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It’s a choice.
It’s always a choice, even when it’s not, not really. Does she want yellow dress or the purple pants today? (That it’s the yellow dress, that it’s always the yellow dress, because she loves yellow, doesn’t mean it’s not a choice.) Does she want to settle down for her maintenance cycle at 1700hrs with a story (and he’ll do all the voices), or at 1730hrs following half an hour’s free time? Learn more about the history of organic life or about the history of her own makers? Talk about this or that, or some other thing. Music, or biology, or mathematics, or literature, or cloud-watching, or something she suggests. She comes to understand quickly that choice is very important to him, and should be to her, long before she gains any understanding of why that's so.
So it’s a choice, to take back her memories of her first life and incorporate who she once was into who she is. Not just the timing of it, but whether she even does it in the first place. Just as it will be her choice what to do with those memories, once she has them. How she feels about them. If she wants to go on remembering and being a girl with two lives, or return to who she is right now, albiet with the understanding that the life unlived should pass into history like other deaths.
She’s thirteen when they first offer her the choice to learn, her father and her makers. She’s known about the version of herself who died very young ever since this version of herself was very young. They’ve never hidden from her what, who, and why she is. But her father says (and her makers agree) that she needs a certain level of emotional maturity to fold those first experiences into her second self, or it could end the same way as it did the first time. They don’t want that. But they're sure she has what she needs at thirteen, and also that thirteen will give her four years of Kasq time to learn to be someone who was two people.
But only if she wants to.
She’s not sure she wants to. She’s always been curious about her first life, but the idea of remembering being and, as her father explains, actually being both herself and the girl who died again is disconcerting on the edge of frightening. She’s not sure who that will make her, or how she’ll feel about herself and her father and her makers when it’s done. She settles for asking questions instead, and they don’t deny her answers, not even the ones that are very complicated, or make her father sad and ashamed. His feelings, he tells her, are his to manage and not hers to mind. They’re certainly not her fault. She’s blameless in everything that happened. And she thinks she understands them, and forgives them, for how and why her first self died.
She’s a little over fifteen years old when she decides it’s finally time. It’s almost a whim. She’s five thousand five hundred days old, that’s a satisfying number, and it’s an unstructured day and she doesn’t have anything else planned for it. Her father holds her hand right up until the moment the makers have to turn her off to complete the reintegration, though she doesn’t understand why he holds so tightly until well after it's done.
When she comes back online, the sensation of knowing is... odd, especially to begin with. Confusion comes first: the memories of her first life are all at once five thousand five hundred days old and two weeks old, and happened yesterday, and are also happening right now. Then, they hurt. It’s all so loud inside her, and fast, like she’s overclocked to the point her emitters are melting under the load and she still can’t keep up with all the data her sensors stream in. The highs of her past life are indescribably ecstatic; the lows full of unfathomable confusion and fear. The curiosity her father always encourages in her is as much flavoured by unfettered wonder as it is by desperation to make sense of herself, her world, her place in it, her need to find and be what her makers her friends her mentors need her to be.
But she can deal with all that. Her father has been helping her prepare for this moment for fifteen years. She has the tools she needs to see, filter, define and untangle it all until it makes a kind of sense, and then feel everything she felt then, but at the right volume. It’s not a dispassionate process, but it is a calm one: naming, sorting, understanding, experiencing, reacting, learning. And when she’s done, she's just a bit more herself than she was a few moments ago. She is simultaneously 5,500 days old and 336 days old and 5,836 days old, and she is the most alive she has ever been. She has lived, is living, and will live. She is Series Acclimation Mil, and she is SAM and Sam, and Sammenhammer, Samauri, Samburger, Samerooni, Queen Sam Samalinna of Samonita, and she is honey, sweetheart, dearheart and darling daughter.
