Again, silence; a few seconds ticked by, before Sisko turned his head and saw the words END OF MEMORANDUM set in place on the screen before him.
He tapped his comm badge. "Commander Sisko to Dr. Bashir. Any sign of Dax?"
"Negative, sir. I'm afraid that—" Bashir broke off his reply. "Odo and I are heading toward Ops. There's a lot we need to talk about."
"Very well," snapped Sisko. "Make it quick."
Another series of bone-jarring impacts rattled through the station before Bashir and Odo arrived. The office door slid shut behind them.
"All right, then—" Sisko leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips against each other, as though the cage they formed would be enough to contain the worry and anger that had grown so large inside him. "I want to hear exactly what you found, and I want to hear it now." There hadn't been time to waste before; that it might already be too late for him to do anything was the chief goad to his self-lacerating fury.
On the opposite side of the desk, Dr. Bashir slumped down into one of the other seats, without being prompted to; he looked drawn with fatigue and an even more visible anxiety. Behind him, the station's security chief remained standing.
"It seems that Dax, as is her usual practice, left detailed notes about what she had discovered, and what she was planning on doing—"
"I'll tell him," interrupted Bashir. He pushed himself upright in the chair, making the effort to bring his emotions under control. "I was Dax's research partner on this investigation, so I think I have a slightly better idea of what's happened to her."
Odo raised an eyebrow, then nodded. "As you please, Doctor." He took a step backward and folded his arms across his chest.
"Dax figured out a way—or so she apparently believed—of entering the hallucinatory environment created by an activated CI module, and then going beyond that to an alternate reality that's hidden behind the sensory perceptions that are evoked in the subject neurosystem—" Bashir looked up at the office's ceiling, drawing in a breath between rigidly clamped teeth before returning his gaze to the commander. "This is allsomewhat difficult to explain. . . ."
"You seem to be doing an adequate job of it," said Sisko dryly. "I'd like to remind you that I have managed to keep abreast of your and Dax's research efforts, at least until these latest developments."
"Well, yes . . . of course. I didn't mean—"
"And if there were time, I'd be able to tell you a few things about Dax's research." He studied the chief medical officer through his arched fingers. "I take it that the notes you found regarding the plans Dax had made, were based upon your previous discoveries regarding the CI modules' interference effect? I'm already aware that Dax previously used the effect to achieve a temporary separation of her symbiont and humanoid neurosystems."
"Precisely, Commander. She had gone back to what had been observed the first time that she had experienced the CI module's effects, when we went into the altered holosuite together. The processing lag between the humanoid cortex and that of her symbiont was immediately apparent, manifesting itself as a severe nausea and disorientation. Basically, it's a failure of the CI technology to coordinate its inductive force upon a shared consciousness; McHogue apparently didn't have Trills in mind when he programmed his holosuite modifications."
"I recall from the report you filed that Dax found a way around that problem."
Bashir nodded. "By using the CI modules' interference effect for her own purposes, Dax was able to separate the components of her dual consciousness—and that was what enabled her to enter into the CI module's illusory sense-world, and for her to move and operate within its field."
"Perhaps it would have been better if Dax hadn't come up with that little maneuver." Odo spoke up. "Or if at least she had refrained from using it again."
The doctor had glanced over his shoulder at Odo, then turned back toward Sisko. "I'm sure that Dax felt she had come up with an entirely rational course of action, given the rather unusual circumstances in which we've found ourselves." A defensive tone entered Bashir's voice. "A thorough review of her last research notes—"
Sisko turned a hand outward to interrupt. "Dr. Bashir, I've known Dax a great deal longer than you have, in both Jadzia's host body and his previous one. You don't need to convince me that Dax had perfectly sound reasons for whatever's been done. At this point, however, no one has explained to me exactly what that is."
"Yes, of course—" Bashir pressed his hands against the arms of the chair. "As I was saying: Dax found a way to separate the symbiont's consciousness from that of the humanoid host body, and she had recent experience of doing just that, from our research into the CI module's effects. What she had done before, though, was to merely have the symbiont's consciousness removed from the merged state, so that the humanoid consciousness could experience the effect of the CI technology upon its neurosystem unimpeded by any processing lag. What Dax had done then was to establish a temporary state of dominance by one component of her shared consciousness over the other; the symbiont essentially became, for the duration of our time inside the altered holosuite, passive and without sensory input or awareness of the humanoid host's perceptions and actions." Bashir leaned forward, his voice edging up. "What Dax has done now, according to the notes she left behind, is to attempt achieving a parallel consciousness, with each half of her conjoined mind operating simultaneously and equally."
"Can that be done?"
Bashir shrugged. "I can't say—it certainly goes beyond the limits of my knowledge about Trill neurophysiology. No conjoined Trill would have tried to do such a thing before now, because there had never been a situation where such a state was called for. There would have been no advantage achieved, inasmuch as a Trill's shared consciousness invariably has a synergistic nature, resulting in an effective intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. For Dax to sacrifice that synergism, and all the strengths it gives her, only points up the unique nature of what she's undertaken."
"And that is?" Sisko leaned back in his chair. Only the pressure of his fingertips against each other betrayed the impatience he felt.
"As I understand it from her notes, Commander, what Dax has attempted is to use the CI modules' interference effect to split her joined consciousness in such a way that one component—the symbiont half—goes under the influence of the CI module and experiences its effects; for all practical purposes, the symbiont's neurosystem would perceive the hallucinatory environment that McHogue has created. The other part of Dax's consciousness, the humanoid host that is Jadzia, would not be a passive observer of the symbiont's perceptions and actions. Do you see what I'm getting at? Dax found a way to go beyond the hallucinated world. One neurosystem undergoes the CI technology's effects, and thereby both components of the Trill consciousness achieve entry into McHogue's private universe—but once there, the other neurosystem uses the interference effect to force a division from its partner, so that it can perceive the actual raw data stream being put out by the CI module. It's as if you were watching images on your computer panel, and you then shifted focus to the actual screen itself instead. Or even beyond that: it would be like studying the screen with a high-powered microscope, so that you could actually see each individual pixel that makes up the digitized image. That's what Dax set out to do, only on a much greater scale, with the CI technology's entire sensory bandwidth."