[JP] Dr. Jansen Orrey & Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - Threshold Conditions (Part 1)
Carter Schimpff
(( Holodeck 4, Deck 3 – USS Artemis-A ))
(( Simultaneously Receiving on Amity Outpost ))
Roy stood alone on the Holodeck, hands tucked behind his back, wearing the expression of a man finally circling back to something he’d meant to do weeks ago.
He had promised Sam Richards he would reach out to Dr. Orrey. He’d meant it at the time – meant it sincerely.
And then the Boraxians happened.
And the riots.
And the hostage crisis.
And the giant spider.
And the–
Well. Everything.
Such was the nature of starship medicine: non-emergent mysteries had an uncanny knack for being shoved aside by whatever fresh hell had chosen that week to kick in the doors of Sickbay.
But a promise was a promise. And now that the dust had settled – relatively speaking – he owed Richards exactly what he’d said he would do.
He initialized the program – a recreation of one of the medical labs aboard the Artemis, and then sent a ping through Starfleet’s long range communication network to Dr. Orrey as a sort of electronic ‘I’m ready when you are, sir.’
Roy straightened his lab coat – an unnecessary gesture, he hoped. He’d never met the man before, but in his experience Doctors tended to be collegial when it came to matters of medicine. All the same, Dr. Orrey did outrank him by several steps and many, many years of experience.
((Holodeck B, SRC Sub-Level 11, Amity Outpost))
Jansen stood inside the holodeck awaiting the signal on the communique. It was a difficult connection to make over all this way. As soon as he got the message he immediately cleared time on his schedule. Not only did Sam need help but so did a colleague.
He had worked with the Artemis during those beautiful and fun weeks that made up Frontier Day. It also wasn’t his first holoconference..that went to playing violin while Alora sang..then of course came the medical consults and the few counseling consults, not to mention the general education or conferences. Very early in his career he had toyed with the self diagnosis of HoloAddiction, this far out into space though it was just a part of the job. Besides Sam needed help.
Jansen got pulled out of the memory hole by the ping that drew his attention to the arch asking for connection. He pressed his thumb over the screen and reached up with the braided leather cord to tie back his hair as he appeared in..
(( Holodeck 4, Deck 3 – USS Artemis-A ))
Orrey: Doctor Bancroft, I presume?
Bancroft: ::inclining his head:: Dr. Orrey. Thank you for taking this, sir. I know your schedule on Amity isn’t exactly leisurely, and… well, mine hasn’t exactly been a veranda-and-lemonade situation recently either.
Orrey: Sweet Tea is a better option but that can be when I host our next talk, hm? Now ::rubbing his hands together as he looked around the lab:: Lets get down to tacks.
Bancroft: I’ve been meaning to contact you sooner, but you know how it goes – if it isn’t actively bleeding out, it tends to get bumped down the priority list. ::shrugging apologetically:: Starfleet Medical, where ‘non-emergent’ sometimes means ‘see you three explosions from now.’
Orrey: ::chuckling:: That is a good one I will have to remember that.
Bancroft: I’m following up on a mutual patient of ours – Dr. Samantha Richards. She mentioned you first identified her bone anomaly after her little Frontier Day, ah… incident.
He pulled up Richards’ chart on a nearby monitor.
Bancroft: She’s in remarkably good health – a testament either to your work or her own strange brand of cosmic luck. Or perhaps both.
He pulled up a second chart – that of one of Dr. Richards’ newly born twins: Leera Bex Dakora.
Bancroft: She recently delivered twins, one of whom inherited Richards’ condition, resulting in a completely non-functional left leg. ::hand over his mouth in concentration, studying the charts:: You were the first to clock this… whatever this is… and I wanted your firsthand perspective, along with any insight you might have from your years of practice. Was there anything you observed in Sam’s case – clinical or intuitive – that didn’t make it into the official reports?
Jansen rubbed his jaw looking at the charts. It was wonderful to hear that the babies had been born safely. However he failed her by not considering one part..
Orrey: Growth plates…Fvadt…I mean no, not really. I have sort of the same issue ::waving a hand dismissively:: Weird Space sickness, not this specifically. Does the leg move at all?
Roy pursed his lips.
He’d been waiting for that question.
