The Choice
Posted on 07 Jun 2023 @ 9:26pm by Major Porter Wallace
Edited on on 09 Jun 2023 @ 12:56pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Pathfinder Sickbay
Timeline: MD10 - 2020 HR
2611 words - 5.2 OF Standard Post Measure
Wallace woke up in his shack to the familiar crashing of waves outside of his hut. Missing was the slow steady breathing of Ibis and the kids. In a panic he reached out toward Ibis, then stopped. He remembered now: they’d gotten off the planet. He sighed a deep, long, satisfied sigh. Spending the rest of his life with Ibis would have been sweet, but Wallace smiled at the thought of her flying away from this place.
He lay for a few minutes, steeling himself against the inevitable complaining of his knees and back that would come when he shoved himself off his sleeping mat on the floor. Yet, even as he did so, there was no pain. Not even the lingering stiffness of old age appeared. As always, the room was pitch black and he held his hands out in front of him, feeling first for the wall and then the door.
Jerking it open, Wallace stepped one foot out of the threshold and froze. Everything was wrong; at the same time something deep inside of him murmured its approval.
The stars were shining brightly above in a shimmering carpet in the cloudless night sky. The land and sea, however, were washed in a bright light as if it were midday, but lacking shadows as if the sun were straight above. It took him a moment to realize there was no sun; the light emanated from everything.
He hesitatingly stepped fully out of the shack and began to walk toward the communal firepit at the center of the shacks. It hadn’t been used since the others had passed on and he barely visited it anymore for all the missing faces, but something drew him there. As he approached, he saw a circle of people sitting around it. There shouldn’t have been enough room for the dozens of people ringing the fire, but they fit easily as if the very fabric of space-time around the fire had been twisted. It was both a small group and a giant host all at once.
Their clothing was fine quality uniforms, nothing like the seaweed Wallace had been using for garments. Feeling suddenly underdressed, he tried adjusting his shorts only to discover that he wore his Marine uniform. In fact, his entire body had filled out his frame.
“Can’t say I don’t appreciate this dream,” Wallace murmured.
“Who said this was a dream?”
Wallace’s body froze, unable to move, let alone look. The voice was pregnant with a perpetual laugh that seemed on the verge of escaping with every word. He knew that voice. He knew that voice better than any other save one. It had haunted his dreams and had lulled him to sleep for twenty-five years.
“Oh, P.J. Look at you. My man,” Elizabeth Wallace put her cool hand on his cheek and smiled. There was no hint of the violence that ended her life: every golden hair was perfectly arranged, her light gray eyes sparkled, her unblemished cheeks tinted with rose. His wife.
He did not know how to react. Slowly he reached up and put his hand over her hand. “Elizabeth…” This was turning out to be a cruel dream after all. “Elizabeth…”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” she said grabbing his hand and leading him toward the fire.
Wallace didn’t have to ask who the other people were, talking, laughing, and joking around the fire. There was Tom Zimmer, his best friend listening to Nemen, a security officer from his stint on the USS Europa before the War. The Andorian, and was his style, was waving his arms around while telling what sounded like an adventure story. Ming Xiao, a science officer who’d worked with Ibis on the Sunrise was in a deep conversation about accelerating particles and the nature of the universe with Amber Taltos, the Chief Medical Officer on the Nimitz. Despite the fact that dozens of people were absolutely bubbling with chatting, jokes, and stories the sound remained eerily distant, like a conversation heard from afar.
As he and Elizabeth passed around the circle, each person stopped and greeted Wallace like the long-lost friend he was. He gave each one an anxious ‘hello’ or quick nod of his head. He stopped dead at the sight of Commander Sajal Khan laughing at a joke from Captain Amos Forsythe. Both had captained ships he’d been assigned to; both had died in the line of duty. Unlike their others, both stood up. Sajal squeezed Wallace’s shoulder, “Message received, but no worries about the others. They’re all well. You did good, Major. You did good.” Forsythe, a man who had the distinction of saving Wallace’s life on more than one occasion, grasped his hand, “It’s been a long time. It’s good to see you again.”
