Synaptic Transmission (t'Tamarak)

[Jaiysa t'Tamarak 0]

Meritorious Achievement Award

 

An electrical synapse is fast, the fastest mechanism of the fastest organ in the body. The brain's chemical conductors retain more of their signal between neurons, but in the electrical synapses lie the body's reflexes, the automatic responses, the simple, primal actions which keep a body alive.

 

In Mitar Precip's brain, they had failed.

 

3.5 nanometers was all the distance they had to cross. Miniscule. Infinitesimal. And yet, somehow, as a result of this new universe, they had failed. The bursts of electrical energy, weakened by an utterly alien change in the very space they inhabited, strained at their charged bonds and couldn't reach their destination, hanging instead in that negligible passageway of empty space. And as they failed, breathing failed. Heartbeat failed. Digestion, excretion, judgment, reflex, everything, and he collapsed, with no response even to the crack of cheekbone on metal.

 

As exhaustion swirled in the back of Jaiysa's mind, blunting rationality, she found herself fixated upon that idea. A short distance, too small to fathom, and yet a leap of faith. A leap of faith, membrane to membrane. World to world. Universe to universe.

 

And there, lacking the grace of God, go we. The ship shook around her as the engines engaged.

 

They had in a sense gone nowhere. As far as she understood it, their physical location was the same, somewhere near Maturin Station. But they had leapt across the gap, across the cosmological nanometers that separated them from another world.

 

We are the electricity in the synaptic universe, she thought, and the incongruous poetry of the thought made her snort dismissively as the rattling roar of the ship grew, muffled and mixing with the sound of explosions.

 

A function so simple in theory and so complex in practice. Transition from a state of repulsion to a state of attraction. Transmission necessary to survival. She felt oddly detached, waiting it out in silence with a vague sensation of anticipation that, one way or another, soon she would be able to sleep. Raleigh shouted across from her, a noise of pure pain, and she cast her eyes sideways towards him, hung on with all her might as she saw the blood soaking his uniform jacket. The comm was calling for their attention in a hundred different places and none of them could move as the ship continued to shake and pitch and roll.

 

"Brace for exit. Power ready for exit in five...four...three...two...one...exiting."

 

The very fabric of the matter around them seemed to shudder as the ship struck the receiving membrane and surged back into realspace; she almost choked on a shout as the impact threw her into the wall behind her. And then it was over. The universal synapse had fired. They had been transmitted.

 

Clearer sounds began to filter through to her exhausted brain, in the resulting, abrupt silence. The noise of the comms became clearer, mixed in close harmony with a string of expletives from Raleigh. But her eyes first flicked over to the bed holding Precip's body, and she saw a light flare across the readouts there. The silent leap of electricity, neuron to neuron, like an old, familiar friend, a friend who had been lost in that strange dislocation but now returned, pulsing, ten thousand times more important than a heartbeat, into his brain.

 

She smiled abruptly, releasing her death grip on the bed with stiff fingers that complained at the abrupt relaxation. It's alright, then, she thought, with relief that punctured the sensory overload around her. We really are back.