by Star Trek
“That’s right,” she said, answering its thoughts. “And I do not wish to hurt you either.”
It gathered all of the distasteful “feelings” that had percolated inside it from the moment it had crossed into this reality, and directed them toward the other, engulfing her in the vise grip of its fluid tentacles as if it could force a more appropriate response from her.
She had been ready for just such an attack. She did not resist, conserving her energy and using it instead to send her own flow of powerful intentions into its consciousness. Where the two forces met, its rage and her acceptance, there was, for an instant, a delicate balance of energy.
Peace.
It knew this place too. But there could be no peace as long as she protected the object that was vibrating and glowing behind the energy field.
She was struggling to continue speaking. Bound by some of the laws of her form, she could not easily continue making the vibrations she was using to communicate as long as she was held in its powerful grasp.
It knew that if it persisted in this manner, she would defend herself. She was more than capable of repelling any “physical” attack presented.
“Release…me…” she was struggling to say.
Finally, a thin protective barrier closed over two of her facial openings, soft watery organs that some humanoids used to interpret visual stimuli. This action seemed to allow her to focus more sharply on her own intentions.
She did not speak again; nonetheless, it knew in a flash of insight that she wanted it to remember how to take human form, so that they could communicate more easily.
There was no time.
“There is always time,” she struggled.
It slightly released the pressure of its tentacles, and allowed them to explore the humanoid form. Moments later, it had achieved a fair approximation of a human woman, a mirror image of the other that stood before her.
“Thank you,” she said, as her respiration returned to normal.
“I do not want your gratitude,” it replied, amazed at how quickly it was falling back into certain knowledge of every aspect of the form it now inhabited.
This was followed by an uncomfortable silence. Long ago, countless others had stood in precisely this place of opposition. It was pointless to begin the old arguments again, knowing all possible outcomes.
“You are an individual for the moment,” she began. “Would you like a name?”
“I am not a lesser being,” it replied scornfully. “I do not appreciate or require individuality. You forget us, and yourself.”
The edges of her mouth curved slightly upward in the beginnings of more laughter. Laughter was a sign of amusement or pleasure. What positive feelings she could possibly be taking from this encounter were beyond it, but to argue over such a trifle seemed wasteful.
“I have learned more in my time here than I have forgotten,” she countered, “and if you will not choose a name for yourself, I will choose one for you. I was always fond of Vivia. And you may call me Phoebe.”
“This designation serves no purpose,” Vivia snapped.
“I assure you, my designation is essential to my purpose, and to yours, unless this is a purely social visit,” Phoebe replied placidly.
Vivia was momentarily disoriented by the reference. Finally she realized that this “sarcasm” was a form of pointed laughter. As much as she longed for this temporary captivity to end, she understood that to show anger at Phoebe’s game was to empower her further and to divert her attention from more significant issues at hand.
“Very well, Phoebe,” Vivia began. “You have broken our agreement. We are aware of the breach and are working, even now, to repair it. Nor will this crude device you have fashioned aid you in your quest to return to the existence you forswore long ago. You will destroy it now, or you will allow us to do so.”
Phoebe retorted sharply. “For a transdimensional sentience, you are surprisingly obtuse.”
“You cannot insult me, Phoebe,” Vivia replied. “I have no feelings to be hurt.”
“I was not trying to hurt you. I was merely pointing out that you have come here with assumptions which are incorrect. But this has always been so, hasn’t it?” Phoebe did not pause for Vivia’s imminent contradiction. “We did not create the breach. Your precious artificial construct had obvious deficiencies. You were warned that this would be the case, but you chose to ignore those warnings. Life has emerged in this system. Life will not be contained, nor will it hesitate to defend and preserve itself. Those who created the rupture did so in an honest effort to sustain their existence and are unaware of the consequences of their actions.”
Phoebe’s words were disconcerting for two reasons. The first was that as long as they maintained their restrictive human forms, they were incapable of mingling their essences as was more appropriate to their natural state. In that state subterfuge was impossible. Vivia silently wondered if this was not the precise reason that Phoebe had insisted they communicate in this manner. More troubling was the possibility, however, that Phoebe was speaking the truth.
“If lesser beings are responsible, they must be eliminated. Their ignorance does not mitigate the threat they obviously pose,” Vivia replied. “But no lesser being could have created the resonance focusing object you are attempting to protect. It is of us.”
Phoebe bowed her head. “Of course it is. But it poses no threat to you.”
“Then destroy it, and I will deal with the lesser beings.”
“I cannot,” Phoebe replied simply. “All things here are more complicated than you are accustomed to. No resolution can be achieved by force alone.”
Vivia took a moment to consider her surroundings. The simplistic and fundamental atomic compounds that resulted in solid matter of varying hues, shapes, and densities were no match for her manipulative abilities.
“I could destroy this primitive vessel with a thought,” she warned.
“As could I,” Phoebe replied. “Since I have not, you should consider the possibility that I might have a good reason for not doing so.”
“I do not care for your reasons.”
“But you should!” Phoebe shouted. “They concern us all.”
