Clamping Riker: Inducing REM to Stall the Infection
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Riker strains in unconscious agitation while Pulaski battles the controls and flags the brainwave patterns as dangerously irregular.
Pulaski locks onto the proper amplitude, makes a precise adjustment, and steadies Riker’s neural patterns.
Troi demands to know if the treatment is working; Pulaski confirms the stimulation is stalling the infection—but only temporarily.
Pulaski reads a K-complex signaling REM; Troi names it as dreaming as Riker’s face relaxes, the system settling into a precarious equilibrium.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Focused and urgent, with a cold professional determination that masks the underlying weight of responsibility and thinly held hope.
Pulaski stands over Riker's biobed, making precise adjustments to the neural stimulator while watching diagnostic readouts; she identifies a stabilizing amplitude and reports the appearance of a K-complex and REM state.
- • stabilize Riker's neural activity long enough to prevent further neural invasion
- • identify measurable biomarkers (K-complex/REM) that indicate temporary containment
- • Targeted neural stimulation can alter the infection's progression by changing host neurochemistry.
- • Time bought through stabilization is valuable for finding a definitive cure or treatment.
Externally calmer as REM begins; internally at risk and passive, his agency ceded to others while his body becomes the site of an ethical-medical struggle.
Riker lies unconscious on the biobed, initially highly agitated; as Pulaski finds an effective amplitude and Troi confirms REM, his facial expression relaxes and agitation diminishes, indicating the stimulation's immediate physiological effect.
- • (implied) survive the infection and return to consciousness intact
- • (implied) rely on medical team to find an effective intervention
- • (implied) that his command and crew will attempt to save him
- • (implied) that his body will respond to properly calibrated medical intervention
Concerned and watchful; emotionally invested in Riker's welfare while maintaining the clarity to translate subjective signs into operationally useful information.
Troi remains at Riker's bedside, monitoring his affect and the team’s actions; she interprets the shift in brain activity as dreaming and vocalizes the psychic/empathetic confirmation that Pulaski's stimulation has produced REM.
- • confirm whether Riker's internal state is restorative or merely stalled
- • communicate affective/psychic indicators to the medical team to shape treatment choices
- • Riker's inner experience (dreaming) is diagnostically significant and affects the pathogen's behavior.
- • Clear communication of empathic readings will help clinicians calibrate medical intervention.
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The bedside vital signs monitor displays chaotic waveforms that initially indicate irregular neural activity; Pulaski studies these readouts to tune the stimulator and uses the display to confirm a vertex K-complex and transition into REM, making the monitor the evidentiary center of the procedure.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
Enterprise Sickbay functions as the clinical theater for this emergency intervention—its equipment, procedures, and personnel converge to convert technical tinkering into a life‑buying maneuver, turning sterile space into an arena of moral and medical risk.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Pulaski’s all‑negative database search pressures her into initiating the radical neural stimulation."
Key Dialogue
"PULASKI: The wave patterns are still too irregular."
"PULASKI: The vertex waves indicate a K-complex corresponding to an R.E.M. state."
"TROI: He's dreaming."