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“I’m serious, I think this is going to change the way we operate. All we need is a couple testimonials from qualified medical professionals, and we’re set.”
Walking beside his captain, Doctor McCoy snorted. “Like myself, you mean?”
Captain James T. Kirk, Starfleet’s golden boy and professional pain in McCoy’s ass, nodded eagerly. “Exactly.”
“I’m a doctor, Jim, not a psychologist. No one’s gonna care what I have to say.”
“But you are rated in space psychology, and that alongside your year of unparalleled service on the Enterprise will be enough for the board. Don’t worry, Bones, you’ve got this.”
They had reached the doors that led into the experimental holographic chambers. McCoy stopped and turned to face Jim. “I think you’re misunderstanding my position here, Jim. You seem to be under the misapprehension that I’d love nothing more than to put my name to a recommendation that we install these virtual masturbation chambers aboard every Constitution class starship. I plan to do nothing of the sort.”
Jim’s face passed through a near-comical range of expressions, finally settling on amused disbelief. “I’m sorry, ‘virtual…’ what did you just call them?”
“You heard me. And don’t say you don’t know what the crew of any normal cruiser would use them for, let alone those stuck in deep space for five years.”
Jim was shaking his head. “No, listen. A crew out in space with no guaranteed leave time, at least nothing on a habitable planet, can you imagine what having a fully functional holodeck on board would do for morale? To let them feel grass under their feet and sun on their face, hell you could recreate one of those Georgia orchards you’re always going on about and spend your afternoon off lying in the grass eating peaches and listening to the birds sing and the wind in the trees. Can you imagine?”
McCoy knew he was scowling and didn’t try to curtail the expression. “No, you listen. You want to do something good for your deep space crews, you invest in environmental decks and give them real plants and fresh air to spend time with. You create something that’s almost - almost - as good as reality, it’s going to keep people coming back to it, wanting more and never being satisfied with what they get. What’ll stop them from trying to simulate people, then, hm? Recreate old friends or dead loved ones out of scrambled photons and force fields, obsessing over the details of a fictional life? It ain’t healthy, Jim. It’s one thing to talk about tests like the Kobayashi Maru, they serve a clear-cut purpose, but this—”
Jim cut him off. “Yes exactly, there can be a purpose to holodeck technology besides recreation. That’s another reason you’re here, actually. Doctor M’Benga wanted your opinion on the state of your new patient.”
“My new…” McCoy narrowed his eyes, then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh, for the love of--Harrison’s in there?””
Jim nodded. “He’s doing well, apparently. Adjusting well to the idea of his…well…whatever you’d call it. Memory’s still fragmented, but—“
“But you thought, 'hey, let’s put a man from the 20th century, who’s never seen a flying car let alone a space ship, into a machine that will show him whatever he wants, that sounds like a great idea!’ For the love of Christ, Jim, please don’t tell me this was your idea.”
Jim did not have the grace even to look apologetic. “Just go talk to him, and then file your report with the admirals. We have three construction teams in a bidding war to install holodecks on the Enterprise. It’s gonna be great, Bones.”
McCoy rolled his eyes, muttering, unbelievable, but made no more audible objection. He lifted his hand to the control panel Jim indicated, scrolling through the data. Apparently Harrison had asked it to create “The Cavern Club,” whatever the hell that was. His finger poised above the door controls, he shot a look at Jim that said, You owe me. Jim’s answering smile-and-shrug said, Add it to my tab. McCoy slapped the controls with more force that was probably necessary, and stepped inside.
The Cavern Club was aptly named, he’d give it that; maybe a dozen people, if they were friendly, could have lined up shoulder to shoulder from one side to the other under the arched roof he probably could have touched if he’d jumped. As the door slid shut behind him, shimmering before disappearing into a wall of damp brick, McCoy blinked and squinted in the dim light. In his professional medical opinion, this was not a place meant for humans, living or simulated.
