"Exactly—there wasn't any." He pointed to an overhead grille. "These work areas don't get the same atmospheric filtration cycles that the other sectors do. Things get pretty mucky after a while; that's why those access panels are bolted down so airtight. Whoever was in here, they were real professionals." He let his smile widen. "They cleaned up after themselves. And that's how I knew."
"Is this the article in question?" The object seemed surprisingly light in his hands. Sisko rubbed the ball of his thumb across the enameled surface. He could see the reflection of his face in it, as though it were an obsidian mirror.
"That's the casing for it," said Dax. "O'Brien didn't have any trouble getting into it—though apparently he did make the first drill hole by remote, in a bombproof chamber, just to be on the safe side." She pointed to the workbench along the laboratory's other side. "The unit's interior components are over there."
"You've completed your analysis on them?"
"For the most part. I'm afraid, Benjamin, that we'll have a difficult time determining the source of these devices. Whoever built them didn't leave a lot of clues inside."
He set the empty casing down, then looked over the carefully dismantled innards. Bright fragments of metal, the intricate tracery of microcircuits—for a moment, an irrational feeling moved at the base of his own gut, that he was looking at the disemboweled carcass of a once-living creature, one that had crept with malign rodentlike cunning into the core of the station. He pushed the disquieting thought away.
"What about its function?" Sisko picked up one of the pieces, a mute crystalline cylinder, and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. "Its effect on these altered holosuites?"
"I can give you more information on that." She stepped beside him and took the crystal away from him, replacing it in the exact ordered spot from which he had taken it. That small action held a silent reprimand, as though from an elder to a child. Which in essence it was, coming—as he knew it did—from the centuries-old symbiont inside Jadzia's torso. His ancient friend, across a gulf of so many years and aggregate lifetimes. He watched as Jadzia drew her hand away from the piece. "Unfortunately," she said, "a great deal more."
"What do you mean?"
"It's not good news, Benjamin. There are some very serious consequences to what I've found here."
"Related to the epidemic of murders?"
She nodded.
"I had a feeling that was going to be the case." Sisko leaned back against the edge of the bench. "Give me a rundown on it, then."
"Basically, the situation with the holosuites in the indicated sector is as Odo suspected; they've all been tampered with. An operations crew is currently removing the other modules identical to this one. I'll check each one of them out, but I'm confident that I'll find that they're all identical in construction and operation. The technology that's employed in these modules is a very powerful—and illicit—sensory-input technology that's usually referred to by the initials 'CI.'"
"What does that stand for?"
"'Cortical induction,'" replied Dax. "It's not anything new; it was developed shortly after the original holosuite programming modalities were devised. Actually, the relative ease with which these units were spliced into the data stream indicates that CI was originally part of the overall holosuite design, and was removed once the negative effects of CI had been discovered. The CI technology was then suppressed by the Federation authorities; the clearances necessary to do any research into the subject are almost impossible to obtain—if you even knew what to inquire about."
"But you know about it." Sisko gestured at the disassembled components. "You were able to almost immediately recognize this thing for what it was."
She smiled. "There are advantages to having several centuries' worth of memory. There had been some initial distribution of holosuite data; I can remember when those files were ordered back and placed under security."
Her explanation brought a raised eyebrow. "That's not done very often. The Federation scientists must have found something fairly alarming."
"A powerful technology always evokes precautions, Benjamin. One that's both powerful and uncontrollable . . ." Dax shook her head. "The Federation did the right thing in attempting to suppress CI. The murders we've had aboard the station prove that." Her hand moved slowly above the bench, as though her fingertips could read the message encoded in the carefully separated pieces. "You know how an unmodified holosuite works, Benjamin; essentially, it creates an illusory experience by presenting sensory data to the user's normal percept system, including tactile sensations through by means of low-level tractor beams, or by replicating objects that can actually be touched and held."
"I'm familiar enough with the process." He had felt in his own hands the fine-grained hide, the rows of tight stitches curving around a spheroid surface, an artifact from the ancient sport of baseball, perfectly re-created by a replicator component within a holosuite.
"What makes the CI technology so powerful—and so much more dangerous—is that it bypasses the sense organs entirely; it operates by inducing the desired current flow and synaptic discharges in the neurofibers of the user's brain. The resulting experience is much more commanding in the intensity of the illusion created; if undergone often enough, it can begin to override the user's perception of reality itself. This is a threat that's qualitatively different from the essentially benign effects of the regulation, unaltered holosuites. In addition, holosuites normally have built-in safeguards to prevent users from programming any experiences with extremely negative psychological consequences, such as deliberately injuring oneself, sadistic and self-reinforcing acts of violence against others, and the like. Even the holosuites that Quark operates on the Promenade, while admittedly being oriented toward erotic fantasy material, function within those safeguards. These other holosuites, the ones that Odo found have been tampered with—" Dax pointed to the bench. "These cognitive-induction modules essentially remove all such barriers. The consequences, as we've seen, can be severe."
Her voice had been calm and level, the words measured as those in a scientific lecture—which in effect it had been, albeit at a simplified level. Sisko knew that if necessary, Dax could have given him a complete technical breakdown of the CI technology and its malign influences on the humanoid nervous system. Anything other than that reflected her assessment of what he needed to know to begin making the decisions that would insure the station's survival. His own thought processes would have to match Dax's in cold rationality, to sort through this situation's elements and determine the one proper course of action.
"And are you quite sure," he said, "that there's a definite connection between these CI modules and the outbreak of murders on board DS9? It is possible after all, that these phenomena are merely coincidental. We could wind up wasting valuable time and resources by acting on this theory when the underlying cause might be something entirely different."
Dax gave an acknowledging nod of her head. "You're quite right to be cautious, Benjamin. My investigation into the matter is still at a preliminary stage; a great deal will be determined by the correlation I find between the CI programming and the analysis of what I've been recording from the subject Ahrmant Wyoss. And of course, Odo is following up on a number of other leads."
"Very well. Keep me apprised—immediately—of any new developments." His gaze moved again across the sparkling and mute pieces laid out on the bench's surface. The coded words that they might spell out were still not legible. He turned away from them and strode toward the laboratory door.