Voyager: Seven & Annika

Year Eight

It began as a tingle, tentative and uncertain. Nothing definite and never quite detectable. It was a thought given flesh, a misgiving, something Seven had forgotten to remember. She tried to ignore it. But she wanted to remember it. She wanted the satisfaction of clenching the thought, identifying the sensation, even as a part of her warned against it. Oddly, she could identify the warning. It was a taboo.

Seven had few of those. This was nearly subliminal. She knew the sensation only so far as it was forbidden.

"What are you attempting to do to me?" Seven asked her captor, her chilled voice growing even more terse, precise, in counterpoint to the sensation's... lingering.

Her captor did not alter her neutral expression, but there nonetheless seemed to be an impression of satisfaction in the gaze she locked Seven with. "Is it not obvious?"

There was a curiosity now to the sensation. Although it remained infuriating insubstantial, this... hum of electricity inside her that she could not feel, this scent of ozone that she could not smell, this color that she could not see and music whose melody she could not remember... the curiosity grew. It was a splinter in her mind's eye, maddeningly unknowable. Her sense of the pleasure that grasping it would give—her anticipation of it—grew.

Seven forced her attention to the problem. It was clear that this... distraction... was just what her captor intended. Better to ignore it, if for no other reason than not to give the other woman the satisfaction. It was the human way, as Janeway would say. And she was Borg. There was nothing she could not adapt to.

"You are interfering with my Borg implants," Seven said, theorizing aloud—unusual for her, but even the meager sound of her own voice drowned out that electrical current that was passing through her, without origin and without end. "Their regulation of my synaptic pathways is being affected. My cortical node's programming has been altered."

"Correct. How does this make you feel?"

"I am experiencing no emotional duress," Seven insisted. "Fear of you is irrelevant; it will not affect the situation. Since you are not in physical contact with me, I am experiencing no tactile stimuli either."

"Incorrect," the voice replied, words boring into Seven as she was trying to do in reverse, but with an edge of chiding to them. Seven did not pretend great familiarity with emotions, but she thought she would categorize this as sadism. "While I am withholding physical contact, you are experiencing stimuli."

"Explain."

"The stimuli is self-generated. You attempt to deem it irrelevant. It is not."

"It is irrelevant," Seven stressed, but then the sensation struck her a sudden, glancing blow; a shock through her that sent her curiosity into overdrive. What was it? How could she have not been touched, not been interacted with, and yet feel this... tingle. It was not an itch, not unpleasant—more like the wind blowing against her skin, despite her garments. And into her flesh, as well, the pleasing chill penetrating her skin. Seven felt her throat form a gasp, which she refused. "This sensation is meant to be regulated by my cortical node!"

"You are in error," she was corrected, with gloating undertone in even the most precise word. "This sensation is not meant to be regulated at all."

The gale of this deep wind picked up; she could feel it blowing through her, up her body, up to places that she had assumed could not feel this thing. It lingered on her breasts in delicate spirals, filling infinitely the nonexistent space between her flesh and her uniform. It drew up the line of her jaw, this strand of smoke that could touch. It kissed the nape of her neck.

Kissed...

"You are enjoying it," her captor said. "It is apparent you find this most 'relevant.'"

"You will not compromise my core programming, or my biology!" Seven said stridently, refusing to focus on the almost imperceptible feeling that crawled up her body from within, even as it seemed to be touching her all at once—fleetingly, divergently, but her whole body had the feel of being lingered on, fawned over... "There are safeguards in place..."

"This stimuli can grow more appealing," her captor told her, now with an air of instruction. "Or it can become more detrimental. It is dependent on how receptive you are."

"These sensations are irrelevant." Seven worked hard to convince herself she was not pleading. "They are not informative of any danger to me, or any distress my physical form has suffered—"

The wind was growing heavier, leaden, lethargic. It pushed over her lower body, rolled over her groin, left stiffness and heat in its wake—a massage from the inside. It blunted down her legs. It filled up her abdomen. Its heat was ephemeral, airy, but within her... her stomach was twisting, her heart beating faster...

