Rebuild Him

Posted on Wed Aug 21st, 2019 @ 10:10am by Commander Jordan Gunning & Lieutenant Erin Whitlam PhD

Mission: After the Storm
Location: Peluu, Archa IV

[Now]

"It might be better for him if he didn't wake up." One of the voices said, drifting into his subconscious. "If they were doing that to him for months he's probably... I dunno. Gone."

A second voice, it seemed further away, pierced through the haze. "That's not our call to make." It wasn't further away, it was deeper. Slower. More meticulous. Like its owner was concentrating and responding to his companion wasn't a priority. "Besides ... ah, there we go! ... Besides, nobody will give a vole's podex if he dies. But if I manage to save him, bring him back, that's newsworthy, Ferah. Think about it."

Ferah was too busy trying to work out what a vole's podex was to care much about her superior's god complex. She looked at the chart above the patient's head. It showed the extent of the broken bones, the torn ligaments - deliberately torn, restitched, and then torn again, the cuts, even the bruises were horrific. They could repair all of that. "It's his brain you have to put back together."

"Exactly!" he exclaimed, excited in a way that seemed below a man of his standing and reputation. "We have the technology, I have the skills and you have the unwavering optimism of youth - or you should have. We can rebuild him, don't you see?"

The younger doctor rolled her eyes and loaded up a hypospray. They had repaired most of the physical damage but the extent of some of the injuries meant that the knitting process for the bones was ongoing. If he could feel anything in there, it would likely be agony so she was trying to keep him sedated. "Then what? He'd already ditched Starfleet to go and-" she double checked the biography section of his file and rolled her eyes again- "solve crimes and help people beyond our supervision. If there's not a counselor around to keep an eye on him then how long is it before our hard work unravels and he's left quivering in some cell somewhere?"

"What if, what if, what if!" he scoffed, exasperated. "None of that matters, Ferah! What matters is what's before us. What we can do for our patient. We don't know what the future will bring. He could be hit by a tram the minute he leaves this facility, and his perfectly rebuilt brain reduced to a stain on the pavement. Would you lament our unraveled hard work over his still twitching corpse? No! Of course not! Because our concern is the here and now. Yah?"

He already looked like he'd been hit by a tram. Ferah knew better than to argue the point though. When Doctor Savero Wølmar had made his point, the point was made. It wasn't freely available to his underlings to be unpicked and pored over. That was the benefit of tenure, she supposed. "Yeah, I suppose. So what's our first move?"

Wølmar shook his head and shrugged, looking up at the ceiling, "What's our first move, she asks! My, my, my!" He turned back to Ferah and fixed her with a disapproving expression. "Sometimes it would be better to trade some of that youthful optimism for some old world practicality, yah? Go and fetch the cortical imager. We can't just dive in there like some savages, can we?"
__________________

Doctor Savero Wølmar
(Whitlam)

Doctor Ferah
(Gunning)