Tuvok finishes flogging me, those blank eyes of his watching my nerve connections touch open air, pointing at him like flowers towards the sun, when it occurs to me. The answer. Dear Christ, the answer!
My pain saves me from acting right away and Tuvok backs out of the Brig, saying something about coming back in three days to “25% finish the job,” whatever that means.
Alone, I decide to try it out. I have enough freedom of movement to touch my com-badge with my left shoulder. “Transporter: one to beam up.”
My atoms separate and reconnect in the Transporter Room, where the simp of a transporter operator stares at me, mouth agape.
I make spooky hand gestures. “It’s maaaagic.”
“What the hell are you doing here?! Aren’t you supposed to be in the Brig?!”
“Well, I was until my accomplice saved me. Thanks.”
“But-but-but-but-”
I leave her sputtering like a speed boat, breaking down the halls, ignoring the looks I get from the crew. They see the scars and the lack-of-pants and they know, oh they know that Tuvok had his way with me but good.
The great thing about the com-badges is the anonymity. I don’t know what it is about being faceless in front of an audience that secretes risk and stupidity in the user. Nevertheless, the cold was getting to me as were the stares, and I was feeling a bit exposed, so I decided to try it out again. “Transporter: beam directly to Janeway’s quarters.”
Turns out my longtime suspicions are grounded. Even as my molecules re-interlock my vision focuses upon Janeway motionless in the shower, standing under the stream of space water in full uniform. She shrieks like a claxon when she sees me appear.
“Ack! Ensign! I thought I exacted justice upon you!”
“Oh, you did, you did, cappin. Perhaps I am merely a dense fabrication of his pants-less ghost.”
She points her bony finger at me. “Lies! Even ghosts wear pants! They have a sense of propriety!”
“Why sure, everyone loves ghosts.”
“For that very reason. Now put on a uniform and go back to dying a painful death at my hands!”
“Tuvok’s hands. He was the one who took my pants off.”
“T-dogg would never do that! Buckets and buckets of non-truth! And your pain is still because of me!”
“Bah. You’re merely Tuvok’s ventriloquist dummy, and you only believe you have a voice.”
“I’ll deduct two weeks space pay from you!”
“Been watching Forbidden Planet too much, you fucked up slag?”
She smacks her com-badge. “Security to my quarters, stat!”
My cue to exit. I hit my own badge immediately, perhaps using more bicep muscles than should have been necessary, and I use the first name that comes to mind. “Transporter: beam directly to Tom Paris’ quarters.”
Janeway and her unnecessary nonudity fall apart and regroup into an amalgam of tubes and wires that make up the walls of Paris’ domicile. It occurs to me that I might have pulled a Gob. Paris has become a bit of a twisted version of his old self, a sort of perversion. One mission went wrong and he began picking every mission that had the potential to go wrong, out of shame, trying to snuff himself out like two wet fingers pinching a failure of a flame.
His appearance changed with failure after failure. His skin grew milky and pale, his voice scratchy and speaking about nothing but space travel in stop-and-start sentences, his hobby now collecting every oddity known to the universe, his hands fleshy transparent orbs with gaping holes where his fingers used to be.
A bit of embarrassment to the Voyager crew, especially Janeway, they tried to throw him out into space but he took it as forced relocation for his convenience and merely constructed his own quarters using the useless wires and tubes lining Voyager’s inner hull. Engineering never noticed the difference and the top brass now insist to the end that he’s dead. Only us lower children believe in his existence.
I’m carefully sifting around the cords, trying not to open a pocket for empty space to rush in and also trying not to wonder what kind of atmosphere this place has. I enter a gallery of confusing material and I see Tom Paris studying a sandwich resting on one of the glass display stands.
“It’s a long-island fedderburger sandwich. I hear it’s so good that the first bite causes death. The good kind.” He smiles, and for a moment, I can’t locate his face within the rest of his body. “Good evening, Ensign Bob. I don’t get many visitors up here unless they come to borrow something for the Holodeck. It gets lonely. The bad kind.”
It takes him almost seven minutes to say all of this. “Yeah.” So much for word on the street.
“Good thing you’re here. Trouble is afoot in the form of an intangibility demon, and it’s my fault it exists. To explain: my shame has come back to haunt me once more, and is taking revenge on everything that isn’t responsible. You must alert the crew before they lose the only thread holding them to this facsimile of a cruiser and they tumble off into eviscerating blackness. You get, daddy-o?”
Tuvok’s really did do a good job on me -- I forgot all about her! “Transporter: beam directly to Seven of Nine’s quarters!” and I slam the com-badge so hard that it breaks.
Disappointed reality explodes and reforms itself in a soothingly familiar pattern. It doesn’t matter that my com-badge is broken. I can stay here forever. Hell, I’m smiling even though the badge shards are imbedded in my chest cavity and I’m receiving an electric shock every two seconds. I’m happy. Seven’s quarters is everything the Holodeck imagined for me. Brown tones, cozy fire, lack of descriptivity… wait a minute…
“Computer, end program.”
Pixels stretch and die before my eyes and even blanker walls stare at me and my no-pants. Just as I’m figuring out why the Transporter chose to send me to this replication of Seven’s quarters instead of the real one, I feel my pores opening up at the soles of my feet. Before I can cry out, I have no voice, and I can feel myself sinking as if my feet were at the surface of a great lake and I had just fucked over the mob. I’m screwed forever and the last thing I see are two pairs of eyes, four total, that stare widely at me and wonder if I’m real, and now I know what it feels like.