“You have only ever been concerned with yourself,” Vivia argued. “Your presence here is evidence of that. Prove that you are also of us by assisting me.”
“You would destroy what you do not understand,” Phoebe reasoned. “I cannot allow that.”
“You care for these lesser beings?” Vivia shot back. “You have been tainted by your exposure to them.”
“I have been expanded by my dealings with these beings and others like them. I have gained knowledge and experience that is beyond you because you choose to be a slave. I will honor your choice, but you must also honor mine. And you must believe me when I tell you that destroying this vessel and the Key that I am protecting will only hasten that which you have spent your entire existence trying to prevent,” Phoebe replied.
“That is not possible,” Vivia said. “Why are you lying to me?”
“I’m not,” Phoebe said carefully. “You are well aware that our interaction with all matter and energy in this dimension has consequences,” she continued. “The Key is capable of focusing energy across the barrier that divides us, but the power to use it is now imprinted upon one of the beings who inhabits this ship. It was an unforeseen effect. I take no more pleasure in it than you do.”
“Which one of these beings is it, and where are they now?” Vivia asked.
Vivia watched the wave of disconcertion rumble across Phoebe’s face. Phoebe had obviously betrayed something she had not intended. Vivia realized in an instant that Phoebe was weaker than she appeared and this knowledge gave her…pleasure. Then she remembered how to laugh.
The Doctor was, once again, seriously considering taking a name. In four years of almost continual operation, he had toyed with and for a short time adopted more than one—Salk…Schweitzer…Shmullus…Mozart—but these wer
e other men. Great men, to be sure. Their individual accomplishments had lent glory to their names in the eyes of their respective worlds, or those who loved them. But they just weren’t…him. And so, they had been abandoned.
This was hardly the first time he had wrestled with the Who Am I? question. Each time the subroutines that ordered his cognitive processes worked through the equations involved in answering such a question, the results were either black and white or nonexistent. The “black and white” option was, Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One, AK1 Diagnostic and Surgical Subroutine Omega 323, operating aboard the Federation Starship Voyager. The nonexistent option was a bit more disturbing, if a hologram could even be “disturbed.” He was programmed to display lifelike human emotions in conjunction with his practice of medicine. But neither he nor anyone else could say definitively whether or not in displaying those emotions he was actually feeling them.
The fact was, however, that what lay beyond the official designation for his program, a definition of self he had long ago determined was insufficient, was an emptiness that sometimes created an unsettling processing loop. It left him wondering whether or not, without such a definition, he could even be said to actually exist. Often as not, the selection of a name seemed the first and most important step in filling that emptiness. But he didn’t want somebody else’s name, however lauded. He wanted his own.
It had never really occurred to him that none of Voyager’s crew had ever faced his dilemma. Most humanoid species did not allow their offspring to choose their own names. Their names were given to them by those who spawned them. Early on he had realized that as long as Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant, he was going to have to think of himself as more than a supplemental program, but as the ship’s chief medical officer. At Kes’s urging, he had asked the captain for a name. There were many subsequent days when he seriously wished that she had taken him up on that request, rather than leaving him to make the determination on his own.
Maybe Jim. It was short and simple, shouldn’t be too hard for the crew to remember. But Jim was short for James, and there were few Starfleet officers as highly regarded as James Tiberius Kirk.
Adam? It had a nice ring to it. Long ago, certain sects of humans on Earth had believed that Adam was the first man created. As the first continuously functioning and self-aware EMH Mark One, he found a synchronicity in the choice that appealed to him.
But if he was going for simple, why not Matt, or David, or Paul? Having been made in the image of his human creator, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, he hesitated to move too far beyond the realm of human names. Some of the Klingon and Romulan names contained in his databases also had a certain appeal, though they often sounded as if they were missing a few vowels when they rolled off his simulated tongue.
He had been processing the question for seventy-nine uninterrupted minutes when his aural subroutine alerted him to a faint high-pitched hum emanating from one of the storage cabinets in sickbay.
Crossing to the row of cabinets, he pinpointed the sound. It came from storage unit alpha one. The mediumsized drawer contained the first alien artifact he had ever catalogued and stored, the sporocystian remains of an entity known as the Caretaker.
Though most of the crew thought of the Caretaker as the less than caring alien being who had stranded them in the Delta Quadrant, this was not, strictly speaking, true. The Caretaker had used coherent tetryon technology to transport Voyager a distance of seventy thousand light-years from the Alpha Quadrant to the Delta Quadrant, but it was Captain Janeway who had made the decision that left them there. She had intentionally sacrificed Voyager’s way home to save the lives of an entire species. Knowing Janeway as well as he did now, the Doctor realized that faced with the alternatives, he could never have expected her to make another choice. The convenience of 146 Starfleet officers and Maquis crewmen did not tip the scales in their favor when weighed against tens of thousands of innocent Ocampa. Though the challenges posed in attempting to cross the seventy thousand light-years that separated them from their homes in the Alpha Quadrant had been arduous, it was to this exact set of circumstances that the Doctor owed what he considered “his life.” He, for one, didn’t blame the captain. Deep inside his matrix rested a simple subroutine he had labeled “gratitude,” which he recalled whenever he considered Voyager’s unique circumstances and the opportunities those circumstances had given him.
