Bradward Boimler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
antigravboy) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
nightlogs2023-08-31 08:47 pm
antigravboy) wrote in nightlogs2023-08-31 08:47 pm
Entry tags:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams...
Who: Locked to Boimler and Mariner
What: Post-Borg infection aftermath
Where: Infirmary
When: After the game's opening plots
Warnings/Notes: A character dealing with some slight body horror alteration
[The process of fighting off the nanoprobe infection? Not a good time. It's not the pain (though there is some as implants form.) Mostly, it's feeling like getting hit with every childhood flu at once (in a society where medicine isn't amazing). There are times he's very out of it from fever.]
[But every time he's with it enough to ask for progress, the scans are always better. Less implants form until they stop altogether. The formation of the nanoprobes slows as his immune response speeds up. Then things finally tip over that dividing line. His body starts to kill nanoprobes faster than they duplicate.]
[While the whole thing is terrifying, Boimler is Starfleet. He trusts science. He trusts data. If the data says that maybe he's not going to suffer a terrible fate than maybe (hopefully) he isn't. So between some relief to his anxiety over what's happening, and the fevers, eventually he can't help but drift off.]
[Those times he briefly startles awake, between the lieutenant and Mariner, he's never alone.]
[And then it's over. He wakes up one last time, his head a lot clearer. It feels like the fever is gone. Mariner is where she was last time he woke up, seated next to his bed, flopped over onto it, her head resting on her arms. Someone's tucked a blanket over her shoulders.]
[Boimler sits up slowly, so as to not wake her, and reaches for the tricorder they've been using off and on through the night. He pauses mid-reach, looking at the changes to his hand, now complete.]
[Then he grabs it and takes some readings.]
[There's plenty of good news that makes him give a shaky sigh of absolute relief.]
[The nanoprobes are gone. None of the most dangerous implants were created. There is next to no neural transceiver, cortical inhibitor, or any of the other cranial implants that could be used to link him to the Collective, modulate his senses, allow him to be tracked, or suppress his individuality. At most, like Picard has reportedly been able to do, he might overhear the Collective someday. But they can't read him, track him, control him, subsume him.]
[The nanoprobes stopped building a base for an ocular implant before damaging his eye. He has a functioning cortical node to control what implants he does have and his body isn't rejecting them. The nanotubules apparently aren't producing any nanoprobes, which honestly is a huge relief because that feels like some kind of weird accident waiting to happen, and after exhaustively reading just about all of Voyager's public logs (just in his free time, of course) he knows Seven of Nine had to deal with an inordinate amount of nanoprobe-related bullshit.]
[So there's just...a few changes. Various clamps in places. A reinforced spine, some reinforced muscle tissue. He's definitely a little stronger, more durable.]
[...Without having a better physique. Thanks for not even doing him a solid with that, nanoprobes.]
[The part that gives him a long pause, though, is when he looks at the designation of species.]
[He's still sitting there tapping away when Mariner wakes up, like it's totally normal to be partially assimilated and to respond to it with some light reading afterward.]
What: Post-Borg infection aftermath
Where: Infirmary
When: After the game's opening plots
Warnings/Notes: A character dealing with some slight body horror alteration
[The process of fighting off the nanoprobe infection? Not a good time. It's not the pain (though there is some as implants form.) Mostly, it's feeling like getting hit with every childhood flu at once (in a society where medicine isn't amazing). There are times he's very out of it from fever.]
[But every time he's with it enough to ask for progress, the scans are always better. Less implants form until they stop altogether. The formation of the nanoprobes slows as his immune response speeds up. Then things finally tip over that dividing line. His body starts to kill nanoprobes faster than they duplicate.]
[While the whole thing is terrifying, Boimler is Starfleet. He trusts science. He trusts data. If the data says that maybe he's not going to suffer a terrible fate than maybe (hopefully) he isn't. So between some relief to his anxiety over what's happening, and the fevers, eventually he can't help but drift off.]
[Those times he briefly startles awake, between the lieutenant and Mariner, he's never alone.]
[And then it's over. He wakes up one last time, his head a lot clearer. It feels like the fever is gone. Mariner is where she was last time he woke up, seated next to his bed, flopped over onto it, her head resting on her arms. Someone's tucked a blanket over her shoulders.]
[Boimler sits up slowly, so as to not wake her, and reaches for the tricorder they've been using off and on through the night. He pauses mid-reach, looking at the changes to his hand, now complete.]
[Then he grabs it and takes some readings.]
[There's plenty of good news that makes him give a shaky sigh of absolute relief.]
[The nanoprobes are gone. None of the most dangerous implants were created. There is next to no neural transceiver, cortical inhibitor, or any of the other cranial implants that could be used to link him to the Collective, modulate his senses, allow him to be tracked, or suppress his individuality. At most, like Picard has reportedly been able to do, he might overhear the Collective someday. But they can't read him, track him, control him, subsume him.]
[The nanoprobes stopped building a base for an ocular implant before damaging his eye. He has a functioning cortical node to control what implants he does have and his body isn't rejecting them. The nanotubules apparently aren't producing any nanoprobes, which honestly is a huge relief because that feels like some kind of weird accident waiting to happen, and after exhaustively reading just about all of Voyager's public logs (just in his free time, of course) he knows Seven of Nine had to deal with an inordinate amount of nanoprobe-related bullshit.]
