More Art than Science

Posted on Sat Mar 1st, 2025 @ 3:06pm by Doc & Lieutenant S'Lace & Mana'i & Doctor Intharia T'Zor & SubCommander Saa & Lieutenant Commander Atna & Lieutenant Ineel & Petty Officer 2nd Class Tas-engta
Edited on on Sat Mar 1st, 2025 @ 4:28pm

4,041 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: The Serpent's Tooth [3]
Location: Sickbay, DS13
Timeline: (After Mana'i's arrival and briefing)

The hologram Doc stood waiting in the middle of the room as Mana’i and a who’s who of the station’s science and engineering leads entered the sickbay. He had prepared a biobed and everything his colleagues might need, at least from a medical perspective. He awaited Dr S’Lace’s instruction.

Mana’i obligingly removed the icepick-like tool she’d brought with her onto the starbase from a storage compartment on her back, and placed it on a nearby table. The thing was nearly a meter long and about fifty centimetres from blade tip to blade tip and made of a metallike substance that shimmered slightly in the bright overhead lights. Ineel, DS13’s ranking metallurgical engineer, was already scanning it in apparent perplexity. This seemed to amuse the outworlder greatly.

“Protodermis, friends. That’s what it - and I - are made of, mostly. I would be quite shocked if your instruments know what that is.” She supplied cheerily. Poor things. Wait till they learned of the existence of energized protodermis - then their heads might explode. Maybe. These people seemed to have an unquenchable desire to discover and understand absolutely anything and everything they possibly could - a far cry from the people of her universe, at least.

“A rare substance where you’re from?” inferred Saa, circling. She’d rounded up only two people in her department for this, wary of putting too many beaks in the water. These were Ineel, the metallurgist, and Tas-engta, her Choblik cybernetics expert.

S’Lace monitored the readings on the wall display and tried to make sense of it. This was the second...no, third being she had met whose nature stretched the bounds of conventional known science. She turned to hear their response to Saa’s query.

“Very, very common, actually. Everything contains protodemis, even if only particles of it. Even the water. I believe it is quite similar to this element your people have named Carbon in how often it occurs in nature. I’ve been reading - and dare I say many of the scientific advances you all have made would advance my people forward by centuries.” Mana’i replied. “There are other forms of protodermis, in fact, but it’d be a long, boring lecture only my material sciences professor would be able to make palatable to explain it for now.” Indeed, Asika had always found ways to make her classes digestible for her students - something which couldn’t be said for a handful of her fellow academics, sadly.

Her attention turned next to the screen S’Lace was staring at, displaying readouts of her lungs, muscles and stomach cavity. It seemed to bring her great amusement to find the words ‘Unknown Element’ plastered across practically every printout. “Especially screens and medical equipment like these. Our methods of healing the sick and injured aren’t quite as technological - or detailed.”

“Indeed?” S’Lace murmured, turning to regard the being, “Can you elaborate on that?”

“Well. There are several medicinal plants scattered around my planet. There is a hydroponics center in Ga-Metru that grows them now - that is what you call the practice of growing plants in water, hydroponics? Yes, that is more or less what we do.” Mana’i explained. “We refine the herbs into medicines which my people then use. Sometimes they are horribly bitter, but incredibly effective. I believe all your peoples once approached healing and recovery the same way, aa far as I’ve read in your database.”

Saa blinked, but said nothing. What Mana’i was describing sounded one step beyond the kind of medicine practiced by ancient hunter-gatherer societies of humans and dolphins before the discovery of science. It was genuinely surreal to hear an apparent cyborg talk like that. But she wasn’t here to be a cultural ambassador, and had already decided to bite down on all curiosity beyond what was related to the material aspect of her work.

“There are advantages to a holistic medicine,” S’Lace conceded, “Technology is not always reliable and there have been studies that show a more natural approach to healing can in some cases be more efficacious. Unfortunately with the number of different species inhabiting Federation space and with the variety of our neighbors such methods are difficult to implement.”

