From the computer's last statement, Dax had silently counted off three seconds. From previous experience, she knew that was long enough. She opened her eyes, and found herself in another darkness. A world of it; one that she had seen before, that she had walked through, with Dr. Bashir at her side. She kept herself still, not even turning her head; the slightest motion could trigger the crippling nausea she had felt the first time she had been here, the result of the processing lag between the humanoid neurosystem and that of the symbiont within her. Looking straight ahead of herself, she saw the blind windows and ashen walls of Ahrmant Wyoss's hallucinated world, the bleak urban landscape that had been his personal hell.
The illusion was not total; dimly, through the shapes of the deserted buildings and the cluttered horizon beyond, the outlines of the research lab aboard DS9 could be seen, like a brighter video image leaking through the dark one masking it. Without the aid of a holosuite's sensory transmitters and low-level tractor beams operating on her perceptions, the hallucinated world depended entirely on the effects of the CI module for its transitory existence. But those effects had become stronger: less of the research lab could be seen this time than when she had last performed this experiment. The rudimentary intelligence contained within the module had become more adept at manipulating her neurosystem; its function was to continuously learn how to draw any particular subject farther and farther into the world it created.
Dax took a single step backward; for a moment, the vision of the empty city blurred sickeningly, her digestive tract clenching in protest against the dizzying assault. The sensation passed, like the dying of a sudden stormwind; she could see around her nothing but the familiar confines of the research lab and its equipment. On the bench in front of her lay the exposed CI module, its empty black casing pushed aside; the filaments winding among the miniaturized components still glowed as brightly as before.
She had stepped out of the limited range of the module's effects; at this distance, and with the sudden drop-off she had programmed into its operation, the CI technology couldn't reach inside her skull. All of that other world, Ahrmant Wyoss's interwoven fantasies of pain and abandonment, were contained by an invisible sphere, just within reach of her outstretched hand.
"Append research notes," she spoke aloud. "The cortical-induction field appears to have increased effective strength since my previous experience with it; gain in perceptual validity is an estimated twenty-five percent." She paused for a few seconds. "I attribute the additional CI strength to the ongoing aftereffects of repeated exposure to the module's operations, specifically upon my own humanoid neurosystem. As I anticipated, there's been an unconscious learned response on the part of the field-receptive neurotransmitters; interpretation of the CI effects is at an increasingly high level, resulting in apparent perception of the programmed reality simulation without concurrent sensory stimuli from a holosuite. End notes, computer." As the data was being logged into her memory-bank file area, Dax continued to regard the activated CI module, mulling over her previous findings.
The things that she hadn't told her research partner, that she hadn't wanted Bashir to know, at least not yet; those bits of information struck to the heart of the CI technology's mysteries. That the technology represented a two-way passage, she and Julian had already determined; the phenomenon of the black-cased modules reading a subject's innermost desires and then feeding them back, in a spiralling loop of murderous obsessions, had appeared to be the most significant alteration to the holosuites' functioning. But just within the last shift, she had traced down another, equally important element.
All of the CI modules were connected on a subspace communication link. The bandwidth was narrow enough to have eluded her first attempts at detection; she'd had to perform a manually directed frequency sweep to find it just below the station's own transmission range. The modules from the deactivated holosuites had been taken off-line, but there was a sufficient data stream from the one on the lab bench for her to analyze. From a central locus on Bajor'ssurface, a network united the CI modules in all of the holosuites in Moagitty; whatever took place in one holosuite was instantly communicated to the others and factored into their joint programming. The altered holosuites were not creating a multiplicity of different perceptual worlds, based upon the input of their various users, but instead were drawing those users into facets of a single, master-programmed alternate reality. That all-encompassing hallucination had an essentially centripetal, or inward-directed, nature, Dax had discovered; the minor variations between the users' perceptions were eliminated over time, and at an exponentially accelerating rate, resulting in a single world shared among them. The world that McHogue had created for them.
The microcircuits of the CI module on the lab bench glowed with the mute life that coursed through them. Dax thought—not for the first time—of how the module itself was a like a microcosm of the city that had been built almost overnight upon the planet; every component in its appointed place, all designed to serve one function, and merely awaiting the energy and desire needed to bring all to its culminating moment. Moagitty, McHogue's city; his world . . . and his will, on Bajor as it was in the holosuite.
None of what McHogue had brought into being aboard DS9, the epidemic of murder and the artificially generated madness that had erupted in the narrow corridors, had been his true intent; Dax and the other officers had determined that McHogue had used the station for his testing ground, a dry run to calibrate the CI modules' effects. He had said as much himself, in his face-to-face confrontation with Commander Sisko; Bajor and the establishing of Moagitty had been his goal from the beginning.
And beyond that? wondered Dax. The question remained unanswered; given the overweening megalomania that McHogue had displayed so far, she found it hard to believe that a pocket empire—even one named so grandiosely after himself—could be the limit of his ambitions. As Julian had pointed out to her during their investigative shifts in the lab, McHogue showed all the classic signs of a criminal mentality, a true sociopath; by comparison, DS9's own Quark was no more than a sharp Ferengi businessman, content to keep a good thing going.
For someone like McHogue, every achieved goal became a stepping-stone toward ever wilder and more far-reaching schemes. The reality principle was lacking in him; that had been Julian's thumbnail psychiatric diagnosis. McHogue possessed no ability to moderate his appetites, his spiralling egotism, based upon the limits of ordinary creatures. The CI technology and the altered holosuites had been as much a trap for him as any he could have set for his unwitting victims; the perfect hallucinatory worlds he had been able to create with the black-cased modules served to validate a delusional state that was already out of control, like throwing an incendiary liquid upon a raging fire. He had made himself a god in a private universe, one bound by the walls of Moagitty.
And that privacy, Dax had reasoned, was the motive for McHogue's abandoning DS9 and moving on to his purpose-built city on the surface of Bajor. His megalomania dictated a world built from scratch, one that partook of not even the least contamination from a reality beyond his control, every mirror, he wished to see his own face; in every girder and extrusion-molded stretch of wall, he would demand the shaping of his own hand, the outpouring of his prodigal mind. Like walking around inside his head, thought Dax; that was what the patrons who were now locked inside Moagitty would have found. That had been her own perception of her journey through the altered holosuite's illusory world: the ultimate solipsism, one so vast that it could subsume all that entered into it, make them as much a part of the contents of McHogue's head as the curved bone that formed his skull.