You Are Not We

Posted on Sun Apr 26th, 2026 @ 4:08pm by Lieutenant Alexandra Blackstone MD/DSAPM & Lieutenant JG Jezra Siv MD

3,694 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Peril at the Unification Accords
Location: The Mindscape - Siv Symbiont
Timeline: MD 11 - 1300 (concurrent with "A Matter of Trust")

With Jezra's attempts to communicate with Siv, it wasn't difficult to figure out how the two communicated. However, there was resistance where there should have been cooperation. As if Siv were the one restricting the telepathic link. Jezra's mental image interpreted that connection like a console that wouldn't cooperate.

Alex' form resolved behind Jezra and she cleared her throat. "Well, at least you are intact here in your own mind... for now." Alex looked around, a brow raised in her telltale sign of curiosity. "It seems.... dark. You know yourself better, is it just the two... no three of us here?" The echoes of sickbay resonated through the darkness around them for a moment.

Jezra jumped and turned around. Despite the eerie silence in her mind, she wasn’t expecting this particular guest. The reservations about the meld with T'Varel were still there, but she was glad to see... think of?... Alex. "It must be bad if you're here," she commented. Something that vaguely sounded like an order from sickbay whispered by, causing her to turn her head briefly toward the general direction the sound came from. "Normally, I can feel the past hosts as Siv projects them, but it's too quiet now. The last thing I got from Siv was this... feeling of something foreign, but I haven't been able to find it or get anything else from Siv. Every time I try, it gets darker and more disappears."

Alex smiled and looked at Jezra with a soft grimace. "That confirms my fears I think.... I am afraid that I may not have much time. How do you feel apart from your connection with the Symbiont?" Alex looked around the environment surrounding them; her mind racing as she tried to puzzle out the pieces.

Their surroundings not only lacked light, they lacked... life. Like rooms on moving day, stripped of their personality. Just walls. There was a shudder, and Jezra looked to the console before pressing a button. A quiet hiss bled into the air, and the shuddering stopped.

Jezra stared at the console as if it held the answers. It made sense to be afraid, perhaps even panicked. Those emotions were there, but they felt like a borrowed jacket. "I feel... wrong. Like I'm out of sync with myself. I can feel everything, but it's... distant?" She shook her head and gave an exasperated little chuckle. "Everything is wrong, and I have to stand here and remind myself to breathe."

Alex nodded before stepping forward and placing a hand on Jezra's shoulder. "I came to help... but I can't do it from your end I think... I think that I need to connect with Siv through you... but you'll have to trust me."

That made Jezra raise a brow. "Connect with Siv? Is that even possible?"

Alex offered a shrug. "This isn't exactly territory I have tread before; I don't think it has ever been attempted before this moment."

With a slow nod, Jezra glanced around again, looking at how dreary the place looked. "I trust you. Just... be aware that Siv doesn't communicate the way you expect. I don't really know how to explain it, but just... keep an open mind."

Alex nodded, stepping forward and placing a hand on Jezra's shoulder. "Hang in there, don't give up your own strength. We will get you through this."

Covering Alex's hand with her own, Jezra gave it a faint squeeze. "Just don't shock yourself unconscious this time," she teased. The timing of the tease was questionable at best given the circumstances, but humour was a coping mechanism, right? She then turned back to the console and pointed out a part of it. "That will take you to Siv, or rather, how I understand what talking to Siv is like. Just... let me brace before you do anything? The last time I tried, it did, well..." she waved a hand at their surroundings.

Alex nodded and chuckled. "I will try to ensure you can brace but I can't promise you'll get any signals from me. I should hurry... I know the flow of time in the mindscape is much different for most from the physical realm... but that being said I don't think we have a lot of time." She stepped forward to the console and placed her hand upon it, unconsciously in the same setup as a meld.

When Alex touched the console, noise began to seep into the air. It was sickbay again, overlapping voices with a faint ringing of the persisting biobed alerts. It seemed the console also played some inherent role in how Jezra processed her own senses. Without thinking, Jezra covered Alex's hand to guide it into position, the way she'd do it if she were talking to Siv. She winced as more lights flickered, but before either of them could react, everything disappeared. The console. The walls. Jezra. All of it... as if it never existed.

