"But if she could do that . . ." Sisko nodded slowly. "I think I'm beginning to see."
"What everyone who has gone into one of the altered holosuites has discovered—including yourself, Commander—is that McHogue himself is the basic substratum of that illusory world. All of us have agreed that the experience is like stepping inside his head. Even when he doesn't make an appearance, when you're not directly aware of him—he's still there." Bashir hunched his shoulders, as though from an involuntary reaction to his own memory of the altered holosuite. "He's made himself into the omnipresent deity of that universe; that's what makes it so essentially claustrophobic in there, no matter how far off the horizon might seem to be. Every brick, every leaf on a tree is McHogue; there's no getting away from him in there. Except for the way Dax had discovered."
"A shift in focus . . . like standing to one side of the data stream . . ."
"Exactly, Commander. Once the symbiont's neurosystem had locked onto the CI module's effects and gotten Dax into that hallucinatory world, she planned on separating her humanoid consciousness away from what the symbiont perceived—and thus go behind the hallucination. And directly into McHogue's consciousness."
"I can imagine," said Sisko, "the actual reason why Dax didn't consult me about taking this course of action. It wasn't a matter of time running out. It was that she felt I would never authorize such a risky undertaking."
From behind Bashir's chair, Odo regarded the commander. "And would you have?"
"I don't know. . . ." He wondered for a moment. Something had gone terribly wrong with Dax's plan; but without the virtue of that hindsight, it was impossible to tell what he would have allowed his old friend to do. Sisko drew himself back to the situation at hand. "It's not important," he said, shaking his head. "Right now, all we can be sure of is that somehow Dax has wound up not just mentally, or perceptually or however you want to put it, but physically in McHogue's world. She's down there in Moagitty at this moment." Hishands drew apart and became fists. "How could it have happened? How did McHogue do it?"
"We seem to have underestimated our adversary's powers." Odo stepped closer to the desk, turning his gaze from Sisko to Bashir, then back again. "That's been our mistake from the beginning. We assumed that the essential transformations caused by McHogue were from the real—this universe around us—to the unreal, the universe that he had created. We were never prepared for the unreal to become real."
Bashir chewed at one of his knuckles. "That's unfortunately true. And Dax, who of all of us should have been able to see what was happening, made that same mistake. She had left herself an escape hatch, in case anything went wrong: the CI module's effects were a function of her physical proximity to it. All she had to do was take a step backward from the lab bench where the module was situated, and she would have been out of reach of the field generated by the CI technology—rather like stepping from one world to another. The symbiont would have been able to assume sufficient motor control of the host body, to do that much. But something else happened, that Dax hadn't foreseen."
The words Odo had spoken now stirred in the commander's memory. "The unreal . . . becoming real . . ."
Biting his lip, Bashir nodded. "That seems to have been the case here. Somehow, the powers that McHogue has gained through the CI technology have achieved reality in this universe. Once Dax had stepped into his hallucinatory world, McHogue was able to reach into the station, as though with a transporter beam, and remove Dax's actual physical being to Moagitty. We have the tracer signal locked on Dax's comm badge to confirm it."
"What shall we do, Commander?" Odo's voice reached again into Sisko's brooding thoughts. "We need to make a decision. . . ."
He didn't reply. Without asking for any more information from Bashir, any more data from the research notes that Dax had left behind, he knew what she had been attempting to do with her risky course of action. To go beyond the CI module's illusory reality, into the one beyond it . . . into McHogue's head, the dark labyrinth of his mind, stripped of all sensory artifice, the bright-lit summer world and the empty twilight city alike. Impossible to guess what Dax would find there. But what she hoped to find, Sisko knew, was the solution, the cure to the insanity that had engulfed both Deep Space Nine and Bajor.
A line from an ancient folktale, one that had been read to him when he had been a child on Earth, echoed inside him. To go I know not where . . . to fetch I know not what . . .
That had been the mission that Dax had given herself. He had it easier; he already knew where he was going, and what he would bring back.
"Gentlemen—" Sisko roused himself from his silence, as though emerging from the darkness that had sealed over him. He looked at the faces of the two officers before him. "I have made my decision. I'm going after her."
Do you see it?
"No . . ." She shook her head. "Not yet . . ."
You have to open your eyes, chided the wordless voice of the symbiont, from that place both deep inside her and extending through the tips of her fingers. You'll have to open them sometime.
The symbiont had already told her not to worry, that it would be all right; that there was nothing to be afraid of. She had come here, to this false world, as a single entity, one conjoined mind. The decision, the plan, had been made by Dax with no division between one part of her consciousness and the other. To carry out that plan would require the ending of that state—for a time, a small death, such as the one she'd suffered when she had gone into the altered holosuite.
"It's you I worry about." Dax spoke aloud, though she knew she didn't need to for the symbiont to hear her. When she had first experienced the CI technology's effects, she'd had no personal knowledge of their soul-destroying evil; what she knew had come from her observations of its victims, such as poor Ahrmant Wyoss.
You needn't.
That had been part of her inner deliberations as welclass="underline" which half of her joined consciousness should stay locked upon the illusory environment generated by the CI module, and which half should go on to whatever lay beyond that false world. The symbiont was over three centuries old; it had seen and experienced things that its current humanoid host only knew of through their shared memories. So much accumulated wisdom gave the symbiont a defensive armor against the toxic illusions; its soul, for lack of a more scientific term, had developed beyond the mortal concepts of desire and fear that McHogue preyed upon.
The nature of the symbiont made the decision simple enough, if no less intimidating for the humanoid part of Dax. The CI module's world was at least a known evil, one that had become familiar to her through the time in the altered holosuite and the computer simulations she and Bashir had been able to run with its programming. What lay beyond that was the unknown—though from what she and the others aboard DS9 had already discovered about McHogue, she knew better than to expect it to be anything pleasant.
Child, even in this world, time is passing. The symbiont had already withdrawn partway from the joined consciousness, enough that it could enter into an unspoken dialogue with its young partner. Time that is not yours to waste.
"I know. . . ." Jadzia's voice sounded lost to her, as though the world into which she stepped was so wide, the horizon so distant, that no echo could return to her ear. The cold wind she could feel touching her arms carried the words away.