“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
-Carl Jung

The doors to sickbay peeled open with a polite hydraulic sigh that belied the violence that the Fresno had just seen, and Commander Thalissa Zheen stepped through looking like she’d gone 10 rounds with the plasma conduits and won by technicality alone.

In fact it had been one round with one single plasma conduit.  Blood had dried dark along the side of her head after that conduit had blown a bit of bulkhead shrapnel to split her skin in the midst of the attack.  While she’d carried on screaming orders at the crew, somebody on the bridge had helped her up and slapped a sloppy field dressing over the wound with all the grace of a spanner-jockey sealing a coolant leak.  For a ship packed full of engineers who were proficient at committing industrial-scale hate crimes against probability whenever shit got real, that very comparison was just about dead center to the truth of it.

She’d had a hard time staying grounded in that fight.  Even now, she was back there in the crawling frigid environment of Michael’s quarters.  That moment the doors had opened into that impossible cold.  Their breath curling white through the darkness while that figure stood there at the viewport like something caught halfway between the memory of her captain and a corpse…

It had been him.  Or something wearing him.  She hadn’t told the others what she’d seen.  Wouldn’t.  Not yet.  Captain Holbach had only seen a silhouette turning at that viewport before he’d shouted the lights on and it had vanished.  Vorak and the rest of his security team hadn’t gotten much more than that, either.

But Thalissa’s eyes were built for dark places.  Built for that dim light beneath glacial Andorian caves where the shadows moved right before the predators pounced.  And for that one horrid, stretched out instant before the lights came up…

Michael had stood there while frost crawled in spiderweb patterns across the bulkheads and the dark had gathered around him like gravity bending towards a collapsed star.  Not alive.  That would have at least been a relief.  And not dead, either.  Dead things made sense.  Dead things obeyed rules just as much as the living.

This thing had looked like a man trapped somewhere between the two states.  Caught halfway between corpse and consciousness.  Like death had started its process and then lost interest before bothering to finish the job.

Just… wrong.

She couldn’t bring herself to give any of that her voice as Vorak and his security team swept Michael’s quarters for any signs of him or this intruder.  As she called in more engineering and science teams who began sweeping the place with tricorders and resonance scanners.  All of them trying to force this experience back into something rational and measurable.

Then, because the universe had clearly decided as of late to wander off into the weeds somewhere foaming at the mouth only to return and start flinging disconnected horrors at them with both hands like an escapee from a mental institution…

The Vaadwaur, of all the impossible sons of bitches, came shrieking out of warp to open fire.

Red alert ignited across the Fresno as the bridge was screaming contact reports over Thalissa’s comm badge.  An Astika-class cruiser and a Manasa escort had dropped right on top of them to shove an ushaan-tor between their ribs before any of them had realized a fight had even started.

Everything after that had turned into a blur of violence and motion.  The run to the bridge.  The deck plating bucking beneath her feet as the thunder of polaron fire hammered against a bare hull.  Captain Holbach cursing because the Fresno was forced to belatedly raise her shields, and he was trapped here rather than be allowed to beam over to and command the Valley Forge for this fight.

Then of all things, the Klingons had next arrived.  Gods bless the violent bastards.  The IKS Hegh’ta.  A B’rel-class bird of prey, running under the banner of some Great House or other working to politically strangle Chancellor Duras in the halls of their empire, had decloaked right on top of the Vaadwaur formation and entered the fray with the sort of gleeful homicidal enthusiasm that only Klingons could.

Thalissa couldn’t care less which House they answered to.  Whoever had consigned them to join the humanitarian efforts of the Fourth Fleet’s Task Force 93 as some sort of sneering political maneuver designed to piss off Chancellor Duras could have her personal thanks and a bottle of bloodwine.  Or… whatever other putrid things that could pass for engine degreaser that the Klingons drank for recreation.  Because thanks to their intervention and all their combined efforts, those Vaadwaur ships were now debris.  Nothing more than expanding clouds of molten wreckage drifting through the system while damage control teams aboard both the Fresno and the Valley Forge sifted through their wounds and patched it all back together with welding implements and optimism.

Thalissa had slogged through the entire thing, all the while unable to tear herself from what had happened with that figure in the quarters.  And so she entered sickbay carrying all of it with her now.