Elizabeth guided him to an upturned stump and sat the stunned Wallace down. He was questioning the nature of this dream more and more. Many faces he spied were friends or acquaintances (some of whom he hadn’t thought of in years), others, however, he could barely remember serving with and then there were faces who brought no recognition. Was he inventing people for his dream?
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? These are all the people,” Elizabeth said as she settled down on the stump next to his.
“All the people? What people?”
“People you had an impact on before they died.”
“But there are some…like him,” Wallace pointed to a young-looking Vulcan lieutenant several people over. “I don’t even know who that is.”
“Talak?”
Wallace shrugged, the name wasn’t familiar. “I don’t think I know him. I never really had the best relationship with Vulcans. Logic hasn’t exactly been my guiding light for a lot of years.”
“You saved his life during the Dominion War. He was part of a security detachment…you know it doesn’t really matter. People bounce around the universe making a difference to people many of whom they’ll forget.”
“So these are all people that, I had an impact on? Positive impact?”
“Mm-hm.”
“It’s seems like a pretty big group,” Wallace said in awe. He hadn’t been the most pleasant person for close to twenty years. “What about the people who hate me?”
“We didn’t invite them,” Elizabeth chuckled. “That’s a pretty big group of people. You went a bit overboard with the whole angry-killer Marine thing. You could have dialed it back A little bit.”
“Well, I was pretty angry. I lost my wife, my daughter…is she?” Wallace scanned the group.
Elizabeth patted his arm. “You don’t need to worry about her right now.”
“But – ”
“P.J., you don’t need to worry about her right now,” she gave him the Look: one part stern, the other part tender. “As for those other people and your sour disposition. You got through it. I mean, it took you long enough and being stranded in this lovely place, but you got through it. It’s part of the reason you’re here.”
“What’s the other part?”
Elizabeth stifled a laugh, before shaking her head. “Well, you’ve made a habit of dying. Or, rather, not dying. There was that causality time loop you got caught up in. First you died and, then – poof! – not dead. There was that evil entity prowling around the ship who almost tore the will to live from your body.”
“I’ve never thought about crystals the same way since then.”
She smiled and patted his arm again. “Then there was that bear-cat creature on the ice planet. It put you into a coma for two months and should’ve killed you. And now, you tried killing a Pyrryx.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill it. I was trying to distract it.”
“Same difference.”
“So,” he looked around at everyone, “I came here or – er – somewhere like this after all those times?”
“Oh, no. No, you just floated in the…Let’s call it the ‘in-between’ those times. You wouldn’t remember it.”
“Then where’s here?”
Elizabeth scrunched up her nose like she used to when he’d ask her to explain complex medical research. It was usually a sign that she was struggling to simplify her explanation. “It’s where the law of conversion and unfathomable metaphysics meet.”
Wallace looked around again. Everything seemed solid enough, but so did holograms. Was this just pure energy? Was he just pure energy at this moment? “I’ll need to brush up on my physics – er – and theology. Okay. I’ll leave that to the side. But what about this other reason I’m here?”
“The other reason you’re here. Well. Let me ask you how many times did you try to sacrifice yourself for me?”
“I don’t know. A handful,” he replied, even though he knew the true number lay somewhere around a dozen or more, most during the Dominion War. It was easier to find opportunities when Jem’Hadar were constantly trying to kill you.
“You’re thinking about all those times after I died. Those don’t count. I was already dead, P.J.,” she chided. “How about times when I was still alive?”
They’d served together on the Canterbury and the Europa, neither were overly exciting. Mostly patrolling the Neutral Zone in peacetime before the Borg and Dominion. As he sat there thinking, he could remember only once during an away mission. Elizabeth and a medical team had become surrounded by colonists overcome with some sort of virus that caused them to go into a violent frenzy. “Once.”
“You’re thinking of the zombies, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But if I’d been some bald, sixty-year-old doctor you would have come for me, too.”
“You weren’t some bald…” He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“You don’t remember the casualty loop…”
“I remember everyone being shocked I was alive,” Wallace interjected.
