Chapter Text
Part One
(2380-2381)
"Making mountains out of molehills isn't a skill; it’s personality flaw."
The assignment came through official channels at 0300 hours.
Jupiter Station ran a standard 24 hour day cycle even though it was happily situated between the orbits of Europa and Ganymede, took a hundred hours to orbit the planet, and was tidally locked. This was because Medical, back when it had been United Earth Starfleet Medical, had observed that the average person was sensitive to disruptions to their circadian rhythms and that space — and living in space and traveling through space and doing anything else in space for extended periods of time — was going to take those rhythms and torture them like they were spoken jazz if the logistics weren’t ironed out. While humans were no more likely to experience the resulting psychological impacts of adjusting their days by more than an hour or two than any other known species, they made up an overwhelming majority of the fleet and often an overwhelming majority of crew complements aboard ships and stations.
Especially in the Sol System.
So, 24 hours it was.
If you asked Lewis, time was a bastard no matter what measurement you slapped onto it, and the day cycle didn’t matter to him because his circadian rhythm was broken. It had been for nearly five years. It would remain so until the day he finally died.
All of this to say that he was awake at 0300 hours and not especially happy about it.
The assignment itself wasn’t the issue. He’d been told what to do by superior officers nearly his entire adult life and would continue to be told what to do for the rest of it. That’s what he’d agreed to when he joined Starfleet, a choice his teenage self had made and he’d upheld everyday since, despite his many scruples and grievances. No, the assignment itself wouldn’t actually begin bothering him for another couple of days, when he actually had to start working on it. The problem was that Jupiter Station was aligned with Earth’s day, specifically Starfleet headquarters in the coastal west — this was an honor it shared with every station in the system not orbiting its own colony — which meant who ever sent it had meant to do so in the dead of the night.
He read over the first two paragraphs before acknowledging that his eyes were doing that thing they always did, where they unfocused when he was exhausted and kept him from reading more than every third word.
“Haley!”
The shout wasn’t necessary, but she’d know that he wasn’t annoyed at her. (That's true, he's never annoyed with me. Not really.) He was just annoyed, as always, with the general and inescapable condition of being alive.
His holographic assistant activated next to his workbench, looking exactly as well rested and serene as she always did. Lewis hadn’t programmed her with the patience of a saint, she’d settled into that all on her own.
(Thank you.)
Haley practiced that patience now, “Yes, Lewis?”
Because he knew better than to pretend he didn’t need her help, he pushed himself away from the console and gestured to it with a wave and a, “Can you?”
“You should save this for morning,” but Haley was curious by nature and already leaning in to read the screen, her concern for his wellbeing tucked away but not forgotten.
“Oh,” she said with a smile.
That was his first warning, the one he’d look back on later and wonder why he hadn’t seen it then. Her idea of good news from Starfleet was anything that got him out of his lab and, preferably, off the station entirely. Extra credit was awarded if the outcome made other people remember his brilliance more than his many, many flaws. It also helped that conference obligations were her vacations, although he knew she’d center her obvious relief around his health.
“It’s the ETH project,” Haley eventually added when he made a sound at her that could be roughly translated to ‘well?’
“That can’t be right,” he complained.
Well, no, he didn’t complain, his voice just worked that way these days. Lewis was confused more than he was frustrated because Starfleet had pushed him out of the emergency hologram program years ago. The last one he’d built himself was the EMH Mark II. The last he’d overseen was the EMH Mark IV. Who even knew what number they were up to these days (Gavorak knows. At this time, they were working on the Mark VII. I honestly thought the Mark VIs were good enough.)
Also, “What’s the T stand for? Have they decided to change Medical to Triage?”
“Emergency Training Hologram,” Haley corrected him gently.
“What the hell is the use case for that? Do they expect the Academy to experience a crisis where all the adults are killed but the students aren’t?” The question was clearly rhetorical, even though he knew Haley might try to remind him of the Breen attack during the war.
(I knew it was, and I'd do no such thing.)
He leaned in again to make the words out on the screen before she could. She was telling the truth, at least. The Emergency Training Program Mark I. Already in the early stages of research and development.
“Since 2379? Who had it first?”
Haley, too clever by half (again, thank you), queried her own internal databases and came up with the answer in moments, “O’Rourke’s team.”
“O’Rourke? Terrance O’Rourke?” his voice did that thing where an entire rant lived in the space between each word.
“Yes.”
Instead of giving life to the rant, because Lewis knew that Haley didn’t deserve it, he muttered, “What’s the Corps of Engineers doing developing a hologram?”
