VOY - String Theory 2 - Fusion (c)

by Star Trek

  “STOP!”

  For a moment there was silence as hundreds of curious eyes turned on her, waiting for her next command.

  “You can’t play like this in here,” she said, tenuously grasping for a shred of control.

  “Why not?” the silver-haired mouse-child asked.

  “Because you are ruining everything,” Kathryn replied automatically. She had no idea where her mother was, but when she returned and found her living room, Kathryn was going to have a lot of explaining to do.

  “Where else should we play?” another asked.

  “This is our home,” a third chimed in.

  “We like your toys,” another called.

  Janeway raised her hands to silence them. “Then take the toys and go outside.”

  “Where?” the mouse-child asked.

  Turning to the windows Kathryn saw that what had been a tranquil afternoon beyond them was now a vast starless night.

  Part of her felt a twinge of regret at sending the children out into the night, but the larger part knew instinctively that if she didn’t act fast, the house would be torn from its foundation and pulled apart by their wild, unruly play.

  “Outside,” Kathryn said again, pointing at the front door behind her, adding, “NOW!” in a voice that left no room for argument.

  The heads turned toward the door, and in a flood the children were taking their toys and rushing through the door. What had been a standard-sized door frame was ripped from its casing as they poured through.

  Kathryn had expected that once they were gone, she would find herself again in the silence of her mother’s living room. But as the last child rushed out into the warm Indiana night, she saw a soft light resting on the porch. The light bounced and vibrated, pausing at what had been the doorway, and after a moment rose from the porch and flew into the house. It came toward Kathryn, who instinctively raised her hands to shield her eyes from its unearthly brightness, circled her a few times, then darted past her, crashing into lamps, skewing pictures from the wall, and finally bursting through one of the bay windows and disappearing into the darkness.

  Turning back to what had been the front door, Janeway saw dozens of similar lights floating toward her. Though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why, their approach filled her with an overwhelming sense of dread. Somehow she knew how wrong this was, yet the glowing balls kept coming.

  Suddenly, Phoebe stood beside her. In a rush of memory, Kathryn realized that this could not be her mother’s home. She was trapped in the Delta Quadrant, and this being who looked like her sister was, at best, a tour guide from hell.

  “What is this?” Kathryn demanded, still shaking from her encounter with the children.

  “This was our home,” Phoebe replied sadly.

  “No, Phoebe…or whoever you are…this was my home.”

  “As I told you before, Kathryn, I can only show you our truth within a context you will understand.”

  “Who were those…children?” Kathryn asked, wondering at her reluctance to call them the monsters she truly believed them to be.

  “They are the beginning,” Phoebe replied, “the first and most basic particles. Some of your scientists have another word for them.”

  “What word is that?” Janeway asked, searching within herself for a semblance of the answer.

  “The strings,” Phoebe said.

  Janeway paused.

  The strings?

  “Are you referring to string theory?” she asked.

  “You begin to understand some of your limitations,” Phoebe congratulated her. “What you still call a theory is practical truth for us.”

  Janeway’s mind reeled. She had, of course, studied string theory, along with fifty other equally plausible treatises on the nature of the universe. Though never proven, there were a number of serious and respected scientists who were pursuing it as the definitive answer to the question that had, thus far, eluded the best minds of the Federation: What is the exact structure, design, and function of the fabric of space and time?

  Apparently the Nacene were no longer wrestling with this question.

  “So you have proven that the strings are real?” Janeway asked. “You can actually perceive them?”

  “Proof…belief…they are irrelevant. We know them, Kathryn,” Phoebe replied. “And as with all things we know, we wanted them to be of us. Unfortunately, we made the same mistake you just did.”

  “What mistake was that?” Kathryn asked, truly curious.

  “We engaged them, and tried to control them.”

  In a flash, Janeway had at least a part of the picture clear in her mind.

  “You did what?” she asked incredulous.

  “Can you blame us?” Phoebe said disdainfully. “You did the same thing. You understand where the impulse came from. It lives in you as well.”

  Kathryn took a moment to consider this. She vividly remembered her childhood, the early years spent exploring the mysteries of words and numbers, slowly learning to control and manipulate them. She remembered the thrill of each new piece of knowledge that came within her grasp, how she had longed for it, and her voracious hunger for more…always more.

  If this was the truth Phoebe was trying to impart to her, it was certainly one to which she could relate.

  “What happened to the strings?” she finally asked.

  “They did what they are meant to do,” Phoebe replied. “And then they did all manner of things that we never expected. They led us from our home, and in doing so, unbalanced everything.”

  Janeway looked about the disaster area that had once been her mother’s living room. She recognized this place as the only true home she had ever known, and felt a surge of pain and anger at its senseless wreckage.

  “The flashes of light…the things that were beneath the elements and atoms I saw before…those are the strings?” Janeway asked.

  Phoebe nodded.

  “Were they part of our universe before you let them loose?”

  “They are that which binds all of the universe together. They sustain all that is, when they are functioning properly.”