[So there's just...a few changes. Various clamps in places. A reinforced spine, some reinforced muscle tissue. He's definitely a little stronger, more durable.]
[...Without having a better physique. Thanks for not even doing him a solid with that, nanoprobes.]
[The part that gives him a long pause, though, is when he looks at the designation of species.]
[He's still sitting there tapping away when Mariner wakes up, like it's totally normal to be partially assimilated and to respond to it with some light reading afterward.]
no subject
Hey, man. How're you feeling?
[Dumb question, but worth asking.]
no subject
[Read: He is not fine.]
[He climbs out of bed, doing it very stiffly. The reinforced spine is going to take some getting used to. It doesn't make bending easy. Which makes a ton of sense. How many times do you see flexible Borg? It's not exactly like they're out there doing standing front tucks and dropping into the splits.]
[Boimler throws the tricorder onto the bed, not really thinking about how he didn't clear the readings or even thumb out of the screen. Mentally, he's definitely getting pretty far into his own head right now.]
I'm gonna go take a shower.
[That is totally a valid response to this situation. People had helped him clean off a lot of the blood and grossness while he was in bed and given him a new shirt to change into, but he's still grimy as hell. He'd spent most of the night sweating. There's still a little dried blood in his hair.]
[He's not sure how (he'll find later that they answer is "Yetis," and ancient Earth cryptids will not be a satisfying answer) but there are extra clothes draped over the chair at the foot of his bed. A replica of his Starfleet uniform, a tank top, underwear, socks, and boots, that all look like the right size. Weird since this place looks like it absolutely isn't the kind of place to have a replicator and this time period is too early for one.]
[But it makes things easier. He has clothes, he doesn't have to look for some, they're conveniently there for him to grab, so he can disappear and be the okayest person in the world alone for a little bit.]
Yeah.
[He nods to himself, agreeing with himself that yes. Yes, a shower is in order. And yes, he is absolutely, definitely okay.]
[Then he grabs the clothes, spots an attached bathroom that looks like it does indeed have a shower - an old-timey water-based one instead of a sonic one, ew. (But still better than nothing). And quickly walks over, attempting a full Section 31 power walk, clearly trying to outrace her trying to get up and grab his arm or something. But...]
[He can't manage it the way he used to. His spine isn't bendy enough now. It's a stiff, relatively normal-looking power walk. By the time he gets home, the spinal clamp will be too integrated to ever be removed; she doesn't know it yet, but it's an idiosyncrasy of her friend she'll never see again.]
[He shuts the door with a light slam.]
[If she happens to look at the tricorder, she'll maybe see why he's just, you know, totally and obviously lying about being fine.]
[He is, biologically, technically, okay. He will physically recover, he's not so changed he can't adapt, and some of the changes even have benefits.]
[But there's a single detail that stands out. Genetically, there's a lot that had to change for his body to make implants and then to not reject them.]
[Back when they'd taken readings when they first arrived, the wonky weird magic bullshit readings had still made the tricorder assume they were altered humans, guessing what their base species was and assuming it was in some deeply altered state.]
[Now the tricorder says something else. Last time, the readings had said something along the lines of them being 74% human, 26% Unknown, with the unknown part most likely being the mythical...magic? Stuff? The way it had clearly altered them biologically? And alongside that had been all the weird energy readings.]
[Now there are still the same weird energy readings. (Magic??) But... Baseline Species Designation, Estimated: 61% Borg, 39% Unknown.]
[Which makes sense. Borg genetic alterations usually happened first or the implants wouldn't take. Anyone sufficiently altered started to read differently to tricorders. And whatever still read as slightly human in him was still so altered and incomplete and completely off as to be no longer be read as fully human and therefore shunted off into "unknown." Enough of his DNA is still human that he doesn't look like a pasty-faced ghoul but...]
[Only just.]
[Someday, if the weird myth stuff is undone, he'll read as mostly Borg, with the remaining parts of his humanity being treated like a genetic mystery.]
no subject
Yeah. Good idea. No offense, man, but you smell like you've done twenty laps of the Academy campus. [A half-smile - a joke, to show everything's all right. He's a little stiff when he walks away, and she notices, but it's probably just the result of the total thrashing they'd all taken. He'd be fine.
She hopes.
Out of curiosity, once he'd gone into the bathroom and turned the shower on (a water shower - what a throwback) she picks up the tricorder on the bed, half to sneak a peek at what he'd been working on, half to simply close it. As she's about to shut it, her eye catches on the species designation, and her heart sinks into her stomach.]
Nope, [she whispers to herself, aims her own tricorder at the other room, and gets a lock on Boimler's biosignature. Sure enough, his tricorder hadn't been lying. The reading is the same.]
Nope, [she says again, a little more fiercely, and taps away at the tricorder, trying every reading she can. They all come up with basically the same information.
Scowling, she sits down on the bed and really gets into working on it. This is not right.
...and it's probably why he was so faux-chipper.]
no subject
[He ultimately sinks down to the floor, towel wrapped around his waist, taking stock of the rest. There are a few other patches of circuitry, of metal protrusions through his skin.]
[At least there aren't tubes. Borg tubes look super gross.]
[He's eventually left sitting there on the floor, quiet, back ramrod straight when he normally would've been slumping, back pressed against the door. Processing. He's in there for quite a while.]