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Personal Log, Cadet Icheb, Academy Distant Learner Program First Year, Stardate 54212.7
The past couple of weeks have been very strange on Voyager. Sometimes it's been too exciting. It was bad enough we had to retrieve the Doctor from that Dinaali hospital, after he was abducted by the Dralian trader Gar. The reason we found out our EMH had been stolen was because of the injury on the holodeck to Ensign Kim. When Tom took Harry to Sickbay, Tom realized something wasn't right. He knows the Doctor better than anyone besides Seven and Lieutenant Torres, since Tom works with him all the time. The replacement Doctor Gar replicated for us when he stole the real EMH was incompetent! We were lucky we got our Doctor back when we did, because of the next strange series of events.
A holographic Lieutenant Reginald Barclay was transmitted to Voyager through the datastream. The crew wasn't too happy at first. No one received any messages at all from their families in the Alpha Quadrant in this datastream. Because his program was so large, there wasn't room for any other communications. What made it worse was that the datastream didn't arrive at all last month. I hope we can find out what went wrong with "Reg," because I can't believe he was a true copy of the officer the Doctor met when he was sent to the Alpha Quadrant to treat Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, his creator. I spoke with the Doctor this morning. He told me he held many conversations with Mr. Barclay about the entire crew, including me, but "Reg" seemed to have no idea about who I was. I thought it was, well, very strange.
I was a little upset when Mr. Barclay didn't seem to recognize me. I was even more upset when I saw the Barclay hologram was monopolizing the Doctor's mobile emitter. The EMH was caged in Sickbay while "Reg" could visit with everyone in the mess hall, telling jokes and entertaining them with his impressions of the crew. Tom calls it "schmoozing." He was very humorous. His impressions of people's voices, especially the captain's, were almost perfect. But for someone who was sent to us to upgrade our systems so we could fly Voyager through a red giant to get home to the Alpha Quadrant, he wasn't very cooperative. Whenever we noticed flaws in his scientific explanations and tried to correct his errors, he ignored us.
The Doctor pointed out possible omissions from the anti-radiation inoculations "Reg" said would protect us. Since I've had the opportunity to gain more knowledge of shield theory through my Academy classes with Tuvok, I had concerns, as well. I didn't see how the changes he proposed to our shields would be sufficient to protect us from every type of dangerous radiation from the red giant. He always said the inoculations and the shielding would "work together," but I could not see how two imperfect protective measures could do that efficiently.
And then the holographic "Reg" stole an escape pod, kidnapped Seven, and tried to take her through the geodesic fold inside the red giant without any additional protective shielding! We retrieved Seven just in time, or she would have been killed by radiation.
When I spoke with Seven after she was rescued from the Barclay hologram, I confessed, "I should have said something to Lieutenant Torres. My calculations indicated the shielding would be insufficient protection."
"Icheb, she noticed the same thing you did and expressed those concerns. So did I, but the Barclay hologram always had an answer for us whenever we questioned the efficacy of his recommendations. Kidnapping me is something the real Lieutenant Barclay would never do. The Doctor met the man in person. He is certain Barclay wouldn't act that way. A hologram should not be able to do what the person on whom he is based would not do. I don't know what went wrong. Something did."
I've been thinking about this a great deal. Maybe some of Mr. Barclay's memories had to be deleted for him to be sent via datastream, and it also altered his ethical subroutines. It may not be wise to send a hologram of a living human person through the datastream and expect it to actually act like it was that person. The data required may be too complicated to fit into the datastream - although the Doctor went there and came back, and his program is very complicated.
It is uncomfortable for anyone who has lived as Borg to admit to uncertainty. It is too much like imperfection. I hope we'll find out more from Starfleet in the next datastream about what really happened.
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