The Needs of the Many

Posted on Wed Jul 10, 2019 @ 4:53am by Lieutenant JG Camille Lévesque PhD & Lieutenant Penelope Naroot & Lieutenant Nicole Anderson
Edited on on Wed Jul 10, 2019 @ 9:58am

1,410 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Plaga Navis
Location: Quarantine Lab

The walk to the quarantine lab had been quiet. Neither Thomas nor Camille had wanted to say anything, least not in public. Camille wasn’t quite as on edge as she had been during the meeting. Some of her feelings, the ones about Penny, had been resolved nicely. But on edge she was.

When the door slid closed behind her and Thomas, tension hung in the air. For the first time, Camille strongly disagreed with what was happening and struggled to communicate it. But she needed to. “Sooooo...we’re going to be assimilating a planet...”

"If half of what I've heard of that process is correct, I cannot believe she's resorting to that," Thomas said, giving a familiar huff. "This is completely unacceptable."

Camille nodded. She didn’t want a fight. She desperately wanted to avoid one, and not only because it was with Nicole. “I mean, it will save lives. But...”

Nicole stepped into the lab and immediately halted, facing a storm that was intense, terrifying, and hauntingly familiar.

"What the hell was that, back there?" Thomas Anderson said sternly. His hands were behind his back, his chin tucked, his eyes hard as diamonds. He was beloved by virtually all of his students, but the few who crossed him soon learned that he took his craft very seriously. He was in full "angry professor mode" now, and Nicole was pained to admit she was intimidated.

"Professor, I--"

"You come up with some half-baked stop-gap measure, don't feel the need to brief the rest of your team on it, then rush into it. Captain's approval be damned, you should have taken five minutes and thought this out before going off half-cocked and putting us all in a very awkward position!"

“Nicole,” Camille added softly, “when we talked about curing this virus, assimilating all these people against their will isn’t what we meant.”

"Et tu, Camille?" Nicole said, frowning. "I am not trying to assimilate a planet, I am trying to be as minimally invasive as possible without letting this virus go unchecked. I would love a cure, but unless either of you have some insight that will let us come up with something in the next few hours, I don't know what else to do!"

She wasn't quite shouting, but she wasn't calm. She was frustrated, angry and doing her best not to pop off. "We are not going to stop trying to beat this thing, but at the same time, I am not going to give up on the one solution we have to keep these people alive. Look me in the eye and tell me, either of you, that you wouldn't take advantage of every option at your disposal if something like this were at stake."

Camille stood in silence, her eyes watering slightly. She had no idea what to say.

Nicole turned her attention to the Professor and immediately regretted it. The look in his eyes was....she didn't quite know what to call it, but she immediately realized she'd committed the faux-pas to end all faux-pas with him. She went absolutely white and sank down into a chair, a hand over her mouth.

Thomas drew himself up. "I need five minutes," he said. "I'll check on how we can adapt the prions, knowing what we know now." He turned and walked out of the room.

“Nicole,” Camille said calmly. “We don’t doubt that you want to do everything you can save these people. But there are so many factors at play here. This will save lives, but it will cause harm. And T’Mira does have a point about consent. And—are you okay?” She rushed to Nicole and crouched in front of her, looking her in the eye up close.

Nicole was at a complete loss for words. She couldn't understand why a black hole hadn't come to rescue her and swallow them all up. Through sheer force of will, she closed her mouth, swallowed hard and got control of her breathing. "No...I am not okay," she said quietly. "I am very, very, very much not okay." She took a breath and held Camille's hands tightly. It took all she had but she got a grip on her feelings and stamped them far, far down. Finally she calmed and sat back. "What...are our alternatives?" she said. "We have hours before it's too late to do anything. Hours. How are we going to solve this in that amount of time when we are dealing with an entirely different universe of problems?"

"I don't know," Camille said softly. "We'll just have to do our best. As for our current predicament, the nanite idea is probably our best bet to keep people alive until we find another solution. But when the idea came about, I didn't fully understand your plan. Not until you presented it. It threw us off, and is making us ask the questions that we probably should have asked last night." She took a deep breath. "Tell me. Would you test a vaccine on an unsuspecting population?"

Nicole moved to respond, but one part of her mind reminded her that what she was about to bring up wasn't technically a vaccine, and it wasn't technically the entire population, while another part of her mind told her to shut the hell up.

"The problem in trying to draw comparisons," she said, softly, "is that this isn't a test. This is taking drastic action to counter an attack. I wouldn't want to have to force a cure on an entire population, but I don't know if I could live with letting them all die."

"I wasn't actually drawing comparisons," Camille started to explain. "I wanted to take you through steps of things that are obviously unethical and try to find that line."

Nicole nodded. It was an old discussion. She'd had it with her Godfather once. She'd accused him of crossing a line. He said that drawing lines in the sand was a privilege of the young. What we believe we are incapable of, or averse to will be tested at some point, and some lines must be crossed to avoid crossing others.

Camille squeezed Nicole's hands again. "Listen, you're going to save a lot of lives with this. And some of the survivors will hate you for the rest of their lives for it. They'll say you overstepped your bounds, or that you acted unethically. They'll call for an inquiry. But they'll have lives." One of her hands let go for Nicole's to adjust her glasses. "I honestly don't know if this is on the right side of the ethics line. And you will have to answer for this. I'll be there by your side when you do. But next time, explain it to us from the beginning? When you briefed me last night, I didn't realize the nanites might actually install implants that need to be surgically removed. Or that you needed to put the colony in a coma."

Nicole nodded. "I'm sorry. I got carried away. I didn't mean to ignore you, or disrespect you...either of you." She released Camille's hands and sat back. "Strictly speaking, we don't need to put them in a coma, I just thought that'd be easiest for them, so they wouldn't have to feel anything while they were treated. The nanites can disassemble the implants once they're done and we send the kill command. I wanted the entire thing to be as painless and short-lived as possible" She sounded almost pleading by the end. She sighed. "What I am about to do may not be the most ethical decision," she said slowly, "but it's the right one. Being complicit in the deaths of over three hundred thousand people through inaction is a far worse line to cross." She gave a gallows smile. "Remind me of that when I'm being court-martial-ed, will you?"

Camille matched her smile. “Bien sûr, mon amour. Don’t think this conversation is over though. I saw how you looked at him. When we’re done saving lives, we’ll talk more. For now, let’s get back to work.”

Nicole nodded and put her professional facade back on, taking a seat at her terminal.

"Naroot to Anderson," Penny's voice said after a minute. "We're entering orbit of the starbase."

"We'd better hurry," Nicole said.

 

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