"The Borg did not intend for you to feel these things. I do. There is a great variety of them. Almost all are pleasant—from a suitable reference point."

Seven shut her eyes. It was not real. There was no logic to it, no physicality, only a lack of regulation where she had grown used to it. This was not meant to be. There was supposed to be an absence, but it was filling, and how much fuller could it get? How much more could it be?

"You are attempting to spur me into a human mating cycle. The initial stages of... arousal and desire. My response to pheromone stimuli is being heightened... the sensory data being altered... my body is being tricked into feeling this way."

"Your body is making up for lost time. It is welcoming the sensations. They are growing because you wish them to grow. You are wondering what other stimuli you can experience. You are wondering, and envisioning, what I can do to you."

It wouldn't be so bad if the touch were firmer, more concrete, more solid, but it was barely a touch at all. More hint, seeming to exist only in her anticipation of greater sensation, her imagining of how the stimuli could deepen. She tensed her muscles, trying her bonds again, intellectually rejecting the bodily experience she had been left vulnerable to... yet the tension drained from her muscles with each moment. Seven was relaxing into a touch that wasn't even there.

"I do not wish to copulate with you."

"That desire is irrelevant. Your desire to copulate, regardless of target, is extremely relevant."

Her lips were wet. Moist. Had she run her tongue over them, trying to answer a tingle, bury an ghostly kiss? She must've. She parted them in a gentle expression—almost a smile—and felt them stick slightly together, the almost (but not quite) immediate separation seeming to reverberate through her body. It throbbed in her groin, in her belly, her breasts—everywhere she was sensitive to it, and she was sensitive to this throbbing everywhere. She clenched her teeth.

Her endless vocabulary could supply a suitable English word. Pregnant. She was pregnant with this sensation that had grown subtly heavier, until now it filled her breasts and extended into her hardened nipples, engorged her labia and made the crotch of her uniform seem to daringly run over the lips of the sex organ. But that word was imperfect, sullied by his implications, its sexuality.

Seven could not think of another one.

"You find me attractive. This contributes to your desire. This informs the sensation."

"Your aesthetic qualities are irrelevant," Seven insisted. She sounded shrill to her own ears, her voice damaging the sensation, not at all like the voluptuous timbre of the words her captor used.

She was shockingly aware of her body, her own beauty, the sensuality and the lushness and the aliveness of flesh. They were all hers: her long, slender legs, her muscularly rounded buttocks, her strong hips and their flowing curves, the tautly flattened belly... the firm, high-set breasts with their nipples filled to capacity, setting into diamonds. She was not a collective, not a program, not a consciousness inhabiting equipment. She was this flesh and she was feeling.

"You consider the prospect of sexual intercourse with me. Even this ideation gives you pleasure."

She clenched her fists as if she could equalize the pressure, make another part of her body feel as knotted and tight as her loins. As if striking back at the aggression, her body flashed into acute restlessness, a wanderlust, an impatience for this stimuli to grow. She pinched her lips together over tightening teeth. The pressure would not be relieved. She felt dampness between her legs. She felt heat.

"Are you imagining the most likely scenarios? The most pleasing positions, actions, touches? You can imagine more. Roughness. Violence. Imagine all the ways our bodies could be... used."

It was like a hand pressing into her, harder and harder, the pressure growing, pulling tighter, and then some obscure point of pressure slipped through, cut through to her core and flooded her with exquisite delight. She could not even isolate what the sensation had started as, only what it had become. The gasp of surprise that was an ecstasy in itself... ringing in her ears... leaping from her like a note struck from a bell.

"This is sex. This is what they're all so obsessed with. It's been denied to you, every iota of it scrubbed from your body, but I've returned it to you. You have... adapted. And now you will service me."

Her very uniform was a living thing, unseen hands, kissing lips, running over her body softly, tenderly. She could not resist the delicate, yet bold caresses. She could only drink them in, noting how her breathing became more labored, her breasts going higher and higher with every panting intake. Was she still just feeling things? Or was she being fucked?