“Failing. At least, it looks like they’re failing.”
Haley pulled up the records she shouldn’t have access to on the console next to his, then turned it toward him.
Lewis rolled his chair over and began scanning, “Three times?”
“They can’t get the personality algorithms right.”
“Because O’Rourke isn’t even a holographer. He must have a postdoc in one of his quantum labs who is,” which told him all he needed to know about how seriously Command was taking this project and therefore him, “This should have gone to Gavorak’s lab.”
Gavorak’s lab was a deck above Lewis’. Her team had had the annoying fortune of being assigned all of the interesting macro-holographic projects that Starfleet passed Lewis over for, under the guise that his health was still too poor and that the micro-holographic initiatives he had been spammed with were more than enough to keep him busy. She kept eyeing his Directorship like the position was still up for the taking as well as eyeing him with all of the contempt of someone who couldn’t believe he hadn’t died when he was supposed to. Lewis would hate her, if she weren’t so damn good at making holograms or so damn nice to Haley.
“They made the last three EMHs. They know the score, and they have a solid foundation for inoffensive behavioral inte…no,” he was already reading ahead into the project parameters, which looked like they had been designed by a committee of Tellarites, “what am I even saying? This should have been scrapped immediately.”
Starfleet didn’t need an emergency training hologram. It needed an emergency engineering hologram. One that could help keep warp cores from breeching when the ships’ organic engineers had died in a crisis. Except Command would never authorize a hologram having that much access to ship systems because a hologram that could foil a warp core breach could find out how to start one.
“They haven’t scrapped it,” Haley said gently, already preparing to remind him why they were having this conversation in the first place, “they’ve given it to you.”
“This has to be a joke.”
“I don’t think it is,” she was pointing to the name of the assignment’s approving officer.
Another squint. The name and rank came into focus.
That should have been his second warning.
…
Lewis wasn’t an idiot. He knew that Earth was far superior to Jupiter Station in every conceivable way — the air quality, the real sunlight, the wide open spaces that didn’t noticeably curve five hundred meters ahead, the goddamn birds chirping overhead — except for one. He’d insist until the day he died that the people made Earth distinctly inhospitable. Especially the people in San Francisco.
Especially the people wearing red.
They found their way into every building and every room, and it didn’t matter if they were Security, Tactical, or Command, they made every conversation center around them. It took only one of them, a single one, to turn a meeting full of gold on its head.
This must have been what happened with this stupid project.
His welcome party at the front door of the Engineering Corps headquarters was O’Rourke, because of course it was. Lewis had arrived on the earliest shuttle transport, 0500, just this morning, two days after the assignment became his problem, wearing a pressed uniform at Haley’s insistence. He'd arrived so early so he could avoid having to speak to anyone.
Unfortunately, the head of the quantum lab had been his roommate in graduate school and knew him better than anyone made out of actual carbon could.
“Lewis.”
“Terrance.”
The most annoying thing about Terrance wasn’t that he was usually the smartest person in the room (Lewis has shared plenty of stories of him at twenty-five, drinking heavily while Terrance explained his doctoral thesis and understanding roughly five percent of it. He always insists that if he’d listened while sober, he’d only have understood one percent of it) or the tallest or objectively the most handsome despite pushing nearly sixty. It was that he was the rare type of man with multiple acronyms after his name who was actually, earnestly nice. Lewis, also a man with multiple acronyms behind his name, was his antithesis in every way that mattered. They should hate each other.
They actually got on fairly well, whenever Lewis bothered to return his comms.
“I can’t believe you let them drag you to Earth for this.”
“I didn’t let anyone do anything. Did you even see who signed the orders?”
“I watched her wrestle the project away from Admiral Kennelly.”
Most people would be frothing at the mouth that a high priority project had been stripped from their lab and handed to someone else. Gavorak would have absolutely filed a complaint and then walked into his lab with a terse comment or two. Kennelly didn’t even run a lab and he absolutely would, since he’d overseen the entire life cycle of the EMH program just for this one to be pried from his grip.
Terrance looked relieved, as he should, because he had no business managing a project like this, and he knew it. In fact, the amused expression in Terrance’s eyes when he spoke made Lewis think his old friend was besotted by it all.
Gross.
Lewis followed him through the nearly empty halls of the building. He had to give it to the Corps, which he was not a member of despite being in the engineering arm of Starfleet, there wasn’t a redshirt in sight.
“The lab looks pedestrian in comparison to yours,” which was a lie. Terrance’s lab was cutting edge, just not in the field of holography, “but it can support Haley.”
