Back with Unfamiliar Friends

Posted on 07 Jul 2026 @ 9:36pm by Lieutenant Ryan Collingway & Commander Suzanna Batenburg & Lieutenant Commander Steven Remington & Lieutenant Commander Riah Amberlyn XMD

1,743 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: Sherman Oaks (fragment) 1984
Timeline: All back in Arawyn's timeline

// Durango Road and Sycamore Street //

As they moved through the empty street, they easily caught sight of Commander Batenburg and Dr Amberlyn at the corner ahead. One of them was dressed in a dayglo orange jogging suit. This was supremely surreal. Steve waved but did not increase his pace, walking nearly in step with Ryan. He felt a bit of nervousness as they drew near.

One of the two women, the one dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, was moving quickly towards him, holding what might be a first-air kit. Ryan took an instinctual half-step back, his eyes a little apprehensive. He couldn't remember who this was.

“Lieutenant, you are in considerable distress, I see,” said the doctor, without benefit of introduction. She noted the strained posture, the bruising on his face, wrists, and throat. They both looked disheveled and extremely tired, which seemed odd since they had only been caught in the temporal wave maybe an hour ago. She was very curious.

Steve stood back and watched, actually ready to defend his new-old friend in the event it was necessary. He remembered something about the woman, but the memories were confusing, while he did not recognize her as someone he’d ever met, his body reacted in a much more intimate manner, a warmth in his skin, a desire to touch her shoulder, and more, it felt like he was happy to see her. He shook his head and brought his attention back to the present moment.

The doctor opened her kit and removed a stubby, medical scanning probe. “First, let’s see what’s going on that hurts .” She moved the wand slowly from the top of Ryan’s head along his entire right side, pausing at the torso, down to his knees and back up the left side of his body, again pausing as she moved along the torso. Her gaze traveled from the probe's small screen, on which Ryan could see codes populating, and then to Ryan’s face.

“Tylenol?” asked Amberlyn with a curious smile. “Acetaminophen. A temporary pain reliever popular in the 20th and 21st century. I had to look that up. Four hundred years of improvement."

"Unfortunately very temporary, in this case," he admitted. "Don't suppose you have something better?"

“I should think so. And I’m interested that Tylenol had any measurable effect at all against the pain of one broken rib and a second fractured,” she chuckled.

"Let's just say that the advertised 'extra strength' wasn't terriby strong. It keep me going for a little bit, and that was it," Ryan said.

She reset the probe from diagnostic to a treatment setting and gently lifted his right arm away from his body, which resulted in a wince of anticipation of her touching his painful rib cage.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him, and proceeded to touch only his shirt with the side, length of the probe. There was a low hum and he thought he might have felt a sensation of heat, but it was the cessation of pain that brought a sigh of relief.

"Thank you," Ryan said, genuinely appreciative of the lack of pain. But he was also curious. "Um...what did you do, exactly?”

“What did I do?” she asked and realized he was completely serious. Well, he is an engineer and maybe that kind of thing interests him. “The bone repair process actually acts as a micro-replicator at a cellular level, using the body’s own tissues as its source. The tissue regenerator accelerates the process of cellular repair of the surrounding tissue.”

She ran the probe gently around his neck, over the eye socket and the round of his cheek, down his left leg, and finally around both wrists, from which the bruising seemed to evaporate like magic ink.

Amberlyn pulled a hypospray from her kit and pressed it effortlessly to his neck. A painless hiss and she replaced the hypo in her kit. “A little something to manage any residual tenderness.”

Ryan looked at his wrists, astonished. "I think I could get used to 25th century medicine," he said to Steve.

“Yeah, me too,” replied Steve, also mesmerized by the disappearance of the bruising and the explanation of the healed ribs. This also seemed like it should be normal, but a part of him was astonished. Again, he felt the nagging fear that he and Ryan would be like this for the long-term. How could they ever fit back into the life they’d had on this starship if they couldn’t even remember what the medical field had to offer? Maybe, hopefully, they also had mental health practices that could restore their memories to consciousness instead of this partial memory from two very different worlds. He had images of being strapped to a chair and a metal helmet placed on his head with spark plugs and wires. He literally shook off that image.

Only after the Doctor had completed her treatment of Ryan did Riah turn to Steve. “Welcome back, Commander. I’m very glad you made it back safely.”

Steve was almost sure there was more under her tone than just comrade in arms.