“Mana’i, if you were to visit a healer, what would they ask you? What would they check?” Doc asked, feeling slightly flummoxed as to where to begin any physical of a being that defied all their knowledge of life. He hoped he wasn’t stepping on S’Lace’s toes, this was her patient after all, but he got the impression she was just as in the woods about how to continue as he was.

“How I’m feeling at the time, if it hurts... things like that.” Mana’i replied. “I imagine you all do the very same. As to... parts? Well. Lungs. The pulsing of my heart. I suppose anything else really does depend on what I’ve sustained. My sister in Water Dynaea is a superb healer; she worked in a clinic before having her Toa stone bestowed upon her. She purged my brother in Air of poison once, though she nearly lost consciousness doing so.”

“I see. Apologies Doctor, she’s still your patient.” Doc said first to Mana’i, then to S’Lace.

“Considering their unique nature,” S’Lace replied, “I have no objections to such inquiries.”

“Mana’i, if I may ask, how do your people reproduce? How are your young born to you?” Atna asked, hoping there might be something recognisable in that information that would help her to better classify Mana’i. Even as a trained biologist she felt slightly out of place.

“Oh. Well. That is a somewhat puzzling question.” Mana’i answered after a brief few seconds of thought. “New Matoran appear from time to time, but no one really knows how or from where. Legend says that the Great Beings forged my people to serve Mata Nui as he travelled the galaxy. Then he fell into slumber, and so we all turned to living without him, so to speak. Since then, well, we forged our own civilisation. No one ever bothers to posit on where the new ones among us come from. Living by the Three Virtues is, ordinarily, our sole concern.” Once again, she seemed to forget that about 80% of what she’d just said probably meant next nothing to Atna and her colleagues.

“Fascinating. Does someone raise you when you appear or do you just appear as a knowledgable and self-reliant mature individual?” Doc asked, trying to relate the evolutionary logic back to what she’d said.

“Well, no. No one ever teaches us what we need to know to live, for all intents and purposes. We simply... know.” Mana’i replied thoughtfully. “Though, of course, we do need to learn how to perform whatever jobs we take on, no avoiding that. And we do have institutes of higher learning, as I understand you all do.” She seemed to watch with great amusement as the engineers surrounding her icepick grabbed it by the handle and struggled to lift it.

“Oh. Yes. I think this should come off, too.” Mana’i reached up to grasp either side of her Kanohi mask and tugged gently; the thing came off, revealing her much more humanoid-looking face beyond. She would’ve definitely been considered beautiful, with dark gray lips, blue eyes that seemed to glow even with the overhead sickbay lights and a nose that sat perfectly in the center of her face.

Immediately, though, her vitals seemed to take a plunge, causing her to groan and lean her weight on one arm. “No. No, no. This happens.” She informed the two orderlies who rushed to try and steady her. “It’s... a matter of my biology.” The Kanohi mask that once covered her face sat on the biobed next to her now as she blinked as if coming out of a daze. “I will be fine as soon as I’ve put it back on - but I won’t die. I promise.” Mana’i smiled, revealing clean, white humanlike teeth.

“So death is not unheard of. Do your people’s lives end naturally, or only when ended by an outside force?” Atna asked. She had pages worth of questions about the mask, but one thing at a time.

“Well, we do die. Usually from outside influences. I in fact have never heard of any of my people dying of... natural aging.” Mana’i frowned. “Unless you count the Turaga of the various Koro of course - but even then you can scarcely call them old.” Yes, more words that made no sense to the team examining her. Whoopee!

“If it is not taboo to ask, how old are you?” Atna asked.

“Oh, um. That is...” Mana’i put up a hand and seemed to count off on it, in a manner identical to how children would be taught to count. “I stopped counting at about one thousand?” Again, this she said as if people who’d lived for millennia were the most commonplace thing in the world. Which they might’ve been, where she came from.

“Fascinating.” Atna said, raising an eyebrow. She should hope to look so good at half that age.

