Second Chances: Chapter 72

Stardate 53101
May 2376
San Francisco, Earth

It was always easy to tell when it got close to the end of the term, especially spring term. The cadets were a little bit more antsy and the professors a little bit more frustrated. The worst were the first classmen; they knew that there would be very little that would prevent their graduation and their matriculation into the Fleet, and in their eagerness to get started with their careers and their lives, they inevitably let little things drop.

Like details in final projects.

"There are nine of you who still haven't submitted proposals for your final projects," Lt. B'Elanna Torres reminded her Dominion Tech class. "And I'm sure everyone is shocked to know that all nine are firsties." That got a few chuckles out of the class. "Now, there's not much I can do to stop you from graduating if you don't do a final project in an elective class, but I can find out who your chief engineers will be and let them know how disappointed I am in you. Please don't make me do that. I have enough work to do already." She waited for the laughter to die down before concluding, "Class dismissed, see you on Wednesday." She got a few murmured apologies and promises to turn in their proposals as the cadets filed out of the classroom, but she would believe that when she saw them.

She normally stuck around after class to answer questions and help cadets with their projects, but she was in a rush to get back to Pathfinder that morning. Operation Watson, the video communication with Voyager through the MIDAS array, was a renowned success. It had been almost four weeks since the first experimental connection, and in that time, they had had no glitches at all. Every day, the comm connected and got exactly the 26 minutes expected. She had had three Thursday conferences with Joe Carey, all very constructive; while they were still waiting on the finishing touches of the simulation from R&D, she had been able to help him with other issues that Voyager was having, given that it was now several years old and hadn't seen a dry dock since they left UP, and the ship was running smoother now than it had even then.

And of course, Tom being Tom, he had crashed each of those three meetings. For the first one, he came in after Captain Janeway left after her brief introduction to Cadet Nu and passing along her congratulations on the Scott Award and pending graduation. He sat quietly in the back, just watching them work in a way that would have been creepy if it had been coming from anybody else, until Carey had announced at 21 minutes that all of his questions had been answered and he had nothing further to discuss. She knew a set-up when she saw one, but certainly wasn't going to argue with the free five minutes to talk to her husband, getting to talk to each other without anyone else in the room—either room—for the first time since they left their apartment on Mars that February morning more than five years before. She repaid the favor the next week; at 21 minutes, Sarah Carey and the two Carey boys came into the communications lab at Pathfinder and got to spend five minutes with Joe. The next week she had with Tom again, and she and Joe seemed to have settled into an unspoken agreement to take turns spending the last five minutes of the conference with family.

She was going to have to remember to point out to both Tom and Joe that that would have to take a pause while she was on Qo'noS.

With the success of the comm link, Lt. Barclay had started musing of a trans-galactic holographic communicator, so Pathfinder consulted the developer of the original holographic communication: Lt. Commander Kwasi Amartey, now a project manager at Jupiter Station. He had left for Jupiter Station around the same time she had left for Pathfinder, and while they stayed in touch, their paths hadn't crossed since. Starfleet Engineering wasn't a huge world, but there were several thousand engineers in the Fleet, and their specialties were different enough that they didn't go to the same conferences or worked on the same projects.

Until now.

She was surprised to see her friend and former colleague waiting for her outside her classroom door. "This place brings back memories," he mused before she could even say hello.

"How many of them good?" she asked. He grinned, his teeth shining white.

"Absolutely none," he replied.

They headed over to the CRC to get lunch; Scotty Hell had a mess hall, but Torres ate there only as a last resort, as too many cadets seemed to think that her lunchtime would be the perfect time to approach her to ask questions. "We could have done this over comm, you know," she said as they grabbed their trays from the replicators and headed for an open table, not the first time she had said that.

"Gods, I take every chance I can get to get off that station," he said emphatically. "I miss being on a planet," he admitted. She was about to make a joke about that being awkward, considering his choice in career, but he beat her to it. "I know, I know, I should have thought about that before joining Starfleet," he said in a voice that told her he had been teased about this before. "Station is life is just so… sterile. We go to the resort on Ganymede whenever we get a few days off, but it's a domed colony and still a poor substitute." He grinned again. "And my mother has been complaining that it's been too long since she has seen Oye in person. And Aja's parents are on a rare visit to Earth as well, so it seemed a good time to work on wedding plans."

B'Elanna tilted her head slightly at that tidbit of information. "That's a recent development," she observed. Lt. Commander Aja Sero was another holoengineer at Jupiter Station, specializing in advanced holographic programming and having the misfortune of working directly for Dr. Lewis Zimmerman. In the often-small world that Starfleet engineering was, B'Elanna had known her long before Aja and Kwasi started dating after he moved to Jupiter Station. As a lieutenant, she had led the team at Shipyards that had installed the holodecks on Voyager and countless other ships, and even before that, she had been part of the same informal group of holoprogramming enthusiasts on Mars as Tom. She had left Mars around the same time as Tom, taking an assignment on the Lexington with her husband. She had been on a pregnancy assignment on Jupiter Station when the Lexington fought against the Borg attack, resulting in 96 deaths, including her husband. "When did that happen?" B'Elanna asked, referring to the engagement. Amartey grinned.

