by Ilsa J. Bick
“They just…died. Like they needed the machines. Or had become them.” She looked bleak. “They just died.”
“Then what about the animals I just saw? Are they linked to a computer network somewhere?”
“No.” She shook her head. “You’re in the isolation wing. Our power is self-contained. Our computers are in a separate area. Our communications don’t even tie in with the main complex. The animals you saw were never exposed to anything more complicated than a free-standing system that’s not on any network.”
“But you just said that these MEMs, their natural proclivity is to try to link with another system. So if you—well, I don’t know—starve them for contact, what do they link with?” Then he remembered that crowded air in the animal room. “To each other?”
She nodded. “But, again, limited by distance the way one would see with microwave transmission, or line of sight technology. I keep trying to separate them. Interrupt the MEMs, introduce a lesion, all sorts of things. But I keep failing. I separate them too long or too far, they die.”
“Well, then, that would be the end of it, wouldn’t it? I mean, you really can’t take this any further.” But that was a lie. Because Bashir knew that he’d have been tempted to take the next logical step. “What did you do?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Julian? If a brain’s information could be uploaded or downloaded with another machine…”
“Why not manipulate data, yes? Download information into the primates and vice versa?”
“Pretty much,” she said, quietly. “It was all so…exciting, you have to understand that.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said. “The brain’s immense, and there’s so much of it we don’t use. So I understand the temptation, completely. Honestly.”
“No arguments about ethics?”
“Just because I understand temptation doesn’t mean there are no ethics involved, Doctor,” he said, gently. “I said I understood. Here you’d stumbled on a mechanism to put knowledge in or take it out, yes?”
“That’s right,” she said, her voice thin, intense. “Data is data. That’s all we are, really: chemicals and molecules and atoms, and all of it some rearrangement according to a code. All there, just waiting for a compatible system, a way to read it, to edit and to add. It was like being given a key to a locked door. Turn the key and, instantly, you know the thoughts and memories and desires of someone else. Just waiting for me to open that door.”
“But some doors are locked for reasons,” said Bashir. Thinking: I’d have been tempted. A window into the mind of an animal, or even another species…
And then it hit him.
She said memories. She said thoughts and memories of someone else. Not something, not an animal. Someone.
All those isolated empty rooms, each with a bed and a chair and a table and a vidscreen. Just like his. And that angry red eye of a magnetic lock at the end of a silent, dark corridor.
Oh, dear God. Everything came crashing in, and when he looked at her—at that stricken, remorseful face—it was like he saw her for the first time. Not just her blue skin or the chocolate cast to her lips, or even her artificial left eye that had no capillaries and a left hand that made a tiny clicking sound when she moved a finger, and held no warmth. For the first time, Bashir saw—really understood—what all this meant for him now on this godforsaken waste of a planet.
Because she wore her insignia over her left breast pocket. And there was her rank, bars here instead of pips, tacked to the collars of a uniform shirt.
A scientist who broke barriers, and a soldier who followed orders.
“You said a key to a locked door.” His voice was ragged with urgency and hoarse, as if he’d run a great distance, and his mind had only now caught up. “But you didn’t have to open it, Kahayn. Not every door demands that you open it! And even if someone tried to compel you, if they ordered you, you’re a doctor, you’re a physician! For the love of God, you don’t pick people apart! You’re a healer! You could always refuse, you could say no; you could say that I am a person and a person may only go this far and no further….”
“Oh, you could, Julian, you could,” she said, and her voice was so full of remorse and compassion and regret he felt like weeping with her. “In a perfect world, you even might. But the thing is…I didn’t.”
Chapter
7
Lense felt frozen, like that moment that always came in the transporter just before she dissolved: that tiny hitch in time when things were as crisp and detailed and immutable as if cut into the heart of a rare diamond.
“But who would volunteer?” she said. Yet she already knew the answer: the military. Not different from Earth’s sometimes-not-so-distant past at all; in every war, whether with guns or experimental craft or bioweapons, soldiers were fodder. Sometimes they knew what was happening, and why. Many times they didn’t.
“They were desperate,” said Saad, as if reading her mind. “We’re all desperate, Elizabeth, just in different ways. So they did it.”
“And?”
“At first, it didn’t work. They had the same problem with rejection.”
“But that’s what’s so strange about this whole thing,” she said, without really thinking it over first. “I don’t understand the violence of this rejection business. The brain’s relatively privileged, comparatively well isolated antigenically.”
She was only aware when the silence grew that Saad was staring, as was Mara. It occurred to her, too late, that human brains were privileged. But here, their spleen and thymus are so large, probably hyperreactive to stimulus…She thought about trying to backtrack but then figured she’d put her boot in it. “How did they overcome the problem?”
“By finding someone uniquely compatible with everyone else.”
“Like a universal donor.” Well, it could work. There was blood as a precedent. But DNA? “I take it that’s rare.”
“Rare. Yes. Likely a mutation, but a very convenient one.”
