by K. W. Jeter
"It's not such a big deal. They all make a lot of noise; that's what they're supposed to do." Jake shrugged. "What could your uncle have done to you, anyway?"
"You'd be surprised." Nog gazed down glumly at the corridor's flooring. "I don't know. Maybe put a leg shackle on me and chained me behind the bar; I'd be washing out glasses and mugs for the rest of my life."
"Don't worry." From his shoulder, Jake lifted the baseball bat he carried. "I would've come and busted you out."
"Yeah, thanks. You'd be a big help, all right." Nog raised his head, looking a small measure more cheerful. "But then again, I didn't screw up, so it's okay. You know, I think it was different with your dad, because he always let you use the holosuites—the regular ones, that is. He'd even go in there with you, and everything. But they've been off-limits to me from the beginning. My uncle always said the holosuites were just for the suckers—the customers, I mean."
"You haven't missed anything. Not really." The outfield mitt had slipped down the length of the bat and now rested against his shoulder. With the mitt that close to his face, Jake could smell the sharp mingling of leather and sweat it gave off. He didn't know whether the mitt was genuine, something that had come all the way from Earth itself, or an exact recreation, something that one of the holosuites' replicators had cookd up. In one way it didn't matter, and in another way it did.
He had left the bat and the mitt at school, the one that Mrs. O'Brien ran for all the kids aboard the station. Instead of restricting him to living quarters, Jake's father had made a specific point—an order, really—about him going back there this shift, despite all the stuff that had happened in those creepy holosuites. The bat, with the mitt slung around it, had stood propped up in a corner of the schoolroom for several shifts—Jake couldn't remember how long it had been. That showed how wrapped up he'd gotten in that other world, hanging out with that strange boy with the knife and the cruel smile. He was real glad that was over. Having his father find out about it hadn't been the most pleasant thing in the world, and he had his suspicions about who had snitched on him—on DS9, the discovering and revealing of secrets was pretty much Odo's job. But in his heart, he was grateful for that; he might not have been able to end it, to stop going in there, by himself. And then who knew what might have happened to him, if it had gone on any longer? Dr. Bashir hadn't run all those tests on him just to keep in practice.
"Some people really go for it," mused Nog. "The holosuites and all that. My uncle says he's got some real regular customers. And your dad—he uses one every now and then."
"Yeah, he's got a bunch of old ballplayers programmed into one at Quark's bar. He likes talking to 'em. But they all seem to, like, spit a lot. You know? I guess that's authentic and all, but it's really weird."
They had reached the end of the corridor, to where it opened out to a view above the Promenade. Jake leaned it the rail, looking down at the milling crowd.
"The way I see it," said Jake, "is that it's more important for them. For old guys like my dad, I mean." He had given a lot of thought to the matter, and was still working it out inside his head. "Because it's like going back home for them. They didn't grow up in places like this." Jake gestured at enclosing metal walls and ceilings of the station. "My dad remembers all that stuff, trees and grass and everything But I don't." He fell silent for a moment, thinking about the first time he had gone with his father inside one of the holosuites—he couldn't remember how old he was then; it hadn't been here aboard DS9—and the difference he'd been able to discern, even at that age, between the way his father had looked around at the re-created summery world and how strange it had seemed to him. Or maybe not strange, or at least not any more so than the zillion other places he'd already seen, real worlds and Starfleet vessels and Federation outposts that he had stuffed inside his own personal memory bank. Could he help it if a holosuite's simulation of Earth didn't punch his buttons the same way it did for his father? Though he'd been smart and had kept his mouth shut about it, except for saying how great it was—he knew how much it all meant to his dad. He wouldn't have wanted to hurt his feelings.
"You're probably right." Nog stood beside him at the rail. "Though from what Uncle Quark told me, a lot of his customers go into his holosuites just to . . . you know . . . have sex. Then again, when you look at some of his customers, you gotta figure that's the only way they could."
