Story:Star Trek: Alterius Sexus Universe/The Other Side: Chapter One

Darkness. All that Noel could hear was the beating of the heart monitor above her biobed. She opened her eyes slowly due to the brightness of the light. After a few moments of getting used to the light she looked around. Trying to turn around to look at the biomonitor, she realized that her legs, torso, and left arm were paralyzed. Her right arm was just beginning to gain functionality again. She used her right arm to tap the button on the side of the biobed to call for someone. Noel closed her eyes and swallowed hard, then she breathed in deeply. It was strange not feeling most of her own body.

When Noel reopened her eyes a doctor she had never seen before walked in and looked at her vitals and then at her.

"Ensign Noel, can you hear me?" he asked.

Noel opened her mouth and tried to speak but couldn't. She began to panic and breathe heavily.

"Ensign, please calm down," he stated in a worried voice, "you need to breathe slower, you could hyperventilate."

Noel took a big gulp and tried to breathe more slowly, at first struggling at it, but eventually succeeding.

"Good, Ensign, good," he said slowly, "now I'm going to give you a hypospray to help reconnect your neural pathways and bring you out of a paralyzed state."

Noel thought about that a moment, ''A hypospray to help reconnect my neural pathways? When was that invented? I don't know of such a thing created by Starfleet?''  then the hypospray went into her arm and put her into sedation. She closed her eyes and began dreaming of the times when she was in Sickbay on other occasions and and made up occasions.

--

Darkness. McCoy could here the beating of the biomonitor above him. He licked his dry lips and opened his eyes to the brightness of Sickbay's lights. His eyes watered and he closed his eyes and opened them trying to get used to the light this time.

Soon after he could see clearly, he began to realize that he wasn't able to move any part of his body, he was completely paralyzed. Trying to look around, he moved his eyes as far as they could go from side to side. McCoy was able to see that all the biobeds on his left were empty. The biobed directly to his right had someone in it, but he wasn't able to recognize them from this angle. He tried to open his mouth to yell for someone to get in here, but he wasn't able to move his mouth ether.

McCoy kept calm and waited for someone to come in, it was regulation that someone check on patients every fifteen minutes. He sat there trying think of all the reasons he could be paralyzed, his first thought was that it had something to do with the transporter. He tried remembering what had happened after beaming up from Xynia IV. He couldn't remember, he remembered talking with the transporter room before... wait... it must have been the interference that the transporter chief had been picking up.

McCoy didn't know much about the actual workings of the transporter, but he did know that it was theoretically possible for someone to become paralyzed using one. It had to do with the way the transporter separated the physical and mental patterns of a person in order to protect the thought processes, what some would call the soul, of an individual. The medical research behind it was that it was possible for the transporter to fail at properly reconnecting the brain back to the body. The...

A doctor came in to check on the patients. First he checked on the person to McCoy's left, after a few moments of checking their vitals, he came up to McCoy and noticed that he was awake. He looked up to check McCoy's vitals and then looked back down at him.

"Are you able to hear me?" he asked.

McCoy knew that he wasn't able to respond vocally so he blinked a few times.

"Okay, good, I understand," he said, "I'm going to give you something to help your neural pathways reconnect with your brain."

McCoy blinked a few times to show that he understood. The hypospray went into McCoy's arm and he slipped into unconsciousness.