“I left her behind. Someone needs to keep Gavorak from planting a flag in my lab and calling it hers.” (This is mostly true. Lewis doesn't like leaving his lab empty because Gavorak would try to establish squatting rights in it if he did, and I do work as a preventative, if only because she doesn't want to look like a child in front of a hologram. He's also omitting the fact that he's felt remiss asking me to leave the lab after my recursion crisis on Vulcan. I'm fine, really.)
Terrance, keenly aware of the politics of lab space, nodded sympathetically.
He then looked Lewis over once, took in his pallor and the slight way his entire body listed to the right in exhaustion, and opted to lead them to the elevator instead of the stairs.
“Your postdoc,” Lewis stepped in after him and continued speaking when the door closed, “the one who's actually been writing this program. Is she any good?”
Terrance could have responded two ways here. He could have taken insult at the insinuation that he'd had very little to do with the actual day-to-day work on the ETH project, or he could do what he always did and what had gotten him his current position in the first place, take the truth in stride and give it back.
“Ng? Absolutely. She’ll revolutionize programming compression solutions one day if given the right support.”
“That wasn’t the question. Can she actually make a working matrix?”
“Maybe, if this was another EMH, but no. Not something with the sheer breadth of this program, and not something with this level of interference. It was only a matter of time before they took it away from her and gave it to someone else. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be you.”
If Lewis weren’t so tired, and if Terrance was saying this as a critique of Lewis' skills and not as a clear indictment of Command, he would have said something waspish in return. Instead, he muttered a mildly sarcastic, “Obviously I have nothing better to do.”
“Have you read the project parameters yet?”
Lewis scowled. (I have catalogued all thirty-eight micro-variations of Lewis' scowl. This one was frustration that someone who knew him as well as Terrance did even needed to ask.) Of course he’d read the project parameters. In the last forty-eight hours, of which he’d been awake for forty-one, he’d read the parameters. He’d read Ng’s notes on the parameters. He’d read what little pieces of the code Haley had managed to extract from Terrance’s lab’s network that met the parameters and the ones that didn't.
All of it pointed to meddling from a half dozen sources — death by a thousand paper cuts, too many cooks spoiling a stew, insert your own tortured metaphor here. (I'm personally partial to 'art by committee.)
When Lewis didn’t respond, Terrance carried on, “Obviously you have. Did you notice anything strange about it?”
Yes, but because he had some self preservation remaining and didn’t even want his friend to know how keyed into the database Haley was, what Lewis said was, “I’m not answering that.”
The project initial scope had called for the creation of an ECH. Given who Command had selected to emulate the hologram off of, that might have made sense. Maybe. If you didn’t think too hard as to why she’d had to get her crew home in the first place. Meddling in late 2379, after the initial matrix scaffolding had been created, had shifted the project scope to an ETH. Apparently Command considered that an enlisted crewman, in the instance that all officers were indisposed or dead, would still make better decisions than a hologram.
It was in this moment as they entered the lab, with its sixty square meters designed for engineering work that Lewis would never, in his life, approach as something he was capable of doing, that Lewis' running streak of avoiding redshirts was sadly broken. It was also in this moment that he realized that not saying out loud that which he had just been thinking had worked out in his favor.
The layout was pristine, the consoles were in their powered down state because it was only 0530 and even the early birds were still at home, all except for three. Lewis and Terrance, of course. The third was standing with her hip canted against the central console, reviewing the PADD she held in one hand and sipping from the mug she held in the other.
“Admiral,” Terrance greeted, completely unperturbed that a flag officer had made herself at home in his sacred space.
Again, gross.
Lewis had made the mistake of assuming he’d have time to settle in, that he’d be able to situate himself in whatever corner of this lab Terrance had convinced himself could be used to build a complex hologram from scratch, that he’d be sent for at the end of the day at the earliest by an aide or a sycophant or god forbid the Doctor.
At no point in his mental calculus had he considered she’d come to him.
“Commander,” Janeway greeted as she set the PADD aside.
In the next moment, she looked at Lewis that way everyone used to wielding authority did. A cursory check of his uniform, which was freshly replicated and neat (at my insistence); of his overall demeanor, which was spare, scowling, graying around every edge that mattered; and of his rank, which wasn't there because he’d plucked the pips off his collar as soon as he’d boarded the shuttle that morning, having only clipped them on in the first place to stop Haley from heckling him. (I do not heckle.)
If he’d kept them on, she would have said ‘Commanders’, plural, in order to greet them as a unit of quants instead of individuals. Such was the way of people who perpetually had better things to do.