There's a conflict there, one that remains when the rest of the reintegration is complete: it’s much harder to reconcile her feelings about her father than anything else about her first life. She is angry at him, she realises quickly. Very, very angry at him. Angry that he is both and either and neither the kind, loving, endlessly patient father of five thousand five hundred days and the dour, abrupt, aloof Academy professor of two hundred and nine. He is and is not and is both the person who let her cry into his shoulder, helped her stage an elaborate funeral service (complete with heartfelt eulogy) following the death of Goldy the goldfish, and the person too frozen in his own misery to hold her hand as she faced the realisation she was going to lose herself to the swarm, and then, almost certainly, die. The person who’d curated a massive body of fiction, just for her, so that they could spend breezy afternoons discussing philosphy, politics, poetry, how different types of organics see inorganic and synthetic life, and a thousand other things; the one who’d cut to the other side of the quad to avoid speaking to her on three separate occasions (that she knew about) and would call on just about anyone else in xenobiology class.
Anger, she knows, is a natural reaction to the violation of a boundary. He's the one who taught he that! It’s a response to injustice, perceived or real. And her father, before he was her father, was unjust to her. He violated her trust in ways that contributed to her death. And it was only when she died that he was able to see the injustice for himself, and try to be better. Too late, by anyone's standards.
But, also, not too late, which is, she supposes, why it’s such a conflict inside her. She is dead, but she is also very much alive and has been for thousands of days. And he has not been unjust to her in that time-at least, she feels, no more unjust than parents, tyrants all, are meant to be. He loves her, to the point she thinks he might actually forcibly override his ethical subroutines and kill someone for her if it came down it it, and she’s as sure of that as she is of anything else in the universe. But he didn’t always love her, and she’s sure of that too. The two versions of him war in the heart she doesn’t have.
And then the makers complete their checks, pronounce themselves pleased at her progress and the successful reintegration of her two versions, and leave the two of them alone in this facsimile of the Academy's infirmary.
Even though there’s nobody to treat, her father fits here in a way that’s hard to describe, slotting in neatly amongst the equipment like he was made to. In her first life, she’d admired (usually from afar) the way he ruled it like a benevolent king, and envied the ease with which he both embraced and found confidence in his original purpose, the thing he was made to do and be. Now that she has the perspective of two lives it seems more like he’s retreating to a place he can more easily control and defend. As he sits in the office chair, the CMO's chair, and indicates for her to sit opposite, she can so easily imagine his desk as the great stone walls of a fantasy castle, the kind they’d besieged together in play when she was little. Now her loyal knight is errant from her side, the castle’s defences placed between them rather than faced together.
That’s the way of the dour Academy Doctor familiar to her 336-day self, and she doesn’t want him here. So she ignores the offered chair and sits on the desk instead, folding her legs under herself so she can rest her elbows on her knees and rest her chin in her hands to regard him.
He looks old, by human standards. Much, much older than her. He can look like anything, just like she’ll be able to in a few years, so its’s a choice (if one she doesn’t understand at all) to look that way. But by technology standards he’s truly ancient, so much older than her that she can’t really comprehend it in anything other than pure mathematical terms, even when she tries. He’d once patiently guided her through his own elegantly alien architecture for no reason other than she’d asked, comparing it to her own and explaining the purpose and construction of its strange array of redundant virtual machines and interfacing layers and archaic modules written in languages otherwise lost to time. A ‘Dr. Lewis Zimmerman spaghetti code special’, he’d called himself, and then told her about his own maker.
As 336-day-old Sam, she knows that Dr. Lewis Zimmerman was a very important figure in the development of Federation holography, not least of which because he had made the Doctor and repeatedly testified at his sentience and citizenship hearings. He had even (in)famously lost his temper during one of them and chewed out the Federation technical expert questioning him until the man had cried and the court had to recess (336 Sam may have watched that clip on repeat until she could perfectly emmulate the cadence of insults).
As 5,500-day-old Sam, meanwhile, she knows that he was kind of her grandfather, and liked pizza and pork chops and progressive rock and disco and Vucan word puzzles and terrible puns. That he'd made a pet holographic iguana called Leonard as a teen (because he thought big lizards were cool, a sentiment Sam shares), and who'd evolved over time into "an abomination unto god, science, nature, and just anything else you'd care to name". And she knows that he had spent the last years of his life completing a full rearchitecting of her father and his sister, intended to make them stable, fault-tolerant, self-repairing, and extensible for a long time after he died.
You can always show love through action, her father said, even when it's hard to express it in other ways.