Jake knew that his friend had inherited a wide streak of mercantile cynicism from his Ferengi genetics; the family traits were bound to show up sooner or later.
"There'd be some things about it I'd miss, though. If there weren't any holosuites." He turned his back to the Promenade view and weighed the wooden bat in both his hands. "Playing all that baseball—that was kinda fun." He hadn't yet decided whether it was worth going back in just for the sake of a game.
"Why do you need a holosuite to do that?"
"Come on." He looked at Nog in exasperation. "You need a lot of room to play baseball. That's the main thing." He used the bat to point to the closest bolted panels and girders. "We're just a little cramped for open space here, remember?"
"Not in the loading docks, out by the pylons—they're huge. They bring those freight containers big as whole ships in there."
"Oh sure—and they'd be happy to let me set up a baseball diamond right in the middle of the cranes and all that other heavy action." Jake rolled his eyes upward. "I thought you Ferengi were supposed to be so smart."
"Yeah, well, you're the son of the station's commander, aren't you?" Nog poked him in the arm. "Why not pull a little rank?"
Jake slowly shook his head. "You're not even as smart as I thought you were a moment ago. Believe me, it just doesn't work that way around here. Not with my dad, at least."
"So? Then we'll just have to deal with conditions as we find them—as my uncle would say. What's there to the game, anyway, except hitting the ball and running around the bases? We could do that much right here." Nog looked over the area surrounding them. "How many bases did you say there were?"
"Four. First, second, third and home plate. That's why it's called a diamond."
"Maybe we better make it a triangle, then; kind of a long skinny one." Nog pointed down the length of the corridor. "Okay, right there between those service panels on either—we'll make that home." He turned, tracing an imaginary line with his fingertip. "That girder is first base, and the vent grid's second. How's that sound?"
"Maybe you're not so dumb, after all." The notion had never even occurred to Jake. If you couldn't squeeze a diamond in, and you couldn't change the space, then change the diamond. Simple. As he thought about it, he remembered his father telling him about other games, street games, that were like baseball—hitting and running—but not exactly; you didn't even need a bat for them, just a sawn-off broom handle. That's what you were supposed to do: use whatever you had. He nodded as he looked around the improvised field. "Yeah, that might be all right. . . ."
They worked out a few quick rules. No pitcher—it would have been difficult to manage, anyway, with just the two of them—and hits off the corridor's walls weren't fouls, but bank shots.
Nog backed up toward the area's guardrail. For a moment as Jake rubbed his thumb across the baseball's stitches, the sick and dizzy feeling surged over him again, the same one he got when he didn't stop himself from thinking about the holosuite and some of the things inside it. The metal bulkheads and stanchions of DS9 wavered in his sight, as if they were somehow unreal. He had to squeeze his eyes shut to hold everything in place.
"Hey, come on!" Nog's shout seemed to come from somewhere else, another world. "What're you waiting for?"
He gripped the ball tighter. It was real, he knew; he'd told himself that before. Not like the things in the holosuite. Everything there had always been slightly . . . off. Like they were out of focus, even when they were sharp in his sight and solid in his hand; even when he had been scared of them. Things in the holosuite were always trying to be real. They came
out of nowhere and read your mind, and then tried to become the things they found in there. But they never got it exactly right. He knew that now. He could tell the difference. Real stuff—the whole real universe—waited for you to deal with it, on its own terms.
Jake opened his eyes. The station's metal bulkheads looked solid and hard once more. "Okay," he said. "Comin' at ya." He tossed the ball up, then got both hands on the bat and swung.
He connected harder than he had intended—the feel of the bat in his grip had pumped adrenaline into his system. With a sharp crack, the ball flew the length of the corridor. For a moment, Jake traced the arcing course—it leveled off a centimeter shy of brushing the ceiling—then dropped his gaze to watch Nog backpedaling, hands awkwardly raised above his head to try making the catch. Jake's smile changed to an expression of alarm when he saw how far away Nog had gotten.
