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The little girl, only five years old, watched as her parents threw their computers and their R5D data rods into the replicator to disintegrate them. She then watched as her parents packed their bags. As they departed, they instructed her to remain inside the house.
An hour later, her mother’s communicator, which was still sitting on the entryway table, beeped. She opened it.
“Stay inside, Sovak,” her mother said breathlessly. “Go hide in the root cellar, and don’t let anyone know that you’re there.”
The root cellar, which was situated under the neighbor’s house, was a secret. She was not even allowed to tell her school friends about it. The girl took her nightlight into the cellar and crouched there behind the clay pots containing fermenting vegetables, cradling her stuffed sehlat. Over the next day she heard footsteps and unfamiliar voices, but she remained silent.
Eventually she crept out to explore. She was able to eat the packaged food in the pantry for several days. But when that was gone, hunger made her brave. She peered outside and saw the next door neighbor, a kind, soft-spoken lady, hanging laundry out to dry beneath the desiccated Vulcan sky.
She ventured outside, the grime of the root cellar darkening her face, dress, and hands. The woman from next door stared at the little girl slack-jawed.
“Salir!” she cried out. Her husband emerged from their house and stopped in his tracks. “I think that’s T’Mol’s little girl,” the lady said.
Salir mouthed the name of an obsolete Vulcan deity and approached the tiny, insecure figure of Sovak. He kneeled beside her and placed his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“They left her behind.” He shook his head in disbelief and turned to his wife. “They just…left her behind.”
——————————
Sovak started awake with a gasp.
She was in the Talon’s mess hall, her morning cup of coffee on the table before her. Chiri was standing beside her with her hand resting on Sovak’s shoulder.
“Are you okay?” the slim Ferengi asked. “You were in some kind of trance.”
Sovak forced herself to breathe. She picked up her coffee and tried to drink it. It was room temperature.
“I was reliving a memory from when I was very young,” the Romulan explained. “From when I was a little girl on Vulcan. It was so vivid.”
“You mean…,” asked Chiri, “when your parents abandoned you?”
Sovak realized tears were falling from her eyes and quickly wiped them away.
“Yeah…that’s the one,” she said.
“All right, cut!”
A short man, wearing a ball cap and a jacket, looked up from a computer display and pointed at her. “Good work.” Equipment surrounded her: a large camera and its operator, a microphone on a boom, a woman with a white bounce board. “That’s it for today,” the director shouted.
Sovak attempted to stand, but her head was spinning. She tried to grab the table, but instead fell to the floor. Bright studio lights shined down on her.
“Jazzy,” Chiri cried, lowering herself to her knees and steadying Sovak.
The director muttered “Not again…” under his breath. He ordered the AD to call the nurse over from the other building.
Chiri—or…Madison was her name, Jasmine realized—said, “She’s probably just dehydrated. She seemed to be struggling today.”
The nurse drained two bags of saline fluid into Jasmine Bell while the makeup tech removed her ear appliances and scrubbed the sallow coloring from her face and hands. In the chair beside her, Madison sat, transforming from Ferengi to human with the help of her makeup artist.
The door swung open and the director peeked inside.
“How’s Jazzy?” he asked.
Madison smiled weakly at Jasmine, then approached the director.
“I’ll drive her home,” she said. “You can send a service to pick her up tomorrow.”
“A service?” the director complained. “We’re over budget as it is.”
Jasmine could hear Madison whisper, “Do you really want her driving in this condition?”
——————————
Madison Moore drove Jasmine into Burbank on the 101 as the sun was setting. Her red Jaguar had the top down and the humid wind blowing through Jasmine’s hair felt soothing and therapeutic.
Jasmine thanked her for the ride. Without asking, her fellow cast member followed her inside the house and sat on the couch, watching her has she opened a new bottle of bourbon.
“Want some?”
“Christ Jazzy, lay off the booze. You gotta be up at four o’clock.”
Jasmine sighed. “Did you follow me into my house for any particular reason, Madison?”
“What I’m about to tell you is confidential,” said Madison. Jasmine rolled her eyes and nodded. Madison continued: “I’m serious. The executive producers are talking about replacing you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jasmine, draining her glass of whiskey. “With who?”
“Ann Swenson.”
“Wha—how does that make sense?” Jasmine demanded angrily. “Her character is paralyzed and in a wheelchair.”
Madison stood and addressed her coworker dismissively. “It’s science fiction, dumbass. They can write any shit they want. They’ll release you from your contract and Ann will be the new star of the show. And you’re going to be plutonium to casting directors after that happens. Are you listening to me?”
——————————
The next morning, Jasmine sat in the makeup chair for the usual forty-five minutes it took to turn her into Sovak. After that, she was heading to wardrobe when someone called her name; the show’s editor beckoned her toward the dailies room.
“Did you want to rewatch the scene from the fourth episode that they’re cutting into this week’s show? For context?”
Jasmine was confused. “Why are we recycling clips?” she asked.
“We’re reusing the clip because it doesn’t make sense to reshoot it,” explained the editor. “I mean, the Melkotian assassin, in the script, is basically causing you to relive all your worst traumas in order to push you over the edge.”
Jasmine shook her head disdainfully. “Well, I can’t re-watch it because I never saw the finished product in the first place.”
“Wait—you mean you never saw the finished episode?”
“No. I don’t watch myself act. It makes me self-conscious.”
