B’Elanna stepped back, leaned against the wall beside Chakotay, and watched the exchange. They’d all see reason once they started working through the practicalities of the situation. She knew they would. They had to.
Rollins asked, “Can we get to the rift and back in that time frame?”
“If we plan efficiently,” Seven said.
“And the Nacene,” Tuvok said. “We will need to have a defense plan in place should this rift indeed prove to be a gateway into Exosia.”
“Good thinking, Commander,” Chakotay said. “Make sure we have countermeasures ready to go if need be.”
Nakano glanced up from a padd she held in her hand and over at Seven. “Any potential health side effects—lingering radiation from the Blue Eye or Gremadia’s destruction, for example?”
“Nothing more than what we’re currently dealing with,” Seven said.
Chakotay inhaled sharply. “Are you confident we might actually find something?”
“No,” Seven said. “But I am virtually certain that if we don’t go back to the rift we may never locate the Doctor.”
“If we can trace the Doctor, how will we extract him from wherever he is?” Ayala said.
“Thank you!” B’Elanna muttered.
“Watch your tone, Lieutenant,” Chakotay said, then turned to Knowles.
“Presuming that subspace’s deterioration is ongoing, can we even navigate away from the rift once we get there?”
“I’d need to study the astrometrics data in order to plot a course,” Knowles said, scooting her chair away from where B’Elanna hovered. “But I suppose anything is possible. We might nee—”
B’Elanna’s patience ran out. “Is anyone here the least bit concerned about my engines? Anyone?” Visions of her breaching warp core exploded before her eyes. Fast, shallow breaths made her light-headed. Seven had no right to send Voyager into harm’s way in pursuit of her crackpot theories. Dangling the possibility of Janeway’s recovery before them was no different from a Cardassian archon offering empty promises of clemency to a condemned criminal facing a death sentence. “You tend to be insensitive, Seven, but giving false hope falls into the realm of cruelty. The Doctor is likely obliterated into zillions of photonic pieces and the captain is little more than a breathing corpse!”
“Lieutenant,” Chakotay said, the sharp disapproval in his voice making her flinch.
Accepting that she’d lost this round, she looked away. “Yes, sir.” She crossed her arms over her heaving chest. The throbbing tempo of her pulse in her ears. Her limbs trembled. She squeezed her arms to still them. Steady, focused breathing did nothing to quell her anger.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Chakotay look slowly around the table, meeting each member of the staff in the eyes before ending with B’Elanna. She knew what he was doing. His motives were transparent to her: he wanted to know who was with him as he made a difficult decision. She kept her face forward, refusing to look at him.
“Fine then,” Chakotay said. “When we’re done here, I’ll issue the order to head for the rift to look for the Doctor.”
If B’Elanna’s heart had been pounding before, it abruptly stopped now. Her hands went cold and any hope she had of ever breathing again ended. She thought of the green dot on the map. The hopeful green dot where Tom might be waiting for her. She wanted to scream but couldn’t find her voice. She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and found the strength to speak.
“What about the Homeward Bound? At this point, the only chance we have of finding Tom or Harry is to get out of this hellhole,” she said, her voice husky. B’Elanna fixed her gaze on Chakotay. He had to know that their friendship hung on this moment.
In his face, she found sympathy, but also resolve: Chakotay would not budge.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Her mind blanked from shock. They were abandoning Tom. Thoughts tumbled out, each with increasing vehemence as her frustration gained momentum. “You think finding the Doctor is more important than finding Tom and Harry. The Doctor is software. We can rebuild him. We can’t replace Tom and Harry. There’s not a holobuffer we can pull them out of.”
Chakotay said nothing.
“Lieutenant Torres, the best chance we have at finding a cure for the captain is if we locate the Doctor,” Tuvok said. “Otherwise, her death will be assured. And you, more than anyone, are aware that any remaining data relating to the Doctor’s program has been corrupted beyond recall.”
“What about the rest of us? Do we sacrifice all of our lives for the chance of saving her?” B’Elanna loved the captain as much as the rest of them did, but she couldn’t believe that Janeway would endorse such an all-or-nothing strategy. Or maybe she would, B’Elanna thought. She wouldn’t give up on any of us.
