He re-ran his scans, it couldn't be right, yet here it was. "Something must be wrong with the scanners" He said to himself out loud. If anyone else was in the lab at the time, they would have paid him no attention, he seemed to talk to himself alot when trying to work through problems, and had gotten to the stage where his fellow science officers wouldn't react to something he said unless he either had stated their name first, or was face to face with them.
Nathanial shook his head and stood up. He needed to clear his mind, so he decided to head the Lyrilia surface. He headed to the transporter room, and when he arrived was asked by the young security officer where he would like to be transported to.
"Somewhere where there is no-one else please cadet" Responded Nathanial.
Pot luck suited him at this moment, and as he materialized on the surface and was confronted with a small pond his mind shifted back to the conundrum that seemed to have presented itself.
He sat down on one of the outcropping rocks that was sitting next to the pond and started to talk outloud to himself.
"Sentient, reactive, but nothing that small can be sentient, can it?"
"Who are you talking to mister?" Asked a young female voice
Nathanial jumped, he turned around and standing a few feet away was a young girl, he guessed around twelve or thirteen years old. He made note to give the security officer that beamed him down a piece of his mind when he got back.
"Hello little girl, sorry you startled me, I thought I was alone"
"Alone? Then who were you talking to then?" she asked him.
He chuckled "I was speaking to myself, or maybe the pond."
She looked him over and then sat down on the rock next to him. Such innocence and lack of fear he thought, especially after all she must have gone through in the past few months.
"So what were you asking the pond Mister?"
"I was asking it if I was going crazy!"
The girl shifted herself to get comfortable and waited for Nathanial to go on.
"Crazy yes, for how can life exist at such a molecular level. Its just not possible. I mean molecules are the building blocks of life right, but are they life themselves? I mean you need more than a single molecule to be sentient right?"
Nathanial was off, he started to zone out and forget where he was or who he was, instead his mind just churned through the data he had reviewed. "I reviewed the whole few seconds of data, well not even that, but for that split second, the movement made, was one of preservation, the most basic of reactions from anything that is sentient."
He looked down into the pond, staring up at him was his own reflection, he noted the wrinkles that had started to appear around his eyes and forehead, each one carving its way into his face as a constant reminder that life was not just a walk in the park.
"Yet the evidence is still there" He shook his head and turned to the girl "And we killed it... Omega..."
Cadet Nathanial Doyle
USS Charon