And the answer – accurate though it was – landed on his tongue with the faint metallic taste of failure. He’d known about Sam’s anomaly before the twins were born. He’d correctly predicted which child might inherit it. What he hadn’t predicted – what he now desperately wished he had – was just how much more devastating the expression would be in her daughter than it was in Sam herself.
Bancroft: ::shaking his head slightly:: Minimal spontaneous movement at rest. Hard to tell how much is volitional versus newborn ‘everything-is-a-surprise’ flexion, but nothing approaching functional load-bearing to be sure. ::a beat:: I’m hesitant to draw any hard conclusions, as young as she is, but… it’s not behaving like a limb with healthy structural support, that much I can say.
Orrey: Babinski reflex check out? Or is there nerve and muscle issues too?
A sharp, incisive follow-up. Exactly the kind Roy had expected from a man whose reputation very much preceded him.
It was the elegant physician’s version of: ‘Is this a hardware problem… or is the software corrupted, too?’
Bancroft: Good news there – primitive reflexes are intact. But I’m very reluctant to over-interpret that, especially so early on. Without a structurally sound tibia, I can’t cleanly separate neurological function from mechanical limitation.
Orrey: And the other twin is alright? Can we see the other file?
Roy keyed in a few commands, and a new profile materialized beside them – Aven Nathan Dakora’s vitals, developmental charts, and newborn scans rotating gently in the holographic light.
Bancroft: Here he is, Aven Nathan. Everything I’ve seen, both on scans and in person, says he’s completely unaffected. ::a faint smile:: Funny how in medicine we call ‘normal and healthy’ unremarkable. But, here we are – Aven is gloriously, reassuringly unremarkable.
Orrey: ::smiling:: Boring and safe.
Roy nodded once, then tapped a new sequence into the console. A beautifully detailed double helix unfurled in the air between them – Sam Richards’ mitochondrial and nuclear markers highlighted in soft blue and gold.
Bancroft: I have a working theory about Sam’s condition, if you’ll allow me – it’s nothing conclusive, but the mitochondrial angle keeps tapping me on the shoulder. ::pointing to the holographic spiral:: Her nuclear genome is spotless, but the behaviors we’ve seen fit a stress-triggered mtDNA variant just a little too well to ignore.
Orrey: It isn’t a terrible way to start looking into it.
Bancroft: If that’s true, the reason only the daughter was affected might come down to heteroplasmy distribution. Pure statistical misfortune – dumb luck. She might have inherited a higher proportion of dysfunctional mitochondria while Aven ended up below the clinical threshold for gene expression.
Orrey: ‘You have your mother’s osteoblast.’
Roy swiped his hand across the hologram, replacing the genome with Sam’s post-Frontier Day imaging. The cold glow washed across his features as he leaned in, voice low but engaged.
Bancroft: It would also explain why Sam herself is nearly asymptomatic – unless her bones are pushed into regenerative overdrive. Everyday ‘remodeling’ wouldn’t exceed the metabolic threshold, but a regenerator absolutely would – and in Leera’s case, embryonic bone formation is basically a perfect storm for exposing mitochondrial deficits.
Orrey: Hmmm.
Roy took a breath, straightened, and met Orrey’s eyes squarely. This was the part of medicine he loved most – the moment when mystery became a partnership.
Bancroft: That’s where I need your perspective, sir. If we’re going to give Leera a fighting chance to have a functional leg – and avoid the worst-case scenario I’ve got penciled in – we need to agree on a coherent theory of what’s actually happening.
Orrey: Well we are absolutely going to work against that.
Jansen himself moved to the terminal and pulled up Sam’s recovery info from the first use of the regenerator, throwing it into the air alongside the Frontier Day image.
Orrey: I wonder…if my joke had more grounding in reality than not.
Although it wasn’t strictly necessary, Roy felt himself compelled to move just slightly behind his fellow Doctor so that he could look from the same angle.
Bancroft: ::faint smile:: I’ve found the jokes we make under pressure are usually related to something our brains have already been circling for a while. What’s the thought behind the joke?
Orrey: Perhaps an interruption in the osteoblasts. I myself have a condition that interrupts cellular communication. It causes rapid cellular aging. I managed to come up with a weekly gene therapy based on modified Caitian DNA. ::offering a smile toward his colleague:: Mysterious space radiation really does make the job difficult.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Jansen Orrey M.D., M.Sc.
Chief Medical Officer
Amity Outpost
O238506JO0
And
Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1