“Overall, the crew as a whole stands to benefit from a skilled medical practitioner in their midst,” Tuvok said. “No doubt everyone in this room has had an experience where only the Doctor’s extraordinary capacities saved their lives or the lives of another crew member. Lieutenant Nakano, while adequate, lacks the abilites of an EMH.”
“This fool’s errand could get us all killed,” B’Elanna said. “And then what good will the Doctor be?” In desperation, B’Elanna turned to Clarice Knowles. Clarice and Tom were friends. It couldn’t just be her, Tom’s lover, fighting for his return. Someone else had to fight for him. Clarice averted her eyes from B’Elanna. In profile, B’Elanna could see the pilot’s eyes glistening brightly.
No, she was alone in her battle. The sorry truth was that for anyone but Tom, she probably would have sided with Chakotay and the rest of the senior staff.
But this was Tom.
She inhaled a deep, ragged breath and rose from her chair. Quietly, she said, “Maybe today is a good day to die. I’ll be trying to keep my engines from blowing up before we meet our deaths in glorious battle.” B’Elanna then crossed the room and was out the door. Let Chakotay send Rollins after her. Confine her to quarters. Throw her in the brig. To B’Elanna, it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.
In the space of a thought, the Doctor’s mind reconnected with his holographic form—wait. No. This didn’t feel like a holographic body. Whatever the case, the data stimulating his sensory receptacles felt glorious! Ah, to be alive and—uncomfortable. He was definitely uncomfortable. Cramped shoulder muscles, hard sharp points embedded into his forearms. Cold, damp, and hard. He smelled fermenting plants, no, rotting flesh. His eyes flickered open and he discovered that he was definitely on the ground, facedown on a stone floor, surrounded by dust and unidentifiable debris. Turning his head, even slightly, proved challenging: he was trapped beneath something solid—might it be wood?—that curved over his head and touched the ground in front of him, essentially creating a barrier between him and whatever was above him. Moving his limbs proved equally difficult. Weight on the backs of his legs, especially the calves, pressed them into the floor. Gingerly, he shifted his legs, jostling his knees back and forth to test the boundaries of their confinement. He succeeded in dislodging objects of various sizes and weights; from the sound made when they moved and what little texture he ascertained through his clothing, he guessed he was partially buried by rock or some other building material. He did find it odd, however, that he felt such pressure on his limbs. Not that he was one to show off superior physical skills, but he knew from a few discreet practice sessions on the holodecks that he could bench-press at least ten times what a typical humanoid could lift without any adjustments to his program. Unless a starship had landed on him, nothing he currently faced should pose much of an obstacle to him.
He could definitely tell he was in a small air pocket of some kind, because his upper body wasn’t confined by the same weight his legs were. The hollow space above his back and head, probably created by the same object that shielded his head, provided him with enough room to push back his shoulder blades and fan out his elbows. He met immediate, painful resistance when he tried moving his wrists. (He made a mental note when he returned t
o Voyager to adjust the parameters of his matrix so that his “skin” sensors were not quite as acutely tuned to reproduce every human nervous-system response.) Unlike his legs, his hands had been purposefully restrained, most likely by manacles. Manacles had to be attached to something to be effective. He analyzed the angle of his arms, the position of his body, and concluded that most likely his wrists were manacled to armrests. Armrests were generally part of furniture, ergo the object on top of him must be a chair. The quantity of fine particulate matter in the air as well as the detritus on his person—specifically his legs—led him to believe that the chair had likely prevented his torso from being buried after…what? An explosion? A cave-in? An earthquake?
Annoyed, he sighed. He was no closer to knowing where he was or what relation this place had to his quest to escape Exosia. Vivia had indicated that she would send him to the problem’s point of origin. Perhaps he wasn’t as advanced as a Vivia (his thoughts tinged with cynicism) but he failed to see what his present circumstances had to do with the Nacene, never mind the imbalance in Exosia. He considered the possibility that Vivia had tricked him into believing they had a deal when in reality she had merely engineered another means to contain. That would be a clever tactic. Given the chance and the means, he certainly would have tried it.
