"Are you all right?" He peered in concern at her. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know—" She felt weak, as though Bashir's grasp was all that kept her standing upright. She pressed one hand to her brow. "I seem to be experiencing some kind of processing lag." Around her, as she raised her head, she saw not the illusory city, but the actual walls of the holosuite chamber itself, the hexagonal grid of percept transmitters and low-level tractor-beam apertures. Beneath her feet, she perceived bare metal rather than the rough surface of hallucinated asphalt and stone. "All of a sudden, I'm not picking up the sensory effects. Wait a minute. . . ." Dax held out her hand. The walls faded a bit, enough to be overlaid with ghost images of the programmed buildings. "Something's off—the effects are erratic. . . ."
Bashir glanced over his shoulder. "It seems to be working all right for me. Unusually solid for a holosuite, in fact." He turned back to her, studying her eyes. "It must have something to do with the cortical-induction module—I can't think of any other explanation." He nodded. "That must be it. Plus your being a Trill—the CI technology works directly on the user's neurosystem, instead of just feeding in stimuli through the sense organs the way unaltered holosuites do. The problem must be that in your case, there's two neurosystems operating in tandem, the humanoid one and the symbiont's. The two systems are obviously different enough that they're not experiencing the CI module's effects at exactly the same rate—you're like a subspace receiver catching two transmissions at the same time and scrambling them together."
If the disorientation had been less severe, she would have arrived at the same theory. "I believe you're correct." In her vision, the holosuite walls and the illusory buildings went through a blurring fluctuation. She swayed, holding on to Bashir's arm even more tightly. "Severe loss of . . . equilibrium . . . sense of balance is well below operational thresholds . . ."
"I'll have to take you out of here—"
"No." Dax shook her head, sending her visual field even farther askew. "We came in here for a reason—there's things we need to find out. I think there's a way I can take care of this."
"How?"
"Under normal conditions, a Trill cannot separate the parts of its joint consciousness—once the fusion has taken place, the symbiont and host are as one, even though there is some occasional bilateral functioning."
Bashir nodded. "Just as there is with the left and right hemispheres of the human brain."
"Exactly. But here," said Dax, "because of the interference effect of the CI modules—it appears that the neurosystems inside me are not functioning at equal strength; the synchronization between them has been thrown off." She closed her eyes, holding her fingertips to the side of her brow. "I can feel it. It's as if the field created by the CI modules dividing me into two separate creatures again. . . . "
"That does it." Bashir's tone was emphatic. "I'm taking you out of here."
"No—" She grabbed his forearm. "Don't you see? We can use this. Instead of fighting the interference effect, I can yield to it. That way, instead of struggling to resynchronize the two neurosystems, one can simply take precedence over the other and operate as a de facto separate entity."
"I don't know. . . ." Bashir looked doubtful. "This sounds somewhat risky."
"It would only be for while we're here in the holosuite. As soon as we're out again, the two neurosystems would align together once more." Dax closed her eyes again, ttempting to minimize the chaotic sensory stimuli that assaulted her. "I know it can be done. And there isn't any other way."
"Well . . . if you say so; Trill physiology isn't one of my specialties. But I'm telling you—if I even suspect something's gone wrong, I'm carrying you back out the door." He peered more closely at her. "So which part of you is going to go away for a while?"
"In this situation, it's probably better if the symbiont withdraws; the humanoid consciousness retains better control of the host body's motor functions. . . ." Her awareness had already turned inward, toward that world contained by her skin, a world populated by both one creature and two. The symbiont's thoughts had echoed the words she had spoken to Bashir; the decision had already been made, the process set into motion. Dax willed herself to let go, to allow the interference effect to work upon her. . . .
There was no pain or drama to the separation; just a growing sense of aloneness, a loss greater than the merely human ever realized, endurable only because she knew itwould be temporary.
There was perhaps one aboard the station who had ever felt the same. The friendship between the symbiont Dax and Commander Sisko went back many years, to the humanoid host before her. Somewhere in all that accumulation of memory was an hour when Sisko had spoken of the grief he carried within, the death of his wife. As if he had lost something that was as much a part of him as his breath heartbeat. He had loved her that much.
The withdrawal was complete; she could feel the symbiont's separate mind at the edge of her own consciousness, a touch that was even closer than Bashir's supporting arm.
She opened her eyes. In the holosuite's simulated distance, she could see the oppressive night folding around the seemingly solid buildings. A fragment of another time, a crumpled newspaper, tumbled in the draft moving through the low mist. Julian had been correct: it was easily the most convincing holosuite environment she had ever experienced.
"I'm all right now." The nausea and disorientation had receded. She gently removed Bashir's hand from her arm and stepped away from the grasp by which he had held her up. In the dim radiance from the nearest streetlamp, she could see her shadow wavering across the pitted asphalt surface and broken concrete edge of the curb. "We should proceed with the investigation."
They walked together down the street, their mingled shadows falling in and out of the empty doorways. They were looking for something human—or reasonably so.
Commander Sisko had uploaded a hurried memo to them, giving a few details about what he had called "echoes" in the altered holosuites. He hadn't made it clear what he had been doing inside, whether he had been working his own personal investigation, following a hunch . . . it didn't matter. What was important was that his information had given them another lead to trace down, just when they had apparently exhausted all the possibilities of their previously collected data.
If the users of the altered holosuites had left behind electronic echoes of their personalities, they might yield clues to the CI modules' operations—and their source. At a dead end in the research lab, Dax and Bashir had redirected their attention to the infectious vector of the epidemic.
"There's something here; I can feel it." Bashir stopped and looked around. One dismal street had led to another, as if the holosuite were an endlessly repeating field of urban decay. "Definitely a presence."
Dax had to agree with him. An almost subliminal thread, sounds that were just barely at the edge of perception, had led them on a winding course between the crumbling buildings. She held up her hand, signaling him to be silent as she tilted her head to concentrate. Whatever she heard, she would have to interpret it on her own, without the aid of her silently watching other half.
"Over there." She pointed down a dark alley branching off the street. In some ways, it had been easier to pinpoint the sound; as much as she had been diminished from being temporarily separated from her symbiont, there had also been a sharpening, a cleansing, of her perceptions, as though the sensory data were coming undiluted through one less filter. "It sounds like breathing."
The alley ended blind against a dank wall; it reached several stories above her and Bashir, as though the altered holosuite had labored to produce the ultimate symbol of futility, the death and abandonment of every human endeavor. Close to where they stood was a row of battered metal canisters, obviously a re-creation of the artifacts of a primitive waste-removal system; they smelled like rotting food and airborne disease.