The chaos of sickbay vanished like an echo into a cave, followed shortly by the surrounding darkness. Brief whispers of thought that resembled Jezra's voice were distant, thinning until they no longer held shape. All that was in its place was... silver. There was no horizon, nothing to distinguish sky from ground, but the silver wasn’t still. It twisted and folded without direction or preference, like water being moved by pressure too abstract to give a name. Eddies would appear, disturbing the flow with swirls before it dissipated back into nothingness. The directionless motion of the field wasn't random; there was a rhythm and depth that could almost be associated with presence. While it lacked any defined shape, it also wasn’t nothing.

Alex stayed still, watching the eddies and flows, observing them for patterns or rhythms for a long moment. She could feel the presence around her though admittedly this was her first time directly touching the mind of a symbiont as the Trill guarded them jealously and melding with one had been previously thought to be impossible due to the supposedly basic nature of them.

A few beats passed where nothing spectaular happened. A few eddies popped up, some near the unfamiliar presence and others far away. The unfamiliar presence left ripples in the silver. Those kinds of ripples were familiar, but this wasn't the presence that had merged before. It wasn't like any of the other presences that came before this one. This presence was... temporary.

Alex caught the fleeting presence and narrowed her eyes as she watched it. Something in the back of her mind resonated at the flash but she couldn't quite place it.

The silver shifted, as if a current changed direction. It created the disorienting sensation of moving upwards. After a couple seconds, it dissolved into something else. A space station. A woman with brown hair twisted back into a bun and a teal uniform was navigating a promenade, and the memory seemed to go with her. As the faces cleared up, her Trill markings became more pronounced.

Sialle paused, then turned to face the direction that happened to be toward Alex' mental image, as if someone had tapped her on the shoulder. The noise of the promenade persisted, yet in the memory it became muted. "Can I help you?" She asked. Once the question was asked, time seemed to slow down, as if waiting for a response. The people slowed to a snail's pace, noise and laughter becoming drawn out and slightly down-pitched.

Alex' gaze slid over Sialle passively and then swept around them at the memory for a moment. She tugged on her connection to Jezra and the knowledge in her head as she surveyed everything then smiled as the name came to her; though it was a tenuous and stretched feeling as though the name had been lost in some nearly forgotten memory. "Sialle? You are one of the previous hosts of the Siv Symbiont?"

The presence responds to this. The memory shifted subtly; the same person, but a different background. To the less observant, the shift was so smooth that one could convince themselves that they imagined it. This time, Sialle was in an isolated corridor, where she was talking to a Human woman. Sialle looked like a slightly younger and healthier version of herself, like one who clearly hadn't yet been exposed to the gruesome decisions of war. The air between the two women was thick with the weight of their conversation.

"I wish it were that simple," Sialle told the other woman. A whispered relic from the memory gave the Human the name Kara.

Kara grasped Sialle's hands. "Then please explain this to me," she pleaded. "I love you, but you've changed and I... I just... I need to know it's still you."

Sialle's eyes softened as she freed one of her hands to cup Kara's cheek. "I'm still me. The past hosts are a part of me, a part of Siv."

"The past hosts are a part of me..." the memory echoed.

Alex nodded silent and waiting; to some degree she was apprehensive. Her next words were softly muttered to herself "So far beyond the realm of the known here..."

The phrase "the past hosts are a part of me" lingered in the air for a couple more seconds. The response is different. This presence doesn't see the same way as the permanent one. Something new tickled the senses. Sterility, and a hint of citrus. The scenery began to shift again, but as it was mid-shift a different sensation came through. Pressure. Repetitive, pulsing pressure. Dread. It wasn't on purpose, more like a feeling that had leaked through when it wasn't supposed to.

The sensation only lasted for a fraction of a second before the memory finished resolving into a familiar place. Astrea's sickbay, specifically the CMO office. The two had just sat down to have their tense conversation, and Jezra asked Alex for permission to record their discussion. Time seemed to skip forward slightly, past Jezra's self-identification, to when Alex had stated her name and rank for the record.

