Bashir laid a hand against the alley wall, then drew it back, looking in revulsion at the wet residue on his fingertips. "This couldn't be something from Ahrmant Wyoss's own past." He wiped his hand off on his uniform trousers. "From his personnel files, we know that he didn't grow up on any planet as undeveloped as this. My guess is that he indulged in a preference for these ancient films and then, bit by bit, the contents of his subconscious were altered to match up. The literal truth of his past became less important than what he believed, on some deep level, to be its essence. At one time, it was a common enough psychotherapeutic fallacy that subjects could get trapped in."
"But if what Commander Sisko told us is correct, there should be some version of Wyoss himself still here, his echo." The sound of breathing was closer now. Away from the feeble glow of the streetlights, Dax's eyes had adjusted to the alley's darkness. She could see no break or doorway set into the walls on either side, until she looked down and saw a grime-clouded basement window at the level of the pavement. Kneeling down, she wiped a layer of dirt away with her palm. "Look—" She gestured for Bashir to stoop down beside her. "This must be it."
A primitive light-emitting device, a glass sphere with a flickering electric current inside, dangled from a bare wire, illuminating a basement room. If anything, the aura of decay and stilled cycles of time was even more palpable on the other side of the glass pane. Wooden shelves along one of the cellar walls sagged under the weight of what Dax took to be food-preserving containers, some of the jars broken, others oozing their contents through the seals of their metal lids. An assortment of worn-out brooms and mops, which looked like bones and straggly hair of emaciated corpses, filled one corner of the space; cardboard boxes collapsing with their burdens of forgotten and incomprehensible objects lined the other walls.
And in the center, beneath the light's yellow glare, was a single cot of tattered canvas. With the figure of a boy upon it, his face buried in his arms.
"That's him," came the whisper at Dax's ear. Bashir nodded toward the child visible through the smeared window. "That's Wyoss."
She knew it was true; there was no need to see the boy's features. At her back, it felt as though the holosuite's dark limits had closed tighter around them, the cellar room being the dead center of this small world. The innermost circle of a private hell.
Beneath the boy's ragged shirt—he looked to be about nine or ten years old—his shoulder blades moved with each inhalation. Dax realized now that it hadn't been his breathing that she had heard and that had led them to this spot; it had been a muffled sobbing, a sound both heartbroken and exhausted, one that might have been going on forever, in the hopeless way in which a bleak eternity is confronted.
"There's somebody coming—" Beside her, Bashir pointed to a shadow that had appeared on the wooden steps leading from the floor above.
The boy lifted his tear-wet face from the cot and looked up at the figure that had entered the cellar space. An adult, face cast in shade by the light dangling just a few inches over his head. Dax could see that, even though the boy didn't move from the cot, didn't try to escape, his torso still cringed back from the apparition. The figure held something in his hands, cradling it like a beloved thing; an object long and slender, rigid where its grip was laced with leather straps, tapering to a flexible curve, point studded with a bright spark of metal. As Dax watched, the figure raised the whiplike instrument; the boy rolled away from its approach, drawing his knees toward his chest and guarding his face between his bare forearms and trembling fists. She saw then that his shirt was not ragged but torn, as was the bleeding flesh beneath.
"It's not real," said Bashir as she turned away. "You have to remember that. It's all illusion. Even the boy—that's just an echo, a little bit of data caught in a loop in the circuits. . . ."
She didn't care. Perhaps if the symbiont had been part of her consciousness at this moment, instead of merely observing all that happened at the edge of her mind, that would have provided enough ballast for her to have maintained a clinical detachment. But right now she didn't want to see what she knew was going to happen. It was bad enough that she could still hear it, the high, singing note of the lash as it cut through the air, the sharp impact upon the skin, the gasping sound that was half a cry, half the fearful stifling of that cry.
With her eyes closed, Dax could see the figure more clearly, dissecting the glimpse she'd had of him. Not his face, but what he wore: an exact simulation of Benjamin Sisko's uniform as a Starfleet commander, complete to the small insignia upon the collar.
There was at last—mercifully—silence; she looked at the basement window and saw that the cellar was empty now. She didn't know, and didn't want to ask Bashir what had happened; perhaps the adult figure had led the weeping boy up the stairs, or all the echoes and images had simply vanished, their time-locked rituals expiated for a while. Though something had been left behind: on the cot, like a sleeping snake, lay the instrument the figure had carried in its hands.
"Let's go, Julian." A different nausea had settled at the base of her throat. "I think we've seen enough."
"Wait a minute." He searched the ground, finally prying up a loose stone from the wet pavement. With it, he broke out the window glass, carefully brushing loose the shards from around the edges. The opening was just big enough for him to slide through and land on his feet inside the cellar.
"What're you doing?"
"I think . . . we just have a piece of interesting evidence here." When he climbed back out, he had the lash coiled in one hand.
Neither of them spoke, even after they had exited the holosuite chamber and stepped out into the corridor beyond; not until they had returned to the brightly lit research lab.
Bashir laid the instrument out on one of the benches. It had persisted after its removal from the holosuite, indicating that it was a replicated material object and not just an illusion created by the interaction of the holosuite's low-level tractor beams.
"What did you bring that out for?" Dax looked at the object with a residue of distaste. She felt whole again; the symbiont's system had resumed its normal functioning, operating in parallel with that of the humanoid host body. As though waking from a partial slumber, her augmented mind had begun processing and sorting through all that it had perceived.
"I thought so," murmured Bashir. He traced the object's length with a fingertip before turning toward her. "You noticed, didn't you, how the altered holosuite was a jumble of stimuli from several different sources—"
"I saw that there was some apparition seemingly dressed as Commander Sisko, if that's what you mean."
Bashir nodded. "That certainly explains the murderous fixation Wyoss had formed upon the commander. Wyoss had apparently been caught in a cycle of endlessly repeating some trauma suffered while he was a child; the CI module wired into the holosuite translated that into an environment where Sisko assumed the role of that malignant authority figure. Poor Wyoss had been trying to break out of that toxic world in the only way he could figure out."
"We had already hypothesized that, Julian."
"True; it's the other elements of the hallucinated world that are important. Obviously, the CI module has its own internal programming that it uses to warp the user's perceptions along certain specific patterns. It has to fill in certain bits and pieces to make everything work out. So there's always something left behind—that's something I learned from O'Brien, when he told me how he'd shown to Odo that someone had been tampering with those holosuites." He picked up the object from the bench; it lay heavily across his upturned palms. "Take this, for instance—it's actually a more clever apparatus than it initially appears. Technically, it's known as a limited trauma-induction device; the metal tip has miniature repulsion flanges that can be programmed to a maximum epidermal penetration depth. Very useful for achieving the most pain with the least life-threatening damage to the individual."