Under the Knife ((t'Tamarak))

[Jaiysa t'Tamarak 0]

Meritorious Achievement Award

 

The light seemed unbearably dim; Jaiysa said nothing of it. She was not in the habit of complaining during surgery. It was merely a distraction in a business that would never be made entirely pleasant anyway. Besides, the dimness of the room was partially a reflection of her own dim mood; she was more than familiar enough with her own thought processes to recognize psychosomaticism at work.

 

She did not, if she was to be entirely honest with herself, want to be here. Not anywhere near this place, this medical bay, this particular surgery. Ironically enough, of course, it was for the very reasons that she did not want to be here that no one else could be here in her place. At any rate, it was too late to avoid it; in light of the damage and complexity of the situation in engineering, she had avoided treating Erei’riov Faldek’s neurological issues until now, and now both she and he were paying the price for it.

 

“The device is centered in the medial frontal cortex of the Card’hassin brain,” she said quietly, the words designed to center herself in the situation as much as providing any report on the surgery’s progress. “It interferes with the signals providing feedback on the pain caused by a given sensory input and triggers a release of endorphins in their place. The breakdown of the mechanism is causing both signals to process at once, overwhelming the cortex’s capacity...”

 

So many ways to damage such an extraordinary organ...she thought, looking down at the pulsing, glistening muscle, grey as the scalp and reptilian skull that couched it as it lay open to her scalpel. This was her battlefield; it always had been. She knew every inch of the neural landscape; she knew its function and its purpose. It was her source of power. It was where she had chosen to localize her particular genius.

 

And she hated it. Not Faldek’s particularly, of course, but the brain in general. Faced with such a surgery for the first time since her terrible days in Tehann, she found herself hating it for its capabilities, for everything that it could do or fail to do, as it chose.

 

Or perhaps simply because of everything she could do with it. If she chose.

 

In spite of the dimness, her head felt coldly clear. Her fingers moved deftly against the tissue, gently invasive into the lobe which housed the small Card’hassin device which had caused Erei’riov Faldek’s collapse in Engineering only an hour or so beforehand. There it was, small, grey metal on grey flesh; one might have missed it if they were not looking. An insidious device; she would not attempt to entirely disconnect it, for doing so would result in potentially insoluble damage to the cellular matter surrounding it, and would cause indescribable pain.

 

She knew too many ways to do that already. Too many ways which even now lay available to her with only a flick of the wrist. The thought chilled her.

 

****

 

“Au hesitate, Jaiysa. Why?”

 

“He knows na thing, Amarik. Let him be. Anything further and he will die.”

 

****

 

“I have reached the device and am beginning the introduction of neural blocks to eliminate its access to the pathways which are its primary catalysts.” She turned her wrist sideways, sliding the device into clearer view and starting the delicate procedure with her eyes narrowed, one pointed eyebrow quirked upwards unconsciously. As she worked, she wondered about the long-term effectiveness of the approach they were taking.

 

It was entirely possible that blocking off the pathways which the device controlled would simply result in further pathways being established in ways that she could not predict. She would have to anticipate every possible reaction of both the device and the organ it controlled. And the brain is so adaptive...so creative in its reactions...it is impossible to comprehend the permutations of its response, though I use another of its kind in the comprehension...

 

****

 

“Continue the interrogation.”

 

“To what purpose, Amarik? It will continue until he simply teaches himself to feel na thing at all...and then he will be as y’ya as if au had shot him to begin with. Let it be...fhaen, Amarik, fhaen let it be.”

 

“Continue, hta’Dva! He was insolent and will pay the price.”

 

****

 

She worked as much by instinct as by conscious thought, her dark eyes flicking between the biobed readouts and the incision site with cool intensity. She spoke only a few times more; twice to explain the next step in the procedure, and once with great calmness to request a further addition of sedative to the Card’hassin’s system in light of a reflexive motion as his body responded to the invasiveness of the procedure.

 

Her expression belied nothing of the troubled thoughts, the deja vu which became stronger and stronger as she worked, as she remembered her own comfort with the surgery she worked on. Her own expertise, once a source of pride, now frightened her as she remembered, absently, as if at a distracted distance, what it had come to mean in recent years. She had not made such inroads into another’s mind or body (unless she counted her treatment of Vilanne, which had been an emergency, more reaction than purpose) since Tehann, and at Tehann, she had not been a surgeon, merely an extension of her own scalpel, wielded by another.

 

He would be alright, she finally announced. With time to rest and recover, he would survive. His mental capacity would not be affected -- she was too good, too precise, for that, and though an adaptive relapse was possible, she had taken every care that it would not be likely. She said all this with cool certainty and disappeared out of the room to collect her thoughts, unwilling to reveal the fear that the business had put into her.

 

How long would it be before she could be a surgeon entirely without guilt?

 

****

 

“It’s over, Amarik.”

 

“Good. Au have done well, Maenek.”

 

“I have done what au asked. I have done na as a maenek. And I have na done well.”

 

 

 

 

au -- you

Card'hassin -- Cardassian

erei'riov -- Commander

fhaen -- please

hta'Dva -- expletive

maenek -- doctor

na -- no, not

y'ya -- dead

Edited April 12, 2011 by Cmdr JFarrington