The air had a faint taste of old copper, a dryness that clung to the back of the throat. The hum of crude reclamators filled the silence, not a smooth whisper like Polaris‘ air recyclers, but a coarse, uneven drone. Every surface was sterile, not with care, but with fear. This was not a medical bay meant for healing. It was a prison meant for containment.

Not that containment was needed. At least, they were fairly certain of that. There was no contagion here… or whatever it was the Choradians feared. This was simply a case of a man exposed to something his mind could not comprehend, and the aftermath it had wrought.

Dr. Lisa Hall felt no sympathy for him. That just wasn’t how she was. Everywhere in this galaxy, people suffered. She couldn’t heal them all, and she’d long concluded there was no point in even trying. Her purpose was more basic, the same as it was with the Vorta on Nasera, the Cardassian on Montana Station, and even her shipmates aboard the Polaris. It was about getting from them what was necessary to accomplish the mission. That, and nothing more.

Dr. Tom Brooks shouldn’t have felt any sympathy either. Not after all he’d been through. But still, as he looked at the Choradian soldier sitting before them, he couldn’t help but feel for the young man. He had a unique sense for what Line Chief Jax had been through. He knew the cognitive dissonance that developed when, skip after skip, your mind became slowly dissociated with the normal, linear flow of time itself.

Line Chief Jax didn’t look up as the door hissed shut behind them, nor as their footfalls echoed across the cold slab. Instead, his eyes stayed cast down at the floor as he just kept on muttering to himself. “They died before they were hurt… the doctors stopped the bleeding after, but we’d already buried them before…”

Dr. Hall looked over at Dr. Brooks. “He sounds like you on your best day.” The good news, at least, was that the Choradians were wrong, that there was no supernatural possession at play.

Even the sound of her voice didn’t pull Line Chief Jax from his thoughts. “I saw them dig tomorrow… they dug and dug… but then they screamed… they screamed yesterday when the tunnel collapsed…” It was as though he had no sense they were even there.

Dr. Brooks squatted down at his bedside, positioning himself in a place where Line Chief Jax’s eyes could not miss him, and he opened with a line aligned with the line chief’s own thoughts: “But what if tomorrow, you hadn’t dug, so yesterday, they hadn’t died?”

A light came on, an epiphany of sorts. “I… I… I don’t know…” he stuttered as if his thoughts were folding back in on themselves, a paradox developing in real time, but one at least that he could center on. “The more we fixed, the more it was already broken.”

Dr. Brooks stared at the young Choradian, studying him as if a waveform, for in reality, he might not be all that different. “Causality doesn’t like to be patched. It remembers every fracture.”

Line Chief Jax’s head twitched. He didn’t understand. “Even the air lagged… some walked into walls… some talked after they stopped.”

“Spatial dissonance from chronometric shear,” Dr. Brooks noted, not to the Choradian soldier, for Line Chief Jax would know nothing of temporal mechanics, but rather to his colleague. “The environment itself trying to reassert causality.”

Dr. Hall crouched down next to Dr. Brooks, now herself eye level with Line Chief Jax as well. “When did you first notice the lag?”  

Line Chief Jax’s answer came fractured, like engrams of memory playing back atop themselves. “When… when we stopped moving… but when we were still going. I could hear it… the delay… like footsteps out of sync from the moment we… when we set foot on the moon.”

Dr. Hall pressed him in a surgical tone. “Did it worsen gradually or in jumps?”

“It was worse… before it was better… the lower we went… but we were already there…” Line Chief Jax stuttered, struggling with the chronology.

“How about by position, rather than by time?” Dr. Brooks asked, trying to flip dimensionality to something more stable. “Where were you where the effect was more pronounced?”

That was something Line Chief Jax could hold onto. Not time, but space. “The skips, they were tighter… closer in time… when we were deeper, even if we had been deeper… before we were shallow.”

Dr. Brooks’ eyes flickered with recognition. That was progress. “A retrocausal gradient, a slope in the fragmentation itself. At the deepest point you went, the point when the skips were tightest, what did you see?”

“A light under the rock, like the day was buried,” Line Chief Jax recalled with relative lucidity before being overtaken in his recall of the progression. “I ran… I think I ran before I saw it… I saw myself leaving as I came… was it after, or before…”

“A light under the rock,” Dr. Brooks tried to pull him back. “Tell me about it.”

“It sang,” Jax recalled, hunting for the words. “Like… like… like the hum of the universe itself.”

A curious description, Dr. Brooks thought to himself. If the chronometric lines tightened towards a single locus, then instead of echoes, as you got closer, sound would stack, multiple iterations of the same vibration intersecting across moments, a near-stationary wave in time. And such a point of convergence might mean a source for the gradient.

As Dr. Brooks mulled it over in his head, Line Chief Jax started to rock back and forth again, the silence allowing him to fall back into the hole he’d been in. Once more, his gaze began to drift and his breathing grew uneven as words he wanted to say formed and dissolved before he could catch them. Whatever clarity he’d momentarily found was quickly slipping away.

Dr. Hall perceived the shift, and she wasn’t going to let this moment slip by. She reached out with her hands and took hold of his head, pulling his gaze towards her. “Chief, look at me for a moment.”

He tried to focus, but his eyes were glazing over.

“You said you ran,” Dr. Hall pressed, pressing inward with her palms. “How did you get out? How did you leave the surface?”

Line Chief Jax shut his eyes and focused on the pressure of her hands. That was here, and that was now. It gave him a lifeline to get back, at least for a moment. “I didn’t get out,” he struggled to get out. “I watched the shuttle leave… but then I was on it.”

Dr. Hall wasn’t following, and the look on her face said as much. She released her hands from his head and looked over at Dr. Brooks, hoping he was following better than she was.

“He’s the echo that escaped,” Dr. Brooks inferred.

Not helpful, Dr. Hall thought to herself as she shot him a glare that told him as much. 

“He never left,” Dr. Brooks elaborated with a smile. He loved these sorts of paradoxes. It was part of what drew him to study the strange. “Or more precisely, not all of him left. What boarded that shuttle was causal residue, a fragment that decohered as time folded back on itself.”

“Then that makes him…” Dr. Hall mused. “An imprint?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Brooks shook his head. “More accurately, a moment that got away.”

“Or what’s left of one,” Dr. Hall noted as she rose from her crouched position.

“Same thing,” Dr. Brooks nodded.

The man would be of no more use to them for now, Dr. Hall concluded as she looked down at the broken soldier, who’d slipped back into an incoherent state, failing now to even finish a word before he lost it. “I think we’re done here.” 

She began to move towards the door, and Dr. Brooks pulled away, about to follow. However, as he started to rise, Line Chief Jax’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed hold of his forearm.

Dr. Brooks paused and looked at him.

“You’re already there,” Line Chief Jax said in a moment of clarity and recognition as he stared at Dr. Brooks. He then looked over at Dr. Hall. “And so are you.” Suddenly, he began to twitch, but he fought through it. “I saw you both. You just haven’t arrived yet.” 

And then he collapsed from his seated position onto the floor, his mind unable to take any more, his body seizing for a moment before going completely still. Neither of them spoke. Line Chief Jax had served his purpose, and now they’d leave him to his sleep… or whatever this was.