The room around her churned with post-battle chaos.  A nurse barked for a cortical stimulator while a crewman nearby screamed as a dermal regenerator passed over freshly burned skin that glistened from under a torn uniform.  Medical tricorders chirped constantly in overlapping waves of electronic panic, competing with the buzz of medical staff speaking soft words of encouragement to their patients or shouting for tools or procedures that would stabilize the critical ones.

One of the nurses intercepted Thalissa before she’d even made it three steps into the bedlam, steering her by the arm towards an empty biobed like a homesteader trying to wrangle a wandering, concussed beast.  In one of the only rooms aboard a starship where rank could promptly go straight to hell, the Commander was sternly ordered to sit while the blood-stiffened field dressing was peeled away from the side of her head.  The nurse immediately set to work with a dermal regenerator that bathed the wound in a soft blue glow that stitched it all back together in moments.

And then reality decided to extend its most middle of digits and resume the shenanigans once more.

There was no transporter effect.  No warning.  No theatrics of causality.  One second the biobed nearest to Thalissa sat empty beneath the surgical lights.  Then something blinked violently into existence atop it.  The entire room recoiled.  Gasps.  Shouting.

And there he was.  Captain Michael Dart.

Except, not properly.  His body flickered violently, phasing in and out around its edges as though reality its self couldn’t maintain a stable lock on him.  Whole portions of him vanished and reappeared in ugly bursts of quantum distortion.  His eyes were wide and terrified.

“You’re all speaking in the wrong tense…” he rasped immediately, his voice sounding like it had been dragged across broken glass.  Thalissa had no idea who he was speaking to.  There was nobody near the biobed with him.  His eyes were wide and terrified.  “You’re – uh, hang on…  No.  Me.  I’m the one…”

“Captain!”  Thalissa lunged towards him immediately, propelled off her own biobed by the kind of desperate reflex that bypasses reason entirely and goes straight to instinct, grief, and the raw animal terror of potentially losing someone again.

Half of the medical staff swarmed his bed.  Doctor T’Lan came barreling into the scene like an emergency response team condensed into a single furious organism, calmly and steadily issuing orders at nurses and medics while tricorders erupted to life all around the biobed.  Their words themselves never properly reached Thalissa.  They dissolved somewhere on the outskirts of awareness.  Swallowed whole by the surreal, overwhelming shock of seeing Michael suddenly ripped back into existence right in front of her eyes.

He was clawing at his own face with frantic desperation, fingers digging into his skin like he expected to split himself beneath his hands.  “You’re all wearing them wrong.  You’re wearing their skin all wrong.”

Then Captain Dart’s eyes found her.  Not casually.  With recognition.  They locked onto Thalissa with sudden, violent focus.  Cutting straight through the insanity in sickbay as if she were the only thing in this room his fractured mind could still meaningfully perceive.  The rest of the medical staff…  Doctor T’Lan.  The shouting.  The scanners.  The frantic motion around his biobed.  All of it peeled away behind that stare.

There wasn’t anything comforting found in it.  His expression tightened, something sharp and highly unsettled flashing across his face as if the mere sight of her had confirmed some horror he’d been desperately trying to articulate.  He stared at her like a man staring down an imposter wearing the skin of someone he loved.

“Stop doing that!” he growled suddenly, voice hostile beneath the panic that clawed through it.  He narrowed his eyes harder, accusatory.  Like he’d caught her in the middle of a grotesque deception.  “Stop pretending to be them.  It’s not right!”

One of T’Lan’s eyebrows climbed steadily toward her hairline as she stabbed through layer after layer of diagnostic telemetry on the wall-mounted biobed display next to him, the monitor bathing her Vulcan features in its flickering blue light.  “Fascinating,” she muttered at last.  Thalissa instantly disliked the tone, because it carried the unmistakable sound of a scientist discovering something catastrophically impossible and becoming professionally excited about it.  As subtly excited as a Vulcan can get, at any rate.  “He’s out of phase.”

Michael’s eyes moved like trapped animals behind his skull, ricocheting violently around the sickbay without ever fully acknowledging the room its self.  The sounds that spilled out of him came half conversation and half panic responses, like he was trying desperately to answer questions with something that the rest of them looking on were never meant to hear in the first place.

“I’m the mistake.” he was saying, nodding as if agreeing with a statement that had been made out of their range.  “No, wait.  We are.  Both.  Schrodinger’s idiot!  That’s what we are, stuck in the box and kicking down the sides!”

