“Come here, take a look at this,” Blake Pisani said absent-mindedly as Sidda stepped into Sickbay, directing her to a large wall monitor the doctor was standing in front of.

“You made it sound urgent,” Sidda said as she sidled up beside the ship’s doctor, bumping the other woman’s shoulder purposefully. “But all I see is you staring at a brain?” Studying the monitor, she saw two rotating images on the display with numbers that made no sense to her surrounding both in a halo of information. “Brains?” she clarified momentarily.

Blake pointed at the computer renderings, left to right. “Cat, Willow.”

“Uh, good looking brains?” Sidda asked, still not sure just what she was looking at. “Blake, you’re going to have to walk me through this. Biology might as well be magic as far as I’m concerned.”

“I want to say something to that, but I’ll save it for later.” Blake cast an eye around her sickbay. One other doctor was treating a small burn, and two nurses were busying themselves with the day’s chores. None of them exactly close enough to overhear if she had wanted to speak her mind.

“Dinner with our better halves later, or just a shared drink in the Pnyx?”

“Bitch, please, I am the better half.” Blake’s smile and wink belied the claim. “And besides, Chuck told me some of what was in the briefing pack. We aren’t going to get a solid chance to relax for a while, are we?”

“Not what we don’t claw out for ourselves,” Sidda said, giving Blake’s elbow a jostle with her own. “I’m going to make sure Mac gets a solid night off tonight. For you and him.” Then she turned her attention back to the display. “Right, Cat and Willow’s brains. They’re braining, I assume?”

“Don’t play that dumb,” Blake chided. “Doesn’t suit you.” She cleared a few of the numbers away with a wave of her hand. Colours overlaying each rotating image disappeared as well, leaving large golden-yellow blobs behind. While both of the highlighted areas covered the same part of each image and roughly equal in size, the latter was brighter by far. “See?”

Sidda looked over the entire display wall, eyes flitting over everything for any context clues that might clue her in on Blake’s finding. “Posterior parietal cortex? It’s a human brain thing, right?” She wasn’t playing dumb; she truly had no idea and was asking an honest question. “Willow’s scan is brighter in this colour you’ve chosen. And the numbers indicate,” she trailed off as she studied the number sets, not really understanding the short codes next to each. “Increased activity? Wait, are these numbers changing?”

“Yup,” Blake answered the last question first, tapping Sidda’s arm and then pointing to the primary surgical bed where a figure was laying down. Willow Beckman was as still as she could be while her head was surrounded by an array of scanning elements, each prying as non-invasively as they could at her neural makeup and activity. “Cat’s scan is on record, but Willow, well, every scan of her I’ve done in the last few weeks has been different.”

“That’s concerning,” Sidda remarked. “Right?”

“Yes and no,” Blake replied. “It’s all relegated to the posterior parietal cortex. It’s the part of the brain responsible for spatial awareness, movement planning, handles certain attention related tasks and integrating sensory inputs related to all of that.”

Sidda nodded in feigned understanding. “So, the biological predecessor to a navigational and flight computer all in one?”

“I don’t like the analogy, but it’ll work.” Blake brought up the numbers, pushing the images to the far sides of the display. “I’ve got Cat’s last brain scan up here as a standard stick. She’s the second-best pilot on Republic, not that I’d tell her or Willow that. But the difference in posterior parietal cortex activity between Cat and, say, you,” Blake not holding punches in knowing Sidda’s own skill at the helm, “isn’t nearly as much as between Cat and Willow.”

“Hey, I might not be a pilot, but I wasn’t forced into five years of dance classes for nothing,” Sidda claimed in her own defence. “And besides, ever seen me do one of the security shooting challenges?”

“No, why?”

“You should. It might explain a few things for you.”

Blake just blinked a few times, shook it off, then returned to her explanation. “Anyway, what I’m saying is that Willow over there,” Blake’s volume dropping to a near whisper, “really does have a vastly superior spatial awareness. Like, supernaturally good. As in I don’t know what she can and can’t detect or process because activity like this is unheard of.”

“So, she came here to get cleared to fly again and you think you’ve cracked her party trick?” Sidda asked, turning around to face the surgical bay and the young lieutenant who was laying there, literally twiddling her thumbs while under observation.

“I think I’ve cracked her party trick because something is causing her to push it to the limit right now in ways never before.” Blake too had turned to face Willow. “Scans are showing increased neural activity. A lot, to be honest. But she hasn’t complained about any neurological symptoms. No pain of any sort. All other scans are good. I want to do more scans and figure this out, but I know we need Willow back at the helm if we want to keep moving at warp speed through this Blackout junk.”

