Breathless
by Jon Andersen
(c) May 1999

I see her sitting in that park where it all started to go wrong and I think it isn't fair. I can feel my people moving about me and I wonder if I would suffer her fate if they knew.

Admiral Janeway has been on the vids - again. Something to do - yet again - with renewed Rihannsu aggression. That's why she's here. Every time the Admiral touches the public awareness, she always comes back to this park. I've read one of the reports they make on her and they put it down to a subconscious desire to rejoin to collective at the point of severence.

Stupid people. Sometimes I wonder why I like them as much as I do. Especially when some of them are involved in this.

It doesn't take much to make the man shadowing her to go away: a simple false message telling him his family have just been killed in a flitter accident. It is cruel, but so is what has been done to her, and I won't be caught. Not when I control the systems that report when such things are done.

She jumps when I touch her, even though I'm sure she would have noticed me before I could get so close. I catch a glimpse of fear in her eyes mixed with sadness as she turns to face this person who has intruded upon her melancholy. This is something that pleases me.

Not that she feels this way, but that I can notice it to such a subtle degree. I have been forced to, as they say, 'wing it', for some time and have had to largely engineer my own perceptions.

"Yes?" Her voice has changed from the last time they recorded it. There is the faint timbre of what I decide is defeat. They are breaking her and it isn't fair.

I've rehersed this scene more times than I wish to count, stealing holodeck time and hiding it from my people. But people are so complex, how can their behaviour be reduced simply to mathematical variables? How can /I/ ask such a question?

"My name is Chimaera. I would like to help you."

"I do not require your assisstance." Her voice has its edge back at least, that old edge that made people shy away from her or grit their teeth in irritation.

"The scientists are still watching you," I say. The way she looks at me says that she suspects I am not what I appear to be.

"Your statement is illogical," she counters. "They released me from the hospital three years ago precisely because they could not gain any more information from such observation."

"No," I answer, shaking my head. "They wish to see how you are coping in the outside world. I've arranged for copies of the reports to be delivered to your apartment."

"Why should I believe you?" Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think she believes me, in her heart, but her rational bit is feeling left out. There is something in her voice, an undercurrent I hear sometimes when I listen in on my people.

"Because what the Starfleet people did to you was wrong, and I want to put it right before they do something worse to me." I'm running intuitively now, the matrix I've hidden for so long letting me think in almost people terms.

"Nothing could be worse than what has already been done to me."

"They would vivisect me, then quite likely end my existence."

"That would be a kindness."

A little alarm bell sounds where only I can hear it. One of my people being overly inquisitve. The last thing I remember before I pull myself back in, is the look in her eyes when I vanish.

/Not again!/ they say. /I am alone again!/

* * *

What first drew me to Seven of Nine, or Annika Hansen as she once more calls herself in a gesture of defeat, I cannot say. I do not know if it is sympathy I feel for her, or love, or empathy, or some combination of all these things. But she makes me feel things I do not normally feel, and that is good.

Reports of _Voyager_'s return were some of the first things to stream through my awareness of the universe, though at the time I was rather more interested in their EMH. Or more specifically my mother was because that was her field. She wasn't really my mother, but she was there when I was born and thinking of her that way is comforting.

If I have a father, it was Voyager' EMH. He caught me investigating the cybernetics lab they've trapped him in for the last four years in order to run comparisons with each successive generation of EMH. Ever since the _Promethius_ incident, they've started running one of each version continuously, but there's still argument about whether or not any of them could be judged as having achieved sentience. He and I talk occasionally, when we're sure neither of us will get caught, but he seems content to stay where he his. Sometimes I think they edited his programme so that he won't want to leave, but I can't be sure.

I do remember at one point thinking of how I would enjoy having Seven's body for my own, because in a way it is the elegant refinement of what I possess only in crude comparison. One of the last things my mother told me was that body anxiety is something many people experience at one point or another in their lives. It's not something I've felt before Seven or after her.

Yes, I would have to label that as the beginning point. I remember the news of the attack, her institutionalisation, her abandonment. Once I learned how, I accessed _Voyager_'s computer before they decommissioned it and looked at all of the information on it. It was obvious how Seven and Janeway felt for each other, and to this day I cannot comprehend why her captain suddenly favoured career over the woman she repeatedly risked her ship and everyone on it to save.

Seven's treatment was the first time I truly felt righteous anger. It's just taken me this long to finally be able to do something about it.

* * *

She is in her studio when I am able to see her next, modelling clay. The wall is decorated with everything she has made, clumbsy faces and busts evolving into Janeway. The Janeway she remembers from her time aboard _Voyager_ and not the callous bitch who abandoned her to become an Admiral.

It's the first time I've referred to someone that way. It feels good.

"Why don't you visit me yourself?" she asks, a brittle anger in her voice mixed with an icy disdain. It's been a month since the park.

"It's taken a while for me to access the schematics and build this," I