by Неизвестный
Stop that, commanded the wordless voice of the centuries-old symbiont inside her. The younger half of her share consciousness could sense the other's stern but patient tolerance of humanoid folly. Right now, the symbiont—with its accumulated wisdom, its perspective that reached beyond the births and deaths of its host bodies—served as an anchor against the running wild of her fears and dark fantasies. She was safe that way . . . yet at the same time, the humanoid part felt a twinge of resentment. It was easy enough for the symbiont to take a lofty, enlightened attitude; it hadn't walked around in the nightmare world that had been created in the altered holosuite for Ahrmant Wyoss. The CI modules' interference effect had divided her into two, and only one of those two had gone into that other world. The symbiont had had no knowledge of what she had seen and felt, the claustrophobic streets and decaying buildings, until their separate minds had been merged again into a single consciousness, and the symbiont had been able to examine the new memories presented to it.
The voice moved within her once more, bringing emotion into synch with wisdom. It was her voice that told her to go on with her work, with the tasks that she had made her own.
"Computer," she spoke aloud. "Initiate simulation sequence." Dax drew her hand back from the CI module.
"Sequence initiated and holding at input stasis level." As the computer's level voice responded to her order, a cluster of the module's filaments glowed brighter.
Inside the CI module, Dax knew, a little world had been created; one that was infinitesimally small, not even existing in the dimensions of physical space. Yet one that was still real enough, in the fluid and shifting definitions of reality that she had come to embrace since beginning this investigation. The CI module's internal programming had been, at her command, set into motion; through the linked microcircuits, a loop held steady. And waiting.
"Increase power to operational level." She stood back from the device, her arms folded before her. "Break stasis and begin external effects relay."
"Warning—" The voice of the station's computer held no emotion. "Order as given will result in possible neurosystemic perception of simulated reality, as programmed within the subject device. You are advised to set field limits before proceeding."
Dax had heard the cautionary statement before; she had been the one who had entered it into the computer's data banks. She didn't need to be reminded, but if anyone else had come into the lab in her absence—such as Julian—and activated the CI module, the unanticipated results could have been dire.
"Set radiated field at one meter from center axis of subject module." She stood just within the sphere she had described. "Terminate field effect at maximum abruptness; no distance-algorithm taper to field strength."
"Settings established. External effects relay commenced."
She closed her eyes, placing herself in darkness as the CI module's reality expanded from a mathematical point of nothingness to a circumference that held her within. She could feel the reordering of the synapses inside her skull, the microscopic tug upon the delicate fibers of the nerve and brain cells. Like the pull of a magnet upon iron filings, the simplest possible demonstration of the touch of the unseen upon the visible—the image had struck her before, of how the CI technology worked. But an inexact simile: the magnet, whatever its powers, was an inanimate thing, without thought or volition. Whenever she had felt the CI module's effects, a disquieting certainty had risen within her, of a malign intelligence unfolding to embrace her own.
From the computer's last statement, Dax had silently counted off three seconds. From previous experience, she knew that was long enough. She opened her eyes, and found herself in another darkness. A world of it; one that she had seen before, that she had walked through, with Dr. Bashir at her side. She kept herself still, not even turning her head; the slightest motion could trigger the crippling nausea she had felt the first time she had been here, the result of the processing lag between the humanoid neurosystem and that of the symbiont within her. Looking straight ahead of herself, she saw the blind windows and ashen walls of Ahrmant Wyoss's hallucinated world, the bleak urban landscape that had been his personal hell.
The illusion was not total; dimly, through the shapes of the deserted buildings and the cluttered horizon beyond, the outlines of the research lab aboard DS9 could be seen, like a brighter video image leaking through the dark one masking it. Without the aid of a holosuite's sensory transmitters and low-level tractor beams operating on her perceptions, the hallucinated world depended entirely on the effects of the CI module for its transitory existence. But those effects had become stronger: less of the research lab could be seen this time than when she had last performed this experiment. The rudimentary intelligence contained within the module had become more adept at manipulating her neurosystem; its function was to continuously learn how to draw any particular subject farther and farther into the world it created.
Dax took a single step backward; for a moment, the vision of the empty city blurred sickeningly, her digestive tract clenching in protest against the dizzying assault. The sensation passed, like the dying of a sudden stormwind; she could see around her nothing but the familiar confines of the research lab and its equipment. On the bench in front of her lay the exposed CI module, its empty black casing pushed aside; the filaments winding among the miniaturized components still glowed as brightly as before.
She had stepped out of the limited range of the module's effects; at this distance, and with the sudden drop-off she had programmed into its operation, the CI technology couldn't reach inside her skull. All of that other world, Ahrmant Wyoss's interwoven fantasies of pain and abandonment, were contained by an invisible sphere, just within reach of her outstretched hand.