  “And now they are completely out of control?” Janeway asked.

  “No,” Phoebe said. “Controlling them is not the problem for us that it is for you.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “The imbalance,” Phoebe replied.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Phoebe said sadly. “But you will.”

  Though Janeway knew she must continue in her “education,” she felt a tingling of doubt and fear as Phoebe took her hand and led her through the splintered front door frame into the darkness.

  Harry and B’Elanna stood before the interface console in the holographic research lab and examined their handiwork. Once the ion sweep had been successfully completed, several security personnel had been ordered to monitor every move the multiphasic creatures made, and for the time being, it seemed they were content to leave Voyager alone. With little else to do to shore up the ship’s defenses, B’Elanna had joined Harry as he put the final touches on the holomatrix he had been assigned to develop.

  They had successfully created a hologram of a Monorhan male haran of average size and weight, dressed in a light tunic and pants that were appropriate to Monorha fifty years ago. The holobuffer reserved for personal data and activity subroutines was large enough to contain as much information as a Monorhan brain could hold but for the time being was empty.

  The basic image had been taken from Voyager’s transporter logs, but they had both gone to great lengths to adjust the physical parameters so that their creation was not an exact duplicate of any of the Monorhans who had briefly boarded the ship. Though the distinctions in eye color, size, and shape, mingled with the length of elongated jaw and neck, were in some senses “typical” Monorhan features, their intention had been to create a physical frame for the consciousness that would be as neutral as possible. The only gender-specific
characteristic was the absence of the interior arms that were present only in female Monorhans.

  A small frame holding five of Voyager’s spare gel packs linked through bioneural interfaces had been completed.

  Both the “bait” and the “trap” were set.

  “I think we’re ready,” Harry observed.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” B’Elanna added, tapping her combadge.

  “B’Elanna to Seven of Nine.”

  Seven stood on what she had termed the “bridge” of the Betasis. It was the large room she and B’Elanna had discovered earlier that seemed, in structure and design, central to the ship’s functioning. The viewscreen where B’Elanna had first seen Assylia’s disturbing transmission was still active, but the image of the Monorhan commander was frozen. Seven had considered deactivating it, but preferred to disturb as little as possible, given what she was about to attempt.

  The assimilation tubules located in the implant integrated into her left hand had been stocked with the modified nanoprobes, and she awaited B’Elanna’s notification that the holographic matrix was ready for transmission. In the meantime she had relocated the pattern enhancers she and B’Elanna had used to evacuate the ship on their first away mission from the chamber below to the bridge. It had been agreed that the moment the nanoprobes had been dispersed into the neural network of the Betasis, Seven would use the pattern enhancers to return to the relative safety of Voyager.

  Once she received B’Elanna’s call, Seven wasted no time. Positioning her left hand above the ship’s main computer interface, she extended her assimilation tubules and easily compromised the synthetic alloys of the surface of the interface. Once she had breached the casing, she searched gingerly for the appropriate links to the neural network. Steeling herself to withstand the flood of anger she had experienced in her first connection with the ship, she connected herself to the neural network and released the nanoprobes.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Seven could not sense the presence she had felt before, nor could she determine whether or not the nanoprobes were having any effect.

  Only when the soft pulsing lights throughout the ship began to quicken, then race, did Seven sense the approach of the entity. She immediately withdrew the tubules and stepped back, just as the console exploded. Retreating to the perimeter of the pattern enhancers she had set up near the only chair on the bridge, she watched as every power console in the room erupted in a fiery sparks.

  A moment later, she materialized in Voyager’s transporter bay and hurried to join Harry and B’Elanna in the lab.

  It took almost two minutes for Harry to detect the imminent approach of the consciousness. In order to transfer the synaptic patterns from the Betasis to the smaller neural network they had rigged, they had decided to utilize the data-transfer cable that still tethered Voyager to the array via the dataport located in the docking bay after discovering that the Betasis was linked to a similar port in its wrecked bay. The connection to the Betasis was barely functional, degraded by time and several fused circuits, but Seven had been able to confirm that it would suit their purposes. There would be a brief lag while the patterns were forced to move through the array’s systems, but given that they could survive for any length of time only within a bioneural construct, Harry had anticipated that the transfer would still be fairly quick.

  His hard work was initially rewarded when the miniature gel-pack network was flooded with luminescent particles. It seemed to take only a few seconds for the consciousness to accept the fact that there was not sufficient space within the gel packs for it to sustain itself, and then the mute Monorhan hologram standing before them showed its first signs of “life” by blinking its long-lashed eyelids.

  Harry turned to B’Elanna and caught her premature smile of satisfaction. But the moment of success was cut short as the hologram raised its hands and looked at them closely, as if it were seeing them for the first time.

  “It’s all right,” Harry said gently, approaching the hologram cautiously.

  The hiss of the doors alerted him to the fact that Seven had joined them, but Harry stayed focused on the hologram, fully aware of how disorienting this process must be for the consciousness they had just trapped.