"Nog! Watch out—"
His shouted warning was too late. Nog hit the guardrail with the small of his back, just as the ball grazed past his outstretched fingertips. He was too far off balance to stop himself from toppling over.
Jake ran to the spot where his friend had disappeared. Panting for breath, he looked over and saw the Ferengi youth, eyes immense in panic, clutching the bottom edge of the walkway with one straining set of fingertips. Below him, the Promenade's visitors continued about their business and pleasures; none of them had looked up and noticed.
"Grab my hand!" Jake braced himself and reached over. As soon as he had circled his own fingers around Nog's wrist, he tugged and let himself fall backward. That was enough to bring Nog landing heavily on top of him.
"What happened to the ball?" Nog raised his head and looked around. "Does that count as an out?"
Standing at the rail, the two boys saw what had happened. The ball's velocity had wedged it into a narrow crevice between two of the structural beams above the Promenade—only for a moment; as they watched, the ball dropped free. It struck an angled girder below with enough force to send it caroming toward the side of the Promenade, and into the doorway of Quark's drinking establishment.
They both held their breaths. The sound of glass breaking was appropriately spectacular, as the ball skittered crazily along the bar, toppling some of the patrons backward on the stools.
"No," said Nog in admiration. "That's definitely a home run."
A moment later, Quark appeared in the doorway, teeth clenched in fury, gaze darting around the Promenade for the perpetrators of the outrage. The ball was clutched in one white-knuckled, trembling hand.
"We better split." Jake scooped up the bat and ran, with Nog at his heels.
They slowed to a walk when they were well away from their impromptu playing field. "You know, I don't think my uncle's going to let us have that ball back."
"That's all right. We can get another." Jake hoisted the bat back onto his shoulder. He nodded thoughtfully. "This was a good idea . . . but it's definitely going to take some more work."
"Access granted."
She stepped through the spot where the energy beam had crackled and sparked. It snapped back into place behind her, with a surge that lit up the distant corners of the passageway.
Dr. Bashir was waiting for her on the other side; the security system had dictated that they had to separately identify themselves and gain entry to the restricted area. "Are you ready for this?" He held up a small datacard between his thumb and forefinger.
Dax nodded. "I think we can go ahead with this stage of the investigation, Julian." As always, she was aware of the fine line she had to tread with him, to maintain a cordial working atmosphere while not encouraging his persistent romantic fantasies about her.
The lights on the altered holosuite's control panel blinked into life as Bashir restored the unit's power. The entrances the other holosuites lining the corridor remained dark rectangles, cut off from both the station's energizing grid and any humanoid contact. Until everything about the epidemic of murder had been explained—and rectified—caution dictated a complete shutdown of all the holosuites that had been tampered with, even after the suspect CI modules had been removed; Chief of Operations O'Brien would have to determine whether a lingering toxic effect had been created in the holosuites' original circuits.
She watched as Bashir opened a small access slot on the control panel. A part of her—a part that was not quite as coldly rational as the rest—felt the slightest chill touch of apprehension. The doctor's quick, precise labors with the small tools he had brought reminded her of ancient video recordings she had once seen, of the timers to high-explosive bombs being dismantled. One wrong move and it goes off in your face—that's not likely to happen, chided a familiar voice inside her. The voice, one that had become as much hers as the one with which she spoke aloud, didn't use words to make its meaning clear. It didn't have to; the thoughts of the centuries-old symbiont inside her abdomen ran in virtual parallel to those of the cerebral matter, less than three decades old, inside her skull. She had been one with the symbiont for so much of her body's life that it had become impossible to make any distinction between where its existence left off and hers began. But there were infrequent moments such as this, when a minute twitch upon the nervous system, a release of hormones into the bloodstream, reminded her that the physical form had a life, even a mind, of its own.
Her attention was brought back by Julian's voice.
