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By Root 345 0

atom contained within a molecule of ioxicyllic phosphatase in a remote deck plate within the array. Though the abominations could theoretically find her here, she did not believe they would do so. They were still such simple creatures. For all the potential that lay within their grasp, they had been unprepared to receive the spores and consequently behaved like the infants of primitive races. They had barely scratched the surface of their new existence and remained bound to perverse and irrelevant notions. Their call to Tuvok had been idiotic. He was incapable of grasping the nature of their existence and therefore incapable of rendering aid. Their desire to return home, as they put it, indicated that much of their humanoid existence and values were still thoroughly enmeshed with their evolved essence.

All of this might have been forgivable. There was a time when it might also have been interesting to witness their first halting steps into a larger existence. But in their rashness, they had taken something that did not belong to them, and by doing so, had damned countless others to a half-life within a space-time reality that was not theirs.

Had she been capable of weeping in her disembodied state, she would have cried fierce hot tears. The work, the planning, the purposefulness with which the array had been constructed and the spores had been created were now for naught. How could this have happened? She tortured herself with guilt. The last time she had returned to the array for rejuvenation had been so recently. True, it had been almost six hundred years, but that was the blink of a god’s eye.

She allowed the rage at this senseless waste to move through her. If she was going to salvage anything from this desperate turn of events, she would have to think beyond her anger. She had learned long ago that however unpleasant an emotional state was, it could be released only if it was first accepted and experienced. Denial, though often easier, was ultimately counterproductive.

They were arguing with one another. Tuvok’s fragile brain would never have been able to translate their communication. He would have sensed the constant pounding need that was the sum total of their collective desire for release. But his mind would have interpreted their discussion in the same way that he had first understood their call. It happened in the space of a human breath. His mind would have perceived the sound, but no mind, bound by matter, would have been capable of deconstructing the sound in a way that would have communicated its truth beyond a vague sensation of gratitude, doubt, and fear of the unknown.

But to Phoebe, their words were perfectly clear .

His people are coming for him.

They will be too late.

Not with our aid.

What can we do?

Show them the way.

They are not our kind.

Neither was he.

He was part of them.

Not as we are part of one another.

He came for us.

He is dying.

Perhaps not.

We cannot protect him.

We shouldn’t try. Let the unknowing one come.

Will he become our kind?

It is his only hope.

Phoebe was intrigued. It is his only hope. At first, she could not imagine what they might be referring to. What hope was there for Tuvok? His body was injured, quite possibly beyond his own people’s abilities to repair it. With each fraction of a second that passed, his tenuous connection to the abominations grew thinner as his mind began to shut down, a few neural pathways at a time.

What did they know that she didn’t?

Opening herself beyond the scope of their conversation, she searched for their hope, and was instantly flooded with relief when she found it.

She sensed its frenzied approach… and knew peace. She watched in delight as the one… the unknowing one, they called it… found Tuvok, grasped him roughly around his torso, and bending its face to his, implanted the spore that it carried within it into Tuvok’s mouth.

The convulsions that marked the first stage of transference of a spore into a humanoid body began instantly. Tuvok writhed in apparent agony, as his muscles contracted, seeking to dispel the foreign