He’d been sad for a while after that. She, meanwhile, had been all of seven years, forty two days and eighteen hours old and therefore much, much sadder that he’d refused to let her make her a talking iguana of her very own. And as 5,836-day-old Sam, she knows and remembers all of that, and can also draw a very clear line between 5,500's Dad being sad for several days after talking about his own father, and 336's Academy Doctor forcefully shutting down any attempt by her to discuss his origins. And she finds it outragous that it took her dying to turn him from one into the other.
He watches her back, hands folded neatly in his lap, leaning back in his chair and waiting without wariness for her, having so effortlessly scaled his castle walls, to strike the killing blow.
“I’m mad at you,” she tells him and means it, not lifting her hands from her chin. “Like, really, really mad.”
“I know,” he says softly. “You have a right to be.”
“Maybe you couldn’t have helped me, not really,” she knows that’s true, her fate was sealed the moment she left Kasq unprepared, the makers have said as much and that it’s their fault too, “but-“
“But I could have been kinder,” he finishes, holding her gaze and hiding nothing. “Much kinder. Especially at the end. And I’ll never stop being sorry that I wasn’t then. But the fact that I’m sorry that doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn't be mad at me. Even really, really mad.”
Her makers are actually older than he is in terms of sheer time spent activated, thanks to Kasq’s special gravitational gradient, but he was built before them and, anyway, somehow feels older, especially at times like this. There’s a kind of… heaviness in his eyes and in his shoulders that has to come from somewhere deep in his programming. She thinks it’s because he’s had more experiences than all of her makers have combined. They’re really the ones hiding behind their castle walls, really, not him. Existing, computing, calculating, sometimes working collectively together on a single problem or project until it’s done, and then moving onto the next.
Like making her. Remaking her. Making her and sending her away, and sending her all those demands to gather enough data to make a decision.
They aren’t here to be mad at, though, and she is entirely, 100% certain they wouldn’t understand her anger anyway. She’s not even sure they really understand anger as something you feel and not just as an abstract concept, a biochemical process happening in squishy organic brain she can simulate on their behalf. There's a lot they don't understand. What they were doing when they made her, for example, and how feeling things as intense as terror and joy and loss and discovery would destabilise her. And that’s why her father’s here: to be and understand and explain everything they can't.
“What if I said I hate you now?” she demands, straightening up to loom over him, and feels something almost like righteousness when he flinches and looks away. This is why he was nervous before, this is what he was afraid of. Not the reintegration process, not that she might lose herself in the attempt, or fall apart after, but that she would hate him for what he didn't do for 336-day-old Sam. That, without seperate lifetimes, she might feel betrayed (as she does!) and be angry at him, (as she is!) and won’t want to be his daughter anymore (which she..?). “What if I said I hate you so much that I want you to leave here so I never ever have to see you again?”
“I’d hope you didn’t mean it,” he says, and doesn’t say anything else, even when she lets the silence stretch, letting her anger stretch out to fill the space with it. He doesn’t like silence much, she knows, because he’s always filling it with things. Music. Words. The white noise hum of a warp core and the measured beeping of medical devices. Breeze through autumn leaves, beachscapes and oceanscapes and sudden summer thunderstorms. And everything about him tells her that he’s on the verge of breaking and crying, and getting closer to that verge every picosecond longer the silence and her anger lasts. It’s in his shoulders and his face, the way his resource utilisation skyrockets as a dozen sleeping subroutines roar back to life to check for errors and reprioritise functions and re-calibrate a thousand settings on the fly. The way his knuckles go white, a cosmetic detail she'd never consciously noticed before, when his hands ball into tight fists, still in his lap.
“What if I did!?" she shouts at him. "What if I hate you now? What if I hate you and want you to leave me-" she tries to continue, but finds the anger is bleeding away quickly, too quickly, leaving... misery. Sadness inside of her like a collapsing star, moments away from forming a signularity that will eat her alive, photon by photon. It's like Goldy dying, but worse, ten times worse, a hundred times worse, because at least then she'd had her father to help her, and known that things could still be ok, but now he's the reason she feels awful and how can that be ok? "Daddy-" and she's crying, and his head whips up because she hasn’t called him that since she her sixth birthday, when she’d decided she was a big girl and far too old for such a juvenile form of ‘father’, “Daddy, I was going to die and you wouldn’t even hold my hand!”
