manic depression

the scalosians

Deela, Queen of Scalos wears her long strawberry blond hair high on her head. Her beautiful blues eyes are wrapped in thick long eyelashes. Deela is adorned in a silver and blue sheer gown that reveals her right arm and leg in their entirety.

Kirk sips from a cup on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and suddenly finds himself standing in front of Deela. She explains her people were biochemically hyperaccelertaed due to volcanic radiation poisoning sometime early in the 21st century. The cup Kirk touched was contaminated, thus accelerating him to the same speed the Scalosians operate.

Kirk looks around the bridge. It appears his crew have turned to statues as they stand nearly motionless. The Captain realizes the crew are in fact alive, though at his accelerated rate, they simply appear near motionless. Back in unaccelerated time, his crew watch him vanish to be replaced with a mosquito like buzz in the room. Mr. Spock begins to analyze the buzzing and finds it to be the conversations of those in the hyperaccelerated state.

Analyzing Kirk’s coffee cup, McCoy discovers traces of radioactive water from Scalos in the beverage, and realizes it must have something to do with Kirk’s disappearance. McCoy and Spock use the Scalosian water to make an antidote that could reverse the acceleration effect. Armed with the antidote, Spock drinks some Scalosian water and hyperaccelerates himself to rescue the Captain.

Kirk then takes the antidote and returns to the normal speed of time. Spock however, remains accelerated a while longer and makes the necessary repairs to the ship’s vital systems at lightning-fast speed. Spock then returns the ship, along with himself, to normal. Then Mr. Spock says to Captain Kirk that he had an accelerating experience.

I am a Scalosian, buzzing around the immobile statues around me. I live in a place of never ending ideas and possibilities, constrained only by the number of minutes we are given in this life. I am happy here, perhaps alone, but my ideas and dreams make a better companion than a statue.

I have an appointment with a psychiatrist three days from now who will prescribe an antidote, reducing me to their lethargic state. I am doing it for them. If I take the antidote, can I return to this place? Can I return to Scalos? I don’t want to be slow down, I don’t want to die. I am terrified.

Wink of an Eye, Star Trek episode 68, was released in November of 1968.