From There to Here

Posted on Sat Oct 15th, 2016 @ 3:37am by Lieutenant Ryan North & Captain Tim Williams & Lieutenant Commander Jean Reynard

Episode: Lost Property
Location: Transporter Room 1

After the meeting broke up, Jean and Ryan briefly broke apart to get some information from their respective departments, before meeting again in the ship's transporter room. Jean got their first, trailed by a gaggle of technicians carrying transporter test cylinders. He'd set up several on the pads when Ryan entered.

"There you are. So, I've got some of our test cylinders here, their specs, and a completely list of materials and biologics they've got aboard," Jeans said. "There's a surprising number of literal lab rats. Anyway, I'm thinking that we can send them some specs, and also get started testing here on our end."

Ryan arched his eyebrows at the operations chief as soon as he entered the room. Jean was, apparently very optimistic about their chances, Ryan on the other hand wasn't. He wanted to rescue the other crew as bad at the next person but given the limited amount of technology, well he wasn't sure that was going work. The things that could go wrong were mounting by the moment.

"Are we even sure that we can transport something through?" Ryan asked, leaning against the transporter controls. "I understand the captain's desire to rescue the other crew but this might turn out to be a pointless endeavor."

"Well, we know it's possible for someone to move across without help," Jean pointed out. "My thought is that using the transporter is safer than trying to exactly duplicate what happened. The biggest risk in the body not transferring simultaneously. We remove that by dematerializing them and then just having to create a path for the matter stream."

Ryan rubbed his temples. "The series of coincidences that allowed their doctor to transport over was very... situational. I'm not sure that we can accurately recreate them with the transporter in a way that damage their bodies. The fact that one of them made it over by accident is a miracle in of its self."

"A miracle," Jean said primly, "is just an event that hasn't had enough science done to it. Besides, I have some really cool ideas on how to make the process safer. A smaller dose of baradium might be useful as a tracer to make the matter easier to lock onto, for example."

Ryan rolled his eyes. "I don't remember you being this pragmatic back at the conference. Even if there was a safe dose of baradium that could be administered you're still talking about sending someone's atoms through a phase shifted quantum field. We'd need a very finely tuned phase discriminator to attempt re-assemble them back at this end. Assuming we could that we'd have to find a way to re-align them with this phase without throwing their entire body chemistry out of whack."

"That's the beauty of using the transporter," Jean said. "They're basically in stasis during transport, so we can take our time with the phase adjustments. The transition coils already have a phase discriminator to help beam through roofs and hulls, just not a high enough precision one."

"And I suppose that you think you can make it a precise enough one?" Ryan asked.

"I'm going to pretend your didn't say that. I can design transporter modifications in my sleep. Or at least when sleep deprived... anyways." Jean shook his head. "I will need your help calibrating it for living tissue, though."

"I don't suppose that my saying I highly advise against this is going to stop you from trying," Ryan remarked. "So, you just want to start beaming things over there and hope that we don't some how upset the subatomic balance."

"Subatomic balance?" Jean frowned as he mentally reviewed what he'd studied about these kind of events. "Oh, right. Like with the Voyager incident."

"It was of primary concern when Voyager encountered a similar incident," Ryan explained. "Transferring mass, even at the subatomic level from their phase to this phase could overload our own atomic weight. No one knows what the result would be if that happened but I can bet that it wouldn't be pleasant."

"It's a good thing you remembered that. Yeah, we'll have to account for that somehow." Jean looked at the equipment in the room and pointed at the cylinders. "These are already designed to mimic humanoid lifeforms. We can modify them so that they exactly match the mass and atomic makeup of each person we beam across, and them swap them during the process. That'll keep the makeup of their ship's subspace zone identical."

"Sure, if you think that you can make it work," Ryan said, crossing his arms over his chest. "We're going to need indepth bio-readings from the other phase if that part's going to work."

Jean pursed his lips. "Yeah, we're going to want the elemental composition really close if we don't want to set off an imbalance and chain reaction." He reached for a padd sitting on top of the transporter control console and handed it over. "Here's a list of their scanner equipment. Think it'll be good enough?"

Ryan picked up the PADD and scanned through it. "Eh, it's going to be cutting it pretty close but yeah this should be good enough. We're going to have to draw an awful lot of power in order for you to make this work. And we still need to worry about the possibility of tachyon feedback when we engage the transporter beam. Not to mention, any idea on how you are going to get a transporter lock?"

"It's basically the same process as any other pad-to-pad transport. They take care of dematerialization, so there's no need to lock on, just align our confinement beams during the actual matter transmission," Jean said, an almost manic grin starting to form. "And I already have an idea how to get our beam to their subspace layer."

Ryan shook his head. "Jean, we aren't talking about beaming from a ship to a planet. We are talking about beaming to an entirely different phase!"

"Have you ever heard of a subspace or folded-space transporter?" Jean said, with barely concealed glee.

"Once but last I recall they weren't a viable option because of the hundred or so safety regulations that they violated due to the demands on a ship's equipment."

"These days it actually has more to do with giving the users lethal celluar damage, similar to whole-body radiation," Jean said, "but the actual technology isn't too complicated. You just have to fill out about a thousand forms to even try experimenting with one on inorganic test subjects, and it's incredibly illegal to beam so much as a bug with them."

"You see that part about lethal cellular damage, that's the part that concerns me."

"That's mostly from repeated use," Jean said. "Mostly. And this would be a one-way trip, just pulling them out of subspace. Studies seem to indicate it's boosting the matter stream into subspace that causes the trouble."

Ryan considered what it was that Jean was proposing. "Well, IF you could make this subspace transport work you could rig the bio-filters with a series of infrared wavelength oscillators, that would cut down on the radiation that the crew was exposed too. We should still have medical standing by, they'll most likely need several courses of hyronaline treatments."

"Having to take rad medicine is a lot more fun than being lost in subspace forever," Jean said, "and they're still coming out ahead of the crew from our reality. They get rescued, I get a paper, Starfleet gets a museum - everyone comes out ahead."

"I can't believe I am agreeing to this," Ryan sighed.

"You can be a co-author if saving lives isn't enough encouragement," Jean said.

"No thank you," Ryan sighed. He moved around to the transporter station and started tapping away at the display. "It may take me a few moments to make the adjustments to the bio-filter."

"Don't forget the transporter test units," Jean reminded him. "We need to come up with something they can make so we can test all this, and that's probably more your area than mine."

Ryan nodded. "Alright that should be easy enough. The ship should be carrying enough material to make an perfectly good analogue for a human body."

"If nothing else, I guess there's always literal lab rats. Hopefully we can avoid that, though."

"Should be able to," Ryan grunted. "We should talk to the crew on the De Salle and get them up to speed."

"I'll get us a link set up once we've got the transporter mods ready." Jean picked up a padd and looked Ryan up and down. "How tall are you? Also, do you mind tight spaces?"

"I'm 5'11 and I was a MACO, tight spaces don't bother me but you looked me up and down like you were checking me out or your are planning something mischievous."

"I'm planning to show you where that biofilter you're going to modify is," Jean said, squatting down and opening up a floor hatch leading to the dark spaces below where the bulk of the transporter machinery was. "Hint: it's not as user-accessible as it really should be."

"Great," Ryan muttered. "I was afraid that you were going to say something like that."

OFF:

Lt Jean Reynard
Chief Operations Officer

Lt. JG Ryan North
Chief Science Officer