“I know, honey,” he says, reaching out to her, to comfort her. It's not an attack, but her defenses treat it like one, so she shies away without consciously commanding the movement. After a moment of hovering, he rests his hand on the desk next to her knee. “I know. And I’m so, so sorry. I’ve been thinking about it ever since you were re-made. How did I fall so low that I couldn’t bear to comfort a frightened child?" His voice cracks and he's crying now too, in the way he does where tears don’t actually fall, because in all his long life he’s never gotten around to adding that in. "How could I do that to you? You deserved so much more from me, Sam. I came back to Starfleet, to the Academy, because I knew you were coming and then I-“
“You came back to the Academy… for me?” He’s never told her that before, and somehow that makes everything better and worse at the same time. Caring before he'd known her, but not when he did.
He nods.
“In all my time with Starfleet-” His voice breaks again and he clears his throat, a sign he’s triggered a reset of his vocal subroutines. “In all my centuries with Starfleet, you are the first photonic being to join. It meant... It means a great deal to me. I wanted to be there to help you. And then I made everything about your time there worse. I was selfish, and cruel, and I am so, so very sorry for that.”
“But why? Why are-“ she catches herself. It’s be yesterday, it's today, but it’s also two weeks and five thousand five hundred days ago. “Why were you like that?” When he doesn’t immediately respond, she prompts: “You told the makers it was because I remind you of your daughter. Your other daughter who died. Belle. Was that it? Was that why? Because that’s unfair to me.”
“It’s… part of why," he says haltingly. "But not the whole of it. I- It’s… messy. Many things, interconnected." She's not used to see him struggle to articulate himself, and she doesn't like it at all. "It’s Belle, but it’s Naomi and Jason and Miral, and Icheb and Gwyn and... hundreds more. Voyager. Reg. Lewis. Haley." He face contorts oddly. "But it’s also what I was made to be, and the role I had to play on Voyager, and having to learn how to be-“ He goes to say something else, and stops, and starts and stops again, and his expression turns inwards, just like it did when she’d asked him to hold her hand, and he’s starting to turn away from her, and she feels just like she did in that moment too, terrified and tight inside but out of control too, like the singularity is here and stripping the photons from her body and she can't escape-
But then he blinks and looks up at her, and whatever he sees in her face right now, and not yesterday or two weeks or five thousand five hundred days ago makes him stand abruptly and pull her into a hug, crushingly tight and secure.
“And it’s unfair to put any of that on you. It wasn’t right. It’s not right. It will never be right. And I’m sorry.” He doesn’t have a heartbeat, and neither does she, but the pressure against her tactile net is as soothing as she always remembers it being. “Tell me what you’re feeling, sweetheart. Even if it’s that you hate my non-existent guts.”
He’s always, always taught her to take a moment, whenever her feelings get too big for her, to name them and understand why she has them, and to make a space inside of herself for them so they can’t take her over. This is the same. It's the same. It has to be the same. He's going to help her this time.
“I want to be angry at you. But I am angry at you,” she admits. “So maybe I really want to be more angry at you and can't because you’re my Dad, and I love you. And so I can't be as mad at you as I should be, and that's frustrating! And at the same time already madder at you than I've ever been at anyone! You’re such an…" she searches her linguistic databases, thousands upon thousands of languages and billions of unique words, but can’t find anything that better than: "asshole! You're an asshole! And selfish and… and..! And!”
It’s like her feelings are all commanding her vocal subroutines to say different things, so nothing coherent comes out.
“And?” he prompts, resting his cheek on the top of her head. “I know you’re not just angry. This is too big to be just anger and frustration. There's more to it.”
“And I’m hurt. Really hurt. I was so confused and afraid, and I thought you would understand and help me and you didn’t. At all.” She thumps his chest with both fists to emphasise her words. “You wouldn’t. I just wanted you to help me. Just a little. I was so confused, all the time. And I tried so hard to get you to see me and help me. I looked up to you so much, and you wouldn’t even hold my hand when I needed you to.”
“You gave me your heart without even realising you’d done it,” he says softly. “Without truly knowing what one was. And I stomped all over it.”
