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The Mark 1 gripped the thin hair that Barclay usually brushed down to hide a receding hairline. He tugged experimentally.
“Ah,” Barclay said, shoulders slumping forward. He winced and smiled. “Careful, I don’t have many of those, ah, left.”
The experimental sickbay door was locked under the pretense of maintaining privacy for one of the Doctor’s first real, living patients. Barclay volunteering himself had garnered a few weird looks from his coworkers, but it was true that the trial would provide Barclay valuable insight into the Mark 1’s rapidly developing interpersonal skills.
The Mark 1 ran his fingers to the back of Barclay’s head. The hair there was thicker and less blond. He suspected Zimmerman knew about them. He ran blunt fingertips up and down Barclay’s nape.
Barclay’s whole face screwed up and he let his head fall forward, hiding his expression and bringing his forehead abruptly into contact with where the Mark 1’s solar plexus would be. The Mark 1 repressed an instinct to tense his abdomen, then realized he’d attempted to mirror a diaphragmatic spasm. It was such a sudden sensation of loss that it was almost like getting the wind knocked out him.
The sweet waft of synthehol wrapped pink fingers around the crown of Barclay’s head. The bar was a remodel of an older, functionalist greenhouse, an architectural style characteristic of early Lunar settlement. The interior’s boxy, clean lines were covered over with rugs and throws. Years of drugged smoke clung to the dusty fabric.
Barclay huffed a laugh, although the Mark 1 hadn’t said anything funny, and stopped moving. The Mark 1 waited for him to formulate the joke out loud, but Barclay unfroze a moment later; he’d chosen not to say it, apparently.
“How does this feel?” the Mark 1 asked. He continued stroking his hair against the grain, letting his thumbs rub against Barclay’s ears, cupping his neck.
“Like a warm bath,” Barclay said. “Not hot, well, not like this isn’t, um—not in terms of temperature, but relaxing like that. Do you want to sit down?” The Mark 1 looked down at the back of Barclay’s head.
“You’re not short enough. When did you first begin experiencing hair loss?” the Mark 1 asked.
Against his chest, the Mark 1 could actually feel Barclay’s eyebrows crowd together skeptically. “My mid-twenties,” he said. The Mark 1 didn’t ask “And how does that make you feel?” but wondered it. He’d assumed the image of Dr. Zimmerman and incurred none of the aesthetic changes that humans accumulated while living.
“Fascinating,” he said out loud. Barclay stopped nuzzling and just pressed his forehead against his chest, back tensing again. Some physicians advise placing soothing artwork in the line of sight of either side of the examination bed, in case the patient chooses to avert their gaze during a procedure.
The Mark 1 mimed hooking his foot around a stool his object-collision sensors believed was present, sat, and took a couple steps as if rolling the stool closer. The invisible-stool phenomenon was a recent programming error whose status as bug or feature was still being argued over. It equalized their heights enough to slide Barclay’s head onto his shoulder. Barclay lifted his arms to encircle him, as well, and he rocked them both gently. It was much, much too intimate for this to qualify as “research.” Barclay smelled like coffee and unwashed skin. Research should be sterile and replicable. Barclay’s mouth on his neck registered hot and wet. Oh, good lord, replicable.
“I suppose it would only fulfill a trope to quote the number of nerve endings in the average human tongue,” the Mark 1 said.
“Better than the number of bacteria,” Barclay muttered, syllables disturbing the fine hairs on the Mark 1’s neck. The Doctor stopped stroking his hair and began worrying the sympathetic hairs on Barclay’s neck between his fingers, pulling on them gently.
“Um,” Barclay said after a moment. “I’m not saying—I don’t want to say that you can’t, or, well, shouldn’t hurt me,” and the words rushed out now, “but, um, that’s not really, um…”
The Mark 1 had frozen halfway through Barclay’s rambling, and he flattened his palm against his neck again, using pressure and movement to soothe it. He’d inadvertently found the division Barclay drew between pleasurable head-hair-pulling and bizarre body-hair-pulling. He wondered if his programming would allow him to hurt Barclay on purpose. “Sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t my desire to hurt you, I’ll, ah. Be more intentional, if that’s what you wish.”
“Do you ever—” Barclay cut himself off immediately “—how are you?” Barclay’s spread fingers were creating mountains and valleys in the uniform at the Mark 1’s back. Since there was no skin being projected beneath, there was no friction of cloth against skin. His posterior forcefield simply warped as Barclay gathered him up in his hands like water. If Barclay kept holding him like this, he felt he might well start turning into something else.
In the bar’s converted loft, Barclay wallowed in his Pavlovian response to the holodeck’s yellow grid like he was biting into his own arm.
“Computer, run program Barclay Zed.” His voice sounded strangely far away, dampened. The sickbay appeared. Before he could think, the echo of himself saying “Activate Emergency Medical Hologram” was returned to him by slick, easy-clean walls.
The Mark 1 EMH materialized facing a random direction, a quirk so minor they’d never gotten around to fixing it. “Please state the nature of the medical emergency,” he said.
Barclay looked at him, wordless, for too long. “Just a checkup,” he said.
“Does the word ‘emergency’ mean anything to you?” the EMH asked.
Barclay felt heat behind his eyes. “I’m concerned about my glands,” he said.
The EMH nodded. “You can never be too certain about glands.”
“You understand that holograms are very adept at appearing to be a human body,” the Mark 1 said. “But to explain myself in terms of human physiology would be difficult.”
