Season 1, Mid-Season Interlude: The Abyss

[Alexander Clarke]

"I'm not surprised you can't remember," Jo said. "You practically passed out in the middle of the meeting."

I looked away from the row of buildings lining the street to focus on the woman walking beside me. The uniform she was wearing was atypical for Starfleet, lacking the usual department colors; instead it was nearly all black, made of a classified material that looked a lot like leather. Even compared to my own outfitÁ¢â,¬"a standard Marine's dress uniformÁ¢â,¬"it seemed more uncomfortable to wear in such warm weather.

Of course, I was hardly about to ask about it; there are some lines that aren't crossed lightly, and asking my marine company's Starfleet Intelligence liaison unnecessary questions was one of them, even if we were on...friendly terms with each other.

"Don't give me that look, Alex," she said, rolling her eyes at me. "You're lucky I managed to prod you awake before the colonel caught you. He'd have skinned you alive."

"I wasn't sleeping," I said automatically as I mentally scanned my short-term memory, trying to get a single detail to rebuff her. Nothing came up though, aside from a counselor's appointment I had earlier. In fact, everything up until the past few minutes was a blur.

"You all right? I know you haven't had much sleep lately with all those nightmares."

"Nightmares? How could you possibly know aboutÁ¢â,¬"" I cut myself off when I saw Jo raising her eyebrows at me. "Never mind, that's not what's bothering me right now. How did we end up here?"

"Really? Shouldn't you have a better memory of the city you grew up in?" Jo grinned.

"We're in New York City?" I said, looking around as we stopped at a corner. A couple of yellow shuttlecraft taxis zipped past us, narrowly dodging a signpost that indicated the intersection of Houston Street and Canal Street. A memorial dedicated victims of New York's Sanctuary District stood at the far corner from us. A row of brownstones lined our left while skyscrapers gleamed on the right. "Something's really wrong. No part of the city looks anything like this."

"Sure you're not confusing it with another city?" Jo said, her voice carrying an unexpected tone of anxiety. "They do blur together after a little while."

"Houston and Canal are parallel to one another, that memorial is in Central Park, and skyscrapers aren't right next to brownstones anywhere that I'm aware of."

Jo gave me a frown as we continued down the street. "You sure you didn't hit your head somewhere this morning and got confused?"

"I only remember my appointment with my counselor at nine and nothing since then."

The frown shifted into a puzzled stare. "But you were with me since eight this morning...and since when were you seeing a counselor?"

I opened my mouth to respond but realized I had no idea. I had seen one for several months after my brother Daniel's disappearance and again after my parents died. Aside from then, nothing came to mind, though I had considered seeing one after ninety percent of my company was wiped outÁ¢â,¬"

A sudden wave of nausea rushed through me and I stumbled a couple of steps. A pair of hands suddenly materialized on my shoulders, forcing me to sit down on a bench that appeared out of nowhere. I glanced up to see Jo staring down at me, her concern obvious.

"You're white as a sheet and it looks like you're about to vomit. Is it happening again?"

I looked back down at the ground, biting back another wave of nausea and taking several deep breaths. Tightening my grip on the edge of the bench, I struggled to focus on that tidbit of information that had floated up from the back of my mind.

Something was very wrong. Among the reported casualties from that incident was the Starfleet Intelligence liaisonÁ¢â,¬"Jo.

"Earth to Clarke, you there?"

"I'm fine," I said, trying to mask my panic.

"This is the fifth time this has happened in a week," Jo said. "You're not getting away with Á¢â,¬ËœI'm fine.'"

I quickly sat up, alarmed at this new information. "What's today's date?" I asked, fighting feelings of vertigo from my rapid shift in position.

"January third, 2389"

I stiffened. If Jo was right, she was dead for over three years and I somehow lost track of six whole months. "That'sÁ¢â,¬""

"Impossible? It's not the first time you've said that." Jo took a seat next to me. She took my hands in hers, firmly grasping them as she gave a weary sigh. Another wave of nausea forced me to turn away and I clutched Jo's hands tightly as it passed through.

Once I was sure I wasn't going to spew out my guts, I looked at Jo. She seemed to be watching a shuttlecraft pass above us, but her eyes weren't focused. "What do you mean it's not the first time?" I asked cautiously, trying to regain her attention.