"A few weeks ago," he said. "Aja's mom is a Lunar Schooner, and they have some really strange superstitions about when it's acceptable to announce good news. We aren't allowed to publicly acknowledge it for another two weeks."

"Well, when it becomes public knowledge, file away my congratulations," she offered.

"Thanks," he replied with that same wide grin he often had. "Hey, you should come over for dinner this weekend. Aja's parents are about to be stationed on Qo'noS with the Diplomatic Corps and they will take any pieces of advice they can get. And Aja would love to hear how Tom is doing. And she has a new holonovel out that she wants to send him. Is he still writing?"

B'Elanna rolled her eyes with a smile. "He is," she acknowledged. "And they're just as cheesy as they've always been."

He laughed. "Great! Now Aja is going to make sure that we can figure out a way to send and receive holoprograms, because I'm sure she would love to run them." The two shared a penchant for overly cheesy, low-brow entertainment, what Aja had referred to as 'junk food for the brain,' much the same way B'Elanna described her own Klingon romance novels. "And her publisher is always looking for that kind of program," Amartey continued. "Apparently Aja's programs have quite the cult following."

"If I can get Tom's programs to a publisher, I'd win wife of the year," B'Elanna commented. "Let me know when this weekend, and we'll come over. I'm interested to see if Izzy and Oye remember each other at all."

"You're going to love Ghana," he promised. "It's quite hot there. After being on a climate-controlled station for so long, I thought I was going to melt. It's good to be home."

They started talking work as soon as they returned their trays to the reclaimer. "I've reviewed Voyager's specs when it comes to the holographic systems," Amartey said as Torres led him toward Pathfinder. "Lt. Barclay told me that you already have a working holographic program of Voyager."

She nodded. "It's just about the complete ship," she said. "I use it for engineering, but he uses it to test out programs through all of the communications systems, which involves engineering, astrometrics, the bridge, and he's probably got the thing programmed down to a few Jeffries tubes as well." She entered her code at the Pathfinder doors and he followed her in. "He's probably in there now," she said. It seemed that whenever you needed to find Barclay, it was easier just to check Pathfinder's holodeck than hail him.

She checked the holodeck monitor; sure enough, Lt. Barclay was running the Voyager program. She rolled her eyes and keyed in her code.

And then frowned when the holodeck doors slid open to reveal… a mess hall? Voyager's mess hall, she assumed, given that it was in the Voyager program, but why would the program need a mess hall?

It took her another beat to realize that there were people in the mess hall, people in a mix of the old uniforms that the Voyager crew had been wearing when they left and what appeared to be Maquis fatigues. "What the…" she murmured, and then stopped.

Leaning against a counter, laughing and talking to a few other officers and Barclay, was Tom.

"What. The. Hell," she said, this time loudly and angrily. Her words had gotten the attention of several of the holographic crew, including Tom, who turned to face her, absolutely no recognition on his face. "Computer, end program," she snapped. Immediately, the mess hall and holographic crew disappeared, leaving Lt. Barclay standing in the middle of the room, a caught expression on his face.

It didn't take very many angry strides before she was at him, her fist tightly clenched. "Torres," Amartey said in a voice that was trying to be calming. She raised her other hand to stop him, her eyes never leaving Barclay's.

"What is this?" she asked, barely able to control her voice. He looked absolutely terrified, which was probably the appropriate response.

"I-I-I—"

"You created holographic versions of the crew!" she exclaimed. "For what? To have 150 people look at you adoringly? To have 150 new best friends?"

"They-they help me—"

"You have no right!" she interrupted angrily. "You can't just use people's likenesses without their consent! Do you even know—" She cut herself off, making herself relax her hand from the tight fist it was still wrapped in, and when she spoke again, her voice was again low and cold. "If you don't permanently delete the holograms of each of the crew, I will break your neck." She was usually more creative with her threats of death and dismemberment; it had amused her ensigns and chiefs endlessly back when she was on UP. Her favorite was probably when she threatened to remove an ensign's spine and use his vertebrae as socket wrenches, but there was no mirth today, and part of her was afraid that she was serious. "Do you understand me?"

He looked nervous as he nodded. "I-I…" He swallowed and tried again. "Are-are you going to tell anyone?" he asked timidly. Her eyes widened incredulously.

"You created a holographic version of my husband," she said emphatically. "Who is, in case you've forgotten, your boss' son. You better be damn sure I'm not staying quiet about this one." She angrily stalked toward the exit, leaving both Barclay and Amartey in the now-empty holodeck.