Weak gray light seemed to be creeping in off to his right; his eyes followed the light’s trajectory until he noticed a gap between the floor and the chair that trapped him. Focusing beyond his immediate area, his eyes gradually acclimated to the dim lighting until he could accurately discern more about the pie slice of the room he could see. Wherever Vivia had sent him, he was currently in the interior of a circular chamber, and a fancy one at that.
Exhibiting a sophisticated level of craftsmanship, the paved floor appeared to be composed of tightly interlocked pieces of polished granite. Rubble, primarily broken pieces of pale-colored stone; the Doctor guessed it might be similar to alabaster, as it reminded him very much of the luminous rock hewn from the Tuscan hills. Dark puddles stained the floor like carelessly spilled ink; he heard irregular drips plopping hollowly onto the ground. Inhaling deeply, he drew in a large breath of musty air. Dust trapped in his nose incited a loud, body-shaking, openmouthed sneeze; the sneeze’s momentum caused his face to slam into the floor, his lips and tongue becoming coated with gritty dirt. An unexpected shivery, ticklish sensation shuddered through his body as soon as the air burst through his mouth. He spit and licked his lips, trying to remove the distasteful metallic taste from his mouth and teeth, but didn’t succeed. Immobilized by the chair, he couldn’t reach his tongue to his shirt sleeve or his shoulder. Before he could formulate another strategy to rid himself of the unpleasant sensation, his nose scrunched up and another sneeze blew threw.
His thoughts stopped. He blinked. A sneeze.
A sneeze by itself was not an unusual phenomenon. The Doctor regularly treated patients for such physiological symptoms, which were typically prompted by allergic reactions. Such a reaction was not programmed into his holomatrix, however. Holograms didn’t have allergies, nor did programming them to mimic symptoms of humanoid ailments serve any purpose, as he had discovered when he had given his matrix a “cold.” Mucus-filled noses, rashes, warts, bunions, acne, headaches, backaches, and other such minor annoyances hadn’t been part of Dr. Zimmerman’s design. The sneeze confused the Doctor—greatly. He had little time to ponder what might have prompted such a malfunction when the sneeze repeated itself, this time generously laden with spittle.
Holograms definitely didn’t have saliva. Secretions weren’t part of the programming. The Doctor lingered on his disgust for only a brief moment (thoughts of the mad hologram Dejeran flitted through his mind) before he initiated proper empirical procedures to try to figure out what had prompted such a physical response.
The Doctor was forced to consider the possibility, one that he wasn’t sure terrified him or intrigued him, that he might have been given an actual flesh-and-bone body.
Such a transformation would explain why he couldn’t dislodge the debris on his legs. Without the almost limitless possibilities of his holomatrix, he would be confined to the same limits his humanoid compatriots had. Utilizing all the intellectual capacity he could muster—that certainly hadn’t been attenuated by whatever had happened—he catalogued and analyzed every sensation he could define and some he could truthfully say he had never experienced before. The steady glub-dub of circulation. Heat radiating off his skin. Lubrication in his eyes. And an itch! He felt an itch, though he couldn’t reach it, damnable annoyance that it was. A blunted, gnawing sensation in his innards insisted on being addressed; at best he could define it as achy. At first he thought he might have sustained internal injuries, but upon further evaluation he determined that the underlying sensation of lethargy that plagued him might be due to reduced cellular energy output. Put simply, this body suffered from low blood sugar, an uncomfortable but hardly life-threatening condition that could be addressed by ingesting food.
He felt hungry.
The alternating burbling and tightness in his belly made him think that this body had recently missed many meals. He could imagine how gratifying it would be to assuage this uncomfortable feeling. Ah, to eat! He paused, smiled, and thought, No, the real prize is to taste.