After taking a moment to gather herself, she turned to me and squeezed my hands. "Alex, you've been suffering from some sort of psychosis for several weeks now. Most of the time you're fine, but then you'd have these moments of amnesia, confusion, even hallucinations. No one can explain them and you don't usually remember them after they happen, though you seem to have remembered bits and pieces of the last couple of times."

"But I'm sure I spoke to a counselor this just morning..." I protested.

"Tell me what you remember. We might be lucky and get a breakthrough." Jo gave me a worried smile as she patted my hands lightly, trying to reassure me.

Deciding not to mention my recall of the reports of her death and the loss of most of my company just yetÁ¢â,¬"especially when I apparently can't even trust myself, much less my own memoriesÁ¢â,¬"I decided to try and piece together the fragments of what I remembered from Á¢â,¬Ëœthis morning'.

"Let's see..."

******************************************************************

"And that's why you haven't spoken with your siblings for several years?"

I carefully repositioned myself on the couch in an attempt to avoid outright squirming at the question. These counseling sessions always had a habit of touching subjects should be kept locked away in the shadowy recesses of one's mind, smothered in the darkness, never to see the light of day.

"You aren't responsible for your parents' deaths, Alex," the counselor said as she carefully monitored my reactions. "You can't blame yourself for something you never had control over in the first place. By avoiding your siblings, you're taking away another family member fromÁ¢â,¬""

"I'm not taking anything away from them since they're the ones who abandoned me in the first place," I said icily.

After a brief pause, the counselor sat back in her seat and asked, "In what way did they abandon you?"

I glanced away from her, not wanting to meet her probing eyes. Instead I focused on a painting hanging above a filing cabinet. In it, three daffodils were sitting in a blue vase that stood in the middle of a wooden table. "Did you paint that yourself?" I asked, nodding my head towards the painting.

She turned her head to see what I was looking at. "No, a friend of mine did and gave it to me as a gift. What do you think of it?"

"I've avoided daffodils for years now. There were always so many in unhappy places."

"Unhappy places?"

"Voyager's memorial service, my parents' funerals, my friends' graves," I said, counting them off on my left hand as I went. "How are daffodils supposed to help? All the flowers in the universe won't do anything to bring them back. They're all gone and they aren't coming home."

"Voyager did come back though, with Daniel too if I'm not mistaken."

I put down my hand and refocused on the painting again. "He was gone for seven years. He's nothing like how I remember him."

"Have you tried communicating with him since his return?"

"There hasn't been time toÁ¢â,¬""

"Not even a simple note to let him know how things have been?" She was leaning forward again, trying to egg me on to some profound moment of inspiration.

I turned back to the counselor and gave her a cold stare. "Sam was in charge of updating him when he got back."

"You didn't think your brother might want to talk to you as well?"

"I have to go now," I said, standing up. "I'm going to be late for a meeting." I caught a flash of surprise on her face before she responded. A quick glance at the clock sitting on her desk showed that I had in fact gone over my allotted time by almost ten minutes. It was odd that the secretary hadn't said something by now; she was usually quite persist

"All right then," the counselor said, apparently unconcerned about her next client. I'll see you next week. For next time, though, I want you to think about what you might want to say to your brother if you had a chance to talk to him. I think it could helpÁ¢â,¬""

"Bye," I said as I exited the office. When I entered the waiting room, I looked around for the secretary, who wasn't seated at the desk like usual. Neither was there another client waiting to see the counselor. "Excuse me," I called out. "Is anyone there?" I heard a bang from the closing of a file cabinet from a room nearby and a man emerged, looking frantic and rushed. When he saw me, his face went from a deep flush to a deathly pale within a matter of seconds.

"Do you need something?" he asked as he approached, fidgeting with his fingers and averting his gaze from me.

"Is everything alright?" I asked, finding his behavior a little suspicious.

"Yes, yes, I'm fine," the man said rapidly, finally look up at me, but his eyes still not quite meeting my own. "I'm just trying to find something right now and I don't have that much time. What do you want?"

At his reply, an unexpected feeling of dread swarmed over me. "I just wanted to check my appointment time for next week," I said, trying to keep my focus.

"It's the same as usual, I'm sure," he said. His eyes flickered back to the room he came from. "I'm sorry, but I need to get back to my work right now. You can see yourself out, I'm sure." The man turned around and disappeared back into the room.

