String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [19]
“Which one of these beings is it, and where are they now?” Vivia asked.
Vivia watched the wave of disconcertion rumble across Phoebe’s face. Phoebe had obviously betrayed something she had not intended. Vivia realized in an instant that Phoebe was weaker than she appeared and this knowledge gave her… pleasure. Then she remembered how to laugh.
The Doctor was, once again, seriously considering taking a name. In four years of almost continual operation, he had toyed with and for a short time adopted more than one-Salk… Schweitzer… Shmullus… Mozart-but these were other men. Great men, to be sure. Their individual accomplishments had lent glory to their names in the eyes of their respective worlds, or those who loved them. But they just weren’t… him. And so, they had been abandoned.
This was hardly the first time he had wrestled with the Who Am I? question. Each time the subroutines that ordered his cognitive processes worked through the equations involved in answering such a question, the results were either black and white or nonexistent. The “black and white” option was, Emergency Medical Hologram Mark One, AK1 Diagnostic and Surgical Subroutine Omega 323, operating aboard the Federation Starship Voyager. The nonexistent option was a bit more disturbing, if a hologram could even be “disturbed.” He was programmed to display lifelike human emotions in conjunction with his practice of medicine. But neither he nor anyone else could say definitively whether or not in displaying those emotions he was actually feeling them.
The fact was, however, that what lay beyond the official designation for his program, a definition of self he had long ago determined was insufficient, was an emptiness that sometimes created an unsettling processing loop. It left him wondering whether or not, without such a definition, he could even be said to actually exist. Often as not, the selection of a name seemed the first and most important step in filling that emptiness. But he didn’t want somebody else’s name, however lauded. He wanted his own.
It had never really occurred to him that none of Voyager’s crew had ever faced his dilemma. Most humanoid species did not allow their offspring to choose their own names. Their names were given to them by those who spawned them. Early on he had realized that as long as Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant, he was going to have to think of himself as more than a supplemental program, but as the ship’s chief medical officer. At Kes’s urging, he had asked the captain for a name. There were many subsequent days when he seriously wished that she had taken him up on that request, rather than leaving him to make the determination on his own.
Maybe Jim. It was short and simple, shouldn’t be too hard for the crew to remember. But Jim was short for James, and there were few Starfleet officers as highly regarded as James Tiberius Kirk.
Adam? It had a nice ring to it. Long ago, certain sects of humans on Earth had believed that Adam was the first man created. As the first continuously functioning and self-aware EMH Mark One, he found a synchronicity in the choice that appealed to him.
But if he was going for simple, why not Matt, or David, or Paul? Having been made in the image of his human creator, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, he hesitated to move too far beyond the realm of human names. Some of the Klingon and Romulan names contained in his databases also had a certain appeal, though they often sounded as if they were missing a few vowels when they rolled off his simulated tongue.
He had been processing the question for seventy-nine uninterrupted minutes when his aural subroutine alerted him to a faint high-pitched hum emanating from one of the