Ezri handed the glass to Nurse Juarez, who stood beside her. Julian and Lieutenant Bowers waited just past the foot of her bed, and somewhere, Nurse Richter also worked in the medical bay. Ezri took a long, deep breath, gathering herself for the coming conversation. She had reintegrated enough with Dax to have assimilated the symbiont’s experiences, but interpreting the images—the echoes—had taken some time. Even now, not everything Dax had perceived had bowed to reasonable analysis. Still, she thought that she understood enough that Bowers and the crew had to be told.
As had been the case after her first contact with the object, Julian had wanted her to rest immediately after she had regained consciousness. Again she had insisted on remaining awake, and this time, on speaking herself with Lieutenant Bowers. Julian had relented at once, accepting her claim that she had vital information to impart.
“I saw…I experienced…another universe,” she began. She looked to her left, to where she had brought her hand down into the dark gray substance, but both it and the stand on which it had sat had been removed.
“Could you explain that?” Bowers asked. Ezri looked at him, then raised her hand to her forehead and rubbed at her temple.
“Are you all right?” Julian asked. He moved toward her along the side of the bed, glancing up at the diagnostic panel.
“I’m okay,” Ezri said, dropping her hand back onto the bed. “It’s just that there’s so much in my head right now…I need to find a coherent way to tell this.”
“Take your time,” Bowers said. But of course they all knew that time weighed heavily on them right now. As far as they could tell, they were less than a day away from the next pulse.
“Some time ago,” Ezri started again, sorting out her narrative, “a humanoid race lived on this planet.” That was not new information; the crew had been able to draw the same conclusion from the readings of cities that the probe had returned to Defiant.“They called themselves the Prentara, and they developed a sophisticated virtual-reality technology.”
“Virtual reality?” Juarez said. “Like holosuites?”
“No, not like that,” Ezri said. “They tied powerful computers directly into people’s minds.”
Julian raised his eyebrows. “That can be very addictive,” he stated. “Very addictive, and very dangerous.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ezri said. “But I do know that, sometime later, Prentara scientists discovered this other existence, a pocket universe outside our own that…that…it was…” She grew agitated as she struggled to express the concepts in her mind.
“Easy,” Julian said, resting a hand on her upper arm. “Easy.” She looked up at him, and he offered her an effortless smile. His obvious support meant a lot to her.
“I’m all right,” she told him, and she put her hand atop his. “This other existence that the Prentara found, it was a universe of the mind…the very fabric of it supported and nurtured and… augmented…mental activity. The scientists who discovered it reported amazingly profound experiences.”
“Like a mind-altering drug,” Julian suggested.
“Yes, like that, I think,” Ezri agreed, “but far more powerful. They called the other universe the thoughtscape.”
“Let me guess. They used it to enhance their VR technology,” Bowers said.
Ezri nodded. “They wired their virtual-reality equipment into the interface they had opened between this universe and the thoughtscape. It enhanced their experiences beyond their imaginations, and it worked for them for years. But then something happened.” She paused, still coming to understand the horror in what she had learned. “They found out,” she went on, “that the thoughtscape was alive.”
They all looked at her without saying anything. Even Nurse Richter, across the room, stopped whatever she had been doing and peered in Ezri’s direction. The sudden silencing of their voices left the medical bay throbbing with the beat of Ezri’s diagnostic scanner. Finally, Julian spoke.
“Did the Prentara know?” he asked. The expression of revulsion on his face reflected Ezri’s emotions. The notion of somebody forcibly tapping into another mind, usingthat mind—it was rape of the lowest order. “Did they stop?”
“They did stop,” Ezri said, actually relieved about that part of the story. “But I don’t know if they ever knew that the thoughtscape was composed of living beings.”
“Then why did they stop using it…using them?” Juarez asked.
“They stopped when the first pulse emerged from the interface,” Ezri explained. “The force of it thrust outward, leaving the planet intact, but we’ve seen what the pulses have done to the rest of this solar system.”
“And to the Vahni’s system,” Bowers added.
“The Prentara tried to close the interface, but the pulse had widened it considerably and they couldn’t do it,” Ezri went on. “A substance also came out of the interface with the pulse, and it began forming the cloud cover around the planet. Except that those aren’t clouds.”
“Is that a manifestation of the thoughtscape?” Bowers asked.
“The Inamuri,” Ezri said. “The Prentara called the beings of the thoughtscape the Inamuri. And the clouds aren’t the thoughtscape; the clouds are an extension of the interface. That’s how Dax could commune with the Inamuri when I touched the substance.”
“‘Commune’?” Julian asked. “Not communicate?”
“No, there was no communication,” Ezri said. “Dax could sense the minds of the Inamuri, and their memories, and maybe even Prentara memories imprinted on or swallowed up by the Inamuri. And this story I’m telling…Dax didn’t learn all of this in this form; we’ve deduced it from what Dax did learn.”
“What happened to the Prentara?” Juarez asked.
“I don’t know,” Ezri said. “I don’t think even the Inamuri know. But we saw the probe’s readings. There’s nobody alive down there except for our people.”
“Maybe the subsequent pulses killed them,” Bowers suggested.
“But what are the pulses?”
“I think they’re the result of the Inamuri trying to push their way into our universe,” Ezri said.
“They may still be trying to fight the invasion into their domain,” Julian said.
“Yes,” Ezri said, the word invasionprompting Dax’s memory. “The Inamuri considered the Prentara to be invaders…but…” She searched for the remainder of the recollection. “…they also thought of them as saviors.”
“I don’t understand that,” Bowers said.
“Neither do I,” Ezri admitted. “But I know what we have to do to prevent any more pulses.” Again, all eyes in the room focused on her. “We have to close the interface,” she said.
Per Julian’s orders, Ezri would remain in the medical bay for at least another day—a recommendation perfectly acceptable to her. She felt fatigued beyond any measure she had ever known, even back during the war. Before she could sleep, though, she needed to complete the information load. Julian had provided her with a mild stimulant so that she could do so, but the effects had now begun to abate.
Ezri operated the padd in her hands and played back the last few sentences she had recorded. The clarity of one piece of data seemed suspect to her, and so she erased that part and rerecorded it. Then she listened to it again. Satisfied, she moved on to the final part of her tale.
While she worked at this task, she knew that Nog and his engineering team worked at another. Within an hour of Ezri’s contention that they had to close the thoughtscape interface, Nog had devised a means of doing just that. As she understood it, his plan involved triggering a series of explosive devices to detonate simultaneously in various dimensions of space, including subspace. The idea reminded Ezri of the “Houdini” mines that the Jem’Hadar had used against them at the siege of AR-558.
Nog had explained that each device would destroy a portion of the “walls” of the interface. If enough of the interface was destroyed at the same time, then the surrounding space in this universe would essentially cave in and permanently seal off the realm of the Inamuri. Nog had been specific about the number of devices—thirty-two—because if too few were detonated, then the energy of the Inamuri would be able to overcome the force of the collapsing space, and would instead widen the interface.