Something about this whole exchange bothered me, but I turned around and walked to the exit, not wanting to delve into explore something that would definitely go into unpleasant places.

Then everything went black.

******************************************************************

Once I finished, I studied Jo's face to get a gauge on her thoughts. Unfortunately for me, her mask of cool professionalism had slid into place sometime while I was talking, making it all but impossible to get a read on her feelings. However, her hands still held my own, though looser than before, so I knew she hadn't completely disappeared behind that mask.

After a long pause, Jo spoke. "You never gave a name for the counselor. Can you remember what it is?"

"I didn't? It's Dr....Dr...." Jo watched me patiently as I strained for a name. There had to be a name, yet nothing was coming to me. How could I have been seeing a counselor and not know her name?

"Can you describe her? Maybe that'll help jog your memory," Jo said, her face softening as she gave my hands a light squeeze.

"She looked human enough. Fair skin, curly brown hair about shoulder-length. A few centimeters shorter than me. Maybe a couple of years older than us. Was wearing a standard Starfleet Medical uniform."

"What about that assistant you mentioned? The man you didn't recognize."

"He was...uh...fairly non-descript, now that I think about it. Very average looking. The only thing that stood out was how nervous he was acting. Oh, there was that black hat he was wearing. Odd, now that I think about it. Not only were we indoors, but it was that old fashioned hat with the brim...a top hat? No, wrong era. A fedora maybe? You know, the ones in those holonovels based in the 1950s."

Jo stiffened slightly as I mused over the type of hat. "Do you have any idea what he might have been looking for in the office?" Her eyes betrayed a discomfort that I rarely saw in Jo, which she attempted to cover with a deceptively calm voice.

"None," I said, trying to figure out what had startled Jo. "It was a counselor's office. The only thing you might find is patients' files and those are kept pretty secure. He did seem very urgent about it though, whatever it was."

"Whatever it was, it was urgent enough to keep a tail on you," Jo said, giving a slight nod towards my right. "I think we're being followed by him. Your five o'clock, about twenty meters away, standing on the street corner."

I cautiously let go of Jo's hands and stood up to stretch. As I gave my arms a brief workout, I glanced at where Jo mentioned and spotted the assistant with his black fedora standing alone on the corner, an odd anachronism on the deserted street. From the way he was staring at us, he was making no attempts to disguise his interest either. I motioned to Jo to get up and we began walking down the street.

"What on Earth is going on? If he's from some hallucination like you said, then how can he be here as well?" I said to Jo as we gradually picked up our speed. "And why would a counselor find it necessary to have a client followed?"

"I have no idea, but it clearly has something to do with you. Keep moving."

Jo took the lead as I glanced at a parked shuttlecraft for a reflection of what was behind. The assistant had somehow managed to gain on us in the few minutes since we started moving. Jo turned down a narrow alley and opened the third door down. I followed her through and found myself walking through the corridors of a house that felt familiar to me. Closing the door behind us, I cautiously followed Jo, who seemed oblivious to our surroundings.

A grand piano sat in the living room underneath a tapestry depicting Surak's journey through Vulcan's Forge. A completed Kal-toh laid on the mantel while an ongoing kadis-kot game took up much of the living room table. When I glanced to the pictures hanging on the wall, I realized where we were.

[Alexander Clarke]

"This was my home in San Francisco," I said as pictures of my older siblingsÁ¢â,¬"much more youthful than they were nowÁ¢â,¬"stared down at me.

"Did you say something?" Jo asked, not breaking her stride towards the front door.

"How did we get here? We were just in New York a minute ago and we didn't go into any transporter hubs."

Before Jo could reply, three men wearing black fedoras came bursting into the main hall from the bathroom and another from the doorway leading back to the alleyway. Each was brandishing a phaser and looked crazed enough to use it indiscriminately.

"He's over there, don't lose track of him!" shouted one who I quickly recognized as the counselor's assistant. "And only shoot at the girl!"

Jo reached the end of the hall and yanked open the front door, with me following close behind. Heeding the assistant's advice, I slammed the door shut behind me and heard several people crash into it.

"Back up, back up!" someone said, "Let me get the door!" After a few seconds of vigorously wiggling the knob, a string of curses that would make a Vulcan blush spewed through.

"We have to find a way around," a muffled voice replied.