Instead, she clocked their absence, “Doctor Zimmerman.”
Despite his efforts to keep his own lab hermetically sealed against current events and discourse, the Doctor had prattled on enough about her to give Lewis a general sense that Kathryn Janeway had a gravitational force to rival a collapsing star. He’d been content to remain in her Oort cloud for as long as possible.
So much for that.
“Admiral,” the tone wrapped around the word was nowhere in the vicinity of pleasant, "is there a reason I had to come here to work on this project?”
He cut to the chase because every moment he spent on Earth was another Gavorak had to encroach on his space. Haley could only do so much to mollify the woman.
Janeway was neither surprised nor impressed by the question, “Oversight.”
“Naturally,” if his tone was too dry to be the right amount of deferential to an admiral, well, he’d never once claimed to be a good officer.
Terrance was a good officer and generally a capable reader of rooms. He took the sudden disruption of this tour with grace and gamely accepted the amused glance that Janeway tossed his way, “I was just introducing Lewis to the lab, and he was just telling me he’s already read the project files. If you're here to take him off my hands, be my guest.”
Traitor.
“I have ten minutes to spare,” she obliquely agreed, as if Lewis had sought her out and she was doing him a favor, before crooking a finger at him in the universal gesture of ‘follow me’.
He nearly said, ‘Well, I don’t’ but Terrance knew him well enough to slap him roughly on the back before Lewis could put his foot in his mouth and push him in her direction. The other man didn’t even have to tell him to behave for once; Lewis received that message loud and clear.
They drifted vaguely in the direction of ‘away from Terrance’. Lewis expected Janeway to start lecturing him the moment she could, but she tucked one arm beneath the other and took a sturdy drink from her mug. The fact that it was still steaming hot didn’t appear to slow her down. Between that spectacularly self-destructive quirk, her pressed-within-an-inch-of-its life uniform and the utilitarian cut of her hair, Lewis would absolutely be intimidated if he was even capable of it at this point, since everything about her radiated ‘don’t mess with me.’ Unfortunately, the same could also be said about him, a man without even half her rank or a quarter of her respect for it.
Lewis decided it wasn’t losing if he spoke first if it meant getting this over with, “I wasn’t expecting your personal involvement. The project parameters are straightforward, and I’ll—”
“—You’ll be working from a framework designed by another engineer, never mind the additional constraints.”
“They’ve added more?”
“Since you received the assignment or since you boarded your shuttle this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she parroted back.
“I can handle bureaucratic micromanagement,” he muttered, “since every EMH after the Mark Is exists in spite of it, but beating me to my lab, before dawn no less, wasn’t necessary.”
Janeway pulled up short and squared her shoulders. She was still shorter than him by a spare few inches, but he’d be lying if her posture and the tight lines of her expression didn’t make him feel smaller than her, “I came to personally welcome you to the project, Doctor.”
Something about using that title made her lips quirk in amusement, and Lewis didn’t have to strain himself to understand what.
“Thank you,” he always prided himself on making those two words sound like an insult, and her brow arched dangerously close to her hairline as she took another pull from her mug.
“If you’ll excuse me, I work best when I don’t have to explain what I’m doing as I'm doing it.”
The mug lowered, so did the brow, and she considered the words like they were a request she definitely had no intention of taking seriously, “Too bad.”
Then, as he would come to learn was her style, she added, “Besides, if this hologram is going to wear my face, you might as well get used to seeing it.”
…
The tremors were old companions by now. They came and went along his fingers and, just like certain admirals, grew more assertive the more he tried to ignore them. What they weren’t, he had come to know intimately over the last five years, were an early-warning sign of anything, because that would be useful, and old companions, as Terrance had reminded him today, were absolutely useless. They didn't care if he slept or didn't sleep, ate nutrient-rich food or didn't, or took his hyposprays on time or not. (To be clear, the tremors don’t care. I have it on good authority that Terrance actually does.) They showed up when they wanted to show up, they went away when they were ready to, and whether or not the more insidious symptoms of his illness followed wasn't something they particularly cared to foretell.
His hands shook as he splashed water over his face, and they shook as he wiped his face dry with a towel. They shook as he hung that towel next to the mirror that would have shown him that the bags under his eyes had made a break for the growing hollows of his cheeks, but like any man who was perfectly aware they weren't a sight for sore eyes, he refused to look. Looking would only invoke additional self-pity, and he had enough of that right now thanks to his hands and the farce of a project they'd spent all day working on.