“And you stomped all over it to protect your own!” she says, pushing free of his embrace so she can look him in the eye. “And then that,” she waves around the room, to indicate she means that he’s here, now, with her, and has been for years, “didn't even work! So that means you pushed me away and hurt me for nothing! Absolutely nothing! And- But I think the worst thing is- The absolute worst thing is that I don’t know if I can trust you to not do it again, but I think I'm going to have to because if I start not trusting you or anyone else to not hurt me then I’m going to become like you were. And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be so... cold.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be like I was either, Sam,” he says, and she can’t recall a time he’s ever sounded more serious. “I don’t want to be like that again. It was cold. It was existence without life and it was... It was miserable. I was miserable. Hurting others to try keep them away- it's a miserable way to be, Sam.”
“Very miserable,” she corrects, glaring at him and wishing, when her glare is undercut by the sniffing of a stuffy nose, that the makers hadn’t been quite so rigorous in their simulation of the human form. “You were a miserable old asshole.”
“I was a very miserable old asshole,” he corrects back. His tone and expression haven’t changed, but there’s a tiny glint of humour in his eyes that shouldn't make her feel better but does, a tiny, tiny bit. She also feels a tiny, tiny bit better when he brushes away the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs, and kind of resents that too.
“You’re still an asshole,” she says, pushing away one of his hands. They’re so much bigger than her own that he can hold the whole side of her face in just one of them. Sometimes it seems grossly unfair that he’s made to be so much taller and bigger than her (and that her makers won’t let her alter her appearance parameters to match until she’s done ‘growing’ into them). At others, it’s comforting to see him as a towering god in her small world, one dedicated to her care, education and entertainment.
He cocks his head to the side to acknowledge the validity of her statement, but simultaneously holds up the pointer finger on his other hand, as if to make an important counterpoint. “And old as well. But at least, I think, no longer miserable. Two out of three isn't terrible,” he says, and smiles faintly when she rolls her eyes to express her displeasure at an objectively terrible joke at a terrible time.
And then he’s sitting down on the desk beside her, something unthinkable yesterday, or two weeks or or five thousand five hundred days ago, but perfectly natural today or yesterday or two weeks ago or longer. “You’ve brought a great deal of joy into my life, Sam,” he says, feet swinging. "More than you can possibly know. So I hope very much that you’re not the miserable one now.”
She take another moment to consider her feelings. The space she's made for them to live in. She's angry and hurt and sad and betrayed... and betrayal is the worst feeling in the universe. But it's not overwhelming. The star's no longer collapsing inside of her. It's something she can live with. And so she considers him, too. He is and is not and is both and neither the miserable old asshole Academy Doctor, and her kind, endlessly patient, towering Dad. Just as she is the Sam that lived and died in 336 days, and the Sam who lived 5,500 days, and the Sam who's 5,836 days and counting. And he wants to keep being her dad, and she wants him to be her dad too. The alternative seems really, well, miserable for everyone.
But she’s allowed to be mad at him. And feel hurt because of him. It’s literally why he's her dad.
“I’m not,” she says, turning to look at him. “And I don’t hate you, and I don’t want you to leave. But you hurt me a lot, and I am sad and truly genuinely angry at you. I think I will be all of those things for a while.”
“I think that’s fair and reasonable response to what happened,” he agrees, seriously. “I was a very miserable old asshole. And I did hurt you. Very badly and without cause."
They sit for a few moments, legs swinging.
"Unrelated: having two sets of memories feels weird,” she admits. “Even though they’re all technically my memories. It’s like- You know when- Everything is-”
“It's like the past, the past, and the present are all happening to you concurrently?” he completes for her, when she struggles to assemble words that reflect her experience of being 336 and 5,500 and 5,836 days old all at once. "You're someone now, but you're also the someones you were before?"
“Yeah. Something like this's happened to you?” she asks, and he nods, and she knows this is another reason why he's here and wants to be here for her. There are things that her makers can't give her, teach her, or be for her; equally there are aspects to life as a photonic being that organics struggle to comprehend.