“Oh, you flatter me. You really do.” Mana’i flushed a light shade of pink. “Oh. I suppose you must be quite curious what this is.” She picked up her Kanohi Aglaea and held it in both hands. “This is a Kanohi mask. All people where I come from wear one. Those worn by Toa have special abilities. Mine allows me to discern intentions by looking at another - which is the extent of it, actually. I don’t actually know if there is more to my mask’s powers than I’ve know how to use.”

“Do you mind if we take a look at it with our machines?” Doc asked, assuming it played some necessary role in her continued existence.

“Of course. I imagine you’ll find out several interesting things about it.” Mana’i let Tas-engta take it away for examination before squinting at the EMH, seeming more puzzled than anything else. “Which is why you, doctor, are an enigma to me. I sense absolutely nothing from you, which is the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered. Either you don’t have a mind, or... you’re not actually there.” She mused.

“Well no, the latter is perhaps most accurate. You see, I’m what we call a hologram. I’m made of light projected by our machines. My mind is in our computers.” Doc realised that the explanation fed into multiple further explanations. “To put it simply, we discovered a long time ago that if you write things down and assemble the information in the right order, you can design systems that will do things for you, like tell you what time it is, draw a picture or sing a song. That’s what we call a computer. Those systems got bigger and more complicated at a rapid pace. One day we found that if you put enough information in, you can make a being like myself who can think and speak and act like a person, with all a person’s knowledge, or maybe even more. But at the end of the day, I’m made out of light.”

“A hologram. A being made of light. Takanuva could create these. Though I never imagined that one would be able to speak. Or think. Or heal another.” Mana’i waved a finger through his shoulder, and was surprised to find that where her digit made contact, his form flickered. “Oh. I’m- terribly sorry.” She apologised, withdrawing her hand. “It’s just... everything is new to me.”

“No need to apologise.” Doc said with a comforting laugh. “Plenty of folks in this universe who find my kind fascinating too. Doesn’t hurt me none.”

“Subcom, you need to see this.” The buzzing vocalization came from DS13’s metallurgical engineer, Ineel, who had plugged his tricorder into one of the unused stations nearby to examine its readings on a larger screen. Saa swam over to see what he’d found.

Ineel was a strikingly attractive dolphin of the Stenella genus, with blue and white countershading divided by black bands that looked like someone had dipped a calligraphy brush in ink and dragged it from his eyes down along his sleek flanks to his tail, leaving sinuous flowing lines that seemed too artful to be natural, but were. Smaller and more agile than a Tursiops, he was hovering upside down to get a better stereoscopic view of the holoscreen in front of his beak. He didn’t seem to realize he was blocking everyone else’s view until Saa gently nudged him aside.

“Look at this!” He exclaimed, undeterred. “There, and there. That’s not natural atomic structure. I believe these are all synthetic elements. Commander Atna, Doctor, what do you think?”

Atna took a few steps around Ineel and Saa, and looked for a long moment at the results. “They are certainly not natural in our universe. But I agree, the ionic bonds appear excessive, almost to the point of redundancy. Like the elements were designed for fortitude and replacability.” She looked to S’Lace for her opinion.

“Agreed,” S’Lace replied, “But is this a result of evolution or design?” she glanced at the others, “If the former then it would seem a more dynamic environment that what our sentients normally see might have been at play. If by design...”

She let the sentence hang.

Atna considered S’Lace’s suggestion against everything she could immediately recall that their guest had said. “Mana’i, is it fair to assume that in matters where no answer about cause or nature is available, that the likely explanation would be the influence or action of the being you mentioned, ‘Mata Nui’?”

“More or less. Of course, I’m sure that, with your advanced equipment, you might just find a scientific explanation for everything and anything you find about me.” Mana’i’s eyes lit up with amusement. “I recall reading about one concept in particular in your databases - even the apparently mystical becomes but science and practical theory in the minds of those who understand it? My people have never put too much effort into discovering things about our world with empirical science; perhaps you all might.”

