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The human brain is a complex system-even now, in the 23rd century, it is not fully understood. Memory is not fully understood. But the human brain is understood to be elastic, and hearty. Memories are not stored all in one place, in a neat little chunk of data that can be erased without a trace.
Uhura’s brain is not an ancient earth floppy disk, and Nomad was not a magnet being held to it. Her memories are still in there-the rapid rate at which she re-acquires knowledge is proof of that. The fond familiarity in her interactions with Christine, the muscle memory in her fingers when handed a familiar instrument, the fact she lapses into her first language when no one has re-taught it to her, are all proof of that.
She just has to be cajoled, carefully, into forming the neural pathways that will once again allow her to access what she already knows.
The realization is a relief to everyone. There is precedent for treating patients with amnesia, and even if the cause is unusual, McCoy is relieved to have something to at least begin basing a treatment plan on.
He discharges her from sickbay, and Christine volunteers to walk her to her quarters. Hopefully a familiar environment will trigger more memory recovery. It usually does, in patients whose amnesia is not caused by psychological trauma or psychic interference. At the very least, it can’t hurt.
McCoy appreciates precedent. Appreciates peer reviewed medical data and drugs that have gone to trial and diseases that he doesn’t have the dubious honor of naming. Far too often for his liking, “new life and new civilizations” also means “new germs, poisons, and ways for people to be maimed”.
There is no precedent McCoy can think of for what happened to Scotty today.
People have been revived after dying-after their hearts stop, at any rate. Medically dead. He tries to hang on to this fact, to put todays events into context. A stopped heart can be forced back into beating with the right equipment, and fast enough action. Manually, even. Chest compressions. Keep the blood circulating. He’s done it before, brought patients back from the brink, back from technical death.
Dead for seconds. For minutes.
Scotty was dead for nearly an hour.
Scotty was dead. For nearly an hour. And now he’s complaining about being asked to sleep in sickbay for the night to be monitored.
Because he died.
McCoy feels ready to be sick.
He’s glad to have Scotty back. Of course he is. God, of course he is. But if he thinks about it for too long, it leaves him unsettled, because that man died, and stayed dead, and then was fixed. Fixed, like a machine. Of course Scotty isn’t too perturbed-doesn’t seem to be, anyways. Shaken, for sure, but in the same way he would be after any other near-miss. “I almost died”. Not “I did die.”
Put into the context of machinery, it makes sense to Scotty. You fix what’s broken, and it runs again. The human body is a machine-an infinitely complex one, one we don’t necessarily have all the schematics for yet, but it’s just an assemblage of moving parts and chemical reactions, and his was broken, and now it’s not.
For an engineer, the thought is a comforting one.
McCoy is less comforted.
Because yes, the body is an assemblage of parts and pieces, chemical reactions and joints and systems. But that is absolutely not all a body is, all a person is. It can’t be. That’s too utilitarian. McCoy refuses to believe that his body is just a machine.
But Scotty was fixed. Not healed-repaired, fixed, by a machine that assumed he was the same. And he seems fine, mentally and physically. And the cognitive dissonance makes McCoy feel a little sick because that man died right in front of him.
He doesn’t want to hold it against him. God knows it’s not his fault. But he can’t help but wonder if his friend is really the same Montgomery Scott he was before he died.
McCoy decides that he needs a drink, and tries very hard not to think about checking Scotty’s pulse and finding nothing