The Doctor Sleeps

Posted on Tue Jun 17th, 2025 @ 4:35pm by Lieutenant Patrick Ryan M.D.

412 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: A Silence of Friends

Sickbay – Isolation Ward Three
The room was still, lit only by the soft amber glow of diagnostic monitors and the steady hum of filtration systems. Dr. Patrick Ryan lay motionless on the biobed, his body fevered and pale, breath shallow but even—held in a fragile rhythm by medical systems set to compensate for what his body could no longer manage alone.

Outside, the storm of the Velrith Plague raged on.

Ayryn Trynn had moved him to the far end of Sickbay when his condition worsened, away from the critical triage zones. There was little else she could do now. The man who had held this place together for as long as he could had finally succumbed to the very thing he fought to stop.

But inside the stillness of his mind, Patrick was not idle.

In the fog of unconsciousness, memory and instinct clashed. He drifted through fractured images—Vashti’s convulsing form, D’Sai’s eyes wide and terrified, Rush flatlining as he shouted for a stimulant that came too late. He saw Trynn’s face hovering over him, her voice urgent, but the words slipped through his mind like water through cracked glass.

Somewhere beneath it all, a part of him knew he was no longer in control. And that truth gnawed at him harder than the fever.

He tried to reach—tried to move toward the console, to finish the analysis Stormy had sent. His subconscious mind still raced through spore patterns, mutation models, the flawed protein bonding site on the polymorphic variant. The answer was there. He just needed time to find it.

But time was not on his side.

Alarms pulsed dimly in the distance. Monitors beeped out the data of other patients in critical decline. Patrick's own vitals were borderline. Another few hours and he might follow D’Sai.

And yet…

Somewhere deep in the haze, a sensation stirred—a spark, small and persistent. Not consciousness, not yet. But a resistance. A flicker of the determination that had kept him standing long past the point of collapse.

His body was failing.
But his mind?
Still trying. Still fighting.

And if the crew could hold the line a little longer—if Trynn could make sense of what he’d started, and Stormy’s cure came through—then maybe, just maybe, he’d wake up to a world that still had something left to save.

For now, Patrick Ryan slept. Fevered. Weak.
But not finished.

Not yet.

 

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