And yet, there he was, sitting by himself in one of the window-like niches set into the arching walls. There were other figures in the room, a few loudmouthed musicians up on stage and a handful of oddly dressed teenagers dancing even though there was no music playing, but McCoy had no interest in them, they were holograms, their strange behavior due to their programming. McCoy walked over to the man sitting alone.
George Harrison looked up as McCoy stopped a few paces away from him, gave a jerk of his head, and looked away again quickly, taking a pull off the bottle in his hand and then lifting his other hand to his lips.
McCoy suddenly recognized the odor that had tugged at his memory the second he opened the door. It was tobacco smoke. He hadn’t smelled that in a good ten years, not since Dramia II.
“Where’d you get a cigarette from?” He asked by way of opening the conversation.
Harrison glanced at him and then away again. His mannerisms reminded McCoy of a teenager while the lines in his face told a different story. George nodded at the very out-of-place chrome replicator unit stuck in the wall beside him. “That nice lady doctor told me this here box would give me anything I wanted, if I asked. So I asked.” He toasted his beer to McCoy. “Very obliging, your future machines.”
McCoy stepped up to the replicator and ordered a whiskey. If Harrison got to drink, so did he. And next he might order up a cigarette, see if the thing it created was a genuine cancer stick such as was banned on most Federation worlds, or a substitute as unsatisfying as the synthehol he was about to down.
The whole thing was a farce, in any case. The only reason Harrison might be considered “his patient” was because he was the lucky man McCoy had ordered extracted from his cryotube to make room for Jim in the aftermath of his death, six months ago. They’d kept him in an induced coma until enough manpower could be spared to deal with the unexpected complications of getting him back into the tube. McCoy had called up anyone he could think of with the technical knowledge to deal with primitive cryotechnology, but it wasn’t until Mr. Scott could be spared from the poor shattered Enterprise for five minutes that they gave any thought to the identity of their snoozing captive.
“Whoahhh hold on there, wait just a minute,” Scotty, ever the curious one, had poked his nose around the curtain shielding the man, only to yank it aside completely. “You dinnae know who that is, do you? Doctor McCoy, that is George Harrison yeh’ve brought me to try and stuff back in that torpedo!”
He’d grown accustomed to Scotty’s dramatics, so he didn’t look up from surveying a recap of the captive’s vitals. “Any relation to the fiction of John Harrison?”
Scotty had made several gasping, strangled attempts at forming words, before snatching the PADD from McCoy’s hands, jabbing furiously at it for a moment, and handing it back with a much-younger image of the man who lay comatose in front of them, the caption GEORGE HARRISON - THE QUIET BEATLE blazoned beneath it.
There was probably one in a million people who could have recognized on sight a Terran pop star who’d been dead for centuries, but that was Montgomery Scott for you. Over the course of their year on the Enterprise together, for every time McCoy had accused Scotty of being off his rocker, he’d been impressed by his ability to discourse on subjects that spanned disciplines and centuries. His knowledge of anything that interested him was encyclopedic. He reminded McCoy of Jim, in that way. A Jim with even less of a filter, who didn’t care what people thought of him. And so the case stood that if Scotty thought this was a Beatle who was supposed to have died of lung cancer and been cremated in 2001, after asking the prerequisite, “what else are the voices telling you,” McCoy quickly moved on to, “so how did he end up here?”
Once Harrison’s identity had been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt, the decision had come down that they were to try and revive him. For the time period, Harrison’s life was almost perfectly documented, hardly a day left unaccounted for, and there was what was considered to be overwhelming proof that he was neither psychotic nor violent, in other words completely unlike Khan. If they could speak to him, he might shed some light on how Khan came to be, provide some answers to those still reeling in the aftermath of Khan’s destruction. They also moved to conduct idents of the other 71 human popsicles. Several of them had died in their tubes. Several more were identified from old Earth records as various breeds of criminals and evil masterminds consistent with what they had expected to find among the companions that Khan had killed to protect. Many remained nameless but there were, to their growing astonishment, more like George Harrison. Men and women from the late 20th century who had been considered geniuses in their fields; another two musicians, a painter and a sculptor, a philosopher, a poet laureate, and a nobel prize winner. All public figures who were known to have died, no mysterious disappearances or abductions among them.