"Keep moving," Jo said, her voice growing distant as she continued onwards. "We can't stay here."

The moment I turned around, I froze. We were standing inside a funeral home, one that I had been all too familiar with. Feelings of grief and hopelessness swept through me when I spotted the blown-up picture of my parents at the front of the room, standing beside two closed caskets. The caskets were covered both with the flag of United Earth and the United Federation of Planets and were surrounded by wreaths of red poppies.

"What is going on here?" I whispered to myself. "I'm losing my mind. This can't be real."

"Alex, we have to keep moving," Jo said, breaking my focus. She was standing at the end of the hallway, gesturing toward another door she had opened. Before I could move, the fedora men came pouring into the room from a side entrance, brushing past me to open fire at Jo. In a matter of moments, she was vaporized by an energy beam, not leaving as much as a strand of hair behind.

I fell to my knees, unwilling to comprehend what I had just seen before me. Once again, I was unable to save JoÁ¢â,¬"

A sharp pain spiked through my head, ricocheting between my temples and the back of my eyes. Someone was yelling in the background, trying to get through to me. After a few minutes, I realized it was me, screaming myself hoarse as the pain intensified. Suddenly, as quickly as it came, the pain was gone. I found myself lying on the ground, frantically panting and drenched in sweat.

"Get up," a familiar voice said. "I don't have time for this anymore."

A pair of hands dragged me up and tossed me to my feet. Looking up, I saw that it was the counselor from my...dream? Vision? Hallucination?

"No, you were right the first time. Technically, anyway," she said.

"What are you talking about?" I gasped out, still trying to catch my breath. The fedora men had vanished, leaving me and the counselorÁ¢â,¬"which probably wasn't her real jobÁ¢â,¬"alone in the funeral home.

"You're in a sedated coma right now, so in a sense this is a dream. So were the counseling sessions."

"But Jo said this has been going on for months..."

"She's not wrong. You've been kept in this state for quite some time now and she's appeared with an unusually high frequency. Even more odd is that she has been actively interfering with my investigations, which is exceedingly rare for an untrained subconscious. I tried looking into why after a few...unfortunate incidents early on, but there seems to be no connection between you and any of the probable causes."

"So Jo really is dead?"

"Well, not here in your dreams I suppose, but out in the real world, that's what the reports say and that's as far as I know. That's not my concern, however. What I'm looking for is that memory that you have amnesia aboutÁ¢â,¬"the incident where most of your company completely vanished and you can't remember why."

"I thought that information was classified."

"Oh, it is still. But you see, something very important happened during that incident, and as one of its few survivors, I need you to tell me what."

"If you know that I have amnesia about it, why even bother asking? Why kidnap me, drug me, and meddle around in my dreams for months on end for information that you know you won't find?"

The Woman started pacing around me. "I believe you had repressed the memory due to how traumatic it was for you. But despite all the effort I spent making sure your mind was stable enough to handle a multi-person intrusion to carry out a more thorough search of your memories, I haven't been able to locate the memory for that incident. Either I misjudged the strength of the mental conditioning the marines gave youÁ¢â,¬"doubtful, since I was able to access at least a small portion of the classified information in your headÁ¢â,¬"or the memory was buried far further than I had thought. As for the kidnapping, it was a necessary step to guarantee that I would have enough time to extract the memory from you while also purging that emotion suppressant you were hooked on with minimal side effects. Given that it would satisfy both your curiosity about what happened and help me meet my deadlines, I think it's about time we worked together."

I was speechless at this turn of events. A mere half-hour ago, I thought I was losing my mind. Now I find out I was in fact being mentally probed for something that I couldn't possibly know. The lure of finding out what happened overcame my shock and suspicion of an ulterior motive, however. After all that I had gone through in my lifeÁ¢â,¬"the loss of my parents and siblings, the disappearance of Jo and my company, the battles on distant, forgotten planetsÁ¢â,¬"to learn that I experienced something so traumatic that my mind removed it from my conscious mind was staggering.

"How am I supposed to help if you've already crawled through every single memory of mine?" I croaked out after a long pause, knowing that there was a good chance I would regret this decision.

The Woman stopped in front of me and turned to face me. "There are some connections that I still haven't been able to piece together yet. The daffodils, for instance. The memories clearly show poppies at those scenes, and there are no significant instances in your life that had daffodils in themÁ¢â,¬"at least, none that I could find."

