Resilience Reset, Part 2

Posted on Wed 30th Dec, 2020 @ 11:55am by Lieutenant Damion Ildaran & Elizabeth Anderson M.D.

1,320 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Denouement
Location: Elizabeth Anderson's apartment, etc.
Timeline: MD-3, 1800 hours

Previously, in Dr. Anderson's apartment...

"If you're dealing with it at all, you are an extraordinary human," Elizabeth said, taking his hand and leading him over to the sofa. "I already know that, but tell me what you're thinking ... feeling, and then we'll take a cleansing walk through the monastery gardens. I only know what I do through finding those files. A visual file would be ... far worse." She sat and pulled him down next to her, waiting for him to gather his thoughts and tell her what he needed to share in order to begin to heal from the things he'd seen and heard.

Damion joined Elizabeth on the sofa and silently thanked the god he didn't exactly believe in that she somehow knew the sofa was the right place to be.

"It wasn't static holography. It was holodeck-quality, but it wasn't the bodies from the autopsy files you gave me--we still don't know what that was all about. I was there, in the room, able to interact with the holograms just as Addams and the CO before Suzuki did with the--experimental subjects--when they found the room." Damion shuddered.

"You told me Dobbs was bad. What connections you made to come to that conclusion, I'm not sure, but you're right. I knew the person I've been calling the blaggard was bad. But--bloody hells, Elizabeth. He left six people to exist all alone in a room for--Addams told me near on fifteen years! Not to die, mind you, but to exist--just barely. They pretty much all must've died when Addams disconnected them from the computers they were jacked into. If you ask me, she did them a kindness."

"That's not even existence," she said, shuddering. "We have no way of knowing what was going on inside their heads, if anything at all. It could have been anything from some kind of virtual reality, something normal, to living hell, to ... just nothing at all." Her eyes stared off into the corner of her living room, but they weren't seeing anything in the present. She was imagining what she'd shared with Damion, the autopsy reports. "At least those in the reports I found were actually dead ... gone somewhere else."

She brought her eyes and her attention back to Damion. "What do you think this has to do with your case? Is this Dobbs person out there still doing this evil ... maybe worse?"

Damion pursed his lips. "Our witness said--and I think Dr. Addams agrees--that Dobbs wants to separate the life force from a person's body. How you do that, I've no idea. Our witness said he's concentrating on women now; he used to select people of both sexes. At the time that 49-Alpha lab operated, Dobbs was apparently working on a way to fight the Borg by creating human versions of them. Trying to fight a strength with the same kind of strength makes no sense to me, but what I saw in the hologram image bears it out. All six of the subjects I saw in there were slowly being transformed into--something resembling Borg. I'm guessing that may have been why the experiment was abandoned--because it didn't work fast enough. But that's my unfounded speculation."

Elizabeth mulled this over for a minute. Here was someone truly evil, in the most traditional sense of the word, who had been developing his talents for decades. He'd managed to hide who he was for an entire career as he rose to prominence in Starfleet, giving him freedom to do whatever he wanted to forward his own plans ... and he hadn't slipped up and gotten caught. In her experience, which admittedly was limited in longevity and in opportunity, it took great good to combat great evil. Who could stand against this man? And was he now more than a man? In his own mind, she thought he was, but what about in reality?

She gazed at Damion. He was a good man. His horror over what he'd learned showed that he was, but she already knew it. Was he capable of standing against someone like Dobbs? Or could he surround himself with enough people who were good to defeat the former admiral? How many would he find who would be willing?

"Setting aside everything else, for now, what concerns you the most about what you learned from Doctor Addams?" she asked him at last.

"How to take him and his underlings down with as little harm to our own folk as possible," Damion said. "Dobbs is not stupid, and he has worked below the sensors for decades. You told me not to go after him without an army, and I agree with you. After that--finding his victims and getting them to where they can be helped. Concurrent with that--doing everything we can to ensure that none of his victims are so badly harmed that they become just like him. That last, though, is out of my purview. Possibly the second concern isn't my purview, either, but we obviously can't just go in there, nab Dobbs and company, and then tell his victims they're free to go home now; have a nice day."

"My fear is that you won't find anyone you can save," Elizabeth mused. "When his machines and experiments are shut down, what will be left to keep the bodies going? That's based on what he was doing here, admittedly, but how different is it to separate a body from it's life force, and then use the life force for whatever purposes he has in mind? How successful has he been? Is it even possible to reunite what he's separated?"

Anderson reflected on what little she knew about what could be going on in Dobbs' lab. For a moment, it struck Elizabeth that, in a sense, she was a life force without a body at all, and the irony of that wasn't lost on her, but it also wasn't germane to the issue at hand.

With a sigh, she finally said, "There are so many questions, and no answers to them. I need to know what I can do to strengthen you. I don't want you to lose who you are while you are dismantling this man and his machines. How can I help you do what you have to do?"

"Strangely, I don't fear that as much as I used to," Damion said. "Right now, I'd consider losing myself in my persona to be in effect losing to Dobbs, and I'm determined not to allow that to happen. I do have my doubts about how realistic that is." Damion looked at her. "As far as I'm concerned, you're helping me just by being you."

"Then the doctor suggests you give your mind a play break for a while. Let's go take that walk in the park, put this on the back burner. Maybe it will percolate a bit on low heat, while we enjoy the evening air and the monastery gardens. I don't believe rain is set for tonight, so it should be a lovely evening in the garden and along the River Walk. What do you think?" she asked. Always, she wanted him to have input in whatever decisions were made.

Damion gave her a faint smile. "I think that ... thinking about this too much won't be productive. I could worry myself about this for hours. There's no sense fretting about this until Grax asks me to formulate a plan--or formulates one himself and orders me or someone else to carry it out. Until then, for this evening at least, I need to step back from it to give it a fresh attack in the morning. Why should I ruin time spent with you with thoughts of that bloke?" He reached out for her hand and clasped it. "Let's go remind ourselves that the universe has beauty enough to fight the ugliness."

 

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