Be glad you weren't here for when some of us got pulled into lovely little nightmare worlds. That was horrible. [ She hasn't dealt at all with the masks yet, though, so her opinion on what's worse might change. ]

They're essentially signal relay stations, to help us improve our ability to track transmissions. The hope is that we can develop a better way to trace the location of things like transmissions that seem to come from within the ship, or assist Security and Medical in tracking down calls for help that aren't able to give details on their location for whatever reason.