Captain Addison MacKenzie - Giving Voice to the Voiceless

[Gnai]

Once again, @Addison MacKenzie blew my socks off with this incredibly poignant sim reflecting on the aftermath of Frontier Day, really digging into the horrors that those in Starfleet Medical would have to see day in and day out as they tried to give resolution to all the families of the lost. I cannot praise this sim enough!

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(( Main Hospital – Residential Level, Earth Spacedock ))

In the immediate aftermath of the assault on Earth and the Spacedock, Starfleet’s commanding officers who survived the Borg incursion and Changeling infiltration were offered tours of the badly damaged facility. Large sections of the base were completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, the station had been closed to non-essential personnel, and the civilian population had been evacuated. Search and rescue teams had been deployed, locating only a handful of the station’s massive population who were still alive. Those who hadn’t managed to escape were presumed lost and now, days later, the operation had turned to search and retrieval.

With things on the Artemis in Genkos’s capable hands, Addison volunteered to help what remained of the station’s medical officers in treating those who needed immediate medical attention. Fortunately, the station’s hospital section remained relatively unscathed. Their job had been to stabilize the patients as best they could, then to discharge them to one of the other nearby starships whose medical staff would likely be better equipped to give them the continuing care they likely needed.

Now, after what had seemed like years, but was only days, the situation had turned to accounting for the dead.

Addison MacKenzie was a surgeon, not a coroner. Her job was – and always had been – the living, not the dead. Now, her role shifted as she was tasked with using her medical training to determine someone’s cause of death…

…and to attribute an identity to a corpse.

A surgeon’s job is always difficult. No matter how easy or complicated a particular surgery might be, there always exists the possibility, no matter how improbable, that at the end of the procedure, a patient will live, their family will be happy, and they will be able to move on with their life without consequence. In death, there was a desolate lack of any such assurance. Instead, her job was to use clues left behind to determine how someone died, collect a tissue sample, compare it against the Federation database to try to attribute an identity to a body and, if possible, contact any possible family and inform them of the news.

And move on to the next.

The job wasn’t inherently hard – in many of the cases, determining a cause of death was the easiest part. The Borg, even in their new state of modified assimilation, left a path of eerily familiar destruction in their wake. Now that their goal was no longer the assimilation of lifeforms, but rather the elimination of life itself, it became very easy to see the tactics used:

Close range phaser blast.

Severed spinal cord.

Massive blood loss.

Asphyxiation or decompression.

Each case was depressingly similar to the one before it – so much so that the process had become routine – but it was the conversation afterward that took its toll on the commanding officer of the Artemis.

For days on end, the procedure had been the same: work a 16- or 18-hour shift, go home, eat something, get whatever rest you could, and show up to do it again the next day. For Addison, rest meant the opportunity to get off the station and back to the Artemis – getting to sleep in her own bed and check in on the ship helped offer a sense of normalcy to a routine that was anything but normal.

Today, clad in dark red surgical scrubs, she tried to recall how many corpses she’d worked with throughout the first ten hours of this shift. 25? 30? It was hard to think of them in terms of numbers – each of them had a face, an identity, a life that was cut short and, in many instances, brutally terminated. After the first day, she’d quickly learned that she couldn’t waste valuable brain power on trying to remember all their names – the best tactic was to compartmentalize any information that gave life to the lifeless and stick to the clinical task at hand.

Having completed the number of patients assigned to her for the day – the number had decreased dramatically despite the excellent recovery efforts of the search teams, a sign that they were likely approaching the end of their work – Addison removed the gloves from her scrubs, discarded them, and rubbed her face with the back of her hand. She took a deep breath in through her nose and closed her eyes, nearly falling asleep as she stood there, but forced herself to blink her eyes open.

The day’s hardest work lie ahead.

Addison retreated into one of the nearby medical offices, whose previous occupant now joined one of the long lists of the station’s deceased, and practically collapsed into the chair behind the desk. She remained crumpled in the chair for several minutes, simply breathing slowly through her nose, as she stared at a blank computer screen. Sitting there, she briefly entertained the thought that if she stared at the screen long enough, it would jump to life and complete the task at hand on her behalf.

Alas, it wasn’t that easy.

It never was.

She took one last, long breath through her nose, sent energy into her abdomen, and forced herself to sit straight up on the edge of the chair. Looking down on the PADD next to the display, she brought up the first record – an eighteen-year-old engineer technician who’d been newly assigned to the station and was only three weeks into his tour – and the contact information for his next of kin: his mother. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and shook her head briefly.

Mothers were the hardest.

She took one last deep breath through her nose and activated the display.

MacKenzie: Computer, open a channel…

 

[Doz Finch]

Wonderfully written and moving. 👏

[kimstapledon]

Ouch.  This one hit hard.  I was wondering when someone would write about efforts to rebuild the station and recover the dead there.

Very well written.