As McCoy began to examine Harrison, conclusions began to form. Harrison had, indeed, died of lung cancer. But then, someone had gone in and systematically removed all the cancerous tissue and, at the same time, somehow restored and reinvigorated his body. The scans showed an eerie similarity to Kirk’s when the captain had lain unconscious, his body working on overdrive to repair itself in the aftermath of the infusion of Khan’s blood. Khan had come to Harrison, McCoy would lay money on it, and offered him eternal life. And Harrison, in pain, dying, and scared like any other human about to make his journey into the undiscovered country, had agreed to whatever terms he’d proposed.
Up on stage, the musicians suddenly broke into a raucous, almost tuneless song, startling McCoy out of his thoughts to find that he’d finished his drink without hardly tasting it. He ordered another and went to sit beside Harrison in the niche in the wall.
“Wha’sat, then?” Harrison asked, nodding at the drink.
“Whiskey,” McCoy held it up to catch the feeble light. “Horrible fake whiskey. Never trust a machine to make your drinks.”
“Cheers,” George held up his bottle to clink against McCoy’s glass. “Thought this brew tasted off.”
McCoy nodded and sipped, enjoying the warmth in his chest, not fighting the placebo effect of the synthehol. The musicians finished their song and immediately started on another, the wail of a harmonica carrying over the sound of the teenagers cheering. They must be the other Beatles, McCoy realized, squinting at them through the gloom. He’d spent several hours reading up on them, partly out of curiosity but as much as to get Scotty to shut up, and he was somewhat pleased with himself to find that he could identify them all. There was John Lennon in a black suit with a ridiculous round collar, coaxing sounds out of his harmonica unlike anything McCoy had ever heard; there was Paul McCartney, head to toe in leather with his hair plastered in sweaty bangs to his forehead, working the crowd with winks and smiles; and there was Ringo Starr banging away at his drums, head bopping along to the beat and grinning from ear to ear. McCoy leaned forward to get a better view of the fourth shadowy figure lurking towards the back of the stage, facing into the corner.
“That supposed to be you?”
George looked up briefly, then away again, shaking his head. “Nah. This funny box thing has got it all wrong. That’s Stu, that is. Stu Sutcliffe. He never played at the same time as Rings. He shouldn’t be here.”
More than once over the weeks since Harrison awoke and started talking, McCoy had found himself indulging in speculation that made him shudder. What it would do to his own brain to go through a whole life, to die in agony, and to wake up hundreds of years later and be faced instantly with questions about what he had been doing with the guy who was responsible for hundreds of deaths, including half the friends and family of most of the people treating and caring for him. And then to be brought here, to this shadow chamber, to see almost-but-not-quite representations of the people he’d spent a good deal of his life with.
McCoy took a long pull on his drink, watching as the cigarette burned down, untended , between George’s fingers. “Not quite the world you were expecting to wake up to, huh.”
George laughed, the sound unexpectedly warm. “Not by half, mate. There’s faces in this room I never expected to see again. Not looking like they used to, anyway.”
McCoy heard the meaning behind the words - Not in this lifetime, anyway - loud and clear. After the drama of reviving Harrison, and after McCoy had declared him physically fit, he had largely been released into the care of others. The primary psychologist working with him had told McCoy that Harrison had at first seemed unable and then reluctant to recall his meeting and arrangement with Khan, and had said little beyond acknowledging that he had known Khan for a short time before his death.
“What did you think you were getting into, when Khan came to you? What did he offer you?” McCoy didn’t hang much hope on getting answer, beyond the bragging rights it would afford him if his blunt question succeeded where weeks of therapeutic probing had failed.
“I thought you’d worked that all out for yourself,” Harrison replied, sounding almost…disappointed? It was hard to tell behind that thick accent of his. “Eternal life and a princely kingdom. I was to be Krishna on Earth living a life of wine, women and song. Didn’t they tell you me memory’s gone bendy?”