Ineel was now fully vertical, nose down like an out of control zeppelin, as his sonar beam manipulated the display. “These interlocking electron shells, in theory I think they could be containing energy in a way we’ve never seen before. And the molecular chains I’m no biologist doctors but they look almost organic to me.” The metallurgist had a way of shedding his punctuation when he was on to something.

“I concur.” Atna added. “While I am unsurprised that alternate representations of the physical universe would appear through the anomaly, it is rather fascinating that such difference does not simply cease to function upon crossing the threshold.” Atna changed tact slightly, turning back to Mana’i. “In the course of your existence, have there been many great discoveries? If so, have they dramatically changed your society?”

“Oh, several. Though I’m afraid that by ‘dramatically changed’ I do mean ‘scarred’. Take, for example, the unearthing of the Bohrok. Or the fact that Turaga Dume was actually Makuta Teridax in disguise. Or that the island of Mata Nui was in fact part of Mata Nui Himself.” Again, Mana’i shrugged as if these things happened to her and her society as commonly as the average vehicular accident. “Though if you mean scientific discoveries - only a handful. The purification of water, for one. Nowadays Ga-Metru does it all, though we’re now letting other Metru have the technology too.”

“I see. Thank you.” Atna said, feeling once more out of her depth. This being and society was unlike anything she had encountered. She hoped the Doctors had more to add or suggest.

S’Lace listened silently and pursed her lips in thought. For all they knew this being was making things up as they went along. Without corroboration how could they tell which was truth and which was fiction? But until they were caught in a lie they would have to take Mana’i at their word...

“As interesting as that all might be,” Saa said, “It doesn’t help us understand her physical properties. Ineel. What. Is that.” Her beamform had widened to enlarge part of the molecule, or pseudo-molecule, being shown on the display.

Still vertical, the metallurgist side-eyed the larger Tursiops. “This is going to sound wild, Subcommander, but I think we may be looking at a form of programmable matter.”

Saa squinted back at him, skeptical. “How do you justify that conclusion?”

He returned his focus to the display. “Like Commander Atna said. These elements shouldn’t exist with any stability under the physical laws governing our universe. Therefore, they don’t. Therefore something else is holding them together. You could say it’s elementary, Subcommander.”

“You could, but let’s not.”

Ineel shrugged his pectoral fins at her lack of amusement, reflecting that Saa was a good mechanic but a poor conversationalist for a dolphin. “The point is that there’s something going on here that we can’t see,” he said. “This tricorder doesn’t have the resolution, but when we get her into my imaging chamber, I think we’re going to find a kind of baryonic matter we’ve never seen before.”

Saa glanced from the icepick to their visitor, chewing it over. He was right: it did sound wild. But she couldn’t think another way around it. “OK, but ‘programmable?’”

“Programmable? As in, give it instructions and it follows those instructions? I’ve never thought of protodermis as that, if anything.” Mana’i quipped. “Though it does fundamentally comprise very many things in my universe - the water, the soil, the trees and so on...”

Ineel nodded vigorously, switching through different scans of the visitor’s tissues. “Look at the way these molecules are behaving. They look like proteins, but they’re not. They’re not really molecules at all as we understand the concept. It’s like you took a sheet of tritanium and told it to behave like something organic, and it did. I can’t think of any way that happens without some pretty complex instructions.”

“If I may?” Tas-engta, the cyberneticist who had been quietly at work during the conversation, interrupted from Mana’i’s side. The diminutive Choblik was only waist-high to the visitor, and reached up to offer her back her mask with one of his robotic arms.

Mana’i seemed quite bemused as she accepted her mask from the... well, furry bean with mechanical limbs?

As soon as she took it, Ineel’s display went wild. Some of the pseudo-molecules began rapidly arranging themselves into new forms on the spot.

“Whoa!” Ineel started back involuntarily, caught off guard by the sudden action in front of his beak.

