"Wow. What a rush! Two, two, two, brains in one. Although, I'm sure his brain's nothing compared to yours, Rommie."
"Harper," said the AI, testily.
"Oh. Okay. I know. To work it is." Harper paced slowly surveying the bluish virtual atmosphere. He stopped before a glowing data stream in the matrix. "Alright, Rom-doll. Time to find out what's on the boy's mind. The way this is rigged might get a little intense. Since my link is through your link to him, you're going to see everything I find...like it was firsthand. Ready?"
"Yes."
"Alright. Hold on to your data port, 'cause here I go!"
Rommie felt a jolt.
An amazing array of images and impressions flashed across her line of sight. Dazzling bits of information flooded through her consciousness. Some were pleasant like laughter, but others were horrific, nightmarish sparks of fear whose meaning she was unable to grasp. In a flash they were all whisked away, moved through her, to the more adequate stability of the Mainframe.
"That's it!" Harper voice chortled. He walked out from behind a data stream and sidled over. "I got it, Rom doll. Hey, you okay, Rommie? Rommie?"
She didn't answer him.
There were times when a sense of hopelessness pervaded Rommie. Once when she was counseling Dylan to be objective about his decision to use Harper's innovative yet risky teleporter, he had lashed back at her.
"When I touch you," Dylan asked. "Do you feel me? Or do you measure the pressure of my fingers against your skin? When I speak, do you hear my voice or do you interpret an acoustic wave? I can't be objective about this. I'm not a machine."
She told herself it was his grief over losing Sarah talking. Yet, the words rankled in her mind long after she was certain her captain had forgotten them.
She wanted to be thought of as more than a machine. The one person in the universe who had known her the longest, who had worked more closely with her than anyone she had ever known, had also spoken that cruelest of statements to her. It caused her to wonder if her situation was indeed hopeless.
Because no matter how much her captain shared in the discoveries she made about the universe and herself, something would remind him.
It was a question she didn't like to ponder, but it arose none the less. No matter how much any organic came to know who she was, would they ever forget what she was? If the answer was no, was her existence worth anything at all?
It was the voices that roused her. Faraway and indistinct, she would have dismissed them as static--had it not been for the familiar modulations that sparked a memory. Suddenly, the voices grew clearer.
"Tell me what's happening?"
That was her captain's voice. She'd recognize it anywhere. Why did he sound so concerned? What was happening? Or rather what wasn't? She was shocked when a self-diagnostic showed that all nonessential systems of the avatar had been temporarily suspended.
"Intialization of emergency shut-down procedure. You know, that safety Rommie was telling you about."
Shut down? Rommie thought as she listened to the second voice and instantly ran a status check. Yes, a systematic shut down had begun. One by one her components were powering down. Why am I shutting down?
"Can you reverse it?"
"That's what I'm trying to do. But this program. It's running on its own. She was prepared to put herself in complete shut-down to save me from neural shock. Basically, this program was created to protect my ol' noggin. The noggin's fine, Rommie. Don't do this to yourself. Snap out of it!"
She recognized the plea coming from her engineer. That was definitely Harper's voice. But Harper was supposed to be jacked into the Mainframe, wasn't he? No, he couldn't be. Why didn't she know? With an effort, Rommie fought the systems shut down. She awakened all but her visual sensors and checked again. No, Harper was definitely safe. The avatar herself was no longer linked with Mainframe.
Safe. Emergency subroutine invalidated. Halting. Systems check normal. Returning to full active status. "Emergency shut down terminated," she heard her voice say. Rommie's brown eyes fluttered open. The faces of Dylan, Harper, and Trance greeted her. She gave them a disoriented stare, looking at no one in particular.
"Rommie," said Dylan, concern in his blue eyes. "Are you alright?"
Her eyes settled on Dylan's features and she sat up, slowly. She blinked once or twice, trying to detect any sense of the fail safe she'd installed to protect Harper's brain during the link. The program lay dormant and she swiftly deleted it. A program capable of independently shutting her down was too dangerous to harbor in her mind for longer than necessary. She said, quickly and too sharply, "Yes. I'm fine."