That word was a caress all its own. She touched herself by thinking it. She renewed the urgency with which her body was assaulting itself.

"If you fuck me," she said, her voice not her own, not Borg, not like anything she had ever heard. "Will these sensations end?"

"No. But you will enjoy them."

Seven could feel her nipples humming with anxious fullness, her legs trembling to bear the heaviness of their caressing, her body bending as a river of caresses flowed down to her sex and made her take the weight of each touch. She was panting. "I'm already enjoying them...!"

Her captor shook her head. "You have not even felt them."

Seven almost moaned aloud. She fixed her stare on her captor. Her tormenter. Her deliverer.

Herself.

"Fuck me," she told the other Annika Hansen.

Then she did moan out loud.

***

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."

It intrigued Seven, the zest she read into those words, the musical cadence she heard in them. She knew it was not something programmed into the EMH, and doubted it was intended by him. Nonetheless, unintentional as it was, there was a lapse in perception.

She perceived a warmth that wasn't there, though ephemerally, something existed between them. Affection, friendship, camaraderie. Although he could not have known it was her that he would be greeting, she nonetheless received as a warmer greeting than other crewmembers would receive. Affectionate without trying. The intricacies of human expression, which she'd once found direly inefficient, now proved almost insurmountably labyrinthine. No certainty, just strata after strata of meaning and intent and innuendo and subtext, with the truth trapped between two poles.

Amusing, in a way. Some crewmembers were said to relate to each other because they 'spoke the same language,' sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. She and the Doctor related to each other because they did not speak the same language. In all the universe, they were two without a shared space to claim them. Perhaps only Voyager would've had them.

The Doctor looked around sharply, registering that he was not on sickbay, but on the holodeck, its slate gray surfaces and lines of yellow unrelieved by any of the functional aspects of his work environment. Without any program running other than his own, it was a desert.

"I take it someone else has failed to heed my advice about keeping the safety protocols on while doing their 'research' on the Pon Farr," the Doctor said snippily.

"That is not the case," Seven replied. Her hands were stiffly behind her back, fingers locked in place, the cold metal of the fragmented endoskeleton on her digits coming as something of a relief. Since her encounter, she'd felt overwarm. The chill of a PADD or console came to relieve the tension for her.

"Yes." The Doctor looked around pointedly. "Not that you aren't pleasant company, but you don't seem to be injured. So unless you intend to injure someone—and in that case, I am obligated to advise against it, if only to lighten my workload."

Seven's lips stayed flat, but were tickled by a smile. "There has been a change in circumstances. While you were offline, the ship encountered a riff in subspace, bridging a gap in the space-time continuum. The other end of this bridge was a parallel universe, one previously encountered by the Enterprise."

The Doctor's databanks were quick to make the connection. "The universe of the Terran Empire. Yes, I've often seen Mr. Paris express an interest in the concept. It all seems quite binary to me—good people being evil and the dark turning to the light... as if a light switch is the grand measure of morality."

"They're quite real," Seven assured him. "There was a vessel of the Terran Empire, similarly marooned in the Delta Quadrant—although apparently in an attempt to develop a fiefdom free of the technology superiority of the Alpha Quadrant and the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. Upon encountering us, they saw our ship as an opportunity to resupply themselves, and attacked. They boarded the vessel and almost seized control of it, but were repelled after a hostage situation lasting several hours."

"Quite the dramatic interlude. I take it no one was injured and thus no one saw the need to inform me of any of this."

"There were... casualties." Seven could not remain stationary. Not thinking anything of it, she went to the arch to check on the ship's workings. "The other Voyager disabled our ship with an extremely advanced computer virus. We were able to counteract it, but several systems were damaged. Including the bio-neural circuitry containing your programming."

The Doctor grimaced, raising a hand to his scalp as if to feel for a hair out of place. "I don't... feel damaged?"

"Several file partitions were corrupted." Seven's finger pounded against the LCARS panel, summoning up report after report on Voyager's functions. "We were able to halt the degradation, but extensive accessing of your program will cause deterioration."

