Subduction Zone

Posted on Thu Jun 12th, 2025 @ 12:20pm by Lieutenant JG Sylorik MD

Mission: Season 6 - 5.5 - Day to Day
Location: Gymnasium, Deck 9
Timeline: Two Months Ago
1249 words - 2.5 OF Standard Post Measure

The gym was quiet in the early hours--just the monotonous cadence of resistance equipment and the quiet pulse of the artificial gravity in the deck plating. Sylorik moved with his customary precision, his form upright, breath controlled, cadence exact. Pushups in ascending sequences, then decline. Core holds at breathless intervals. This was a calisthenic circuit he had personally restructured for optimal cardiovascular engagement.

He'd had good reason to double the duration of his physical training.

His skin glistened faintly, the gym's bright warm lights catching the sheen across his bare shoulders. He rotated his body into a shoulder bridge, held it, then moved into a high plank, counting the heartbeats. Slower than they should be. More erratic than he liked. It was a physiological anomaly he had first attributed to leftover ketones due to a change in his diet over the past month. But it had persisted. Quietly and more than a little intrusively.

There had been no change in routine. No dietary lapses. No stimulant interaction. And still, this signal within his body remained--off-frequency, like static coming through in a transmission.

He completed yet another set, ignoring a twinge near the base of his scapula. The discomfort was entirely unimportant.

What was important was the feeling. Still present.

He had spent his life insulating himself from imprecise states. As a surgeon, he could not afford to approximate. As a Vulcan, he'd trained since adolescence to extinguish anything that might interfere with logic. However, no amount of reasoning or exercise had eradicated the sudden reminder of past trauma he'd been experiencing of late.

It had become more than a distraction.

He stepped off the mat, reaching for the towel tucked across a bench. His fingers closed around the fabric just as the gym doors parted with a hiss.

Ensign Iozhara stepped through, dressed in off-duty athletic wear and her obligatory breathing apparatus. Her auburn braids were pinned tight against her scalp, and a thin stylus was tucked behind one ear as though she'd just finished her clinic hours but hadn't entirely made the switch to being off-duty.

"Doctor Sylorik," she said with a courteous nod, her amber eyes scanning him once, then again. Not overtly but with silent observation. "I've never seen you here this late."

"Due to a change in schedule, I am in the midst of moving from Alpha Shift to Beta Shift." He toweled the sweat from his neck. "I have found that altering the hours I engage in physical activity aids in my body's rhythm."

"You've done five circuits already." She tilted her head. "That's not recalibration. That's endurance training."

Sylorik paused, folding the towel with care. "Perhaps. The distinction is largely semantic."

Iozhara didn't move. "Are you all right?"

He should have dismissed the question. Deflected. Returned one of his own. Instead, he hesitated--a pause that stretched just one second too long. Her brow furrowed.

He drew a breath. "I am... experiencing an internal anomaly," he said, the words quiet and clinical.

Her brow climbed. "You are?"

"I am."

The declaration landed in the space between them like a dropped beverage--unexpected and irretrievable.

A second passed. Then another. She waited expectantly.

He met her gaze, then broke it. "It is a transitory condition. I should return to my quarters."

She didn't argue, but the way her gaze followed him as he walked out was not the look one gave a man composed.

* * *


The corridor was empty at this hour, though Sylorik passed a crewmember in operation gold jogging by with a protein shake and the glazed eyes of a woman beginning a double shift. The ambient lights of the current shift were low. He walked in silence, internal monologue folding inward.

His thoughts became a torrent of images lifted from his--and others'--memory. Each one more graphic and vivid than the last. The bodies of colonists twisted and burnt. A sky red with fire. The image of his own soot- and blood-stained hands. A sickening rust colour that felt grainy and gritty.

The sounds were worse: the cries of the maimed and dying. The animal-like screams of innocents. And the sound of volcanic fissures ripping apart the land hundreds of kilometers away.

"Unbidden, a face appeared in his mind's eye--a young woman, her featured smudged with soot and sweat. She carried something bundled in cloth, which he would soon discover was her infant. Tragically, the child had been accidentally killed by her in an attempt to shield his body from the pyroclastic explosion that devastated her village.

In the haze of shock and grief, she couldn't comprehend that the tiny child was dead. She begged Sylorik to treat the baby, but he simply couldn't get through to her. He struggled to determine what was more tragic—that she had inadvertently caused the infant's death or that she couldn't grasp the reality of it.

Sylorik bit back the urge to retch.

He had performed triage on similar wounds. He had coded patients on tables that trembled from seismic displacement. But the thing that haunted him was not failure--it was the silence that always followed. After the cries. After the collapse. The silence.

He reached his quarters, entered, and engaged the lock behind him. The lighting was set to low by default. He stripped his damp clothes and walked to the shower--then paused. Changed course. Opted for hydrotherapy instead. It was a concession, he told himself. Nothing more.

The warm cascade of water against his skin was bracing and grounding.

Until the voices started.

They were not loud at first--just echoes. Laughter. Then alarm. Then screaming. The kind that came from deep in the throat, rupturing as it left the body. Cracking rocks. Smoke and a sulphur-thick haze. The ground heaving beneath them.

He braced a hand against the wall. His breathing began to hitch.

"Doctor--no--don't let me die--"

Not real. These voices were not real.

He had checked the colony manifest. They had not survived. But they still spoke. Every night, they continued to speak, all because one man had chosen to keep their memories alive.

He backed out of the shower, still dripping, still trembling. The voices swelled as he crossed the room. He dropped to his knees beside a storage compartment beneath his bed, fingers fumbling at the access seal. He had stashed the vial case behind a backup triage kit. Completely illicit and untested. But necessary.

His muscles had begun to contract, causing cramping in his extremities. His entire body began to grow cold and numb, as though he had just plunged into some arctic waters.

Sylorik's hands were shaking. He could barely steady the hypospray. The injector clicked against his neck and the hiss of release reverberated like an explosion in his own skull.

Silence.

Blessed, weightless silence.

He stayed there--naked, cold, breathing against the deck--until his pulse fell beneath ninety. Until those phantom voices receded into memory. Until the images faded into the ether.

He exhaled and turned onto his back.

He could feel it--the artificial calm, synthesized and synthetic. It was not peace. It was absence.

A full sixty seconds passed before he moved again.

Lying on the floor, eyes trained on the ceiling, Sylorik considered the final variable in his equation.

Continuing in this manner is not feasible.

The voice in his head sounded like someone else's.

He stayed on the floor for a long time, the silence now an echo of its own.

* * *

Lieutenant JG Sylorik, MD
Medical Officer/Surgeon
USS Elysium