Empty, lifeless space spread before Sisko as he stepped onto the Ops deck. The instrument panels showed their monitoring of the station's continuing functions, the unconscious maintenance of DS9's homeostasis. Slowly, he turned where he stood, his gaze searching . . .
And finding.
He had perceived that he was the only living creature there. He was not proven wrong, when a chair before one of the consoles swung about revealing the figure that had been sitting there.
An image with his face.
His voice: "I've been waiting for you." A smile formed on the face of Sisko's own echo. "For a long time."
He nodded slowly, acknowledging its existence. He knew he should have expected it.
"That's right," said the echo. It stood up from the chair. "But you forgot, didn't you? Because you didn't want to remember. That you had left something of yourself behind, just like all the others, when you first came into this world. That bright summer place . . ." The echo looked around the Ops deck. "Very different from here. But . . . the same as well. In its essence."
"Because it's you, isn't it, McHogue?" Sisko regarded the seeming mirror before him. "Everything here is you."
"A metaphysical conceit, Commander." The echo's voice changed slightly, letting the other's seep through, as though from behind a mask. "I'm afraid I don't see the point in discussing it any further. Why should I make any distinction between myself and this universe? The question that should be asked isn't whether you exist here, my dear Sisko, or any of the others, for that matter; the question is whether McHogue exists anymore!" The mask of Sisko's voice turned radiant with triumph. "I've become the universe!"
"This universe," said Sisko. "This little, shabby world inside your head—that's all."
The echo looked pityingly at him. "You still don't understand, do you? You never realized the agenda I had from the beginning. No one did—not General Aur and the Bajoran provisional government, nor that fool Gul Dukat and the rest of the Cardassians; none of them. And certainly not you, Commander. Otherwise, you would have known that this isn't the limit of my ambitions. There is no limit." The voice had shed all pretense of disguise, becoming openly that of McHogue, a cry that echoed against the space's circumference. "With every tiny scrap of life that I've taken in and added to myself, even down to an insignificant, broken creature such as Ahrmant Wyoss—with every one, this universe has grown and become greater. And now it's time to go from inside here"—the image smiled and tapped the side of its head—"to out there." It turned and pointed to the stars visible in the central viewport.
Sisko looked up at the vista of worlds beyond counting, then back to the image that bore a mockery of his face. "It's not your ambition that knows no limits, McHogue. It's your madness that does."
"You doubt, Commander, because the process of transformation is not yet over. There are so many more lives that I need to bring inside my own, their little souls to be added to my great one. It will take a long time, I know. Or no time at all, perhaps—in the twinkling of an eye, as it was once said. Already, eons are as microseconds to me. When time itself ceases to exist—because I have abolished it—you shall see, as others have already seen, that this waiting, this mere game that you have called your existence, was but an illusion all along."
"Spare me the mystical claptrap." Sisko hardened his heart, let the cold rigor of his thoughts become an armor against the other's words. But there were things McHogue had said that he knew were true. A dire process had begun: McHogue had both his city of Moagitty on Bajor and Deep Space Nine as part of his world; the stable wormhole and all the treasures onto which it opened would continue to be an irresistible magnet for all the intelligent entities, humanoid and otherwise, of the galaxies. They'll all pass through this sector eventually, thought Sisko. And they would all experience the effects of the CI technology; there will be no escaping it. And then inside each one of them will be a little piece of McHogue. A seed of this new universe—he could see it, like a speck of infinite darkness. And another time would come, when McHogue was greater than the universe that had been his progenitor. Then the transformation would be complete, Sisko knew. Another reality would have supplanted the old; the unreal would have become the real. And all that exists—all that could exist—would be there, inside the head of the smiling figure that had stood before him.
The face behind the mask had faded, along with McHogue's voice. Sisko watched and said nothing.
"It's a shame you won't experience that, Commander." McHogue's voice had become almost a whisper from some distant point. "In your case, I'm going to make an exception. You've reached the limits of my hospitality. I'm afraid that it's time for you to cease existing . . . in this universe or any other."
The last trace of McHogue disappeared from behind the echo. Sisko found himself gazing into the image of his own face again, with no other force inhabiting it.
His face . . . and behind it, something that he could still recognize, something that was yet a part of him.
"There can't be two of us here. That's not possible." The echo's voice came from deep inside, as though the words were the result of long brooding. "You'll have to go." The image's hand lifted and reached for Sisko's throat.
His strength had been depleted by the rigors of his passage through this world; he found himself unable to struggle, to tear loose the grasp that choked away his breath. Both his hands tugged futilely at the echo's tautened forearm.
Even as Sisko gasped for air, his knees buckling beneath him, he could look into his echo's eyes. And see what this part of him had become.
The echo's face—Sisko's face, transformed but still the same—was an emotionless mask, cold and inhuman, divorced from all feeling. Behind the dead eyes, no concern existed for his son, for Dax or Kira or Bashir or for any of the DS9 crew members; for no other living thing. There was only the desire, the will to command, to control, to bend reality to one's own inexorable will.
"That is right," whispered the echo, watching life dwindle in his hand, the last spark dying. Sisko could hear the words spoken in his own voice. "Now you know the truth at last. The truth that you kept hidden even from yourself."
A wavering shadow swept across the echo's face, through which its cold gaze burned toward him.
"The truth," came the voice to his ears. "That I am what was always inside you. When you searched for murderers, you looked everywhere but in your own heart."
No . . .
He could not speak aloud. A vise of iron clasped shut upon his throat.
In that world, in the universe that had collapsed to the width of a man's hand . . . a world that had already turned lightless, without air . . . he closed his eyes. Looking for something in that darkness . . .
Something that he found. That had always been there, just as the other, his echo, had told him. But not in his heart. But somewhere else, as real and unreal as the other's fist locked upon his mortal flesh.
That didn't matter. In a world without time, there was no need for breath. In the eternity between one heartbeat and the next, he opened his eyes.
His echo no longer stood before him. But a door, that slid open, spilling bright, false sunlight against his face. He walked slowly toward it, letting the sharp-edged radiance slip through his open hands . . .
Leaving behind that part of him that was dying, lungs and brain struggling against the stopped flow of oxygen . . .
He stepped into the sunlight; the door closed behind him, and he was once more in that small, limitless world. That McHogue had created . . .