“I’ve heard that you haven’t been too eager to remember anything about Khan, yes.” All the data they had on people who had survived primitive cryogenic freezing processes told that the brain compensated in different and varying ways, but memory loss was a common theme. Often the subject would fixate on a certain time of their life, a high point, usually, a time that defined them for the rest of their lives, and live primarily in that moment, though the other memories were there and could surface. “But you lived a long life before you met him. Is that all lost, Harrison?”
“You kin call me George, mate. They tell me he called himself Harrison, makes a fellow a mite uncomfortable, like.”
McCoy lifted his hand in apology. “George. All right. What can you remember?”
George leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, rubbing his temples and slowly shaking his head. “I remember…I think I could remember everything, if I wanted. It’s like…I’ll tell you what it’s like, it’s like there’s a bleedin’ mansion inside me head,” he tapped the side of his head. “Buckingham bloody Palace right up here, and all me mem’ries are locked away in different rooms. And I could go in all them if I wanted and poke around, see what comes up. But…I mostly prefer just to stay in the vestibule. You know. Less painful in here.”
“Here?” McCoy glanced around the club. “This is the vestibule?”
“In a manner of speaking, yeah. It’s easier to sit in here than to go sifting through to find the others I left behind. I had a son, I know that. And a wife. But…they belong to another time, don’t they? Another me. I don’t think…” George looked away, drawing raggedly on his cigarette. His voice was rough with smoke and emotion as he finished, “I said goodbye to these friends many times over the years ‘fore I finally kicked it. And I went to sleep that last time on the assurance that I’d wake up a new man, free of the cancer, all the pain of being trapped in me body.”
“This was what Khan promised you?”
“Aye. He knew the talk, that one. He came to me as a guru. He was to be the means to liberate me from my threefold suffering, and I would join him in building his new order. Said he needed men like me, who saw the world as it was and the world as it should be. Through plain living and high thinking, we would rescue mankind.” George snorted. “All that and a stable full uh unicorns shitting solid gold. It woulda been a wonderful life. Hey I’ve been talking to that Captain Jim of yours. He’s got a rather grand opinion of himself, he has. He tells me you actually put him in charge of one of your spaceships?”
McCoy laughed out loud, startling himself and drawing the attention of the kids on stage. “Believe me, George, you’re not the first to be expressing incredulity on that point. There’s times even I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s running on all thrusters, and he’s my best friend, mind.”
The other Beatles had laid down their instruments and were weaving through the crowd to get to them. McCoy felt so close to getting real information out of Harrison - George - and he watched their approach with apprehension.
But George spoke before McCoy could continue to press him. “He, your Captain I mean, has the talent to turn his own opinion of himself into everyone else’s opinion of himself. Reminds me of a few people I know,” he gave a significant glance at John Lennon and Paul McCartney before turning to face McCoy, his brown eyes unreadable, “actually, he shares that talent with a certain despot you’re all so curious about. If you’ll pardon the inference.”
“Pardon?” John echoed, leaning heavily on George’s shoulder and blinking at McCoy, “Pardon, excuse me, pardon’s pardon for asking, but who’s that little old man?”
He was looking in McCoy’s direction, and McCoy turned to look as well. The burst of laughter at his back made his ears turn read, and he prepared his best scowl for the upstart as he turned back around. He was thirty-three, dammit, and hardly “old.” Especially not next to George.
“This is Leonard McCoy, John,” George said, and McCoy registered surprise that George remembered his first name. “He’s a doctor.”
“Ohh, a doc-tah! Lovely, innit, that’s just swell. Budge up there Geo an’ give us a ciggie.”
“Budge up and get your own ciggie, John. You’ve filched me dry.”
McCoy looked between them, struck by the dissonance of seeing John and the others, perhaps twenty-three or four, interacting with George as though he was still their age mate. George himself seemed to be relaxing into the role, playing a part in a well-rehearsed drama.
“Never took you fer a liar, son,” John’s hand sneaked into the pocket of George’s jacket, emerging with the pack. He lit one amid George’s grumbling protests, looking hard at McCoy.