And the truly horrid part that crawled under Thalissa’s skin and stayed there, was that she could not reconcile whether these were the ravings contrived of a man with whom madness had completely and utterly consumed, or if they came from seeing something that the rest of them could not.  It felt like the rantings of a man caught between overlapping realities, receiving signals from somewhere beyond the confines of the room while his mind slowly tore its self bloody trying to process both worlds at once.  Every attempt to touch him only deepened the hysterics.  Someone would reach for his shoulders or arms and he’d recoil instantly, panic exploding across his face with the kind of primal horror usually reserved for one who’s just realized they’d stepped barefoot onto a live tricobalt mine.  Ravings of something vast and unspeakably hostile that was coming to consume them all.

At one point his frantic, darting gaze locked back onto Thalissa for a second time with such an abrupt intensity that it froze her where she stood.  His arm shot upward, finger trembling as he pointed directly at her like a man identifying some hidden flaw only he could perceive beneath her surface.  “You’re doubled.  You don’t feel doubled?”

“His quantum variance is destabilizing!” someone in the crowd of medics said.

“You have to put it back!” Michael was shouting.  “Undo it all!  Roll it back!”

“Unacceptable,” T’Lan said, her tone controlled but unmistakably grave.  “His molecular phase integrity is no longer holding.”

Michael kept ranting in ragged, terrified bursts about something finding him.  Every fragmented warning tumbling out of him carried the same awful implication; the more stable he became, the brighter his signal grew.  The more it would attract them.  Then suddenly his entire body went rigid.  He screamed, his eyes widening in a fresh panic as if he’d just witnessed something catastrophic.  “No!  Wait!  You can’t…”

The words died instantly in his mouth.  Not interrupted.  Collapsed.  One second frantic and sharp.  The next?  Thick and slurred like his nervous system had been abruptly drowned in sedatives.  For one deeply nauseating moment Thalissa had the insane impression that somebody…  Or something…  On the other side of whatever fracture Michael had fallen through had just reached in and forcibly shut him down.  His whole body slackened.  And for one jarring moment, she could see right through him.  Then his body distorted sideways like a corrupt image before it vanished.  He was gone.

The entire room stood froze around the now empty bed.  Before Thalissa could even begin to parse what they had all just witnessed, her comm badge chirped.  Bright.  Normal.  Offensively so.

“Bridge to Commander Zheen.”

For several long moments Thalissa could only stare at the empty space over the bed.  “What is it?” she asked numbly, shaken to her very core by what they had all just seen play out.

“We’ve got the Commanding Officer of Task Force 93 on the line.  Captain Thakrass is requesting an immediate conference between the command staff of the Fresno and the Valley Forge.”  There was a pause.  “And he says to include the Klingons.”

She blinked once, like a system struggling to reboot after a catastrophic overload.  “The Klingons,” she stated flatly, the words emerging through that strange emotional dead-zone shock made when the mind encounters too many impossible things far too quickly, and has simply abdicated from the attempt to react properly.

Before she could be answered, a second voice suddenly bled faintly through the channel somewhere in the background.  Distant, irritated, and Thalissa suspected very much Andorian like herself.

“Patch me through already, damn it.” The voice snapped sharply.  “I’m done speaking through intermediaries.”  A quiet rustling followed.  Muffled acknowledgements.  Then the line cleared up.

“That is quite correct, Commander Zheen.” came the voice more clearly over her comm badge, Captain Zarroc Thakrass’ tone unmistakably authoritative.  “You will find the presence of that Klingon ship to be a very valuable asset if you wish to survive where you must go to attend to… certain matters.”

“What matters would that be, sir?” she demanded, her numb flatness giving way now to something more sharp.  “I don’t know if you’re aware, but Captain Dart –”

Thakrass interrupted her sternly.  “You’ve just survived an encounter with something that by every accepted understanding of the events of our past year should not have been able to occur anymore.”  His voice carried the exhausted weight of a man who was tired of being several revelations ahead of everyone else he was dealing with.  “The Vaadwaur Underspace corridors were collapsed.  Their blackout networks were destroyed.  These incursions are not supposed to exist, yet yours was far from the only encounter we’ve seen.”

A pause lingered, and then his voice lowered to something more gravely.  “Convene your people.  Include the Valley Forge.  Include the IKS Hegh’ta.  And then contact me again.  Because we have a source.  One I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable in doubting further.  Let me just tell it to you straight.  If you trace these incursions back to their origin point, you’ll find Captain Dart to be the source of all of it.”