In the shadow of Ganmadan.
It was a little offensive, the clear sky and beautiful weather. It should be raining, thundering, like in her dreams--red and scary, foreboding--but it isn't. Jean Luc Picard died and it is...just another day. She knows that Alton Soong and Dr. Jurati are working on it, maping and copying his neural patterns into the golem Soong had reserved for himself. There's no guarantee it will work, that they can take the patterns off a dead man and expect them to function. He may not be restored at all, and Soji feels terribly lost. She has siblings here, dozens of them, but she's the odd one out. Not one of them can really comprehend what she's been through in the last few days. None of them can even start to relate. Dahj is gone. Her mother is an AI, a holo construct that was meant to keep her from breaking her cover. Narek is--somewhere outside. In a cell? The fact that she'd even consider talking to him only enhances her distress. She's all alone. Again. And the Romulan fleet is gone, but so is most of the Starfleet one. They are defenseless, completely out of orchids, and only Soji seems to recognize that the danger hasn't passed. That they aren't actually safe from anything. Another nudge to her bedrock could topple everything again, and again, and again and she chose to let the guarantee of safety go. She hates herself for giving that up, for shutting down the transmitter, and then hates herself in another way for even considering summoning the extra-galactic synthetics. Her life isn't worth every organic one. It's objectively true but so very hard to remember when the threat of death and destruction seems to hover over her like her own personal raincloud. So Soji sits, miserable and distraught, on the edge of Alton Soong's desk and tries not to think about it. Unfortunately the only distractions she has are the synthetics littered around the office. Alton Soong had been so proud, so excited to show her his prototypes. The golem, the next set of fractal clones, mice for Spot II to chase. Each one was meticulously designed and he loved them, truly. His crowning masterpiece was the reproduction of Data. It took up the center of the room and all Soji could do was stare. He looked peaceful, like he was sleeping and not just an empty, expertly sculpted husk in a stasis chamber. She was almost jealous, that he got to sleep so softly while she was vibrating with anxiety about the next calamity, the next loss, the next inevitable, crushing death. She runs both hands through her hair, tugging it to try and clear the maudline catastrophizing. It half works. "I wish I could have met you," Soji says to the stasis chamber and her arms drop back to her sides. "If half of what everyone said was true, you'd probably have something profound to say."
"Or...at least you might give me a hug."
She was tearing up, thinking of her Dad, the fake ghost in her dreams. He never existed but she had memories of him saying profound things. She recalled her mom trying to cheer her up--or Dahj, who may have actually done that before they were separated. Picard had even tried to comfort her, in his own way--and now she comes back to Narek again. The last man standing. God, her life was pathetic if the Tal'Shiar were her best choice for a hug. She wipes her eyes and tries to stop thinking again. It doesn't work any better this time. "Fuck," Soji says to the empty room. To the construct that is not her kind of father. It required a quantum computer to hold what they had of Data's neural patterns--if the code, the information, were any less she might have been able to boot him up, to talk to him through holograms like she did her mom, but even Soji understood that he was too complex for that. Data required a body and Soong had never completed the method to transfer-- "Wait--Agnes fixed it," Soji says, largely to herself, partly to the construct. Alton Soong had lamented how his masterpiece copy of Data would forever lie dormant. Because Bruce Maddox hadn't finished the work to make transfering consciousness possible. But Dr. Jurati had finished it. They were using it on Picard right now. Which meant-- Soji shot up from the side of the desk and all but darted to the stasis pod in the center of the room. Now, looking at the unoccupied copy, she saw something other than a hollow body--she could--she could put him back, right? If it were a copy of Data, he could work in this body? She immediately pulls up the controls on the stasis chamber and snatches a data slate off Soong's desk. Data was kept in the computer, he was the cornerstone of it, she should be able to just...run Jurati's protocols and put him into the duplicate, right? The tiny thread of hope that wrapped itself around her heart was as cutting as it was fragile, but Soji was desperate and so very alone. If she thought anything could work, anything at all, she couldn't have stopped herself from trying it.