“So, you’re clearing her duty?” Sidda asked, seeking an unequivocal answer.

“Yes, Commander Sadovu, I am clearing Lieutenant Beckman for duty.” Blake even made the effort to sound proper and professional as well.

Sidda, for her part, couldn’t hide the shiver that ran down her back. She still hated using her family name. She’s spent so, so long just being ‘Sidda’, not wanting to rely on her family name back on Vondem, or the reputation her mother had built up within Starfleet either. “I really should have taken Revin’s name.”

Blake snorted. “No comment.” And then she was walking over to the surgical bed, waving Sidda along in her wake. “Lieutenant Beckman, how do you feel?”

“Bored,” Willow answered truthfully. “Annoyed as well. Scanner on this side,” she said, raising a hand to point at the cluster of scanners to her left, “keeps making this high-pitched whine.”

“I’ll get that looked into.” Blake stepped around the bed, tapping at controls and bringing the scanners to a halt, retracting the assembly that had held them in place. “But the scans look whoa.” She trailed off as Willow sat up.

“Doctor?” Sidda asked as she to saw what had interrupted Blake’s train of thought.

The question further heightened the confusion starting to grow on Willow’s face. “What?” she asked. “What is it?” She retreated slightly when Black intruded into her personal space with a hand scanner, eyes firmly locked on a medical tricorder. “What?” she repeated.

“Your glowing,” Sidda offered. “Well, okay, not glowing, per se. Blake?”

Blake continued her scan in silence for a moment before she set the tricorder down, stared at Willow directly for a second, eyes squinting, then tapped at a control on the side of the surgical bed. “Computer, holographic mirror for Lieutenant Beckman.”

With a chirp to confirm the request, a holographic bust appeared in front of Willow as Sidda stepped aside for the creation. With the high-resolution scanners of sickbay at work, the recreation was exacting in every detail, including the most relevant one – the faintly luminescent golden laurel that encircled Willow’s head.

The young woman’s shock gave way as she turned her head from side to side, examining the hologram’s appearance as she did so. “What the hell?” Willow asked in a quiet voice, trying to grab and move the laurel but to no avail.

“Well, I can say that’s coming from you, Lieutenant. Not sure how or why, but it is all you.” Blake’s answer barely registered for Willow, still busy turning her head from side to side and examining the holographic doppelgänger. “It, uh, doesn’t seem to be interfering with anything, at least.”

“What is this?” Willow asked, finally looking away from the hologram.

Blake shrugged. “It’s a laurel,” she said, though her tone delivered it more as a question. “I don’t exactly have access to all of Starfleet Medical’s vast repository of knowledge to give you specifics, but I’ve heard of something like this before. It, uh, well,” she trailed off, rocking her head side to side. “Either of your parents have one?” she asked tentatively.

“My mother most certainly doesn’t. And I don’t know who my father is.” Willow tried once more at removing the laurel, which refused to budge. “I look like an idiot.”

“I don’t know, I think it looks good on you,” Sidda said, trying to offer support while she examined Willow herself. “Certainly a unique look.”

“Ha ha.” Willow’s response was dry and humourless. “Are you going to keep me in sickbay, what with all of this?” she asked Blake as she waved hands around her own head.

The doctor looked at Sidda, then shrugged in defeat. “As much as I’d like to, Lieutenant, we really do need you back at the helm. So, how about a deal? You wear a cortical monitor for me, promise to come back to Sickbay if you start to feel weird and I don’t track you down and drag you back here as soon as you’re off duty.”

Willow thought about it for a few seconds, mouth pursed to one side as she considered the offer. “For how long?”

“Couple of days at most. I should get plenty of information to formulate a hypothesis. Or you’ll hop, skip and jump us somewhere where I can consult a larger medical database on this uniqueness.”

“Yeah, uniqueness, that’s one way to put it,” Willow complained.

A few minutes later, a medical boilerplate from Blake about the cortical monitor and Willow was on her feet and quickly out the door, leaving the two older women in her wake. More than a few sets of eyes around Sickbay took in Willow’s unique new look and all received the warning look from Blake that said ‘not a word’ with the authority senior doctor’s learn somewhere along the line.

Sidda was the one to break the silence first. “That’s a first one for me.”

“Never seen anything like it myself,” Blake said with a shrug. “I think I’ve heard about something like it before. But uh, if my hunch is right, and with the scans I do have, I think I know how she’s doing her whole moving around trick. Even the whole sensing the Blackout thing as well.”

“Oh?”

“Ever heard the ancient myth of Hermes?” Blake said, heading for her office and waving Sidda along. “So, back on Earth…”