Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×15

Writ­ten by: Michael Dismuke

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 9^th August 2026

Humans have a pecu­li­ar attach­ment to round num­bers that have no real sig­ni­fic­ance. Lyo­n­esse’s stard­ate chro­no­met­er is about to reach 10,000, and the crew is insist­ing on some kind of cel­eb­ra­tion. I am not sure what they have planned, but it will undoubtedly be very loud and prob­ably messy.

Lieu­ten­ant Valik’s Per­son­al Log: Stard­ate, 9999.7

Plot: Lyo­n­esse’s crew mem­bers are van­ish­ing at an increas­ing rate fol­low­ing a celebration.

The ‘A’ Plot: Many, espe­cially Human, mem­bers of the crew are look­ing for­ward to cel­eb­rat­ing as the ship’s chro­no­met­er rolls over to stard­ate 10,000. Cap­tain Mas­uda agrees that it is worth organ­ising a New Year-style party, and leaves the arrange­ments to her seni­or officers. James organ­ises a poker tour­na­ment, gambling work shifts, ahead of the main party, while Dr Vale-of-Winds arranges a potluck meal.

Although arrange­ments are made to allow those whose shift would start after the party to par­take, with alco­hol-free and syn­the­hol drinks provided, Valik decides to pass. He intends to work through the event, ensur­ing that the ship remains at peak effi­ciency. Vale decides this is unfair, and vis­its him in engin­eer­ing to per­suade him to come and mark the occa­sion in the interests of keep­ing crew mor­ale up. He even­tu­ally agrees and attends the potluck bring­ing plomeek soup.

The party goes well, with James cel­eb­rat­ing his win and impend­ing time off, but Valik devel­ops a stom­ach upset and leaves early. Astan rushes off around mid-even­ing look­ing very green, but there are rumours he was drink­ing too much.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing, Lyo­n­esse approaches a matched pair of spin­ning neut­ron stars, des­ig­nated BC-23. While not pulsars, they are very act­ive and the astro­nomy depart­ment is eager to study them, espe­cially their elec­tro­mag­net­ic quad­ru­pole moments. Jin soon registers a spike in the mag­net­ic field strength of the sys­tem, which up to that point had ris­en stead­ily as they got closer to the bin­ary stars. It appears to be con­nec­ted to the level of elec­tric­al activ­ity between the stars. It seems likely that it will affect Lyo­n­esse’s sensors and com­mu­nic­a­tions, and could poten­tially cause dam­age, so the cap­tain orders that the sur­vey should be car­ried out from a safe dis­tance, des­pite the protests from the sci­ence depart­ment that this will take much longer.

Mean­while, sick­bay records a num­ber of incid­ents of naus­ea, includ­ing Valik, who remains in his quar­ters to rest. When Astan fails to report for duty, Vale becomes con­cerned a patho­gen of some sort is loose on the ship. Saur­ik also reports in sick, and Vale begins to won­der if there is a con­nec­tion to tele­path­ic abil­ity. She checks the records and, as she expects, all the Star­fleet per­son­nel report­ing naus­ea have high esper rat­ings. There are no access­ible records for the sur­viv­ors from Che­vareth, Sonak and Atlantis, although sev­er­al of them have also repor­ted nausea.

While stud­ies of the neut­ron stars con­tin­ue, a wave of what looks like blue stat­ic elec­tri­city washes over the ship from bow to stern. There are no ser­i­ous injur­ies from the effect, although some indi­vidu­als trip and fall badly when sur­prised by it. Pre­cau­tions are taken against anoth­er occur­rence, but it does not repeat. Jin’s scans show that elec­tro­mag­net­ic activ­ity spiked when this occurred, and some sys­tems briefly went off­line, namely the trans­port­ers, the holo­graph­ic pro­ject­ors in the recre­ation room and the food fab­ric­at­ors in the kitchens.

Doc­tor Vale’s researches show that the naus­ea out­break is not caused by an infec­tious organ­ism, but by an over­stim­u­la­tion of part of the brain. The region in ques­tion is lar­ger in those with high­er esper cap­ab­il­ity. Cross-ref­er­en­cing with the sci­ence depart­ment records shows a cor­rel­a­tion between instances of naus­ea and peaks in the elec­tro­mag­net­ic field strength in the sys­tem. The med­ic­al team begins work­ing on a way to reduce the effects.

The next morn­ing, the head of the deck depart­ment reports that two mem­bers of his team failed to report to work. While this could be related to the naus­ea prob­lem, there are no signs of them in their quar­ters. Vale reports this to secur­ity, where it turns out that Astan is also miss­ing. Fur­ther checks show that about 10% of the entire com­ple­ment is miss­ing, both crew and pas­sen­gers. Around the same time, the quarter­mas­ter dis­cov­ers that around 20% of the ship’s food stores are also missing.

Secur­ity sweeps con­firm that none of those affected are on the ship, and it turns out that all of the miss­ing per­son­nel had repor­ted naus­ea over the pre­vi­ous 36 hours. Fur­ther invest­ig­a­tions show that the com­puter core has been accessed, and that this occur­rence coin­cided with the dis­ap­pear­ances. Weirdly, the trans­port­er sys­tems became act­ive just after the com­puter access, but the phase trans­ition coils and Heis­en­berg com­pensat­ors did not, which means that the sys­tems did not actu­ally trans­port any of the miss­ing individuals.

Shortly after­wards, the kit­chen fab­ric­at­ors began work­ing without instruc­tions, and pro­duce unusu­al geo­met­ric shapes made of some­thing resem­bling cor­al. The recre­ation room pro­ject­ors and trans­port­ers begin exper­i­en­cing power fluc­tu­ations, and fail to oper­ate con­sist­ently des­pite realign­ment. Jin exam­ines the fab­ric­ated objects – and is sur­prised to see that they appear to incor­por­ate DNA from the miss­ing crew members.

Then anoth­er wave of blue stat­ic washes over the ship. More of the crew dis­ap­pear in front of their hor­ri­fied col­leagues, melt­ing away as if in a trans­port­er beam – includ­ing Valik.

Obser­va­tions: Stard­ates in this era do not cor­res­pond to sol­ar years, but are coun­ted from an arbit­rary zero point (mid­night on the 31^st Decem­ber 2214, using Earth’s UTC). One stard­ate cor­res­ponds to approx­im­ately 66 Earth hours. This is because every cul­ture has its own way of meas­ur­ing time. Humans and oth­er spe­cies still try to mark sig­ni­fic­ant num­bers though.

The BC-23 sys­tem is a close bin­ary pair of neut­ron stars, orbit­ing very close togeth­er. The two stars are vir­tu­ally identic­al and their rota­tions are in per­fect syn­chron­isa­tion, caus­ing an unusu­al link­age between their mag­net­ic fields. It is this that has attrac­ted the atten­tion of the astro­nomy team.

Ref­er­ences: The recre­ation room is an early ver­sion of the 24^th cen­tury holo­deck, equipped with pro­ject­ors cap­able of cre­at­ing appar­ently sol­id images. The pro­jec­tions have no sol­id com­pon­ent, mean­ing you can walk right through them, and it does not have the com­put­ing capa­city to run inter­act­ive stor­ies. It is primar­ily used for envir­on­ment­al sim­u­la­tions for train­ing and recre­ation pur­poses, the lat­ter being employed to help alle­vi­ate the psy­cho­lo­gic­al prob­lems arising from long deep space mis­sions. The recre­ation room was first seen in Star Trek: the Anim­ated Series, and later in Star Trek: Dis­cov­ery.

Ques­tions: Where is every­one going?