"Append research notes," she spoke aloud. "The cortical-induction field appears to have increased effective strength since my previous experience with it; gain in perceptual validity is an estimated twenty-five percent." She paused for a few seconds. "I attribute the additional CI strength to the ongoing aftereffects of repeated exposure to the module's operations, specifically upon my own humanoid neurosystem. As I anticipated, there's been an unconscious learned response on the part of the field-receptive neurotransmitters; interpretation of the CI effects is at an increasingly high level, resulting in apparent perception of the programmed reality simulation without concurrent sensory stimuli from a holosuite. End notes, computer." As the data was being logged into her memory-bank file area, Dax continued to regard the activated CI module, mulling over her previous findings.
The things that she hadn't told her research partner, that she hadn't wanted Bashir to know, at least not yet; those bits of information struck to the heart of the CI technology's mysteries. That the technology represented a two-way passage, she and Julian had already determined; the phenomenon of the black-cased modules reading a subject's innermost desires and then feeding them back, in a spiralling loop of murderous obsessions, had appeared to be the most significant alteration to the holosuites' functioning. But just within the last shift, she had traced down another, equally important element.
All of the CI modules were connected on a subspace communication link. The bandwidth was narrow enough to have eluded her first attempts at detection; she'd had to perform a manually directed frequency sweep to find it just below the station's own transmission range. The modules from the deactivated holosuites had been taken off-line, but there was a sufficient data stream from the one on the lab bench for her to analyze. From a central locus on Bajor's surface, a network united the CI modules in all of the holosuites in Moagitty; whatever took place in one holosuite was instantly communicated to the others and factored into their joint programming. The altered holosuites were not creating a multiplicity of different perceptual worlds, based upon the input of their various users, but instead were drawing those users into facets of a single, master-programmed alternate reality. That all-encompassing hallucination had an essentially centripetal, or inward-directed, nature, Dax had dis
covered; the minor variations between the users' perceptions were eliminated over time, and at an exponentially accelerating rate, resulting in a single world shared among them. The world that McHogue had created for them.
The microcircuits of the CI module on the lab bench glowed with the mute life that coursed through them. Dax thought—not for the first time—of how the module itself was a like a microcosm of the city that had been built almost overnight upon the planet; every component in its appointed place, all designed to serve one function, and merely awaiting the energy and desire needed to bring all to its culminating moment. Moagitty, McHogue's city; his world . . . and his will, on Bajor as it was in the holosuite.
None of what McHogue had brought into being aboard DS9, the epidemic of murder and the artificially generated madness that had erupted in the narrow corridors, had been his true intent; Dax and the other officers had determined that McHogue had used the station for his testing ground, a dry run to calibrate the CI modules' effects. He had said as much himself, in his face-to-face confrontation with Commander Sisko; Bajor and the establishing of Moagitty had been his goal from the beginning.
And beyond that? wondered Dax. The question remained unanswered; given the overweening megalomania that McHogue had displayed so far, she found it hard to believe that a pocket empire—even one named so grandiosely after himself—could be the limit of his ambitions. As Julian had pointed out to her during their investigative shifts in the lab, McHogue showed all the classic signs of a criminal mentality, a true sociopath; by comparison, DS9's own Quark was no more than a sharp Ferengi businessman, content to keep a good thing going.
For someone like McHogue, every achieved goal became a stepping-stone toward ever wilder and more far-reaching schemes. The reality principle was lacking in him; that had been Julian's thumbnail psychiatric diagnosis. McHogue possessed no ability to moderate his appetites, his spiralling egotism, based upon the limits of ordinary creatures. The CI technology and the altered holosuites had been as much a trap for him as any he could have set for his unwitting victims; the perfect hallucinatory worlds he had been able to create with the black-cased modules served to validate a delusional state that was already out of control, like throwing an incendiary liquid upon a raging fire. He had made himself a god in a private universe, one bound by the walls of Moagitty.
And that privacy, Dax had reasoned, was the motive for McHogue's abandoning DS9 and moving on to his purpose-built city on the surface of Bajor. His megalomania dictated a world built from scratch, one that partook of not even the least contamination from a reality beyond his control, every mirror, he wished to see his own face; in every girder and extrusion-molded stretch of wall, he would demand the shaping of his own hand, the outpouring of his prodigal mind. Like walking around inside his head, thought Dax; that was what the patrons who were now locked inside Moagitty would have found. That had been her own perception of her journey through the altered holosuite's illusory world: the ultimate solipsism, one so vast that it could subsume all that entered into it, make them as much a part of the contents of McHogue's head as the curved bone that formed his skull.
"Thus, Moagitty itself," said Dax aloud. In the limited spaces of the research lab, without Bashir or anyone else listening, her voice sounded remote, almost disembodied. The time had come, she knew, with the careful working of her thoughts, that she would have to speak and let the station's computer record what she had discovered about McHogue and his world—and what she had determined her course of action to be. She didn't want to leave her working notes in disarray; there might not be a chance to straighten them out later. Not for her, at any rate . . .