Her AI appeared on a screen in the Med Deck wall. "Captain, the call you've been waiting for from Vesa Five is coming through..."
"Put it in my office. I'll be right there." Dylan looked at Trance.
"Harper's vitals are stable and Rommie's scans, normal," Trance answered his unspoken questions. "It's okay for now."
"Okay," Dylan nodded, but did not move. He looked reluctant to leave. After another moment, he said, "Well, if anything happens, you know where to find me."
Rommie watched her captain depart before she focused her attention on Harper. His hair was rumpled and his eyes looked tired, yet the corners of his mouth still broke into his signature smile. In one hand, he held a flexi and was rapidly entering data into it with the other. He hopped up onto the edge of her bed. "Don't tell, Dylan, but I really thought we'd lost you for a moment."
Rommie nodded to her engineer.
Her hologram flickered on, standing next to the bed. "Run a self-diagnostic to be safe."
"I will." Rommie's gaze suddenly took on a far off look.
Safe.
A wisp of thought whispered at the back of her mind and then evaporated like a curl of smoke.
"Keep me safe," said Rommie.
"What's that?" asked Harper. His fingers paused over his data flexi.
"Just a thought I--" Rommie shook her head, wondering what had triggered her to say those words. Her brown eyes now fixed on the still form of the boy. She watched him for a moment in silence. Then, she looked to Harper. "Is he alright?"
"He's fine. It'll be a few hours before we see the results of my ingenious procedure. Until then, he'll rest easy."
"He'll...awaken?"
"That's the plan. I'll let you know when..."
"Please do."
She walked out of the Med Deck and headed for Command. Remnants of thoughts still whirled in her mind from her encounter with the boy. Though she couldn't sort out all the sensations she'd experienced in that brief span of time during the link, she did catch one. Even if all hopes failed and she didn't learn another thing about the boy, she knew what one desire they shared.
He wanted to belong.
Andromeda's first officer, alone on the Command Deck, rose from the pilot's station as Rommie entered. "So, everything went okay? I assume the operation was a success?"
"Harper's fine," Rommie replied, answering Beka's first concern. "The rest remains to be seen."
Beka nodded.
Realizing from the prolonged silence that no more details were forthcoming, Captain Valentine turned attention to her work. "Tyr and I finished every possible scan we could on that ship. Once he was convinced the ship wasn't an outright threat to us, he suggested blowing it out the sky to cover the fact we'd been aboard it. I suggested he only wanted to attract unwanted attention from whoever might come investigating such an explosion in this sector. I told him to go do something more constructive with his time. Maybe I've been hanging around you and Dylan too long, but boredom is no excuse to go looking for a fight. Here's what our scans found." She punched a button on a panel and the details flashed on several of the ship's screens.
Beka tilted her head to one side as she looked at the screen. "There was something oddly familiar about the patterns. Couldn't quite place them, but I think I've seen them somewhere before. What do you say, Rommie?"
Rommie glanced at the scans and frowned.
"What?" Beka asked. "What's the matter?"
"The only times I've seen readings like this was when Trance steered me through the slipstream and when Harper used his teleporter across time. I must tell Dylan." Rommie turned and abruptly left the Command Deck.
Beka looked up at the still scrolling scans, but couldn't make heads nor tails of them. She drummed on a nearby console. "Sure, Rommie. Go tell Dylan. Don't bother to enlighten me. Andromeda, would you help me out here?"
Thus summoned, Holo-Rommie flickered in beside her. "If analysis of this data is correct, that ship does not belong here."
Beka squinted, peering out of the view screen at the derelict ship, thinking about how Rommie had mentioned Andromeda's significant encounters with time travel. "You mean it belongs to another time?"
Holo-Rommie crossed her arms and shook her head. "More like another universe."