“…so we won’t talk about what happened. But the thing on the ship that grew out of that crystal. You saved someone’s life and it nearly cost you your own. You didn’t need to do it, in fact you sprinted from the Marine barracks, seven decks down, nearly broke your neck in a Jeffries Tube in the process to get to where the entity was. There was a Security team already in the Science Labs when you showed up, and one of them was a split second behind you in trying to stop it from getting to that enlisted crewman. Do you remember?”
“Sure. But you know me, I hate sitting around with nothing to do in an emergency.”
Elizabeth gave him a deadpanned look. “And the bearcat on the ice planet?”
“Someone was in trouble. I wasn’t…We were in a cave system and I was – ”
“Was it two or three chambers away? Who was it you saved again? Wasn’t it the same crewman?”
Wallace did something he didn’t think he had the capacity to do: he blushed. “This is about Ibis.”
“What I love about the ice planet was that she had a boyfriend who was with her in the cave with the bearcat,” Elizabeth chuckled.
“The Doctor.” Wallace sighed. “The guy was great in a medical emergency, but when I showed up, he was blasting away at this ten-foot tall, half-ton beast with a phaser. All between Ibis and that thing was a stalagmite she was hiding behind. All his phaser was doing was pissing it off more.”
“Absolutely. Phaser was useless. So, Mr. Expert Tactician decided the next best option was trying to wrestle a thousand pounds of muscle and fur.”
“It worked. It gave her enough time to get away.”
“You jumped on its back and tried to bash its head in with a rock.”
“I succeeded at getting a few good whacks in. The thing was bleeding.”
“Oh, yes. It was bleeding. Then it dragged you off and bit your shoulder and clawed at you until – seconds later – a fully armed Security team arrived and managed to scare it off.”
“Ibis got away.”
“And you nearly died from the venom from its bite and claws. You were catatonic for two months!” Elizabeth laughed now, a full-body shaking laugh. After a few seconds, she wiped tears from her eyes and said, “I’ve missed talking with you. I’ve missed your tenderness that you hid behind that leathery exterior. I’ve missed that you can see complex tactical problems in real time and resolve them in a few seconds, but struggle with admitting you feel something about someone else to the point of mulishness.”
Wallace lifted a hand to her face, stroking her jawline with his thumb. “I got you, didn’t I?”
“No. I got you. You would have never asked me out. I asked you out and I asked you to marry me. And it still took you a full year to tell me you loved me. I shouldn’t be surprised it took you years to admit to yourself that you had feelings for Ibis. She wasn’t as – ahem – forward as I was.”
“Ibis and I have been together for years now.”
“You just told her you love her like yesterday, P.J.! You’re not exactly moving very fast.” Elizabeth grabbed his hand off her face and kissed his palm, “So. Here’s the other reason. You almost died all those times for Ibis Xeri, including this last time. In honor of you cheating the universe out of your death on multiple occasions for her, you’re being given a choice. Stay here with me or go back to Ibis.”
Wallace felt his stomach drop and then became acutely aware that everyone else had stopped talking and were paying close attention to his and Elizabeth’s conversation. Hundreds of eyes leveled his way, filled with tenderness and love. He suddenly felt buoyed by their presence, lifted up. He could stay here with them in this warmth, in this place where no one was in pain. But he got the choice that they didn’t and they were willing him to make it. The impossible choice didn’t seem so hard after all.
“That’s where they’re here.”
“Mm. Yes.”
“I spent a lot of my life wanting nothing, but to get you back.”
“I know. Because of it, you didn’t live it. Now’s your chance.” She leaned her head onto his shoulder. “And it’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
Wallace’s eyes fluttered open. The bright lights above his head made it difficult to see anything clearly. His mind felt like it was trying to push its way through vat of molasses. Every thought was slow in forming, slow in coming, and then was sucked down before it could do anything.
He felt a hand squeeze his. Slowly he turned his head to find Ibis, tears already streaming down her face, her hand trying to stifle sobs. He squeezed her hand back.
Wallace had to open his mouth a couple of times and work his tongue to get enough saliva in his dry mouth for him to croak, “Pyrryx…easy-peasy…didn’t…put me in…a coma. So, bearcat…was…tougher. Who knew?” He slowly lifted her hand to lips and kissed it. “I had…a…crazy dream…but…okay…now. I…come back to…you.”
