Stardate: 70615:1200
Title: Extinction
Author: CMO Ted Matthews
Time: After "As Commanded", Before "A Duplicitous Destiny"
Scene: USS Horizon/Sickbay


The scanning of personnel for the unique brain wave pattern that indicated the presence of another 'entity' was a laborious task, especially when it involved the systematic screening of the whole crew. Whilst Ted had definitely sensed some ill feeling from Ensign Remmick, he couldn't tell whether the Engineer resented the implication of the test or if he had some kind of deeper issue with the half-Cardassian doctor.

Autumn's visit had indeed been a bit of a relief from the repetitive task and even though she had handed him more data to consider he welcomed the distraction. Ted quickly scanned the pads and then checked his schedule, he had Dathan due in for his screening but he saw the COS had pushed back the appointment - no doubt some issue he was attending to.

~

After an hour of studying the data and referring to the Federation medical database, Ted had drawn some worrying conclusions about the inhabitants of the half-destroyed world inside the sphere.

From the three test subjects that the away team had taken scans of, the doctor observed a pattern of malnutrition and its associated diseases and illnesses. Using a computer generated program to run the scenario on a few months Ted entered the extensive data that Basil had managed to learn from the locals, with data ranging from food intake to the number of hours of (artificial) daylight, and also included general social behaviours of the population.

The pictures taken by the away team showed slightly larger eyes than an average human, potentially because the artificial sunlight in the sphere was being turned on less and less, and the populous talked about the rare event of babies being born. The trends showed that infertility was fast becoming an issue.

As the scenario played out, Ted watched the extinction of the population on the planet. The world on which they lived was dying and so were they.

If the planet had been viable they would have been able to support themselves, but the crumbling ground was a hostile host to the people and so they were reliant on the sphere. But the sphere had become reliant on the planet for power, and now they were stuck - any more destruction of the planet would kill the populous outright; no more destruction of the planet meant the sphere would shutdown and the populous would slowly die.


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Lt. Commander Ted Matthews
CMO
USS Horizon
NCC-72400
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