Post 302: Just another day

Posted on Wed Nov 12th, 2025 @ 5:16pm by Admiral Christopher Bradley & Lieutenant Thomas Ryan MD

559 words; about a 3 minute read

Chris Bradley stood over his desk, surrounded by floating holo-panels covered in tactical data. Long-range scans. Delta Quadrant energy signatures. Fragmented Kazon traffic intercepts. He annotated a line item regarding Ocampan subspace anomalies when—

The stylus jerked in his hand.

A small tremor.
Barely perceptible.

He blinked and flexed his fingers. Nothing. No pain. Just that tiny, involuntary movement.

He went to write again.

The tremor returned—just enough to loosen his grip and send the stylus rolling off the desk.

Chris stared at his hand for half a second.
A tremor wasn’t a warning sign.
It was an interruption.

He picked up the stylus with his left hand and set it aside. Then he placed his right hand casually on the desk—flat, steady.

It didn’t shake again.

Good.
Normal enough to ignore.

The door chime sounded.

“Enter,” Chris said.

Dr. Tom Ryan stepped in like a man who had come to talk, not treat. No med kit. No tricorder. Just a padd in one hand and an expression halfway between a smirk and mild annoyance.

“Thought I’d stop by,” Tom said. “Wanted to run something by you regarding medical staffing rotation.”

Chris nodded toward the chair opposite his desk. “If you want to sit, you’ll have to move the intelligence report on top of it. Someone keeps burying my furniture.”

Tom picked up the report—and that’s when he noticed the stylus lying on the floor.

“You drop that?”

Chris didn’t bother looking. “Apparently so.”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “You don’t drop things.”

Chris returned to his holo-display, tone even. “Today, I did.”

Tom didn’t buy it. He pulled a neural scanner from the padd—folded inside the casing like an emergency tool.

Chris didn’t react. “Expecting to examine someone?”

Tom shrugged. “I’m habitually prepared.”

Before Chris could object, Tom activated the device and scanned his right hand.

Results populated on the office display: faint Synthulan neural residue along the motor cortex pathways.

Tom frowned at the readings. “You’re showing residual interference. It’s minor, but it’s there.”

Chris’s jaw tightened. “Define minor.”

“Like scar tissue in your nervous system. The tremor is your motor cortex misfiring under load.” Tom studied him carefully. “It doesn’t mean relapse. But it does mean we monitor it.”

Chris nodded once. “Fine. Run whatever tests you need.”

Tom paused. “We should tell Dakota.”

“No.” The refusal was immediate and clear.

Tom folded his arms. “She deserves to know.”

“She deserves peace,” Chris countered. His tone shifted—not pleading, not emotional. Command. “And she will have it.”

Tom didn’t back down. “Chris—”

“That’s an order.”

The air between them went still.

Tom held his gaze, weighing it—friend vs. officer, concern vs. command. Finally, Tom exhaled through his nose.

“All right. I won’t tell her.”

He started to leave, then stopped at the door and added:

“On one condition.”

Chris lifted an eyebrow.

“You don’t hide this from me. You report any changes. Any tremor. Any symptom. Immediately.”

Chris considered it. A fair line. Professional. Contained.

“Agreed.”

Tom nodded once. “Good. Then we move forward.”

He left as abruptly as he arrived.

Chris lowered his right hand back to the desk, palm flat, steady.

No tremor.

Not this time.

He returned to his work.

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