The Doctor Dances

Posted on 02 May 2016 @ 7:48am by Commander Jayla Kij

546 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Outbreak
Location: Sick Bay Labs
Timeline: MD 8 : 0300 hours

Jayla sat staring at the monitor, unable to believe what she was seeing. After getting Harvey onto a biobed, she had returned to the lab and begun to run some tests.

There was no doubt about it; she had an antibody that was unbelievably effective in dispatching the virus. In fact, it was over-effective. She had added a bit of the virus to her blood and watched as the antibodies replicated themselves at an alarming rate and quickly destroyed the virus.

She briefly toyed with the idea of injecting herself with a bit of virus to see what would happen, but rejected that idea quickly. Instead, she'd headed out to collect samples from other Trill to see if they had the same antibodies. She'd found a total of twelve junior officers and enlisted- all unjoined- and they, as well as the three Trill senior officers, all had the antibody. Some of them had traces of the virus, but even as she watched, the antibodies in the blood samples attacked and killed the virus.

She rubbed her face with both hands and looked back at the screen. She rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Computer,” she said, putting a slide with the antibodies on it on the scan table. “Can the substance on the scan table be replicated?”

There were a few beeps as the computer did its thing. “Negative. The replicator is incapable of replicating living matter.”

Of course, she knew that, but she still had to ask. “Pull up the last blood sample test results for Captain Harvey Geisler,” she said, adding more slides to the table. “Given what I have here on the table now, how long would it take to grown enough in the incubator to cure him?”

A series of beeps, clicks and chirps preceded the answer this time. “It would take approximately two hundred forty hours to incubate enough antibodies to cure Captain Geisler.

Jayla stared at the slides, stunned. Two hundred forty hours? Ten days? She had two days, tops. According to those on the planet, once the delusions and hallucinations start, the patient had two days.

She made a quick call to Yolvanda to tell them what she'd found and get them to check all the Trill on the planet. If all Trill carried the immunity, they had a chance.

And then she looked at the isolated virus with which she'd been working. “Computer, is there a faster way to grow the antibodies?” she asked.

“Antibodies can be multiplied in the incubator or inside a host body.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” she muttered. Again she looked at the phial filled with the virus.

It was the idea of a desperate person. She loaded the virus into a hypospray, then stopped. There was no reason to inject live virus into her blood stream. She could do it with dead virus for the same effect. Vaccines contained dead virus to train the immune system to fight an infection.

She took the phial of virus back out of the hypospray and began the arduous task of extracting all the viruses from the suspension liquid, which would effectively kill it.

This had to work or she was out of ideas....

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