Mestral’s Legacy: Chapter 14

April 11th, 2154
11:54 pm
Daniel Keilan’s Apartment
Vancouver, British Columbia

Daniel rolled the neurochip between his fingers as he sat, lost in thought, staring at the screen of his computer. The tiny speck of metal had been inside his head until six months ago when he had it extracted. He had been trying to make sense of the logged data ever since. The database of alien neuroscans presented a whole new avenue for analysis and yet, after convincing Dr. Supriya Ansari to give him a copy of her database, he was reluctant to examine it too closely. The implications of a possible match were enough to start his head throbbing.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and returned to the first file in the database. It was the fifth time in as many hours that he had done so. He set up a new search algorithm and a digital filter to clean up some of the background noise in the scans. While the computer sifted through the neural patterns of the fifty or so aliens, Daniel raided the fridge. His stomach had been reminding him loudly for several hours that he had not eaten since leaving Supriya’s lab.

His apartment was sparsely furnished since he spent little time there that didn’t involve sleeping, showering or dressing. Most days were spent in his office dealing with administrative minutiae or, when he could manage it, in his lab or on the wards. The domestic neglect was reflected in the meagre contents of his fridge. As he picked through the dozen items on the shelves, his mind returned to the problem of the database’s origins. Supriya’s cockiness had disappeared when he had tried to pin her down on the source of her scans.

The fifty-odd neural scans were of fairly mediocre quality which meant that they had likely come from a handheld scanner. None of the scans had any accompanying physiological, proteomic, or genomic data that was routinely collected from medical volunteers. The absence of physical samples strongly sugested that the ‘patients’ had been unaware that they were being scanned. How had she managed to do that?

Turning the question over in his mind, he pulled a juice container that he had not seen for a while out of the fridge and popped off the lid. Although he didn’t remember buying it, he did remember that orange juice wasn’t supposed to be green and fuzzy. Sealing the container, he tossed it down the garbage chute. Still hoping to find something edible, he perused the other items.

Fifty aliens. Healthy ones, since sick ones tended to see their own medical personnel. How does a Terran get access to that many aliens without leaving the planet?

Deciding that the fridge was a lost cause, he turned to the cupboards. Poking among the boxes for something edible he eventually dug out his prize of half of a bag of stale cookies. He popped one in his month and grimaced: barely edible. He was starving, it would have to do.

The computer was still chugging through the analysis when he returned to the living room which gave him some more time to think. Diplomats? Probably not, those functions were pretty closely guarded and were invitation only. Actually, most functions involving aliens were – – oh, shit. That had to be it! The Interspecies Medical Exchange had held a conference on Earth last year. The last thing he needed was to have his department involved in an interplanetary incident.

The computer beeped: the analysis was finished. There were a number of partial matches, but looking at them more closely he saw that they were for the baseline neuroscan, not the period of time when he was sick . . . nuts? Indisposed? He had never really figured out what to label it, but he knew it when it happened. He scrolled down and froze: among the partial matches to Andorians, Vulcans, and several unlabelled scans (Supriya’s record keeping had been hit and miss), there was a match to a scan two weeks before whatever it was that happened to him became unbearable.

He opened the file. In some respects it looked just like his scan. In others it was very clearly alien. Unfortunately it was one of the unidentified scans. The database wasn’t set up to match the alien scans to each other so there was no way of seeing whether it matched any of the identified neuroscans.

He suddenly had the urge to get out and take a walk, go for a run, do anything but consider the implications that his neuroscan was a partial match for that of an unidentified alien. What did that mean? Was it normal? Was it a sickness? A virus? A prion? Was there a cure?

Daniel buried his head in his hands and tried to ignore the headache that was growing in intensity. His stomach suddenly revolted against the deluge of stale cookies that it had been subjected to. He barely reached the bathroom in time.

While washing his face he tried to decide what to do next. The man in the mirror was pale despite his bronze skin and his normally neat dark brown hair was dishevelled. Pulling his eyelid down he extracted the brown contact lense that he placed there once per week, and repeated the task on the other eye to reveal lilac-coloured eyes.

At home they were common, but here they were a nuisance novelty. When he had first joined the Department of Neuropsychiatry, geneticists in the Faculty had asked him to allow them to do a genetic scan. They simply could not believe that a man of science would not advance scientific knowledge by providing a genetic scan. It was no use explaining about the genetic exploitation of indigenous peoples in the 2000s, didn’t he know that geneticists were different now? He finally figured out that it was just easier to hide his eye colour than be hassled.

Not having had any medical problems, aside from this thing that happened to him every seven years or so, he had never had a genetic scan. He had never considered getting one, it just wasn’t something that was done where he grew up. He studied his reflection in the mirror thoughtfully.

At home they had a story about how the lilac eyes came about. He had always thought that it was just a story made up to explain a spontaneous mutation, now he wondered if it was something else. A pale-skinned woman with pink hair and lilac eyes descended from the sky in a cloud. She became part of the band, and eventually bore a child. A child with dark hair, dark skin . . . and lilac eyes. It was said that she died during a raid but that before she died, she killed four invaders without touching them at all. Lightning was said to have shot from her hands, dropping them where they stood. It was just a story, wasn’t it? The man in the mirror did not know and neither did he.

As a child he had heard the story many times. He had even tried to shoot lightning from his fingertips along with a some of his lilac-eyed cousins. They never managed it.

He turned out the lights and lay on his bed pondering these thoughts and others. Right before he fell asleep at five in the morning he contacted the IME switchboard and asked for the physician most experienced in alien physiology. Which kind of alien, they wanted to know. He couldn’t tell them. In that case, they only had one candidate for him.

After making another brief comm call, he crawled into bed. Satisfied that he had done what he could for now, he fell into a fitful sleep wrestling with the problem of what he would tell the Denobulan.

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