“Yeah, me too.” He felt strangely nervous, self-conscious.

“Are you injured?” she asked, this time it felt very professional.

“I don’t think so, not physically anyway.”

“I’m going to run a scan just to be sure,” she announced and completed the same scanning procedure as she had done for Ryan. “All good. Physically, you say. Are there other issues?”

“Well, a few,” began Steve. "Nothing that can't wait."

The other woman approached and Amberlyn, Steve and Ryan both turned their attention to she who was clearly Commander Batenburg.

Suzanna had been studying her tricorder, comparing its readings before and after the displacement wave had passed. At the same time, she listened as Amberlyn examined Collingway and Remington. The two officers sounded... different. Not physically, but cognitively. Their responses suggested they were attempting to reconcile two incompatible sets of memories.

Ryan suddenly blinked as he looked at the women's headband. His memory was nipping at him. There was something under that headband, something she was hiding. Pointed ears... "You're an alien," he breathed. "We're talking to an alien."

Suzanna raised a single eyebrow. She had expected some degree of temporal disorientation, but this was more pronounced than anticipated. She turned to Amberlyn. "Doctor, I believe both officers are experiencing memory displacement. Their statements indicate they currently believe they belong to a version of 1984 rather than our own timeline."

She glanced at the tricorder display. "My scans also show residual chroniton and interphasic particle contamination consistent with transit through the spatial tears. I suspect their exposure has affected more than their physical location. It appears to have altered their temporal frame of reference."

Suzanna looked back to the two officers, her tone calm and reassuring. "Lieutenant, Commander, you are officers of the USS Arawyn, currently conducting an away mission. Whatever you experienced within the anomaly was real to you. We will determine what occurred, but first I need both of you to describe everything you remember.”

“We have determined the same thing, Commander. We have incomplete memories from both 2425 and memories of being a part of 1984. Since we are from here, it follows that those 1984 memories were implanted. The flow, if you will, between the memories is very fluid and while I know myself to have been a science student at a college in Sherman Oaks in 1984, I also believe I was a part of an organization known as Starfleet, 400 years in the future. We have done considerable research using the tricorder, which both of us seem to know inside and out, but a lot of that appears to be unconscious knowledge. I was able to alter the tricorder to act as an Electromagnetic Resonance Generator to get Ryan out of jail, and he was able to further reconfigure it to align with and predict the regular reoccurrence of the temporal wave, allowing us to join the wave at it’s origination point and ride it through the temporal distortion. Both of us just knew how to operate and internally reconfigure the tricorder. While there, we found out that where we were was some kind of holding space. As far as a report on what happened, if we include everything, that is an extremely long story for our time here. By our timeline, we were separated from you for almost 24 hours and a lot happened in that time. But here, apparently a much shorter period of time has elapsed.”

"Once we started to remember things from 2425, it felt like the construct we were in started to fight against us," Ryan said. "Like Steve said, I was arrested. Told that I couldn't leave no matter what, and that I would have been much happier if I had lived my life as a student and stopped fighting. The more we pushed back, the worst it seemed to react. But there were things in that reality that wanted to help us remember. Things named after the senior staff, for example."

"Clyde also helped us put a lot of the pieces together." He paused, then added, "we named the scanner Clyde."

Ryan looked at Batenburg. "You mentioned something about a...boy? Did he do this to us?"

“That, too, is a lengthy explanation,” Suzanna replied. “The concise version is that we have identified an individual, appearing as a young boy, who seems intrinsically linked to the existence of this fragment and the displacement phenomena we have observed.”

"Have you found the boy?" asked Steve. "And where are all the people that were in a panic over the ships in the sky. I remember that now."

"Lieutenant Flammia has gone in search of him. The people were apparently part of the constructed world we believe the boy is responsible for," replied Riah. "I'll explain more as we investigate here."

Ryan said nothing for a moment, thinking. "Commander Remington and I will help however we can," he said. Calling him by his rank seemed so unfamiliar to him. He knew they were a hybrid of both times, as Steve had said, but they were still part of the away team. The experience they had was still buried inside them.

Somewhere.

~~~
Commander Suzanna Batenburg
Executive Officer
USS Arawyn
&
Lieutenant Ryan Collingway
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Arawyn
&
Lieutenant Commander Steve Remington
Chief Science Officer
USS Arawyn

 

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