Torres didn't know how many hours had passed between her discovering the extend of Barclay's Voyager program and when she found herself standing in a park not far from the CRC. She had gone to Owen's office directly from the holodeck and railed at him about what she had found and demanded that Barclay be kicked out of the Pathfinder Project. He had patiently listened to her fumings before calmly stating that personnel decisions weren't hers to make, which set her off again. And then she had gone to her locker in the CRC's gym, changed into her running clothes, and ran, hearing Tom's voice in the back of her head: Let's go for a run, Torres.

Kahless. How had that man known her so well before she even knew herself?

And now she was back at the Presidio, her legs aching and her chest heaving, trying desperately to get enough oxygen into her lungs. "Lt. Torres," a pleasant voice said, and she straightened, trying to identify who said it.

She had met Commander Deanna Troi once before, when she was a cadet and the counselor was working on her hybrid certification, but she recognized the half-Betazoid right away. "Sir," she replied, and the counselor gave a small smile.

"Would you care to join me on a walk, Lieutenant?" Troi asked, and even though her legs felt like they couldn't hold her up much longer, Torres nodded her assent, and they set off. "The last time we met, you were excited about your engagement," Troi said conversationally.

Torres remembered the conversation. It was sometime in the early spring her firstie year; she had spent most of the day at Starfleet Medical for her routine exams, and Counselor Troi was assigned to assess Bayrote's treatment of Torres. They had chatted about inconsequential things for the first few minutes, and then Troi had asked her about Tom, and Torres had told her about how he had tried to slip a proposal into the conversation when she was making repairs to the Paris shuttle. "That was a long time ago," Torres finally said.

"It wasn't that long ago," Troi countered lightly.

"If this is supposed to be a counseling session, sir, I'm going to have to decline," Torres said firmly. "It took Dr. Bayrote years to get me to open up to him, and you've got a long way to go."

Troi smiled that little smile of hers again. "You have every right to be upset at Lt. Barclay," she said, and Torres barely managed to bite back a sarcastic response. "It was an inexcusable invasion of privacy." Belatedly, Torres remembered that Barclay had come from the Enterprise; given how screwed up he was, there was a good chance that he had been seeing Counselor Troi professionally, but the counselor continued before she could comment on that. "But that's not why you're upset, is it?"

"Are you saying that's not enough?" Torres asked in disbelief.

"I sense… embarrassment, in your reaction."

"If you think I'm embarrassed about what I said to Barclay, you couldn't be further from the truth," Torres assured her.

"Not that," Troi replied. "I think you're embarrassed about what bothered you. It wasn't that Reg used your husband's likeness, was it?"

Torres glared down at the ground as she walked. Gods, she hated telepaths. Her favorite thing about having Reyana as a roommate was that she had been completely disinterested in other people's emotions. "I've been married for almost six years," she finally said, reluctantly. Kahless, had it really been that long? "I lived with my husband for eight months of those six years, and I'm terrified that in the last five years, he's decided that he doesn't love me anymore, or forgotten why he did in the first place." She certainly wasn't going to get into the abandonment issues that John Torres had caused, because Troi wasn't her counselor and she got enough of that from Bayrote. "Barclay programmed the characters to only recognize him and each other," she said. "So when the holographic Tom saw me—"

"He didn't recognize you," Troi finished for her. She was astute enough to know that Torres didn't need her to state that maybe the source of the anger was less that Barclay had created holograms of the crew—which was bad enough; was that even legal?—but also the fear that Tom wouldn't love her anymore. Which she knew on an intellectual level wasn't true; she saw Tom once a week and received letters from him every day. She knew that he loved her and was hoping that he'd soon be home with her and Izzy. "Would it help if Reg reprogrammed him?"

"No," Torres said flatly. "I'm not one for the fantasies of the holodeck." And she didn't understand people who would rather live in their holographic worlds than the real one. Tom used his programs for entertainment; he didn't actually think that he was Captain Proton, or whatever his new comic book program was. Barclay preferred the holodeck to the real world, preferred holograms that he could program and control to real people that he couldn't, and she wondered often if he thought he was the person that he programed his holograms to believe he was.

"I'm sure Reg—"

"Sir," Torres interrupted. They were back in front of CRC and she stopped to face Counselor Troi. "I appreciate that you and Lt. Barclay have history, but I'm not ready to forgive him for this, and I'm not going to stop pushing for him to be dismissed from Pathfinder any time soon. If you excuse me, I need to get a few things from my office and then pick up my daughter from my mother-in-law. I hope you have a good evening." She didn't wait for a response or a dismissal before she turned to enter the CRC.

The next Thursday, Joe and Tom were already in the astrometrics lab on Voyager when Torres activated the comm link, and the bright grin Tom gave her when he saw her was enough to remind her why the real world was so much better than anything that could be programmed for a holodeck.