"His own little world." She held out her hand, fingers just touching the invisible field of the CI module's radiation. "His own universe." Not here, aboard Deep Space Nine, but in his own self-willed, hermetically sealed environment, where nothing not of his own creation could intrude. And where, as in that ancient Earth story, The Masque of the Red Death, he could pull the great doors shut and let the grim revels begin, free of any interference from the outside.
"But you forgot one thing," murmured Dax. A back door to that world, that private universe, a door left open aboard the station; she could almost imagine it against her fingertips, waiting to be pushed wide enough for her to enter once again. All she would have to do would be to take a single step forward—and she would be there. Walking inside McHogue's head, the night and stars at the horizon of his skull.
He had forgotten about the one CI module left operable aboard DS9; operable, and connected to all the others by the subspace link they shared. So that made one world among them, the world that McHogue had created. Dax had wondered if, in his furious rush toward the fulfillment of his desires, that apotheosis named Moagitty, all that had preceded the city's rising upon Bajor had been heedlessly discarded behind him . . . or if McHogue had remembered, but had thought he'd succeeded in making the crossing of this threshold too frightening to contemplate.
For she was frightened; Dax had to admit that to herself. The memory of what she had seen before in that world haunted her. With every step taken in that dark vision had come the sure knowledge that more lay beyond its surface, things darker yet and wrapped around a heart concealing even greater violence. The apparition of Ahrmant Wyoss as a battered and abandoned child had been essentially saddening in effect; the weeping figure at the foot of those basement stairs had been no more than one of the holosuite's electronic echoes, and perhaps even less than that. An echo of an echo, the last fading vestige of that fragment of the hallucinatory world that had once been Wyoss's mind and soul. When Wyoss died in the world outside the altered holosuite, there was no one left to bear him from memory into eternity; McHogue, the god of the new world, had other business to take care of. Always rushing forward toward his own glorious destiny, leaving the broken corpses behind . . .
Rushing toward that bright doorway, the one that Dax had seen the last few times she had gone alone into the CI module's field, her humanoid neurosystem separated by the interference effect from the anchor of the symbiont. At first a spark, just at the horizon of that dark world; enough to cause her to suspect what it might be. And then, a discernible opening, from the oppressive, smothering night to a furious illumination. She could hear the voices and shrieking laughter from beyond. And this last time, from which she had just now stepped back, into the safety of the research lab and the enclosing station—the doorway had been bright enough, light spilling out to cast knife-edge shadows around her, so that she had been able to tell for certain where it led.
"To Moagitty." The fear that arose in the humanoid part of her kept the voice a whisper, throat tightened to just her breath. She could speak the name of the opening's destination, the luminous break in the artificial world generated by the CI module on the lab bench. It led straight to the interior of McHogue's city, into the shared hallucination that had grown so large as to consume the reality that held it. Into McHogue's world . . .
She had already decided what she was going to do. There wasn't time to consult with Benjamin. No time—plus there was the chance that as commander of the station, he would forbid any such action as she was contemplating. Dax could easily picture him telling her that the risk to her life and sanity was too great; they would have to find another way to forestall the catastrophe that was already reaching toward them.
Before coming to the lab, she had studied the latest reports at Ops's meteorological-observations desk. All the other crew members' attention had been focused on the storms battering the surface of Bajor; only she had noted the other numbers, the ionic discharge factors surrounding the upper atmosphere, the indices of positron emissions rippling through the fabric of space itself. The numbers were just a few degrees off normal readings, but she could see the direction in which they were heading. An exponential acceleration; soon enough they would hit the steep part of their slope, and that would be when Deep Space Nine would feel the first shock waves. The disturbances whose e
picenter lay within the walls of Moagitty would have reached this far, like an ocean-bound tidal wave, one that gathered strength as it rolled outward. At that point, McHogue's private universe would have attained its own critical mass; there might be no way to stop the implosive subsuming of the outer reality into the voracious black hole he had created. Beyond that, Dax could not visualize; nothing in her symbiont's centuries of experience had prepared her for such an eventuality.
Or for what she had to do now.
"Computer—begin recording; append to research notes file."
It took her only a few minutes to bring everything up to date. That much was her duty as well; now, if for some reason she was unable to return to the lab—to DS9 and this world outside the CI module's field—someone, perhaps Julian, might be able to come along afterward and complete her work.
"End record."
Another voice, yet still her own, spoke inside her. Are you ready?
There was no need to answer aloud. Her symbiont knew the thoughts they shared, as easily as her left and right hands could bear a common weight cupped between them.
The decision had already been made, each part, the humanoid and the symbiont, aware of the needed actions—and the consequences thereof. One hand would have to carry the burden, and the other close tight . . . and wait. That was the lesson Dax had learned from the first time she had gone into the altered holosuite's illusory world; a Trill's shared consciousness had to be divided, the CI module itself forcing the symbiont's mind from the intermingled contact with the humanoid's, for the hallucination to take hold and become real.