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Tendi, Mariner, and Boimler were gathered around the terminal in Transporter Room 2, watching Rutherford work.
“You all really shouldn’t be helping me with this,” Rutherford said.
“Hey, it’s a tradition!” Mariner said. “Besides, we’ve got plenty of buffer time to kill. Pun very much intended.”
It was true that for almost a year now they’d gotten together once a month to “help” Rutherford purge the transporter buffer. It had started because Rutherford had thought maybe letting Tendi remove The Dog’s residual signature from the buffer would help her move on from missing the strange pet she’d created. It had helped. And while they were checking all the stored patterns before deleting them permanently they’d also run across the admiral who’d yelled at Tendi when she tried to offer him a glass of tulaberry wine. Removing him from the Cerritos’s memory had had a sort of satisfying vindication to it, even if his actual self was sitting safely in an office in Starfleet Headquarters somewhere. Knowing that he was, in fact, fine, while they deleted this trace of evidence of him, made the whole thing feel better, in fact. Safer. Simultaneously more and less transgressive than if Tendi had just yelled right back that his assumption that, as an Orion, she had a personal investment in tulaberry wine sales was downright offensive.
From then on Tendi had started joining Rutherford every time he pulled pattern buffer reconciliation duty.
Two months later Tendi was pretty sure the Ligursian fleas that had infested the Lower Deckers’ bunks (but somehow Boimler’s bunk more so than everyone else’s, unless he was just more susceptible to flea bites—which he swore he wasn’t) were going to show up on the deletion list, so she asked him if he wanted to come wipe the last trace of them off the ship. He did.
Of course, as soon as the three of them were doing anything regularly, Mariner found out about it, joined them, and told them about how transporter buffer wiping had been one of her primary duties on her first posting—while remaining suitably mysterious about just when and where that posting was.
Rutherford’s protestation that they shouldn’t be helping him was as much a part of the ritual of transporter buffer deletion day, or TBDD as they called it, as any of the rest of it. So, with his formal discouragement officially lodged for the record, Rutherford said, “What should we do first?”
“Oh! Oh! The pea gravel!” Tendi said.
“Yeah!” Boimler agreed. “I was finding that stuff in my boots for weeks!”
“Oh yes, Madame Antedian,” Mariner put on her flounciest voice, “these tiny rocks are of the finest quality and fit for your palatial aquarium. Unlike those tiny rocks, where are jagged and lumpy and awful and would make the most horrible floor.” Mariner dropped the voice. “Can you believe we carted those things across four star systems?”
“And how did they keep ending up all over the ship?” Rutherford said. “They were in crates. Specially sealed crates so that the saline from Vixa wouldn’t evaporate off them.”
“I think the saline rotted the seals,” Mariner said. “I think that was their plan all along. Scatter gravel all over our ship and then get offended when we arrived with a less than full tank so they’d have the upper hand in negotiations.”
The crew had had to shovel pea gravel into newly replicated crates twice before they finally reached Antede III.
Rutherford stepped aside so Tendi could do the honors of fully wiping the pea gravel from the Cerritos’s memory.
“Let’s do the Risian cook next!” Mariner said. “He was last transported more than six months ago, right?”
Rutherford checked the log. “Sure was!”
“Flambe this!” Mariner made an elaborate flourish with her left hand as she deleted his residual pattern with her right.
He’d been brought aboard by the Tellarite ambassador the Cerritos was transporting to his next posting. The chef had been cooking for the Tellarite ambassador for almost a decade and had demanded that one of the holodecks be turned into a kitchen for him for the entirety of the trip. Less holodeck time would’ve been bad enough, but on top of that he’d insisted on throwing a crew dinner every night. A Tellarite’s palate took some getting accustomed to for many Federation species, and after the first crew dinner the senior staff had come up with multiple ways to graciously offer lower ranking officers their places at the chef’s table. Mariner had choked down more than her share of unidentifiable food and all of their taste buds had sighed in relief when that particular duo had beamed off the Cerritos.
The deletions continued at a steady clip. Rutherford removed the dragon scale armor Billups’ mother had sent that had shed sharp, opalescent scales everywhere, that stuck like glitter and clogged up vents. Boimler got rid of the trace of Ransome’s brother who had spent his whole stay asking people to play handball with him and pouting when they said no. Mariner erased the Bynars who had kept suggesting ways to improve efficiency, even though the increase was never more than .003% and the time it took to implement the change meant it was a net loss of efficiency overall. Tendi wiped out the three tons of fertilizer they’d dragged from Trill to Altus. It turned out shed trill symbiote skins had exactly the right alkaline content to be beneficial to Altus’s over-farmed soil. It also turned out that they smelled like unwashed belly buttons.