"I have no idea either. I've probably seen more Antarian moon blossoms than daffoÁ¢â,¬"" I paused. "Wait a minute. Daffodils was part of a code I used with Jo, to ease the boredom between peacekeeping actions and special operations. They were a warning for an irritated superior, which usually meant Starfleet Command was worked up about something."

"You had your meeting at Starfleet Command earlier. Nothing of note happened."

"Did I go into General Preston's office?"

"Not that I recall..."

"Let's get moving then," the Woman said, unlocking a door to her left. Motioning for me to go through, I passed through the doorway and found myself standing in a corridor of Starfleet Command, several doors down from where General Preston worked. The Woman followed behind me as I walked to the door.

"Are you ready for this?" she asked. "Whatever is behind this door will answer all of your questions about what happened."

I gave her a nod and began typing in my Starfleet passcode. A second after I pressed the last key, I heard the click of the door unlocking. My hand trembled as I slowly grasped the door handle and pulled open the door.

Behind it was a white curtain that covered the doorway. As I moved to part it, the Woman stopped me with an iron grip on my upper arm.

"We'll let Sam here go through first," she said, motioning to her Assistant, who appeared out of nowhere beside us. Not even bothering to acknowledge us, he walked past us and parted the curtain. Immediately, the smell of disinfectants swept into my face, burning my nose and causing my eyes to start tearing up. Through the tears I glimpsed a room that was completely white and bathed in a blindingly bright lightÁ¢â,¬"so much so that I wasn't able to tell where the room ended, if at all. Apparently unbothered by the harsh smell or the blinding light, the Assistant stepped inside.

That was the last I saw of him. Moments later, it seemed his body was decaying at an extremely rapid pace. His clothes browned and fell apart before disappearing once they touched the ground. His hat was eaten away by invisible moths. His flesh blistered and boiled away in a matter of moments. His hair fell from his scalp, disintegrating before it touched the ground. In the few seconds I saw his bones, they rapidly decomposed into dust.

The Woman stepped back and slammed the door shut. A moment before it closed, while the curtain was swinging back in place, I thought I saw a faceÁ¢â,¬"Jo's face.

Before I could react, the Woman was pulling me away from the door, dragging me down the corridor. "Impossible," she said frantically. "A memory wipe of that magnitudeÁ¢â,¬"not even the Tal Shiar's Class A amnesiacs can do that. And that's if you volunteer for the memory purge." The Woman stopped at the end of the hallway and turned to face me. "I have no idea what happened to you, but if it was dangerous enough that you consciously chose to forget it, then we're out of time."

"We?" I asked as I watched her pull out a remote of some sort and pressed a series of buttons. "Who's wÁ¢â,¬""

"Initiate protocol Sigma-Delta-36."

The building began to shake violently. I was thrown onto the ground, with the floors and walls beginning to warp and twist. As I watched, the Woman vanished in a flash of light. I closed my eyes, feeling the building collapse in on itself. I braced for the pain, not caring that it was supposed to be a dream.

After a few minutes of not feeling anything, I realized I was still alive. I cautiously opened my eyes, not knowing what to expect.

There was nothing.

I felt myself floating in a sea of blackness, an impenetrable darkness that engulfed me. If this was where my mind spent its unconscious moments, I could easily see why it conjured up dreams. Even the cold darkness of space had distant stars to guide one's way, offering a hope of another life form somewhere, anywhere.

Here, that hope didn't exist. The void had no beginning, no end. There were no visual markers to navigate by, no sounds to judge one's position, nothing to reach out and touch. I couldn't even see my own hand as I waved it in front of my faceÁ¢â,¬"or at least felt like I was.

After a few minutes of struggling to get my bearings, I gave up, instead curling up into a ball in a futile attempt to hide myself from the infinity surrounding me. Despite having nothing in it, being nothing, the abyss was watching me, waiting for my next move. I sensed a gnawing madness slowly growing inside of me, patiently taking apart my mind.

"I'm still with you," a voice whispered softly. "I'm still here with you, Alex." The burdensome weight of the void's gaze eased a little at the sound of Jo's voice. I couldn't see her, I couldn't touch her, but her presence was comforting, even in an ethereal form. It gave me the thinnest of threads of hope to clung to as I floated silently in this endless emptiness, waiting for someone to save me from myself.