Random Convergence

By Laura Schiller

Based on Star Trek: Voyager

Copyright: Paramount

"Can I help you, Ensign?" asked the EMH.

Ensign Robert Mulcahy inched into Sickbay, peering at the biobed closest to the door as if its recently deceased occupant could still get up and pounce on him. He walked around the body, fascination and revulsion warring on his tanned, narrow face.

"Damn," he exclaimed, shaking his head. "That's even creepier than I thought it would be."

The Doctor glanced from Mulcahy, with his black hair and yellow Engineering uniform, to the armored Borg drone with his light green eyepiece and papery skin; as pale in life as it was now in death. Their faces, however – brown eyes; aquiline nose; thin mouth – were identical. Their voices had been identical as well.

"Come to see your possible future, Mr. Mulcahy?" the Doctor demanded, feeling rattled. "That is what you'd look like, more or less, if you were assimilated."

Mulcahy cursed again. "But it's dead, isn't it? So … like … it can't assimilate anyone else."

The Doctor's temper, barely held in check through the ordeals of the last hour's Borg attack and the death of his patient, blazed up.

"Crewman One just sacrificed his own life to destroy that Borg sphere that was after us, Ensign!" he snapped. "Yes, he's dead. He put up a personal forcefield to stop me from saving his life, to prevent the Borg from getting hold of his advanced technology. And I'd appreciate it if you stopped calling him it."

"I'm sorry!" Mulcahy held up both hands. "I'm sorry. So … wow."

He looked down at One with a new, cautious respect. "He did that? Amazing. What … what else did he do? Can you tell me anything more about him?"

Slightly mollified, the Doctor picked up his laser scalpel and turned the body over as he talked. "Well, he was insatiably curious. Whenever Seven gave him a data node to process information, she'd barely turned around before he finished it and came asking for a new one. He had a way of saying, 'I wish to assimilate more information!' – like a child asking for candy. It was rather charming, actually."

Mulcahy cast a dubious glance at the dead drone. 'Charming' was not a word that came to mind. Instead it gave him an uncanny feeling of déjà vu; himself as a small boy, tugging on his mother's sleeve and asking question after question. 'I wanna know!'

As an engineer, he worked with Seven of Nine from time to time, but did not know her very well. In fact, he found her distinctly un-knowable – a haughty, pedantic perfectionist with all the warmth of the ice planet Delta vega. She scared him, even after almost two years on board. He tried not to go near her if he could help it.

Now, however, it seemed that he and Seven were connected in a most bizarre and unexpected fashion. He recalled the horror of that set of tubules lunging at his neck from the computer console in the science lab; grabbing him like a living being. This drone – One – was a merging of his DNA and Seven's nanoprobes. Well, and the Doctor's mobile emitter.

"So Seven of Nine was looking after it … him?" Mulcahy asked.

"Who else?" asked the Doctor.

Who else, indeed? Who would want to look after a Borg, besides another Borg? Nanoprobes called to nanoprobes, it seemed.

"She had a hard time getting him to regenerate, she said," the Doctor confided as he cut a hole in the back of One's skull to extract the mobile emitter. "Had to order him three times. Some children just don't like going to bed, eh?"

That gave Mulcahy another flashback – his father carrying him to bed, reading him stories, always stopping before he felt himself tired enough to sleep.

A queer sensation of guilt was creeping up on him, as if he were somehow wrong in not having come within ten ship's decks of One during his entire short existence. He felt like a father who'd abandoned his child. It was ridiculous, of course. The drone was not his son, just an accident; an accident that was now remedied. All the same, Mulcahy squirmed.

"A-ha … " The Doctor very slowly pulled out his mobile emitter with a small set of tongs.

"It must be a relief to have that back, Doctor," Mulcahy remarked. "For Lieutenant Torres, too."

His commanding officer had been cranky all day due to 'that petaQ of a hologram waking me up at six hndred hours to nag me about his goddamned emitter, as if I were his personal maid and didn't have a ship to run!'. A cranky Torres made for a very unhappy engineering staff.

The Doctor sighed as he attached the emitter to his uniform sleeve. "I suppose so … but honestly, Mr. Mulcahy, right now I feel as if I would gladly spend the rest of our voyage cooped up in sickbay, if only this remarkable young man were still alive."

He pulled a white sheet over the body. Mulcahy bowed his head.

"Of course."

After being briefly scanned for residual nanoprobes (there were none), Mulcahy left Sickbay in a somber and meditative mood. He wondered if there would be a funeral, and if he could get up the nerve to go. He wondered if he should talk to Seven. He did not like her, or even know her, but the situation seemed to demand it somehow. What would he say to her, though?

He jumped as Seven herself suddenly runded a corner of the corridor and they found themselves face to face. He caught a flash of startled recognition in her blue eyes – of course. He and One had the same face.

"Ensign," she said, with a tiny nod, and walked past him. Her eyes, he couldn't help not notice, were red from crying; even her perfectly pinned-up golden hair was slightly dishevelled.

"Er – Seven, wait!"

She turned around. Calling her that felt oddly informal, almost intimate; but what else could he say? 'Ms. Seven' sounded wrong, and he could hardly address her by rank since she didn't have one.

"How are you?" he blurted out. "I'm … my name's Robert Mulcahy. I'm the one whose DNA is … well, you know."

She nodded again.

"If there's anything I can do … "

"I do not require assistance," she said, frostily as always, and stalked away before he could think of a reply.

Fine, he thought, stung by her attitude. Be that way, Borg Princess. I only wanted to talk.

However, the next time his Bolian friend Chell made a disparaging comment about Seven in the mess hall during lunch, Mulcahy's reaction surprised everybody at the table.

"Just drop it, all right?" he snapped. "If she hasn't assimilated the crew by now, she's not going to. We've got no right to judge her."

He couldn't help but find the dumbfounded silence of his friends rather satisfying.