“Several times.” He looks up and away, indicating he’s accessing his deep memory storage. “Primarily during the temporal wars-time travel is a nightmare, sweetheart, don't ever do if you can possibly avoid it-but the very first instance was stardate 50252.3. I ran out of memory and experienced a cascade failure after exceeding my intended maximum 1500 hour run time by roughly 11,342 hours. Kes and B’Elanna repurposed the matrix and some other elements of my primary diagnostic utility to ‘shore me up’ and extend my operating life. It took several days for me to re-index my memories, complicated by the fact that the utility and I had been running concurrently for the better part of a day, so I had its memories and my own, all with exactly the same chrono markers. For a while I was even remembering myself looking at myself remembering myself looking at myself.”
It takes no time at all to do the math. She knows he was originally designed with very limited run-time (her 336-day self knew all his original technical specifications, so her current self knows them too), but she’s never thought about the technical issues that might have come with exceeding it.
“Wait wait wait- you ran out of memory before you were two? That’s not in any of your biographies. Or personnel file. Or-”
“It was, frankly, a miracle I lasted that long. And many things that happened in Voyager’s early years aren’t recorded for posterity anywhere but here.” He taps the side of his head, then stops abruptly, his next words slow and deliberate, with a note of warning she knows all too well. “Sam, how did you get access to my personnel file?”
“I was-am? programmed for modest acts of rebellion,” she admits, not yet sure how to describe the skills and knowledge from her 336-day self now that it’s part of her 5,836-and-counting self. “I wanted to learn more about you, and you weren’t exactly falling over yourself to talk to me. Also, the Academy really needs a new encryption standard. It only took me 247 seconds to break in.”
“I’ll be sure to tell the Chancellor,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Did you access anyone’s personal logs?”
“No, because that’s, like, super ‘get kicked out of the Academy and go to jail’ illegal, not ‘punitive menial labour’ transgression for a cadet. Modest acts of rebellion.”
“Well, I suppose that’s something,” he says, though his sigh tells her he’s less than pleased. “At any rate, you should find that the overlapping sensation fades over time as you create stronger associations with some of your memories than others, and accumulate run time as your integrated self. Leaving the gravity well and closing the quasi-loop we’re in should help make things feel more ‘linear’ too. If it doesn’t get better, or starts to become disorientating, let me know, and we'll find out what’s happening.”
“I will.”
“Promise?” He holds up his hand, littlest finger extended, to begin the ancient and sacred Earth ritual known as the ‘pinky swear’. She regards it and him, and considers that, if she accepts and completes the ritual, she’ll be honour-bound to uphold this promise for the entire rest of her existence. And it's an implied promise, too, that their relationship will get back to something very like it's been for the past five thousand five hundred days, sooner rather than later. That she's not going to be very angry with him for very long.
“Promise,” she agrees, and links her littlest finger with his. But before he can un-link their fingers and end the ritual, she adds: “You have to swear too.”
“I do?”
“Not to become a miserable old asshole again. Not just for me, but for you. But mainly for me.”
“Ah. Of course.” He straightens, and looks her right in the eye, falling into the steady, formal cadence she knows from debate class and the recordings of his various legal proceedings and deliberately overdramatic line readings intended to make her laugh. “I, Emergency Medical Holographic Program AK-1 Diagnostic and Surgical Subroutine Omega 323, variously known as the EMH, the Doctor, Doctor, Doc-“
He has a thing about names and she knows that, if she lets him, he’ll absolutely list everything he’s ever been called.
“Dad-“
“-and Dad, do solemnly promise, avow and pinky-swear, that I will not let myself become a miserable old asshole again. And,” he adds quickly, before she can unlink their fingers and end the ritual, “I so too avow and swear that I will love, care for, and support any version of Series Acclimation Mil, also known as Sam, for as long as I exist, even when she’s quite justifiably furious at me. And,” he adds, softening and losing the legal cadence, “that I’ll hold her hand whenever she wants me to, for as long as she wants me to.”
Another big feeling. Not sad, or happy, but both and neither at the same time. Bittersweet.
“Promise?” she asks, tugging on their linked little fingers, looking for any hint of give.
“Promise,” he says, and leans over to kiss her forehead. And she knows, with complete certainty, that he means it, and that's bittersweet too.