As intriguing as the possibility of becoming the equivalent of a holographic Pinocchio was, he knew, without being told or having proof, that he wasn’t entirely transformed. Though he certainly had physical limitations that hadn’t encumbered him previously, he still had access to his memories, his medical knowledge, and facts and skills relating to the various hobbies he had cultivated over the past few years. The essential elements that defined his identity appeared to have survived his removal from Voyager. He, the individual known to the crew as the Doctor, had exceeded the parameters of his programming to the degree that he could exist outside the holobuffers or his mobile emitter. I think, therefore I am. The realization struck him profoundly; he savored the thought: I am. I am more than a matrix and programming. I have evolved.
And yet he retained parts of his original nature. Weakened versions of his holographic capabilities lingered with him in this form. With concentrated effort, he could stretch the limits of this body’s senses and have enhanced visual, auditory, and olfactory capabilities. But what he could muster couldn’t compare to what he was accustomed to. He lacked the ability to effortlessly shift his vision between ultraviolet and infrared light spectrums or analyze the chemical compounds of whatever came in contact with his skin. The organic material that housed him placed limits on his ability to express his holographic nature. He concluded that he wasn’t entirely humanoid nor was he entirely holographic. Rather he’d become a hybrid, a synthesis of two, seemingly incompatible matters, photons and flesh.
While he wasn’t entirely certain what rules governed this new state of being, he knew that changing his current circumstances should be his chief priority. Slight decreases in the temperature and an increasingly fresh smell in the air indicated to the Doctor that the chamber opened to the outside. Probably not purposefully, he guessed, betting that walls had crumbled or a roof had caved in. Unexpected circumstances had to have wrought the destruction he could see, but whether it was an act of war or nature he couldn’t tell. He knew from the smell that many dead bodies lay buried beneath the debris; all too soon the stench would be stultifying.
Shadows moved in the room outside; the Doctor saw the shifting shades across the floor and knew he wasn’t alone. He was unable to discern words in the unintelligible, sibilant whispers he heard echoing outside. A glimpse of a sleeve, the glint of steel—a weapon or tool, he couldn’t be sure—and the footsteps, alternately sounding a ringing clackety-clack or a muted shuffle against the stone, gave no definitive clue as to who or what was outside. He recalled from his brief time with Vivia that a grating whirring field exuded from her—like a discordant energy aura. While her energy didn’t prompt any discomfort in the Doctor, it
was distinctive and he knew he’d recognize it if he encountered it again, even with his new physiological makeup. Thankfully, he didn’t sense it here. He heard multiple sets of footsteps, different vocal intonations; he guessed there were two or three individuals in the room. He almost called out to them to ask for help.
Almost.
In this moment, the Doctor realized he had a decision to make. A Starfleet hologram came programmed with an encyclopedic knowledge of rules and regulations coupled with a strict dictum to adhere to those regulations. Practical experience had taught the Doctor that sometimes rules needed to be fudged; Janeway had taught him that when circumstances called for it, rules needed to be tossed. While the Doctor hadn’t known what to expect when he accepted Vivia’s challenge to find the Light and stop him, he now knew that most likely, he had been sent to a pre-warp civilization. Whether he lived in the past or present he couldn’t say; he supposed it was somewhere in the past. Not only were there Prime Directive issues to consider, there was the conventional thinking about contaminating the timeline to consider as well. The Doctor prided himself on being a model officer, one who upheld the procedures that made Starfleet the outstanding organization it was. Yet…here he was. With a decision to make: to break the rules, or not. Theoretically, he could find a way to extricate himself from the wreckage and then stealthily search this world for evidence of the Light. He might be able to perform his mission with a minimum of interaction.
Or he might not.
He had a new appreciation for Janeway, who navigated this ethical gray area with far more confidence than he felt at present. So he decided to follow Janeway in making his choice. In the years he had known her, she had first erred on the side of assuring her crew’s survival; second, she examined the humanitarian or moral issues of a situation; and finally, she considered how the consequences of breaking the rules would impact her first and second priorities. If what Vivia told him was accurate, not only was Voyager in danger, the stability of the fabric of space-time across the universe was threatened.
String Theory, Book 3: Evolution Page 10