“Well, this is one of the defining moments for your character. I mean, you should watch it at least once. That episode was nominated for an Emmy, although admittedly that was for special effects.”
Sitting alone in the darkened room, waiting for the projector to warm up, Jasmine thought about Brenna Jones, the actress who played the felinoid C’Mal. Brenna was still complaining about C’Mal’s death scene five weeks after they had shot it.
“So badly written,” Brenna had grumbled that very morning as they painted on her facial stripes. “Bang, and I just fall dead. No speech. No tears. Sovak doesn’t even stop to cry. Her soul mate dies…and nothing. So bad. Just…wack.”
When Jasmine pointed out that they were supposed to film some new lines of dialogue for that scene, Brenna countered, “Yes, new lines for you. I still just drop dead.”
Finally, the scene began to play on the large screen. Sovak’s mother was stumbling toward her, threatening to break her neck. Sovak fires her phaser and finds it has no effect. Both Sovak and Danise fire at her mother and keep firing, with Sovak pleading with her to stop.
Sovak’s mother immolates, and Sovak collapses, her mother’s green Romulan blood pooling around her.
Jasmine found she couldn’t breathe as a wave of nausea encompassed her from head to toe. She fled the projection room and stood hyperventilating in the corridor. Madison, already made up as Chiri, sprinted to her and held her. The editor looked on with concern.
“What did you do?” asked Madison.
“We were watching the clip from ‘Deathwish,'” he said.
“You moron,” chided Madison.
Jasmine looked at Madison and said, “It’s my life up there on the screen. Everything is being stolen from me. Snatched away, piece by piece.”
Madison started guiding Jasmine toward the “planet” set where she was due to start filming.
“Honey,” she said, “I think you need a break, but they sure as hell aren’t going to shut down the show just for that.”
——————————
Brenna was already waiting on the planet set, standing on her mark next to the full-size shuttle prop. She directed a look of smoldering disdain at Jasmine, who was reviewing her lines.
Madison suddenly squeezed Jasmine’s hand. “You’ve got this,” she said.
The director yelled “action,” and the scene progressed. The disruptor fired as before. The blast hit C’Mal, who fell and lie motionless.
Sovak shook her, listened for her breathing, felt for her pulse.
She was quite still. She was dead.
“Why?” cried Sovak. She looked up into the blinding studio lights. “Why this again? Why me?” She stood and clenched her fists. “I know what you’re doing and you’re not going to win!” Then she stumbled and fell to the sandy floor. “You won’t defeat me,” she vowed, hardly able to breathe.
The AD brandished the script at the director and complained, “None of those lines are in the script.”
“It’ll be fine,” the director replied. "Cut."
Jasmine passed out.
——————————
She came to, still made up and dressed as Sovak, in the lounge area, stretched out on the couch. The studio was dark and deserted.
On the way to the engine room set, she encountered the night security guard.
“You’re still here, Ms. Bell?” he asked.
“I fell asleep,” she began to explain. “Or…did I?” She recalled dreaming that she was indeed Sovak. Or was it Sovak dreaming that she was human?
She approached the engine room set and the door swished apart for her. The inside was brightly lit, the panels and displays all working. She used a phaser to quickly weld the door shut.
“None of this is real,” she told herself. “Cycles of pain and suffering. None of it is real.”
She entered her password, disabled a number of parameter locks and safety protocols, and began to flush the antimatter cell into the warp core. Alarms began to sound. Energy and heat levels rose. The magnetic and electric fields containing the reaction began to lose geometry.
Madison Moore’s face appeared on the comm display—fully human, not Ferengi.
“Sovak, you’re not thinking clearly. You’re not well. Open the door and let us in.”
“I have to end this,” Sovak replied. “I know this isn’t real and I have to end it.”
Brenna Jones then appeared—also fully human, not Caitian.
“Sovak, the deaths you’re going to cause by creating a warp core breach are very real.”
“I can’t live in this skin any longer,” Sovak cried. “I can’t do it.”
She heard her son’s voice: “Mom, you’re going to kill us!”
Sovak watched the energy levels rise into the red due to the uncontrolled reaction in the warp core.
“Soon, soon, soon,” she said, adding, “For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.” She released the magnetic locks, reversed the Penning tube’s polarity, and raised the shields on battery power as she watched the warp core eject from the underside of the hull of the Talon like a missile.
——————————
Sovak awoke in a bed in sickbay. Her crew were all there—mirror C’Mal, Syron, Chiri, M’Vek.
Sitting up, she asked, “What happened?”
“You overloaded the warp core and ejected it,” said Syron. “When it detonated, it destroyed the cloaked Melkotian ship and killed the assassin inside it. But you really scared us. We knew you were in some kind of delirium, but we couldn’t help you. We really thought you were going to destroy both the Talon and us with it.”
“I can’t even remember what I was thinking and how it made sense,” admitted Sovak. “Perhaps my subconscious knew what it was doing all along.”
Chiri said, “Well, it’s obvious now that the Romulan syndicate still holds a grudge. But…how did you know about the Melkotian? How did you realize he was controlling you? That it was all an illusion?”
“Well, I know it sounds crazy, but I read it in the script,” said Sovak, shaking her head. “If the Melkotian hadn’t referenced himself in the illusion, I don’t think I would have put the pieces together. But it’s good that I did. I would have done anything…anything…to escape.”
THE END