"Deterioration? Seven, I'm a holographic lifeform! To do anything but gather dust, I need to access my program. To do otherwise is like suggesting that you live your life without a cerebral cortex!"

Seven shut off the panel, realizing it had become something other than... efficiency. In the darkened glass, she saw her own face. Its neutrality. "Infrequent use of the compromised gel packs, with limited read/write interaction, is still possible. We calculate that half an hour sessions, with twenty-four hour interludes, will preserve your program until the data specialists at the Daystrom Institute can repair and transfer your files."

"The Daystrom Institute? That's back in the Alpha Quadrant!"

"I am aware of its coordinates."

"Then I'm to be... asleep for all but thirty minutes a day? How can I perform my duties that way!"

"You've been relieved of duty," Seven informed him. "We've contacted Starfleet and they're uploading a new medical hologram via Pathfinder. We'll be able to encode it on spare gel packs."

"Spare... this is really most absurd, not to mention intolerable!" The Doctor stated, managing to make it sound like the filthiest curse imaginable. "You're telling me that my program can't be transferred to one of these spares?"

"Not without risking extensive damage," Seven said. "The same reason we could not make a back-up of your modified program. The EMH Mark 1 was never designed to be..."

The Doctor paced the confines of the holodeck, always seeming almost about to charge through a wall rather than turn aside at the last moment. "To be what? Indispensable? No, it was designed with built-in obsolescence... how hard did you try to keep me functional when you could have a more advanced model at your beck and call? Where are the other crewmembers, where is the Captain?"

"It was thought that you might become emotional. We thought you might take the news better coming from me—that not being seen in a vulnerable state would minimize your embarrassment later on."

"Why should I be embarrassed? Isn't it a normal reaction to be aghast at the notion of spending all but thirty minutes a day in a box? And you! Who are they to stick you with this duty?"

"I volunteered," Seven said. "The Captain wished to do it—I surmised you would rather hear it from me."

"Well, of course I want to hear it from you... better that than the thought of all of you drawing straws over it... but there has to be a mistake! Something you're overlooking, perhaps? It's a simple matter of transferring files from one system to another—"

"It is not," Seven said. "Your personality is also engrained within the neural pathways formed within the bio-gel, in replica of human thought. Without those pathways, you would not be you."

"Then copy the pathways!"

"We have been able to do so previously, when we had time to properly format your program for transfer. In this case, we would have to do a molecular analysis of the bio-gel, then replicate precisely every detail of that analysis on another gel-pack, then transfer your files between the two. We do not have the capacities to do so."

"Then... then... damnit, Seven, I'm a doctor, not a computer engineer!"

Seven accepted his outburst with a nod. "I am making continuing efforts to find a way to repair or bypass the damage. I hope you trust in the quality of my work."

The Doctor sighed. "Could you... program up a chair, please? I would like to sit."

Seven tapped on the arch's panel. A chair appeared. The Doctor sat.

"Thank you."

Seven accepted this too with a nod. Oddly, withstanding the Doctor's own distress had reduced her own. She found it easier to solve the issues of interacting with him then to diagnose her own complications.

"A number of the crew would like to visit with you in the coming weeks. We're ordering it based on when they're off-duty and when your program can be brought online..."

"Oh my, no. I'll curate the list myself. I have no wish to find myself confronted with a hypochondriac Bolian when my time is suddenly even more valuable."

Seven eyed him wryly. "I believe their intent is to be 'well-wishers,' rather than seeking your medical expertise."

"Oh yes," the Doctor recalled, leaning back in his chair. He stared up at the ceiling. "A new EMH. What's he like?"

"She—or more accurately it—is a simulacra of a deceased Starfleet officer named Jadzia Dax. Its designer, Julian Bashir, wished to honor her after she died in the line of duty."

"How touching. I suppose she's quite personable. Gives out lollipops for anyone sits through a tricorder scan. Programmed with 55,000 instances of small talk. A full head of hair..."

"She is more... universal, than you were."

"Lowest common denominator, I knew it. Replaced because I wasn't sexy enough. It's a travesty."