  He vaguely heard Seven ask disdainfully “What have you done?” before the hologram looked on him with dark despair and began to wail and groan, the clicking of its secondary tongue thrashing against its lower palate indicating what Harry believed was imminent danger or distress.

  As the hologram fell to its knees it began to tear at the skin of its face with the dulled claws that jutted from its fingers. Dark blue blood poured from the rents in its face as its pitiful cry echoed throughout the room.

  “Computer, deactivate holomatrix,” Seven ordered through the confusion.

  As Harry turned on her, B’Elanna said sharply, “You can’t do that!”

  But Seven was working furiously, reconfiguring the physical parameters of the holomatrix. “There is no alternative,” Seven chided her, undeterred.

  “The synaptic patterns are destabilizing,” B’Elanna warned as the gel-pack network began to glow. “The patterns are attempting to return along the same path, but the temporary neural network can’t sustain them.”

  As if to prove her point, one of the gel packs burst, spewing its contents onto the workstation. The others were expanding quickly and within moments would also be ruined.

  “Computer,” Seven called, “activate holographic file Kim Monorhan interface beta.”

  Another Monorhan shimmered into view. It bore a vague resemblance to the neutral Monorhan Harry and B’Elanna had created. Harry didn’t immediately register the significance of the alterations Seven had made, but he could see that B’Elanna recognized the new template immediately.

  “That’s Assylia,” B’Elanna said softly.

  “Who’s Assylia?” Harry asked, but there was no time for B’Elanna or Seven to respond. A second gel pack exploded, and for a moment it seemed that the consciousness would rather face extinction than another experience in the holobuffer. Harry reasoned in a flash that either way their options were rapidly disintegrating and shut down the miniature neural network.

  The revised hologram came again to life. But this time it was as if it sensed the change in its physical form and found it more curious than frightening.

  Hoping that Seven’s assumption had been right, Harry added a full-length mirror to the room and placed it before the Monorhan.

  The hologram was again examining its arms and hands, running its eyes down the length of its body with wonder. When the mirror appeared, its elongated jaw dropped open and its eyes grew large. Only when it had extracted and extended its secondary arms and swallowed with visible relief did Harry start breathing again.

  Finally, hiding its secondary arms within a pouch in the back of its cloak, it turned to Harry, Seven, and B’Elanna and said, “How is this possible?”

  Harry smiled slightly, still disconcerted by their first failed attempt to integrate the consciousness with a holomatrix, and said, “We possess technology that allowed us to re-create your body using something we call a holomatrix.”

  “Who are you?” the hologram demanded haughtily.

  “My name is Harry Kim, and this is the starship Voyager.”

  She cast a questioning glance at Seven and B’Elanna and said, “I am Assylia, rih-hara-tan of the Fourteenth Tribe of Monorha and commander of the Betasis. I would speak to you in private, Commander Harry Kim.”

  B’Elanna couldn’t help but snicker softly before tapping her combadge and saying, “Torres to Chakotay.”

  Assylia jumped slightly as Chakotay’s disembodied voice echoed over the comm.

  “Chakotay here.”

  “Report to the holographic lab immediately. There’s someone here who wishes to speak with you.”

  “I’m on my way. Chakotay out,” he replied.

  Turning to Assylia, B’Elanna said, “Our commander will be here in a momen
t. I’m Lieutenant Torres, and this is Seven of Nine.”

  Assylia looked more closely at Seven and said, “I know you.”

  Raising herself to her full height, Seven replied, “We have interfaced once before.”

  “You invaded my ship,” Assylia said, her serpentine neck extending upward until her eyes were level with Seven’s.

  “We were looking for information,” B’Elanna interjected quickly. “We need your help.”

  “How many of your people have died, Lieutenant Torres?” Assylia asked.

  “None…yet,” B’Elanna replied.

  “They will,” Assylia said sadly. “It is only a matter of time.”

  Chapter 12

  Tom’s first step in analyzing the array’s tetryon transport system was to confirm that his initial hypothesis—that what one thought before transport was relevant—was accurate. He was able to confirm it in a way that satisfied him, but had your typical Starfleet scientist been shown his methods or results Tom was certain he would have been laughed out of his uniform.

  Once the creatures had been made visible he took the unauthorized but, in his opinion, absolutely necessary step of returning to the array to test the system in its own “home.” Given the size of the station he was able to use the schematics to pinpoint locations which he was certain were devoid of life-forms and move freely between dozens of transport sites and Voyager. Up to that point, his premise held. As long as he focused intently upon his destination just prior to stepping into the line of alcoves, he ended up at the precise coordinates he imagined.

  Step two had been to remove a pair of the mechanisms in its entirety from the array in order to attempt to integrate it into Voyager’s systems. As a team of engineers set to work rebuilding the pair of alcoves in the main shuttlebay, Tom analyzed the scans of the transports to determine as best he could why the mechanism worked. It would have been enough for him to know that it did, but he was going to need more than theory to sell the first officer on the plan he was about to propose. He was going to need irrefutable proof that the device could be used safely.