventy percent of the reaver's mass is actually cancer tissue."

McCoy looked at the creature in astonishment, "The thing is a walking tumor..."

"Mutation is a consequence of re-sequencing process, whatever process was used. DNA molecules are having normal structure and everything is blueberry pie. And then there is this," Ayash waved both of them over to a computer console against the side wall. A display there - what he was working on when they came in - showed an extreme close-up, probably nanoscale, of one of the Reaver's cells. Spock saw that the cell was in the process of undergoing perfectly normal division, with chromosomes dividing up along the spindle body, ready to separate into two new bodies. But at the critical moment, the cell seemed to reverse course; the spindle collapsed, and the otherwise circular body suddenly exploded into a shape like a mediaeval mace, spearing any nearby cells with its barbs. Almost immediately, the cell collapsed into itself as a shriveled mass of protoplasm, but the cells that had been around it all began to fizz and bubble like alkaseltzer tablets, then expanded, then quickly divided and expanded again.

"Fascinating..."

"What the hell could cause that?"

"I have not the foggiest. As I say, DNA replicates normally and everything is blueberry pie. Then suddenly the cell attacks neighbors, they turning cancerous, they do the same to neighbors, and not so blueberry pie. I have theory, but it is... strange, no?"

"Any theory is valid at this point, Doctor," Spock said.

Ayash nodded in agreement. "This effect. It reminding me of experiment on Mars colony, say, forty years ago. Doctor Isaac Soong using transporter system to replicate organic tissues..."

"The bio-replicator experiment." Spock nodded, remembering himself, "Doctor Soong attempted to use a transporter system to dub the pattern of a living organism onto a mass of inert material with the goal of creating a perfect copy. Initial tests showed promising results, but his first attempt with a live animal subject caused severe disruption of the duplicate's genome."

"Even that was different," McCoy said, "the duplicate lab mouse lived for thirty eight seconds before it... well, exploded. It didn't mutate into some kind of crazy supermouse."

"Regardless," Spock said thoughtfully, "the analysis of the creature's cell structure did yield similar results."

McCoy looked at Spock, then looked at Ayash, "You're saying this creature - this person - was replicated?"

Ayash grinned, "Doctor, this entire planet having been replicated, no? Why not the people too?"

"The principal is sound, doctor," Spock said, "Given proper materials, a sufficiently immense replication matrix could allow for the duplication of an object the size of a planet. Indeed, duplication of massive structures may already be possible with existing technology. It is the duplication of details - organisms, geologies, cities, cultures - that requires more precision."

"Apparently too much precision since the entire civilization got some kind of..." McCoy looked at the Reaver, "Xenoforming breast cancer."

"It evidently lasted long enough for this culture to develop along similar Earth-like norms."

"Well..." McCoy thought for a moment, "The industrial fabricators on the Enterprise are the size of a grain silo and they produce finished products maybe two meters on a side. What kind of machine could have built a planet? Something that massive moving through space, we would have seen it from Earth."

"Indeed." Spock looked at the recording of the cell-burst play through again and studied the more detailed sensor notation scrolling on an adjacent screen. Which, McCoy had learned by now, pretty much left him off in his own little world until that analytical mind of his could be bothered with the more mundane effort of carrying a conversation.

McCoy turned his attention back to the Reaver, still held aloft in the tractor field. "Can I ask you something, Ramsi?"

Doctor Ayash said, "You just did, Leonard."

"Why didn't you volunteer for the search mission? I thought you grew up in Gaza City."

Ayash shrugged, "Gaza City today is not Gaza City of 20th century. And Gaza City of 20th century is not Gaza City of the Other Earth."

"Well, sure, but aren't you the least bit curious?"

"That is why we have history books, no? Besides, if I was that curious about home town, I would be tourbus operator, not Starfleet Consultant."

"Fair enough."

"I am curious about this one, though," Ayash gestured at the Reaver, "I sit and I think, if this planet is replication of Earth, then perhaps this creature is mutation of someone I know." he grinned, "This could be my mutant duplicate sister, no? She must having better luck on this world than on real one."

Spock glanced back from the computer console, seemed to think about something, then turned back to his work.

McCoy snorted, "If you can call it luck."

"Oh, I forgetting to tell you. Photosection of pelvic region turn up the good news. This Reaver being two weeks pregnant."

"Oh, wow." McCoy looked at the creature and grimaced, "The male's sex drive must have mutated to match."

"Not at all. I have profiled several corpses recovered from city center. Fifteen males, all dying from internal injuries. They being crushed while mating. And mutilated and partially eaten afterwards, so probably not consensual on the male end. After what happening to Ensign Riley, I am recommending male team members use much caution from now on."

"What did happen to Ensign Riley?" Spock asked.

"He was attacked by this young lady here. I have not mentioned it to him, but his tricorder recorded the reaver's calculated attempt to disrobe him. I suspect the young woman probably would have stimulated his... er... anatomy somehow, forced a mating, then following normal behavior, eaten his intestines to prevent other females doing the same."

"Reminds me of my ex wife." McCoy sighed and moved back over next to his remarkably unperturbed companion, "Spock, I've got a sudden urge to leave this planet. Will you still need me down here?"

"No," Spock said tersely. Then after a moment added, "When you return to the Enterprise, bring the creature with you. You can conduct a more thorough examination using the ship's xenobiology lab."

"I'm not sure an examination would help at this point until we know how this thing was created in the first place." McCoy said, "And I'm not convinced it was replicated either."

Spock looked up curiously. So did Ayash.

"Think about our fabricators. They can't create things out of thin air, they have to have raw materials to work with first. If this planet was created, it had to have been created from something, and the easiest way to do that is if your base material is chemically similar to your desired product. Now, what if this creature here was an indigenous form of life transformed into something not-so-indigenous? Its original genome might still be recoverable somewhere beneath all that programming."

"That is a leap of speculation, Doctor, but it is at least as plausible as any other hypothesis."

McCoy nodded, "Well I'll leave it up to you to find the answer, Spock, I'm a doctor not a detective..."

"Doctor Ayash," Spock stood up slowly and pointed at the monitor, focussing his attention on something he had been looking at for the past minute or more, "Do you recognize that?"

Ayash looked over Spock's shoulder, as did McCoy once he decided not to leave right this minute (and fully convinced he was about to regret it).

"If I did not know better," Ayash said, "I would say that is hearing aid."

"Hearing aid?" McCoy leaned closer, staring slack jawed.

"Hearing loss was widespread in the local population," Spock said, "A consequence of constant high-speed flybys by military aircraft. The problem primarily affected children."

"Then this creature was probably child during Israeli occupation..." Ayash looked back at the Reaver in amazement, "Three hundred years ago? How is that possible?"

"Either this creature is extremely old," Spock said, reaching for his communicator, "or this planet is extremely young."

"How could-?"

But Spock was already tuning in to his team's frequency. "Spock to Doctor Marcus."

"Carol here."

"Have you completed the quantum dating analysis on the coastal soil samples?"

"I... uh... finished those samples an hour ago, Mister Spock."

"Good. Save your results with due precision, then return to the test site in twenty minutes and repeat the entire analysis before returning to base camp with both samples."

"What? Why?"

"Just a theory, Doctor. Meet me at base camp in two hours. Spock out."