“So they incorporated his…her DNA?” she asked. Saad nodded. Mara’s eyes had narrowed to slits. “And these people, they linked up and couldn’t be separated?”
“Right.” Saad held up a finger. “All but one. This universal donor, as you say. He linked, but he could also unlink, still function and think independently. They weren’t really prepared for that.”
“Why couldn’t the others?”
Mara looked at Saad, and Saad stared at a point above Lense’s head for a moment, sighed. “I think they don’t really know. But maybe he was what you called privileged.”
“But then…even if they link, who decides? Which one of them gets to, I don’t know, call the shots? What happens to free will?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
Of course, it was. But then she thought again about what he’d just said. “You said was privileged. Past tense. What happened to the donor?”
Saad shrugged. “Gone. And no use cloning his DNA without him around to, as you say, call the shots. The rest of the pod was like a computer idling, waiting for a command. So the Kornaks started looking for another, very special person. But now, you see, Nerrit’s coming.”
“So they think they found someone. Okay. But why are you telling me all this? How is this related to me?”
“Because I have to ask you a very important question, Elizabeth. And I need for you to answer me honestly, truthfully.”
“I’ve never lied to you, Saad,” she lied. “What do you want to ask me?”
“When Mara found you, you said you’d come here with friends, on a hike.”
“Yes.”
“And that you got separated.”
“Yes.”
“And you had no equipment.”
“What is this, Saad?”
“Funny,” he said. He pushed up, walked to that lumpy, wrapped bundle she’d noticed earlier, and twitched the cloth free.
Lense went absolutely, perfectly still.
“Because you know?” Saad picked up her hel
met and turned it this way and that. “I was just about to ask you the same question.”
Bashir’s chest was tight. He couldn’t breathe. He was burning up, and then freezing cold and the hackles on the back of his neck stood on end, and then he started to shake, uncontrollably. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it. The beat of blood in his brain was so remorseless he thought his skull would explode. His thoughts raced like rats on a wheel spinning to nowhere: about cogs in a machine and implants and those primates and the air above his head filled with their silent words and images…Ah, God, if he could just stop his brain from thinking, just for an instant! Just shut his brain off, just shut down!
“Julian.”
Got to get out of here. He squeezed his eyes tight, but he was still thinking, thinking, thinking, and he wanted to run to a dark closet and hide and draw his knees up, the way he had when he was small and stupid and couldn’t say his name properly; and still he’d laughed with all the other children because he was so lonely and too dull…
“Julian.”
…too simple to understand that they were laughing at him…
“Julian.”
…at poor, simple, dim little Jules, the ninny, the nit no one liked and his parents despised.
“Julian, look at me.”
His eyes snapped open. “Why did you show me this?” His voice cut his raw throat like a knife. “Why?”
“Because you needed the facts.” That wash of yellow fluorescent glare turned her skin the color of bile and made his look dead. “Truth for truth.”
“But why?” Hot fury flooded his veins and then before he knew what he was doing—or maybe he just didn’t care—he had her by both arms, the way he might with someone he loved and hated in equal measure. She tried to twist away, but now he had her and he hung on tight. “Why have you done this, why? To torture me? What do you want? For the love of God, what do you expect of me?”
“The truth.” Her eyes ticked back and forth, the left lagging a bit; and she’d gone so pale he saw the solitary salt track of her tears dried onto her right cheek. “Where do you come from, Julian? Who are you? What are you? If you don’t tell me the truth or give me something tangible, I can’t help you. Look at it from my perspective. If you have nothing to hide, then why should I interfere? Why show you anything? You would take the fMRI and pass.”
“But Blate wouldn’t let me go. You know that. Even if I passed, would that really stop him? Or you?” He gave her a rough shake. “Really? Look at all you’ve done already! Wouldn’t this man Blate simply decide that I’d fooled you in some way? Because, remember, there’s the suit, Doctor, there’s the suit. So would he order you to do this anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Because I need to know! I need something that tells me this far and no further because there’s more at stake here than you can possibly know or understand. So I need to know the truth. Before I risk everything, I need to know and I need to know right now, Julian, right now—before it’s too late.”
“Too late?” Now he gripped her very hard, harder than he’d ever held Ezri even when she was killing his soul, though he’d wanted to. Oh, God, how he’d wanted to break something in that runabout on that long trip back from Trill to DS9, when she’d let him go. Because it was too late for Julian, always too late: too late with Jadzia and then with Ezri. And yet how delicate he’d been, how so very polite because good, sweet, dear Julian was brought up not to make a scene because it might draw too much attention and then people would start asking the wrong questions. So he’d always been in hiding, all his life. Even in love because the truth was so dangerous. “Too late? What does it matter now what I say when Blate’s mind is made up?”
“Because it does. Don’t you see, Julian? I’ve been honest with you when I could’ve lied. Nothing impelled me to choose against myself by showing you everything. All my ugliness and all these mistakes, ones I made even when I thought I was doing good rather than harm. But I showed you because you are a person, not an animal. I did it of my own free will, and that is the last thing that separates me from the machine, but it is the very …last…thing!” She was weeping again, tear upon tear but only along one cheek, one. “A machine can decide, but it can’t think. Unless it is programmed to do so, it will not choose against itself nor make any other judgment other than what fact allows it to see.