“So yer a doctah, then? Come to diagnose our quiet little Be-atle, tell us what’s wrong inside his ‘ead?”
McCoy opened his mouth but George was already speaking, his low voice carrying beneath the noise of the place. “Nah, don’t flatter me, John. He’s been brought ‘ere fer you. We’ll keep it quiet, like, but we all thought it was for the best. Din’we, Ringo?”
“Oh, aye, that we did, John,” Ringo launched into his part after an obvious wink from George. “We just thought, it weren’t right, our Johnny suffrin’ an’ carryin’ on so. Thought there must be somethin’ wrong in his ‘ead so we called in a doctor.”
To McCoy it all sounded like good-natured ribbing, but something was darkening in John’s face, his hand clenched around the cigarette and his shoulders hunched.
But then Paul sidled in next to John, bumping their shoulders together. John turned to glare into his bandmate’s face, but Paul was undeterred. “You see Johnny, I been tellin’ you fer years. They’re all jus’ jealous uh you.”
John’s face softened, but only for an instant, and then he was crossing his eyes and blowing out his cheeks, making crazy faces and accusing his friend of being “soft” and suggesting he might want to get in line next to have his head examined. Finally he stood, handing the pack of cigarettes back to George after extracting one and sticking it behind his ear. Nudging at Paul, he said, “Come ‘ead, then, Macca. Leave the play pen to the kiddos, hey?”
And, blowing a kiss at George, John skipped off across the room. Paul followed on his heels and Ringo seemed to melt into the darkness. McCoy was left breathing in the cloud of smoke they’d left behind, blinking rapidly and trying to remember, wrap his mind around the fact, that they had all three been holograms. He looked at George, who seemed to have shrunk in on himself.
“And how was that,” McCoy asked, cursing whoever had signed off on this, “for realism? Did they seem just like the people you knew?”
George wasn’t listening, his eyes still fixed on his old bandmates. Paul had his hand on the small of John’s back as they disappeared into the crowd, and seemed to be whispering something in his ear.
“Yeah,” George called, his thick accent falling away, leaving him sounding older, bitter. “Yeah, don’t hide it or anything. We all knew!” He threw the spent end of his cigarette onto the floor, slipping back into the voice that sounded more like his Beatle self. “Fuckin’ tossers. Can’t even do a bloke the courtesy of leavin’ off in public so’s we can all go on pretendin’ not to notice.”
“Okay,” McCoy said after a moment, shaking his head, “I’m lost.”
“Which is right where John wants you to be. Always the smartest, always the cleverest.”
McCoy snorted, recalling a very similar conversation he’d had recently. “I know someone like that. And the worst part is, he probably is smarter than everyone around him, but god damn if he isn’t an asshole about it.” That got a laugh from George, so he continued. “And the thing is, Jim - our captain, who you were talking to - now Jim’s decided he likes the bastard, so no one can say anything about him.”
George nodded. “Right. Would that be the fellow with the funny name your Captain was going on about?”
“Spock?” McCoy laughed. “That’s him.”
George lit another cigarette, offering the pack to McCoy. Hesitating only a moment, he took one, leaning in to let George light it for him. Putting out the match, George continued, “And John only ever takes advice from Paul, he’s the only one he takes seriously, really. ‘Sides Eppy, now and then.”
“Sounds familiar. Is Paul as full of himself as Jim is?”
“Oh, aye. And probably more, Paul McCharmley has never faced real danger in his life, ‘cept maybe from John himself. Your Captain Jim tells me he’s always rushin’ about after space pirates and the like. And Khan, uh course.”
McCoy snorted. “Jim was laid out on a slab when Spock took out Khan. And then it was me who saved his dead ass. Jim didn’t do much besides run off like a maniac after the guy who killed his daddy-figure.” He bit down on the angry words, Got a lot of people killed. Did no good to think like that. “A lot of people died. But somehow he’s still got his ship, still got the love and support of the whole goddamn world. Dunno how he does it but if he could bottle it he’d be richer’n the Andorian pope.”
“That sounds more like John,” George said darkly. “Smartest, cleverest idiot I ever met. Meanest, too.”