Some of the traces were just older (or, younger, really) versions of themselves and other members of the crew. Traces from the most recent transport were kept, but anything older than that was wiped. The rule they’d tacitly agreed on for those was that everyone would delete their own traces. This month Tendi wiped ten pattern traces of herself, Rutherford deleted eight, Boimler removed twelve, and Mariner had a whole twenty to remove.
“Look!” Rutherford pulled up the next file in line, “This is the one from when Shaxs beamed down into that fertility festival by accident. You can see all the pollen the biofilter had to remove before rematerializing him.”
“They should’ve let him keep the pollen,” Mariner said. “Just let T’ana come meet him on the pad.”
“I, uh, don’t think the transporter pad would’ve survived that,” Tendi said.
“What’s this one?” Boimler pointed at a file name that was just an undated string of numbers.
“Hm,” Rutherford said, opening the file to look at the pattern more closely. “Looks like some kind of inorganic matter. I bet it’s fine to get rid of.” But when he tried to wipe the file, it just reappeared in the transporter log. Rutherford tried again, and it popped right back on to the list. “That’s weird.”
“Should we try materializing it?” Tendi suggested. “That should clear it from the cache.”
“I guess.” Rutherford ran his fingers up the transporter controls and something started shimmering on the pad.
It wobbled there for a moment, mostly shapeless, and Rutherford adjusted the containment field, trying to bring whatever it was into cohesion. It was hard to finesse the transporter controls when you didn’t even know what you were transporting.
Then, finally, the shimmering light resolved into a small pouch and fell to the transporter pad with a plop.
Tendi went over to look at it more closely. It was small and brown, and closed with a pull cord at its top. It fit easily in her palm. “What is—” she started to ask, and then the bag burped. Or something inside it did.
Tendi opened it hesitantly and peered inside. “I don’t see anything.” She bounced the bag gently in her hand. “It feels empty.”
Tricorder in hand, Boimler went to join the inspection of the pouch, but before he’d made it halfway across the room, a snout poked up out of the bag’s opening, followed quickly by a head, and then a whole dragon, about the size of a Earth horse, jumped out of the bag and landed on the transporter pad. It immediately lunged for Tendi’s arm and she yelped, staggering backwards and falling off the pad and onto the floor.
“Computer, raise a level one force field around the transport pad!” Mariner shouted.
The bag had been jostled out of Tendi’s hand as she fell, and it lay on the transporter pad, within the force field. The dragon nosed at it, and chewed its draw string experimentally. There was smoke seeping out of the bag now, and a few brightly colored pebbles had scattered from its opening.
Boimler looked frantically around at his crewmates as the dragon gave up nibbling on the bag and breathed a small plume of fire at him. It crashed against the force field and dissipated. Boimler didn’t quite shriek. “What is going on?”
“Oh no,” Rutherford said slowly, “it’s a sack of Sax.”
“A what?” Mariner said.
“The instrument Captain Riker plays?” Tendi asked.
“He plays the trombone,” Boimler said officiously.
“Sax. They’re this interdimensional being we ran into awhile back. Don’t you guys remember? They wanted to use the Ritos’s warp core as a piece in their five-dimensional board game? Or, that’s how they explained it to us, anyway.”
“Oh, right.” Mariner nodded. “They turned everyone purple for awhile because we were worth more points that way.”
“They had one of these, or this,” Rutherford pointed at the bag. “They kept all their pieces in it.”
“So what’s it doing here? And why’s there a dragon in it?” As Mariner asked this a trill symbiote oozed its way out of the bag. Stacked on top of it was a full place setting for a state dinner. The entrée was some sort of grilled meat.
The dragon snapped up the meat, knocking the plate to the ground, where it shattered. Then the dragon began nosing at the symbiote.
“I think everything we’ve been deleting has been funneled into the pattern trace of the sack of Sax,” Rutherford said. “When we materialized it, well, it materialized all that other stuff as well. Beaming interdimensional beings and artifacts is a big no-no in Billups’s book. It opens up a whole can of worms our systems aren’t designed to handle. We didn’t know Sax was interdimensional when we beamed them on board.”
“And all the patterns we deleted are being re-interpreted by the bag.” Tendi had gotten to her feet and was standing right at the forcefield, staring at the strange parade of objects and creatures that was coming out of the bag. “We deleted Billups’s dragon scale armor and it turned it in to an actual dragon.”
Said dragon was currently batting some of the pebbles around between its paws.
“And that’s the pea gravel for the Antedian aquarium!” Tendi said.
“We’ve got to get rid of it!” Boimler said.
