Relativity & Reason

[Annabelle O'Halloran 0]

 

"I know sensors are down, I don't care what you have to do," Wade ordered the young ensign in a booming voice. "Go up to Ten Forward and look out the window if you have to, but I need to explain to the captain why we aren't moving!" The young engineer straightened her yellow uniform and stormed away from him, her face as red as a tomato.

 

Anna stepped off the turbolift in time to hear Wade's 'suggestion' and nimbly hopped out of the way as the agitated young woman came barreling by. "Excuse me," Anna murmured to empty air and then walked to where Wade was standing. "I decided to come down and see where Engineering is at with our current situation and I have to tell you, Mr. Knight, it didn't occur to me to hit Ten Forward on the way," she said, eyes sparkling, as she swallowed back a laugh.

 

Wade leaned against the bulk head with a sigh and turned towards Anna. A slight, yet tense, chuckle passed his lips at her remark and he shook his head. "I doubt the solution is going to present itself outside of any window." he said coolly, the frustration that was apparent only a moment ago faded behind a mask of pragmatism. "Have you guys up on the bridge figured out why the sensors went out?"

 

"Oh, of course we have. I came down to tell you the good news in person," Anna replied dryly, and then just shook her head. "Nope, all we have is that very pretty cloud on visual. I really did come down to run a couple of things by you."

 

He looked hopeful for a moment before he realized her tone and sighed even louder as she continued. With a nod he headed over to the pool table and leaned against it, crossing his arms in front of him. "What's on your mind?"

 

Anna followed Wade and took a seat at a workstation, spinning it around so she could look up at him. "An increasingly strong gravimetric distortion field was recorded before sensors went out. Any gravitational or spatial distortion large enough to cripple the ship and fool the sensors would probably warp space time."

 

Turning away for a moment, Wade pointed to another ensign working across the room. "Cola, work on getting me a status on the warp field." Tapping on the desk behind him with a finger, he looked down at Anna with an inquisitive look. "I had been thinking about that as well. Here on my end it seemed to me that all systems were go and for all intents and purposes we were moving."

 

Pulling a pencil from behind his ear, he broke it in half and sat half of it on the desk in front of him. "Lets say that this pencil represents space," he began, placing his finger tips at each end of the pencil, "And lets say that this finger is the Reaent, and this is another point in space, say the nebula."

 

Placing the other end of the pencil a foot and a half down the table and moving his finger to the end of that pencil he continued, "Now let's say we 'stretch' space out, adding more space between point A and point B, it would take far longer to close the distance. So let's say the other end of this pencil was on the other side of this room, it would take a long time to measure the distance traveled between them in millimeters." He looked back to Anna and grinned, trying to fit the splinters of the broken pencil back into place. "Am I making any sense at all?"

 

Anna smiled in response to his grin, and nodded. "The strong concentration of graviton particles; you're theorizing that we're in an area where space itself is stretched out? Is that correct?"

 

"Well, that's what I'm thinking, but it's only a theory at this point based on what my sensors were telling me before they blew out." He said with a nod, "That's basically the gist of it."

 

Anna idly swiveled the chair back and forth a bit, thinking it over. She stood up abruptly and walked a few feet past Wade and then came back, turning to face him. "The thing is...that 'nebula' is not a nebula. It's some sort of distortion and that transmission fragment that was scanned and you identified as being sent on a Fleet emergency band somehow bled through from somewhere...some time. I think you're right that space is distorted in this area and I don't pretend to understand why. I think we may be dealing with a couple of things and the end result may add up to a temporal anomaly."

 

Wade brushed the hair out of his face and grumbled to himself, "I hate temporal anomalies." Yet he leaned his head back, mulling over her theory. "What if that transmission we received..." He paused for a moment, thinking of the right words. "As you know, space and time are so closely related that they are essentially one and the same. What if that transmission we received became caught in this region of space, where things travel more slowly?"

 

"And if it did," Anna asked reasonably," how long ago was it? What ship was being told to come back to port? Why was it being told to come back to port?" She smiled all of a sudden, and gave Wade a sideways glance. "I hate temporal conundrums, too. We could just as easily say that the transmission is bleeding back from the future."

 

Wade's eyes lit up, "Right! It could very well be at the source of the anomaly that the opposite may be true. Space could be compressed, having the reverse effect, meaning if a radio transmission passed through that region at some given time in the future it would been..." Trailing off once more he threw his hands up into the air and growled with frustration. "This is all unproven anyway. As far as I know, we could have been standing still the whole time."

 

Wade's enthusiasm was short lived but Anna wasn't disheartened. She enjoyed seeing the usually pragmatic engineer get excited and she had an idea... "And now we come back to the most immediate concern. We've got to get the sensors back online. What do you think about calibrating them to compensate for high density graviton particles?"

 

Musingly he scratched at his short goatee, and gave a quick nod. "Right, we'll need to adjust the sensors to account for the strong gravitational field," he said, stretching out the final word in his sentence. "I think we can pull it off."

 

"That's good enough for me, Mr. Knight," Anna replied with a satisfied smile. She knew he wouldn't say it if he didn't really think it would work.