Up on the stage, John was waddling around, eyes crossed, arms spastically failing. A cruel imitation of a disabled person the likes of which McCoy hadn’t seen since his grade school days.
George was still muttering around his cigarette, but suddenly broke off, rubbing between his eyes. “No. This box, this hologram room, it’s got everything almost wrong. Half-right. It’s like it’s gone inside me head to pull out the worst memories of everything and built all me anger into three people who look and sound like I remember them at their worst. It’s a joke.”
“Computer,” McCoy made a decision, standing up and pulling George to his feet, “end program.”
The club shimmered and fell away, leaving them standing in a sterile, featureless room.
“Come on,” McCoy said, leading the way to the door. “I know a place we can get real drinks. And some food, too, you look like you haven’t eaten in days.”
“Since I had real food? Feels more like centuries. Ta,” he nodded as McCoy held the door for him and they left the holo wing behind. “Tell me, does all your food come out of machines in pleasing pastel colors, or can a bloke still indulge in a home cooked meal now and again?”
“It will be my pleasure to introduce you to the best dining experience San Francisco can offer in its present state. My favorite restaurant survived the recent attack, which nearly turned me religious. Do you like Indian?”
George looked at him, arching an impressive eyebrow.
“Oh, right,” McCoy nodded towards a side door that would take them out into the sunshine. “I think I heard something about that. Have you been out into the city, yet?”
“San Francisco? Played here a time or two.” George nodded, his face turning dark. “Nearly got meself trampled visiting this horrible hippie hill place. Got chased off by these spotty kids off their heads an’ thinkin’ I’m Beatle George, the great Messiah, come to give them the next big truth. Put me off thinking drugs were a path to anything more'n addiction and dropping outta yer life.”
McCoy had heard about that, actually. And he had found out that the free clinic at Haight-Ashbury was still where it had stood in George’s time, and wondered if George had access to that memory as well. Scotty had been even more shocked to find out that he wasn’t familiar with George Harrison because McCoy was a doctor; apparently George had been so turned off by what he’d seen happening in the drug culture in the late 1960s that the next time he was in San Francisco he had given a large sum of money to a rehab facility that was about to go under. “Well there’s been a few changes since then. For one thing, I can almost promise that no one is going to recognize you when we go out, let alone…mob…you..”
They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and no sooner had George lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the midday sun than his name was called out, in a breathless brogue McCoy recognized.
Scotty skidded to a halt in front of them, reaching for George’s hand, stammering about what an honor it was to meet him, adding, when he could string words together again, “And so good to see you out and about, no man as brilliant as you should be kept hostage in that shiny prison they call an infirmary, no offense doctor.”
McCoy glared at him, shaking his head. George looked bemused but didn’t pull his hand away from the heartfelt handshake. Scotty continued, unabated. “Are yeh just out t’take the air, then? Mind if I join you? Ach, I can’t tell you just what a thrill it is to even be speaking to you. Your music had such an influence on me, m’whole life I’ve been indebted to you. Do you know I coded my equation for transwarp beaming - ach, sorry, listen to me. That’s to say, I came up with a very technical, very cutting-edge theory that changed the way we travel in space, while listening to -”
“Don’t tell me, I know this one,” George interrupted. “It was ‘Across the Universe,’ right?”
Scotty gaped at him, then stuttered, “D’yeh think I dinnae know who I’m speakin’ to? I’m not talkin’ about Beatles music, I’m talkin’ about yer album, Living in the Material World.”
George’s eyes went wide, then he glanced away, looking distant for a minute. Then recognition dawned and he turned back to Scotty with a grin that made him look decades younger. “Do you like Indian food?”
“Do I like…what kind of a question is that? Are you going to Marahani?”
“We were,” McCoy said pointedly.
“Brilliant! Best fare this side of the pond. So tell me, George, may I call you George? I’m Scotty. Pleasure. Anyroad, tell me…”
McCoy trailed after them, muttering, “Yeah, great, let’s all go. It’s not like I ain’t used to playing third wheel around here, anyway.”