“There’s a progressive change going on in the DNA patterns of every one of you,” Krissten said, sighing in frustration. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out whyit’s happening. Or what it’s ultimately going to do to all of you.”
“For starters,” Bashir said, “it seems to have grown Nog a new leg. As well as given Ezri and the symbiont mutual independence.”
“But what about you,Julian?” Ezri said, an edge of concern in her voice.
Krissten changed the display yet again, but Bashir couldn’t bring himself to look directly at it. He could no longer deny what was happening to him. On some visceral level, he knewwithout needing any confirmation from the instruments.
“Progressive neurological degeneration,” he said, studying the weave of the carpet near his right boot. It felt strangely liberating to voice aloud the thought he’d tried so hard to avoid for the past two days. “At the rate I’m declining, by tomorrow I’ll probably no longer be able to function as this ship’s chief medical officer.”
“You don’t know that,” Ezri said.
“I can feelit, Ezri.”
“I think we need to run some more tests,” Krissten said, but Bashir couldn’t hear any hope underlying her words. She knew he was right.
Fatigue once again crept up on him. His eyes ached, and when he spoke there was more acid in his words than he had intended. “Ensign, I’ve already been scanned down to the Planck scale.”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you see a clear pattern of neural degeneration?” he said. “A systematic collapse of synaptic pathways?” In his mind’s eye, he saw the windows of the Hagia Sophia, in which hundreds of small candles were slowly guttering and flickering out, one by one. The image chilled him to the marrow.
Krissten nodded silently, though with obvious reluctance.
“Then we already have the essential picture, at least in broad strokes. Call in Ensign Juarez and Lieutenant Candlewood. They’ll be able to help you further interpret the data you’ve already collected. I want to know how long I have left.” Feeling a sudden leaden weariness, he turned and strode toward the door and entered the corridor.
“Julian,” Ezri said, dogging his heels.
He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. “Ezri, I need to be alone. To rest.”
“Well, it’s good to hear you admit that every once in a while. But there’s obviously more to it than that. So tell me.” Her voice had none of the steel he’d become accustomed to over the last several months. She sounded every bit as frightened and vulnerable as he felt.
He decided that now wasn’t an occasion that called for a stiff upper lip. “I believe I’m… reverting,Ezri. Regressing to what I was before Adigeon Prime.”
Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “Before you were genetically enhanced.”
“I can’t begin to explain it,” he said, nodding. “But somehow our encounter with the alien artifact has begun… undoingmy genetic resequencing.”
She seemed to mull that over for a moment before responding. “It sounds crazy, but it fits. Nog and I are reverting, too, if you think about it. He’s become the two-legged Ferengi he used to be. I’ve been turned into the unjoined Trill I was before the Destinybrought me together with Dax. And you’re becoming…” She trailed off.
Slow, plodding, uncoordinated,dumb Jules Bashir,he thought. The little boy who was such a grave disappointment to his oh-so-doting, upwardly mobile parents.
“Maybe this isn’t such a great time to rest, Julian. If you’re really slipping as fast as you think you are, then our best chance to find a cure might be sooner rather than—”
He cut her off. “Ezri, I don’t know if I could find a cure for this even if I were at the top of my game.”
She folded her arms before her, donning a smile that he sensed was purely for his benefit. “It’s not like you to just give up, Julian. The Persian army still hasn’t even shown up yet.”
“I’m notgiving up. I’m just trying to make you understand that the cure, if it exists, isn’t going to come out of the medical bay. It’s going to come from inside the alien artifact that caused all of this in the first place.”
His mounting weariness was becoming acute, and she now seemed aware of it as well.
“All right, Julian,” she said, seeming to draw on some inner reserve of strength. “Get some rest. I’ll take what you’ve just told me straight to Commander Vaughn. If there’s a cure anywhere aboard that artifact, I swear to you we’ll find it.”
He thanked her, then excused himself. Alone, he found himself momentarily lost on his way to the quarters he and Ezri shared, but quickly recovered and found his way.
Once the door was sealed behind him, he collapsed onto the narrow bunk and considered what lay ahead: a transformation from the educated, accomplished, nearly superhuman Julian Bashir to plain, slow, unmodified Jules.
Jules.
He had repudiated that name during his childhood, after his parents had, in effect, repudiated him—when they’d had his DNA illegally rewritten when he was only six years old. Whatever Jules might eventually have accomplished if left to his own devices had been rendered moot from that point on, forever after consigned to the shadow world of roads not taken. Inaccessible mirror universes.
After Adigeon Prime, the frustrating learning disabilities he’d suffered as Jules had slowly receded over the horizon of memory, banished to an obscure corner of some boarded-up cloakroom within his mental Hagia Sophia. Reborn, young Julian excelled intellectually, academically, and physically—but not spiritually. All too often he had felt like a created thing, an object designed to replace a child who hadn’t measured up to his parents’ lofty expectations.
Which, in a very real and undeniable sense, was exactly what he was.
He vividly recalled the day, three short years ago, when he had taken his parents to task over this. Facing the distinct possibility of dismissal from Starfleet because of his illegal genetic alterations, he had wished that Richard and Amsha Bashir had never taken him to Adigeon Prime, that they’d instead simply allowed nature to take its course with young Jules, for better or for worse.
That errant wish now appeared to be coming true—and the brutal reality of it horrified him. He realized now that it meant the loss of abilities and talents that he had come to take for granted over the better part of three decades. The loss of what he sometimes feared were the only things that gave him value as a human being.
The loss of self.
Bashir closed his eyes. But instead of sleep, he sought a cobbled street in Istanbul, where a flight of stone steps led him up to the front of the silver-domed Hagia Sophia. He stood for a moment just outside the main gallery of his memory cathedral, apprehensive about what might await him inside, but determined to survey the damage regardless.
He entered, expecting the series of chambers that curved around the dome’s interior to be disordered, ransacked, essentially empty. Instead, he saw a party of white-smocked men and women, busily constructing walls with bricks and mortar. He smiled, uplifted for a moment by the hope that they were here to make repairs, that their presence was evidence that he was somehow recovering his faculties, that he was going to make a recovery without recourse to whatever inscrutable powers had deconstructed him in the first place.
Then his heart sank like a burned-out star abruptly collapsed by its own gravity. The white-smocked men and women weren’t making repairs. They were walling off staircases, doorways, and vestibules. They ignored his screams, continuing their work as though he weren’t even present.
Brick by brick, they were isolating him from a lifetime of memories—and systematically robbing him of every skill he’d ever come to take for granted.