"What I'm doing," he said, bending low to peer into the access slot, "is wiring in the programming that we were able to download out of the other holosuites that Ahrmant Wyoss used." He poked a logic probe into the maze of circuits, drew it out, and read the LEDs on the handle. "He started out with one of the standard programs, a generic urban simulation, but it seems to have been extensively modified by the influence of the CI modules. We'll know better what's in the program when we get it up and running."
"Wouldn't it have been easier to run a model simulation through the computer?" And safer, that same part of her thought without speaking aloud.
Bashir shook his head. "There's some kind of interlock routine that's been interlaced with the program—O'Brien tried to break it out but he had to give up eventually. Apparently, the only way to get into it is by activating it with one of the CI modules." He made a few final adjustments. "There, that should do it." He glanced round at her. "All set?"
"Of course."
"Here goes, then." The holosuite's door slid open.
They stepped through and into darkness. As the door shut behind them, sealing away the corridor and completing the illusory world surrounding them, Dax quelled the twinge of physiological panic that accelerated her pulse for a few beats. She had spent so many hours poring over the transcripts of Wyoss's drug-induced ravings that she had a reasonable idea of what to expect. But the impact of the reality—or artificiality, she corrected herself—was still oppressive.
In the perceived distance around her and Bashir, a sulfur-tinged night fog clung to damp, crudely surfaced streets. The mists threaded between looming buildings of dirt-stained brick; empty windows gaped down upon them like the hollow eyes of idiot spectators. Ragged curtains fluttered listlessly across the glass teeth left in the broken frames. The blue radiance from the overhead streetlights barely penetrated the gloom, serving more to make the hallucinated night a tangible sensation upon the skin.
"Well. This is cheerful," said Bashir. He turned, studying the claustrophobic vista. "Sort of an exercise in negative mood induction, don't you think? It's got that—what did they use to call it?—that film-noir look to it."
She caught the reference to the ancient art form, the cinema of the late twentieth century having been a limited sensory-input predecessor to the holosuites themselves. "If by that you mean overtly depressing, I'd have to agree."
"It has a certain bleak charm, I guess. Though if I had known this was what was going on inside Ahrmant Wyoss's head, I would have argued for pharmaceutical intervention." Dax took a step forward; a sudden wave of dizziness swept across her, nearl
y toppling her from her feet. She felt Bashir catch her by one arm and around the shoulder.
"Are you all right?" He peered in concern at her. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know—" She felt weak, as though Bashir's grasp was all that kept her standing upright. She pressed one hand to her brow. "I seem to be experiencing some kind of processing lag." Around her, as she raised her head, she saw not the illusory city, but the actual walls of the holosuite chamber itself, the hexagonal grid of percept transmitters and low-level tractor-beam apertures. Beneath her feet, she perceived bare metal rather than the rough surface of hallucinated asphalt and stone. "All of a sudden, I'm not picking up the sensory effects. Wait a minute. . . ." Dax held out her hand. The walls faded a bit, enough to be overlaid with ghost images of the programmed buildings. "Something's off—the effects are erratic. . . ."
Bashir glanced over his shoulder. "It seems to be working all right for me. Unusually solid for a holosuite, in fact." He turned back to her, studying her eyes. "It must have something to do with the cortical-induction module—I can't think of any other explanation." He nodded. "That must be it. Plus your being a Trill—the CI technology works directly on the user's neurosystem, instead of just feeding in stimuli through the sense organs the way unaltered holosuites do. The problem must be that in your case, there's two neurosystems operating in tandem, the humanoid one and the symbiont's. The two systems are obviously different enough that they're not experiencing the CI module's effects at exactly the same rate—you're like a subspace receiver catching two transmissions at the same time and scrambling them together."
If the disorientation had been less severe, she would have arrived at the same theory. "I believe you're correct." In her vision, the holosuite walls and the illusory buildings went through a blurring fluctuation. She swayed, holding on to Bashir's arm even more tightly. "Severe loss of . . . equilibrium . . . sense of balance is well below operational thresholds . . ."