“Calm down, Boims,” Mariner said. “They’re just rocks.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“How are we going to do that, though?” Rutherford said. “Usually we just have the replicators reclaim any matter we don’t need, but that’s basically just like transporting it. It won’t get it fully out of the buffers.”
“Maybe we could just keep it there?” Tendi suggested. “How much damage could it cause just tucked in a corner in the transporter buffer?”
“That’s just asking for trouble down the line,” Mariner said. “You know these sorts of things always come back to bite you. Look!” She waved a hand at the dragon, and the increasingly large piles of rocks, and the trill symbiote slurping its way in between them. “It’s already come back to bite us!”
Then a hand reached out of the sack’s opening, and slowly dragged itself forward, pulling the arm it was attached to out of the bag as well, and then a shoulder, and then the entirety of Ransome’s handball obsessed brother. He got to his feet, saw the dragon and shrieked.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Boimler said.
“Let’s just run a targeted phaser sweep over the pad,” Mariner said. “That should take care of everything.”
“There are like, a bunch of sentient things on that pad now,” Rutherford objected.
“C’mon, I would hardly call Ransome’s brother sentient. Besides, there’s another one of him out there.”
“As a transporter original, with a very impressive clone,” Boimler looked caught between pride and chagrin, “I object to the cavalier way you are treating that duplicated individual’s life.”
Tendi waved her hand in front of the duplicate Ransome sibling and he turned to look at her blankly. “Hello?” she said. He kept staring for a moment, and then glanced down at his hand, which was holding a ball. He held it up to her quizzically. He started to hand it to her, but his hand hit the force field and he yelped again.
“Ok,” Mariner said, “I know I said the guy wasn’t sentient, but he wasn’t that dense.”
Tendi pulled out her tricorder and began scanning the collection of objects and creatures on the other side of the force field.
A single Bynar emerged from the sack and then got down on hands and knees to peer back inside it. The Bynar was hit in the face with a gob of Plomeek soup as the sack began spewing a variety of sauces.
“I’m not actually detecting any neural activity from any of the life forms on the pad.” Tendi peered more closely at her tricorder. “The trill symbiont doesn’t even have its electromagnetic charge that it needs to communicate. They might not actually be sentient.”
Mariner pumped a fist. “Phaser them!”
Boimler joined Tendi next to the field and also waved a hand at the Ransome sibling. “Can you understand me?” Boimler asked very slowly.
“Phaser them, Rutherford!” Mariner said again. “Before it’s too late!” The accumulating pebbles, sauces, and discarded symbiont skins were quickly filling up the space. The Bynar was almost knee deep in a sludge that was guaranteed to fill the whole ship with a nauseating stench if it managed to escape the force field it was pressing against.
“What if we’re wrong?” Boimler asked.
Suddenly Billups’s voice echoed over the comm system. “Engineering to transporter room 2. We’re detecting some very strange power usage spikes from your pad. What’s going on down there?”
Rutherford tapped his combadge. “Uh, nothing sir! Just taking a few extra precautions with this month’s buffer wipe.”
“Alright, ensign. Let us know if you run into any trouble.”
Rutherford chuckled nervously. “Will do, sir.” He closed the line hastily.
“Wait,” Tendi said, “remember all those game pieces Sax was creating? Didn’t they make a whole life-sized 3D chess board featuring members of the senior staff as pieces?”
“Yeah!” Rutherford said, “Dr. T’ana’s had a full tail. It was so weird!”
“I bet these are just like those,” Tendi continued.
The Bynar was doing an awkward doggie paddle to stay above the rising line of the Sack sludge. It had almost reached Ransome’s brother’s chin.
“And those didn’t have minds of their own,” Boimler agreed. “Sax had to tell them were to move on the board.”
“We never actually saw Sax create sentient life,” Rutherford said. “And it’s the sack that’s creating all these things now, not the transporter, so I bet they’re just like Sax’s chess pieces.”
“Even emptier than Ransome’s brother on the inside!” Mariner said. And then shouted “Phaser them!” again.
Rutherford looked at Tendi and Boimler. Tendi shrugged. And after a moment’s hesitation Boimler nodded.
“Phasering!” Rutherford said. A sweep of orange light ran across the transporter pad, evaporating everything in its path.
“Well,” Mariner wrapped her arms around Tendi and Boimler’s shoulders, “let’s hope next month’s TBD Day is just as exciting as this one.”
“Maybe let’s not hope that,” Tendi said.
“C’mon gang, drinks are on me.” And Mariner steered them towards the transporter room’s door.
“The drinks are free,” Boimler grumbled.
“Not the point!” Mariner said.
Just before the door swished closed behind them, a small pebble rolled through it and bounced unnoticed past Mariner’s boot.