Putting the Past to Rest
Posted on Fri Feb 9th, 2024 @ 2:30am by Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell
Mission:
Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire
Timeline: Current-ish
"We think the time has come Bonnie. People are requesting closure, and a service or at the minimum a Celebration of Life can give people that which they seek." The older woman with the kind eyes said as she attempted to implore Bonnie to do the right thing. "Think about it, please. This would mean more if you were here instead of somewhere out there." She pressed.
Bonnie stood, half hunched over her chair, unable to sit, unable to run away. Her face was half hidden by her hair as it fell over her puffy eyes. She didn't respond, she didn't have the words. Her father had passed and her one attempt to get back to Earth had failed leaving her depressed yet unable to do anything about it. Now, they were stationed and she had time, but dredging up the feelings again felt like the wrong way to make progress.
The channel closed, the older woman's face gone, Bonnie was once more left alone with her thoughts. Like a damn bursting her tears began to stream from her eyes, but it didn't stop there. Unable to control her weeping, she began sobbing out loud, bawling without the ability fight it as though her body needed that release. Her knees gave out and she collapsed backwards onto her bed where she curled into a fetal position.
It was only an hour or so when she finally woke from her nap, determined. It didn't matter that it was 03 hundred and 30 hours in the morning. She half-heartedly donned her uniform, laced up her boots, and walked out of her quarters, her hair still a disheveled mess. She didn't care. Her focus was on one thing and one thing only, her transporter experiment. Maybe, just maybe, if she threw herself into her work the feelings would wait. Maybe if she could focus on the experiment in Transwarp Transportation she would be able to make it to Sol and back before anyone knew she was gone.
The bay where she and Dean had been working on the transporter was still empty in the wee hours of the morning when she entered. The lights came up to visual levels automatically revealing the experiment in all of its glory. It had miraculously survived a crash landing and subsequent Dinosaur encounter along with a Cardassian incursion and the most recent energy-sucking beings. It beckoned to be finished.
Together they had built the machine to spec, interfaced it with the Sunfires' systems and even gotten to the point of testing it. Only to have it fail miserably time and time again. The final test had them attempt to send one of Deans Deanwhich sandwiches across subspace and back only to see it age by several months and have a bite taken out of it. The actual bite was a good thing depending on how one looked at it. It meant the sandwich had reached its destination.
Bonnie rolled up her sleeves, rubbed her hands together and chose a starting point to begin digging back into the project.
After a good amount of swearing, 3 hours or so later, she turned the spanner one more time. It promptly slipped, and clanged against the Duratanium solenoid rocker arm before falling onto her forehead with a thud. "Son of a Mother of a biscuit tamer!" She yelled as she slid out from under the console she had been deep under, clutching her grease-covered head. She picked up the spanner in frustration and smacked the side of the console in anger causing sparks to fly. "Ugh."
Standing, and wincing from the pain, she ordered the computer, "Computer, activate Transwarp Transporter and run first simulation, double speed please." The computer obeyed and the transporter activated briefly. It would still take several minutes before she got a signal back and a result from the sim.
As she stood clutching her head, she stared at the Deanwich still resting in its stasis container, the same as it was the day she and Dean had tested the Transporter over two and a half months prior. "What? Don't stare at me like that unless you can tell me what I'm missing." She said sternly to the sandwich, which of course did not respond.
She had spent so many hours thinking about the problem. Spent so much time trying to find her failure. She had done so with the thought that she had plenty of time to spend on the problem, but now her little bubble was gone. The universe did not revolve around Bonnie and now they were going to bury her father without her. She was literally out of time.
The sandwich continued to mock her from the stasis container.
Minutes later, the transporter activated briefly, then the computer chirped and displayed the results "Transport Failed. Anomaly persists." But Bonnie knew it would fail, in fact her focus seemed to have shifted to the mocking sandwich as if the answer was just going to jump out at her. The stasis field hummed away until her eyes grew large in realization and understanding... the epiphany hit her like a wrench to the forehead.
She clutched her head with one hand, "Of course, why didn't I see it before?!" Her other hand activated her tricorder and scanned the Deanwich again, this time looking for something very specific.
TBC
