“It wouldn’t have made any difference. It had to be done.”
“Nancy, you and I have been through a great deal of this journey together. You have suffered the torments of the damned, and no one, least of all me, would blame you for wanting a clean slate.”
“What?”
“I’m not even sure you were willing to admit it to yourself. We all have secrets we refuse to face. But none of us are ever given a chance like the one presented to you, a chance to make them go away.”
Sensations Conlon had not experienced since the transfer began to assault her. Feelings, in all their messy, frustrating fullness, began to force their way into her consciousness.
“Please don’t do this,” she pleaded.
“I’m not doing anything,” Cambridge replied. “Memories are nothing more or less than connections between our senses and our experiences. Your memories are now divided into partitions within your matrix. You can choose whether or not to access them. The Doctor and I have done a great deal of work with his program addressing a similar situation. It was that work that enabled me to intuitively grasp your current condition.”
“I don’t want to remember,” Conlon realized.
“And in this form, you don’t have to. That’s its gift and its curse. But without all of your memories, you will never be whole. You will never again be the woman you were before your consciousness was transferred.”
“I don’t think I ever want to be that woman again,” Conlon said.
Cambridge paused, allowing her time to live a little with this realization.
“Because?” he finally asked.
“Because she was broken. Because her life was not dictated by her choices. Everything about her existence, except her desire to work as a Starfleet engineer, was forced upon her by circumstance. I didn’t know until all of it was gone how much I didn’t miss it. And I don’t want to go back.”
“Even if that means sacrificing your relationship with Harry and your child?” Cambridge asked softly, without judgment.
The counselor had spoken the truth when he said that in this form, memories were partitioned, but that wasn’t unique to this form. Even in her organic life, she had practiced the same art of compartmentalization: difficult emotions were often set aside to be dealt with later.
But later rarely came.
Each partition contained an imaginary door. The memories the counselor was attempting to unearth were locked behind one such door. She had but to open it to remember all of the beautiful and painful memories she had segregated. But before she subjected herself to that, she needed to understand why she had locked them away in the first place.
“I don’t… why would I have… I mean…”
“Did you love Harry Kim?”
“I thought I did. No,” she said, “I thought that given enough time, I would.”
“And how did that work out?”
Conlon shook her head. “I was afraid. I didn’t want to do this alone.”
“Facing death and the termination of your pregnancy?”
Conlon cracked the door open ever so slightly.
“I remember standing on the holodeck in a simulation of a hillside with beautiful trees. I needed to make a choice about the baby, using its cells to save my life. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want to raise the child. Not knowing how long I would live after that was part of it. But the biggest part was that I wasn’t ready to live that life.”
“And Harry?”
Conlon shook her head. “When does liking someone a lot, wanting to know them better, and enjoying their company become love?” she asked. “What I realized that day was that he was safe and comfortable and having him beside me while I fought this fight would make it easier for me. When I’m with him, it just feels like whatever he says, or wants, or thinks, is right. What I want is somehow never as important when he’s there.
“But that day, on the hillside, I knew that even though all of that was true, it wasn’t love. Not like what he felt. It was need. It was weakness. It wasn’t my truth.”
“And you intended to tell him that?”
Conlon nodded. The only reason she could access this information without the emotions connected to them overwhelming her was because she was able to control the information processed by her matrix. Sorting this out in her human body would have been impossible.
It had been impossible.
“But then I woke up and the baby had been born. And Harry was there and said all of the right things and I just didn’t have the strength to fight it. Or him. I could take the pain. It wasn’t going to last forever. And then, he’d be free and he’d have what he wanted.”
“The child?”
“He wanted her in a way I never could. It didn’t seem like too much to ask. And the longer we spent here, struggling together to survive, the more it felt like the right choice. I do care for him. He is the best person I have ever known. I was dying. I knew it. So why not make these last days as happy as we could? What was the harm?”
“It wasn’t what you wanted,” Cambridge replied.
“No, it wasn’t,” she agreed.
“The consciousness transfer was completed perfectly, exactly as you decided it would be, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Conlon admitted to him and to herself for the first time.
“You do understand that retaining this holographic body can’t be the solution to your problem either.”
Conlon nodded.
“We’ll take all of this one step at a time,” Cambridge assured her.
“Would you do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
“I want to speak to Harry before we do the transfer. I don’t know if I’ll be able to…”
“I think that can be arranged,” Cambridge replied.
DEMETER
Commander Atlee Fife’s interactions with his captain had been limited since they had rejoined the fleet. Given the counselor’s recommendations it was unlikely that O’Donnell would resume his position prior to