“But then there’s this.” She put the flat of her palm upon his chest and over his galloping heart, and he gasped because that touch burned him like a brand. “There is faith,” she said, “and there is hope, and all the emotions that are the truths that bind us in a way that a machine can never know.”
“I…I…” His lips clamped together; despair vised his heart, and then because he knew that he would surely kill her where she stood, he spun away. “No, no, no, damn you!”
And then because he couldn’t stand any more—because he knew with a sudden, awful clarity what his fate was—he wheeled around, grabbed the microscope and hurled it across the room with all his might. It rocketed straight as a missile and smashed the glass with a tremendous bang! The glass exploded in a starburst, shattering with a sound like hard, ancient ice. The sound broke him somewhere inside, like a dam giving way, and he howled. His heart battered his ribs; and he was weeping, too, as much from fury as dread because he was, after all, only a man.
“I can’t! Please, please, don’t you understand? If I could, I would, but I can’t! I want to; believe me, you don’t know how much. Do you think I want to end up like them? Like those animals in those cages? Ask me something I can answer, and I will do it! Because however much I wish I could change this, change myself, you’ve asked for the one thing I just simply cannot do, and precisely because of this!” He banged his chest with his fist and then held it there, every beat of his savage heart shuddering through his living flesh because it was still his heart; it was his. “My faith! My heart! My hope and my truth! And I cannot part paths with any of that even to save myself because then I will no longer be a person I…recognize!”
And then it was like a cord snapped, like he was a marionette whose puppeteer had cut his strings. He broke off, turned away. Stumbled for someplace as far away as he could manage in that awful place.
“And so there’s your truth, Doctor,” he said, utterly spent. Swaying, he slid down the length of the far wall. His knees folded and he squeezed his roaring head between his hands. “It’s the only truth I know.”
He didn’t know how long he sat there like that. Maybe long enough to turn to stone. (Please, God, he wanted that because a stone can’t feel love or agony, or the chilling despair of knowing that there is absolutely nothing left—not even hope.) Certainly he sat long enough for his head to stop roaring and his breathing to quiet.
Then he heard a hesitant step, a crunch of glass. When her hands took hold of his wrists, he started, not only from her touch but because his right wrist was cold and his left was not.
“Julian.” Her voice was watery. “Please forgive me, but you must try to understand how very much, how very important this is.”
“Why?” His head was still woolly, and he was so tired. “What do you mean?”
“I envy you,” and then she swallowed hard. “I envy you your heart. Your faith, your integrity, your passion. So let me ask you a different way.” She pulled in a breath. “Julian, will you fail?”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s important. It’s everything. So in four days, when I have to hook you up to that scanner, will…you…fail?”
And there: He saw what she was doing in that instant—allowing him to tell his truth in the only way he could, and he was more grateful than she could ever know because now, at last, he could answer, and it would be no lie.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” said Lense. Saad had her EVA suit now and when he shook it, a shower of grit rained upon rock with a sound like rice. “I have no idea.�
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“It looks to be about your size.” Saad hefted the helmet. “Is it yours?”
She said nothing.
“This is a waste,” said Mara. “Let’s stop this little charade and—”
“Be quiet.” Saad hadn’t even turned around. His eyes fixed on Lense, and she felt her heart swell with anger. This was so stupid; what did the Prime Directive mean now? More than that, she didn’t want to lie to Saad, not anymore.
I care for him, and he cares for me, and that should count for something, shouldn’t it? In this whole crazy universe, doesn’t love count for anything?
And then her mind snagged on something else: Nerrit, and Saad’s source. Nerrit was coming, and that was unusual. Nerrit was coming all the way out here, but not because of her suit. Saad had her suit. But Nerrit’s coming was somehow about her, anyway. But that would have to mean that this was about somebody else, someone like her…
Oh, my God, my God!
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes?” She forced herself to focus just on Saad’s face and his eyes and everything there was for her in his heart she didn’t want to lose.
“Is this suit yours?”
She swallowed. “No.”
“Saad,” Mara began.
Saad held up a hand, and Mara sank back into silence. He looked like he was weighing something on a mental scale, debating how to ask the next question in a way that she might or could answer. Then he replaced her suit and laid her helmet on top and walked to her and knelt and took her hands in his.
“Well, then,” he said, very gently. “Answer me this, my love. Are you the only…one?”
She knew what he meant. More important, she knew who.
“No,” she said.
Kahayn still had him by his wrists. Whether she tethered him there, or this was a comfort to both of them, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Bashir said, “So what now? What happens now?”
“That depends,” she said, “on how much you trust me.”
“Bashir,” Lense said. “His name is Julian Bashir. He’s a doctor, like me. We were traveling together and got…separated.”