Nonetheless, he was more than a little disturbed by the vibrating sound that was growing louder every second in storage cabinet alpha one. The last time the Caretaker’s remains had done anything other than sit there like the inert, irregularly shaped formation of bioremnants that it was had been Stardate 49164.8. He recalled the day vividly.
Voyager had encountered the only other “Caretaker” they had known of, the original’s mate, who called herself Suspiria. She was tending to her own flock of Ocampa, on an array several thousand light-years from that of the original Caretaker. When the ship had come within a certain proximity to her presence, the Caretaker’s remains had begun to vibrate, much as they were doing now, and Lieutenant Torres had used readings of those vibrations to accurately pinpoint Suspiria’s location.
If the benign and somewhat befuddled creature described in Voyager’s logs as the Caretaker was one extreme of his race’s temperament, Suspiria was the other. Hostile and deranged, she had almost succeeded in destroying the ship in her rage to revenge herself on those she believed had killed her mate. Although the captain had managed to thwart Suspiria’s murderous rampage, Janeway was never certain whether or not she had convinced Suspiria that no one aboard Voyager could be held accountable for the Caretaker’s death. He had died of whatever passed for natural causes among his people, the Nacene.
Suspiria had ultimately left the ship and returned to the subspace layer she inhabited when she did not exist in normal space. When Kes had described the dark and bloody range of emotions she had experienced when in brief communication with Suspiria, the Doctor had silently recorded his hope that Voyager never cross her path again.
So it was with no small amount of trepidation that the Doctor slowly opened the cabinet labeled alpha one, and removed the spherical transparent container that now shook with the strange vibrations emanating from the Caretaker’s remains.
He was about to activate the shipwide Emergency Medical Hologram override channel to alert the captain to this frightening development when the irregularly shaped rock began to glow with a faint pinkish light. In the space of a few seconds, the light burned furiously bright. He didn’t even have a chance to set the container on his desk and activate an emergency forcefield before the Caretaker’s remains exploded violently, ripping through the storage container and covering the Doctor’s photonic body with sporocystian dust.
It wasn’t that Phoebe was unaware of the identity of the Key’s new owner. Voyager’s captain, Kathryn Janeway, had been presented with the Key a little over a day earlier, and with typical human arrogance and stupidity, the first thing she had done was remove it from its ceremonial case and give it a cursory visual examination. One touch was all that was required for the Key to sense its new owner and imprint itself upon her.
The emotional spasms she was struggling to contain came from the certainty that Vivia had neither the patience nor the wisdom to do anything other than threaten the owner of the Key with oblivion should she refuse a request. But Phoebe had been watching this Captain Janeway and her crew since the transfer of the Key had taken place. She already knew everything that could be known about these humanoids and their Voyager, and she had no doubt that Janeway would willingly die before being coerced into anything.
“You must leave this to me,” Phoebe replied, refusing to answer Vivia’s question. “I will sever her connection to the Key, but it will take time. Only then will I be able to destroy it.”
“And what of the rupture?” Vivia demanded.
“You have said you are already working to seal it. I trust you will succeed, and the peace and bala
nce between us will be maintained.”
“You have three days,” Vivia replied as she began to release herself from the restrictive and distasteful human form. “If you fail, the Others will return with me, and we will deal with these beings as we see fit.”
Phoebe knew this was possible. It was a huge risk, but one she could easily see Vivia and the Others accepting.
As she watched her mirror image dissipate in a mass of flowing, undulating plasmatic energy, she was abruptly thrown to the ground by the unexpected release of highly charged particles that were displaced by Vivia’s transformation.
“Dammit,” she hissed, picking herself up. Voyager possessed highly refined internal sensors. There was only so much she could hide from them. Vivia’s unnecessary show of force had surely alerted Voyager’s crew to her presence by now.
Although Phoebe had already formed her plan and done much to put that plan into effect, there was still more to do, more than could be done in three short days.
But three days was all she had. Either the captain would do exactly as she said, or they would soon be on a collision course with the unimaginable.
War.
Phoebe took some small comfort in the knowledge that Vivia had, for the present, accepted her less than thorough accounting of the problems at hand. Phoebe did not like to lie. It was usually an unnecessary complication. But in this case, the whole truth had been a risk she was not willing to take.
Turning to examine one of the many crude matter-generation devices that were common on the ship, she paused for a moment over an image that rested on the captain’s desk. It was a framed photograph of three women, one obviously older than the other two. All shared the same bright blue eyes and auburn hair. The face of the eldest was marked with slight furrows, particularly around the eyes and mouth, and her hair was streaked with gray, but the physical resemblance among the three was still striking.
“Gretchen,” Phoebe said, tracing the older woman’s face with a finger. “Mother of Kathryn, and Phoebe,” she finished. As she replaced the photo and set to work on the captain’s replicator, she decided that of the three, Phoebe Janeway definitely looked the happiest. Perhaps that was a good sign.