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x-x

After giving him his pills, Phlox had dimmed the lights in sickbay, and Trip settled back on the mattress, his mind swirling. Pills, pills, pills; all you can eat, as far as the eye could see; pills pills pills, for days now, pills. At least they were better than the hyposprays. It was funny, actually. The pills made him feel slow and lethargic, and made it hard to think, his thoughts either coming too slow, or like now, all in a jumble. Or maybe that was the illness. But the pills made it harder to think right. At least with the illness he could think.

If he could just get back to the artifact, maybe he could figure out what had happened, why he had those visions, heard the voices. Maybe he could figure out why he was so messed up now.

If he could get it to prick him again...

That was sort of an odd thought. Maybe that was another of those Thoughts That Seemed to Be Someone Else's that Phlox had mentioned.

There was no way they'd allow him near it, at least not in his current state. Anyway, Phlox didn't think his "illness," if that's what this was, had anything to do with the device. Trip couldn't believe that the two things weren't related, though. They had to be. He'd had no symptoms prior to the artifact, nothing at all, and now here he was, off duty for the foreseeable future, and probably going to be sent to a psychiatric hospital next trip back to Earth. Probably never be able to serve in Starfleet again. Probably stuck on meds for life. Who knows if he'd even end up stable enough to live on his own? He certainly wasn't feeling particularly stable right now, despite the medications.

So why not try the device again? Things certainly couldn't get any worse.

He rolled over onto his side, pulling the covers up over his shoulders. He had to be patient. His time would come. He reckoned he just needed to wait and to figure out a plan.

He already knew his first step. He needed to stop taking the meds. They were making his perceptions fuzzy, and it was too hard to think while on them. He figured he could deal with the voices and the visions, for the most part, so long as he could work and plan.

Well, he hoped he could deal with them.

He'd just hoard the pills, pretend to take them, but hide them as soon as Phlox left him alone. He could do that. Just a couple days without them and his mind should be clearer, then he'd take his next step: get himself to that contraption.

x-x

Two nights later, Trip realised that it was time. Phlox was out somewhere, and his tech was working on something in one of the side rooms. Trip had been hiding his pills instead of taking them. Soon enough, Phlox would do a blood test again, and would notice the changes in his blood chemistry. Worse was that he was constantly on edge, waiting for his symptoms to come back. But he'd had to wait - it was only just today that he'd started feeling normal again, like he could really think and function.

Trip slid out of bed. He tiptoed to the drawer where he'd seen Phlox place his hyposprays, knelt down and, with a pair of tweezers he'd liberated from one of Phlox's kits earlier, he began work on the lock. It opened quickly and he reached inside the drawer, grabbing a hypo. He programmed it for a sedative, then slipped out the door into the corridor, hoping no one would see him. Actually, he didn't really care if they saw him, so long as they didn't move quickly enough to stop him. If they tried, he had the hypo. And he didn't have far to go - the launch bay was on the same deck as sickbay. He started running, his bare feet making soft pats on the deck plating as he moved.

God, he hoped the artifact would still be located where he'd last left it. He hadn't even thought of them moving it.

He stopped at the end of the corridor and peered around the corner - there was no one there. He triggered the launch bay doors and stepped inside.

One crewman was working underneath one of the shuttles, and Trip slipped by him without incident. He walked to the barrier that they'd set up around the artifact, then stepped inside. Quickly, knowing that he didn't have much time - either Phlox would find him missing, or his madness would overtake him - he began working.

He tried to reproduce what happened before. Moving his hand over the seam, he jerked away just as a needle came out. It was tiny, but unmistakable, and Trip sat on the floor staring at it. Why had it come out for him, but no one else had found it? What was special about him?

He was the first, he thought. Now it would only respond to him.

"Right," he whispered. He held a shaky finger over the needle, and hesitated. He pressed down.

He heard screaming.

There was a flurry of activity around him, and he felt himself being moved. There were voices...

He saw images of Malcolm, and Hoshi. Working beside him on the artifact. Then the flash. And they were dead. Lying there, dead. And it wasn't a vision this time, but real, and he screamed...

Malcolm was standing over him, but it wasn't Malcolm, it was...someone was speaking to him, but it wasn't Malcolm, or Hoshi. They wanted him to...there was something they needed him to do...he listened hard, holding himself still. He could just understand some of what they were saying. They said it again. And again. The message repeated over, and over, each time louder and clearer, until Trip jammed his hands against his ears, trying to block it out. "I get it," he shouted into the din. "I get it."

He woke in sickbay, his throat sore. He was on his back on a biobed, the room a flurry of activity around him, and he was struggling against the restraints, and the voices repeated their message over, and over, and over, and he struggled, and Phlox came at him with a hypo, and he felt -

Trip woke in sickbay, his entire body aching. Experimentally, he tried lifting an arm, and found that he could - the restraints were gone. He let his arm fall to the mattress, and it seemed to move in slow motion. He was lethargic, everything was slow, he was slow, he couldn't think. He could tell he'd been drugged. He was sore. He must have been struggling. He remembered the restraints, and shouting.

It was quiet now. The voices were gone. Thank God. He closed his eyes and slept.

x-x

Trip sat on the biobed, trying to hear Malcolm through the chorus. The voices had been gone for a bit, but that was at a level of medication that had incapacitated him, so Phlox had backed off the dosage. With that change, they were back. That was okay, though - he was growing used to them. Now, at least, they said more than "Dead". Now they said a great deal.

Malcolm was sitting in the chair beside his bed, reading something aloud from a padd. Trip had missed most of what he was saying, but that was all right. He had something to say himself.

"We aren't related enough," Trip said, and Malcolm stopped reading. Trip needed to explain, now that he knew what was going on. He only hoped that he'd be clear enough for Malcolm to understand him. Maybe help him. Help them. He tried again. "We aren't related enough, to the people who made it. So there was a problem. It wasn't intended to be harmful."

"What wasn't?" Malcolm asked.

"It wasn't meant for us. When it pricked me, it was testing. Then it imprinted. But it wasn't meant for us, so there was a problem."

Malcolm sat straighter in his seat and put the padd down. "You mean the device? The artifact?"

Trip nodded. "We need to get rid of it. Get it off the ship. Or it will happen. You'll die, Hoshi will die, anyone there. It was showing me what would happen. A warning. A message."

It's not meant for you...

"It's not meant for us," Trip said, echoing what the voices told him.

"How do you know all this?"

"They told me. They're telling me," Trip said, his voice rising. "They're telling me it needs to go. That you'll be safe, but it needs to go."

"The voices are part of your illness," Malcolm said, casting an alarmed look around sickbay.

Trip spoke over him. "Or you'll both die. You'll all die. What I saw will come true."

As Phlox stepped towards them and rapidly injected something into Trip's arm, Malcolm asked, "What about you?"

"What about me?" Trip said, suddenly drowsy. Phlox helped him lie back on the bed, and his eyes drifted shut.

"If we get rid of this thing, will you go back to...will you be well again, Trip?"

"I don't know. I can't exactly ask them."

"Why not?"

Trip laughed. "It's a recording."

x-x

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