Funny How Time Slips Away

Posted on Mon Feb 19th, 2024 @ 8:35pm by Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Commander Dean House

Mission: Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire
Timeline: Current-ish

Hours later, fueled by too much caffeine, Bonnie's eye twitched as she stepped back from the whiteboard with a new series of scribbled notes and formulas that to the average viewer meant nothing but to her suddenly held the key to everything. "Of course, I don't know why I didn't see it before." She said aloud to the the Deanwhich. That was right about when the doors parted allowing light to stream in from the corridor. Her focus didn't shift.

"Didn't see what?" Dean's familiar voice should cut through the light being she couldn't quite see him. It was pretty obvious what room they were in, which he'd not been back into since the last time. Question was, was things being dismantled so it could be used for something else.. or?

Her head snapped in Dean's direction, her eyes lit up as big as Bavarian donuts. She let out a small 'squee' for joy, "Just the person I needed." She proclaimed as she rushed through the mess of parts and tools strewn about the floor, just to pull him into the fray. She took his arm and guided him over to her whiteboard where she then stepped back, flailed both arms wide and proclaimed "See!" As if he could just look at her scribbles and understand.

"I hea..oookay!" getting drug along apparently, looking at everything around the floor as they went. Half tripping over things or pushing them out of the way with his foot. That answered one thing obviously. She'd been working on it again. Tilting his head a little bit taking a good amount of time to actually read into it. "Hmm.."

She stared at him for a reaction until her eye twitched. As her arms relaxed she blew the hair out of her eyes, her bedhead still obvious. "You don't see it, um, here let me explain." She said as she flipped through a number of data PADDs on the console top before handing him one. The rest slid off onto the floor. "Chronitons." When that wasn't enough, obviously, she continued and as she did she entered the walking talking animated hands and fast moving mouth thing she tended to do.

Dean listened a moment to her, taking the PaDD and looking between her and it. "Okay, I know what Chronitons are, keep going."

"So, the transporter system uses a Tachyon compressor to compensate for time dilation over distance. This is why once your pattern is deconstructed into energy, the transportation of energy is or feels instantaneous, right? But this was only designed to be operated on a limited scale, ship to surface, ship to ship, station to ship... you get it. Anyway, it was never, at least not to my knowledge or... anyway was never meant to move something across half the quadrant."

She turned to the board and pointed at her first formula. "Time over distance divided by the square of tachyons multiplied by the SIN wave of Chroniton degradation. If my math is correct, the Deanwich made it to Earth, but the falloff of Chronitons began on the return trip." She pointed at the second formula. "For each minute, actually 1.235 minutes to be precise, the Deanwich aged 2 hours. If you remember the return trip took an hour and a quarter."

Tapping along the PaDD, pulling a few things up here, or there. "Right. Which..evidently, this wasn't included in what all I pulled up for us to work from when we first started." At least Bonnie was able to see that Dean was starting to get excited as well.

"By the time it made it back, the Deanwich was 6.175 days older, or the equivalent of 148.2 hours." She paused for a moment, now a bit calmer. "A similar thing happened on the Enterprise a while back. Turned four of the crew including the Captain into children. I think we did the opposite, but same principle." She turned the PADD around, "I calculated the Chroniton degradation curve and managed to create an algorithm to compensate. Then I built a larger Tachyon compensator and made a few more adjustments to the power grid for more stability." She looked at him, her eyes glassy with hope that he both cared and understood.

"So..we kept missing time dilation. Instead of the object moving, it's space moving around it." Dean moving closer to her, "The equation relating proper time and time measured by a bound object implying that relative velocity cannot exceed the speed of light. In this case, instead of negatives, we should have changed the equation to positives. I think..mostly that's it right?" Tilting his head down enough to look back into her eyes, she could see the hope she was looking for.

She giggled, he always seemed cuter when he was trying. She found him intelligent but also understood why his area of expertise was weapons and not science. "Yes, and no... and sort of." She pointed to the last set of equations. "Originally I had considered a point of stasis, like a pod or something. Something capable of containing an object within in order to counteract the aging, but then it hit me." She held up the wrench, "Quite literally. We've essentially built a machine that can counter aging by simply tweaking the flow of tachyons. Aaaaand..." She smiled, "It's ready to test as a transporter."

She got up close to his face, a struggle since she was so much shorter than he was. The excitement was evident though, "Care to try it on another Deanwich?"

"Wait wait wait..I know that look, and that giggle," narrowing his eyes a little, but it wasn't like some times when you want to hide, very very fast, and even then you'd be dead. Giving another look at the PaDD, pulling something up.

"Well son of a bitch. You're right. a pod would have been bad. Never thought to look as you mentioned that with the Enterprise-D. So if we, well I guess you already did, altered what I kinda said flipping the negative poles for the positive. Using the previous buffer scans and all that held. Just like looks to be back when Doctor Pulaski got that infection from the genetically engineered children. They used the same process to reverse the aging issue." Giving a point, "So... I make three. You've not eaten and I know that, I always eat."

He had her there, it had been 6 hours or so and all she had was some electrolyte juice. Her stomach let out a growl at the mention of food. She rocked back onto her feet, "Alright, while you cook, I'll tidy up this mess and get cleaned up."

She started to turn, then turned back with a half thought, turned away again, then back to face Dean. "If this works, are you, uh, still willing to come with me to lay my Papa to rest?" She asked innocently enough. After all it had been some time and he may have changed his mind. People did that right?

"Well of course I'm still willing to go, it was my idea after all. We did all this work into making it possible, even if I weren't going." Dean took one of her hands and gave it a light squeeze. "We're going."

Bonnie smiled, her heart temporarily happy, her face flushed, partially embarrassed by the unexpected hand holding. She glanced at the chronometer, "Oh my, is that the time?" Then she tapped him on the chest, "You better get to making your special masterpiece. I've got to get ready. I'm still going to have to stop at the house before the ceremony and we haven't even tested it yet..." She began to panic.

"Right..on it. I mean..I guess for," looking down to her finger a moment then back to her, "Time sake, no pun intended, I'll just replicate them instead of going back to my quarters or the mess to cook." Turning around to head to the replicator. "Stopping by the house is fine with me."

But she hadn't heard the last bit. The moment her fingers slipped from his, she was gone, out the door and on the way to her quarters to dress and cleanup. Time does not stand still, it just keeps on slipping away, to coin a phrase.

TBC