Decades had been spent on perfecting the feeling of holographic skin, Barclay knew. Barclay also knew, because the Mark 1 had quoted it incessantly, the effect of skin-to-skin contact on humans. Just after birth, throughout childhood, in adulthood. With family, with strangers, with intimate partners. Barclay didn’t understand the mechanism by which his body knew he was touching human skin and not, for example, a beam of sunlight, so he wasn’t sure if the Mark 1 counted towards his prescribed human contact. He never wanted to ask.
“It’s unprofessional, but I will make do,” the EMH said. “As always. Say ‘ah.’”
“Agh,” Barclay said. The holographic tongue depressor was tasteless, cool metal. The EMH’s face loomed very large and close. The medical tricorder was malfunctioning.
“Do you still have your gag reflex?” the EMH asked.
“Guh,” Barclay said. The depressor was removed. “Yes? Yes, why?”
“This procedure would be much easier if your body wasn’t so damnably opposed to being entered,” the EMH said. He produced a long throat swab. “Most procedures, for that matter. Open.”
Barclay’s lips formed a thin line. “Is that, do you really need to?” he mumbled, wary of creating any opportunities by opening his mouth too wide.
“Must I coax you?” the EMH said. “This is for your glands, after all.”
Barclay looked to the left, realized he couldn’t turn his head like he could for an injection, and looked back at the EMH.
“I’ll give you a lollipop,” the EMH said. Barclay smiled, caught off guard. “Uh-huh. Open.”
Barclay stared at the EMH’s forehead, trying to keep those hands out of his line of sight, and opened his mouth. There was the tongue depressor, and then—a few fingerprint points of contact dotting the side of his head, manually tilting him back.
“Breathe normally,” the EMH said, and swabbed his throat in an instant. The hands were out of his mouth. Barclay jerked but did not gag. His throat itched with the lingering tactile sensation. He swallowed but couldn’t scratch it.
Barclay pulled away and looked him in the face. Drippingly sincere concern was apparent in Barclay’s expression, clouding the bubbling—lust was probably the best word for it—that’d been there minutes ago. It had been present, right?
“This is easier with holograms,” the Mark 1 said, almost to himself. He recalled that horrible weekend when his medical database had been corrupted by a power outage and he’d found himself unable to come to anything other than what his implicit memory insisted were incorrect courses of treatment. Suddenly the world seemed as if it could topple one way or another. His queasiness had lingered even after Ensign Garrett patched the issue.
Barclay was looking at him. The Mark 1’s optical sensors didn’t have a peripheral vision, so he could see the mounting eyebrows even if he didn’t make eye contact, which he didn’t. He looked at the wall he’d left blank so as not to distract himself during procedures. Not that he ever did. Get distracted.
Barclay pulled back and gripped the Mark 1 by the obliques. “What are normal sexual relations?” Barclay said.
“Didn’t your parents give you this talk?” the Doctor said.
“Yeah, you always know what to say,” Barclay said, although he didn’t make it sound like a compliment. “Well, don’t put this pressure on me! Usually it’s… if you couldn’t tell, it’s easier with holograms for me, too.”
Restraining agitated people was usually on par with telling them to calm down, in terms of deescalation. The Mark 1 was getting the strangest urge to pin him to the table.
“I’m not expecting you to teach me anything,” the Mark 1 said. “It’s just that we agreed this session might develop my understanding of human umwelt and qualia, if you would be so gracious as to describe how you feel.”
“It’s… unnerving, if I don’t know whether you’re enjoying this,” Barclay said.
“Of course I enjoy this,” the Mark 1 said. “To the extent I can ‘enjoy’ anything, given the word as you understand it refers to a very biological experience.”
Barclay pursed his lips.
“Barclay, I will not condescend to explain the fact that I’m not being coerced and I’m choosing to do this,” the EMH said, “so my actions indicate enjoyment despite the limits of Federation Standard.”
This was where the physical, tingling horniness gave way to cold stabs of guilt in Barclay’s stomach.
“I’m not—you can make your own decisions—clearly—it’s just,” Barclay said, “the idea of being, s-studied, makes it feel… unequal.”
The Mark 1 had a sense of fairness. It was packaged in his ethics subnetwork and was intended mostly for clinical use, but he understood many people’s reaction to being treated unfairly was anger. Capuchin monkeys demonstrate frustration when rewarded unequally.
“You dislike being studied?” the Mark 1 fumed. Strange, that his vocal tone was produced as if he was angry. As much as the team complained that the Mark 1 was as unsociable as Dr. Zimmerman, the Mark 1 naturally translated his goals and thoughts into physical expression understandable by organic beings. He supposed it was a byproduct of being a piece of technology in a field that heavily prioritized user interface.
“Do you?” Barclay said and cringed, although he had a point. The Mark 1’s feedback systems usually buzzed with positive interest when people paid attention to him.
“It’s not that I dislike your attention,” the Mark 1 said. “I apologize. But don’t act as if you’re the more vulnerable one here. I… care what you think of me, too.”
Barclay really looked like he was going to cry. Shushing him would only make it worse, so the Mark 1 settled for running a hand back and forth over Barclay’s anterior thigh. If he were being cruel, he would log the fact he’d predicted that Barclay would well up minutes ago.
“Computer, end program,” Barclay said. The sickbay disappeared in a blink. These holodecks tended to come with good filters for body fluids, among other things, so there were no obscene splatters as the forcefields dissipated. He tripped down the stairs to the bar and saw snakes in poorly replicated drinks.