“I noticed that earlier,” Tas-engta explained with an air of insouciance.

“Extraordinary.” Atna observed as she saw the rapid rearrangement.

“There! You see?” Ineel was triumphant. “They respond to its input! And you say everything in your world is made of this substance?” He asked Mana’i.

“Well, yes. It is a fundamental element in all things, as I understand the element carbon is to many of yours.” Mana’i commented.

“If I catch your drift, you’re suggesting that our friend here is made of subatomic nanites.” Doc summarised.

“It’s a testable hypothesis.”

“Any danger of contamination?” asked Saa.

“Contamination of what kind?”

”Contamination,” repeated Saa. “Grey goo? Alfred von Neumann?”

The metallurgist thought about it. “I think we would know by now.”

“I’m just going to switch this on as a precaution.” Doc said at the mention of the threat, moving to the wall to activate a sterilisation field that would keep any nanoscale material from breaking away from the many mobile surfaces in the room.

Tas-engta sneezed.

Several eyes looked at him.

He looked back.

“...I have a cold,” he said.

S’Lace pulled out her tricorder and murmured, “You think you have a cold. Such symptoms are common to any of a number of ailments,” she swiped the tricorder across Tas-engta’s body to determine what ailed them...

...and then a slight frown crossed her face.

“Yes...it appears you have something analogous to a cold. Stop by Sickbay at your earliest convenience so I might treat it,” S’Lace sounded almost...disappointed...

“Sorry, what? Contamination?” Mana’i frowned. “You think protodermis is going to contaminate the molecular makeup of all your equipment? Or vice versa? Well, um.” She rubbed her brow. “You’re suggesting things which I cannot deny or confirm, seeing as no one’s bothered to do as deep a dive into my - or any Matoran or Toa for that matter - biological makeup and processes. I’m afraid your discoveries are equally as surprising to me as to you. You all have made far more scientific progress than most of my people have in... oh, possibly decades. How long has it been, maybe ten of of your minutes? Fifteen?”

Saa managed to wrest her thoughts out of the raging torrent of concern in her mind, long enough to feel some sympathy for the patient, their guest, who was going through all of this in addition to finding herself in a strange place and an alien culture.

“All we’ve done is look inside you and form a couple of theories,” she said. “As for contamination, it’s a possibility we have to consider. How do you feel?”

“I feel... fine. No different to usual, at the very least.” Mana’i mused. “Just very, very surprised at the discoveries you all are making, is all. And no, I promise I probably won’t contaminate whatever I touch with protodermis.” She added dryly. “I hope. You all are looking into aspects of my biology no one’s ever thought to look into.”

“That’s often how it is when cultures meet,” volunteered Tas-engta. “Different ways of looking at things.”

“It certainly was for us,” agreed Saa. “But let’s deal with the fundamental question. Is this ‘programmable matter’ a passive material, or does it have a reactive mechanism? If it’s a form of nanotech and it’s spread to everything in her world, that suggests reactivity.”

“Maybe,” said Ineel. “Maybe not! If it was a generalized reaction it would just end up in grey goo like you said. Not an organism like her. I need to get her into my imaging chamber.”

“We can’t leave Sickbay until we’ve established the contamination potential.”

“No, but we can beam it in.”

Saa paused, looking around the room. Maybe there was enough space for a material imaging chamber. She’d have to reconfigure the EPS tap to handle it. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get started.” She turned to begin, tools extending from her utility harness.

“Is this safe?” S’Lace questioned, glancing about at Sickbay. Her Sickbay.

“Beaming in a polaron scanner?” Saa said, removing the access panel to the EPS tap. “I don’t see why not. It’s bulky, though. We use it to inspect hull panels. We’ll need about sixteen square meters of floor space.”

Ineel righted himself with a stroke of his fluke, turning to the Toa with a look of barely contained excitement. “While we’re waiting, how about you start telling me everything you know about protodermis? This is going to be worth so many papers.”

Tas-engta sneezed again. This time, nobody looked.

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