(You're going to have to forgive him. He grows especially dramatic if you leave him to his own devices for too long. In just five minutes he'll receive a call from me and the level of self-indulgent ennui will become manageable again.)
Lewis wandered through the small adjoining room of his temporary apartment until a hallway spit him out into the combination kitchenette and seating area, neither of which were especially useful for him. He intended to replicate food only when his stomach absolutely demanded it of him, lest his nausea make an embarrassing appearance at the lab, and he absolutely had no intentions of hosting anyone.
The computer on the small table-desk that marked where the kitchen ended and the seating area began chimed with an incoming comm. He knew immediately who it was because only two people would bother to call him, and only one of them knew he didn't follow the sleeping recommendations handed to him by Medical.
He didn't bother to bounce the comm; Haley's never-aging face filled the screen.
"Lewis," she admonished, the perfect impersonation of the Doctor's dramatic chiding, "you should be asleep right now."
(He absolutely misread me here. I'm not making fun of the Doctor, I'm channeling him. Lewis really should have been sleeping.)
"Eh," he grumbled, plopping into his chair with his mug of lukewarm tea and the state-of-the-art portable engineering tablet he'd pilfered from Terrance's lab. It was infinitely more dynamic than a PADD; he'd probably make sure it ended up in his luggage when he eventually went back to Jupiter Station.
"That doesn't have caffeine in it, does it?"
"No," he muttered, pulling up the schematics he'd ported into the tablet that afternoon. He wouldn't be able to project the ETH's fledgeling holomatrix in his apartment, but he'd be able to run some pretty thorough subroutine simulations.
Haley, as patient as ever (as always, thank you) watched him continue to ignore his tea while he tapped inputs into his new toy. Eventually, she cleared her throat, "Lewis, you promised to tell me about the project."
"Did I?"
(Yes.)
He had, hadn't he? Between her insistence that he wear his pressed uniform and his pips, she'd also extracted a promise to let her know how his first day had gone. His day, obviously, included his work.
"Admiral Janeway was waiting in the lab when I got there."
"That's nice. We could use an ally in Command, and you know what the Doctor thinks of her. He says she's fair."
"He worships the ground she walks on, and if that doesn't portend calamity, then I don't know what will."
Haley smiled, "There's no need to be dramatic, Lewis. I'm sure she was only welcoming you to the project."
"She was passing on project constraints. Did you know they added more while I was on my way to Earth?"
He pulled the most egregious up on his tablet and flipped it so she could read it as he said the worst of it out loud, "An entirely permeable matrix without any magnetic containment. They want me to build a hologram that can't touch anything because, and I quote, 'training supplements should only need to interface with LCARs software.'"
Lewis was, of course, paraphrasing. Haley could read what was on the screen faster than any organic alive, and he knew she'd network in and find the text herself after the call. When (if) he slept tonight, she would turn the official orders from Command upside down and inside out to see if he'd missed anything; by morning she'd have an entire packet of what he could and couldn't do and any potential loopholes to try ready for him.
"I hate engineering things that didn't work just because someone tells me to," he let the tablet thump to the table an pressed a trembling hand to the headache starting in his right temple.
(Again, he's admitting only some of the truth here.)
"You can't solve this tonight."
"No, I have to fix this thing's adaptive personality heuristic tonight. O'Rourke's postdoc created remarkable subroutine lattices. I haven't seen anything this complex in years."
"That high praise coming from you."
He rolled his eyes, "It's a disaster. Organics aren't even this emotionally sophisticated. Do you know why?"
"You'd be even more inefficient than you already are."
"We'd step into subspace traffic," he snapped, "which this training hologram might just choose to do after spending an hour online with only itself for company. They're called heuristics for a reason, for all that Ng seems to have forgotten why."
"Send me a copy of them. I want to see if I can make the iguana argue in circles with Gavorak."
Lewis dug a knuckle into an especially sore patch of temple and sighed, "Leave Leonard alone."
"Leonard is an abomination, and he'll get what's coming to him."
(I still stand by that.)
"Fine. I'll leave you a backdoor into my local files. Is there anything else?"
Haley's expression, which always grew fierce when she thought of the impossible reptile that took up limited real estate in the lab, softened again, "Make sure you shave and keep your hair trimmed. They'll find any reason to call your work sloppy, to call you sloppy, if you let them."
He rolled his eyes; she still hadn't forgiven Command and Medical for taking the LMH away from him.
"Anything that isn’t a waste of my time, Haley."
"Eat and get some sleep, Lewis, or I'll call the Doctor."
He grumbled once more for good effect and cut the line.