"Lieutenant Alexandra Blackstone, Assistant Chief Medical Officer."

Alex nodded, looking around with a wary eye. "I am here to try and help... we aren't alone, are we? and I don't mean the other hosts."

The memory paused for a half second, just long enough to give the impression of careful thought, before it skipped forward again. Jezra's voice said, "... another... person..." Then Alex's: "... don't know what to make of it..." There was a hint of strain pressing on the memory, almost giving the sensation of the walls being closer than they actually were.

Alex took a half step back, wracking her brain for any hint as to what had caused this situation in the first place and after a tense moment she rubbed her brow as her own memory of the book of Ancient Vulcan Rituals and Practices from the Holodeck came forward. "Oh.... that might make sense..." came the soft statement.

The memory shifted again. A sickbay in chaos. It was abrupt, like being slammed into a wall faster than a blink.

The lights were an angry red, and the space was overwhelmed with injured and dead crewmembers. Someone shouted "out of the way!!" when a group rushed in while carrying someone. The one being carried was unconscious and covered in blood, the black and command red of her uniform glistening in several places.

Jezra was there. She was younger, hair pulled back into a low ponytail. When the captain was brought in, her face paled before she scrambled to get a bed cleared. The group put Linora on the biobed and cleared away for the medical team to swarm in and begin triage. Jezra was at her side immediately, assessing the damage to her captain. In the memory, the exact words were muffled, but the procedural response was a clear enough indication of what had been spoken.

The scene progressed through triage until the code sounded. Jezra leaped into action, starting compressions while ordering anyone who was available to bring the crash cart. The indicators on the monitor above the bed faintly pulsed in time with her compressions.

The person on the bed started as a middle-aged woman, but as someone passed in front of Alex's mental image, the face changed shape. The patient was now also Jezra, the older version of her with short hair. The version Alex was familiar with. The younger Jezra in the memory didn't notice the change as it was something meant for Alex to see. Instead, she continued trying to revive her patient, her captain.

When Jezra spoke, it was to address someone who was actually there in the memory. "I'm losing her!"

The scene carried a heavy emotional residue. It was ominous, and it clung to every surface. It reeked of battle, a metallic and wet reality. While its name was never spoken, the emotional burden could only have come from the Cidrin Battle.

Then, the memory shattered like glass, returning to the silver field.

"I can't take this anymore... it's too much..." Jezra's voice whispered from somewhere in the field of silver. Her voice was broken, desperate for a solution. It was also hushed, like words not meant to be spoken to another person.

Alex watched and listened stepping forward toward Sialle. "I have an idea to help you. It will probably take as much coordination as you can muster from all of the hosts contained within you... are you familiar with the idea of a mind castle?"

Sialle's image was the only thing that had remained when the other visual input ceased. She stared for a few seconds, then her image shifted into that of a different woman. Her attire wasn't that of a Starfleet officer; it was gardening clothes. Her mauve-coloured hair was braided back, grown out enough to show some of her true sandy-blonde roots. It was Kohnia Siv, but she didn’t speak. Instead, another voice came from the silver field, one that fleeting impressions recognised as a good friend of Kohnia's.

"The idea of using specific locations in imaginary space to remember things is nothing new, Kohnia." The lilting melody of a chuckle whispered by like wind through tall grass before the male voice continued. "But there is so much more you can do with it..."

"I'll take that as a yes; or at least as close to one as I am going to get. I need you construct one around us... and then I need you to pull Jezra's psyche behind the walls of it... if you don't... well I don't like the prospects." Alex explained, her words rapid and in a single breath before she took another.

The mental image shifted to an older man in an apron, and a faint scent of bread trickled through the silver field. "That is quite the request," Yarem said, looking at a PADD in his hand.

This presence is concerned. Anxious. Wants urgency.

Then, something different happened. The mental image changed more quickly, like a reflection being warped by a breeze. Each new image collaged words together:

Sialle. "This is-"
Jedex. "Risk."
Jezra. "Uncertain. We-"
Yarem. "Are not-"
Kohnia. "You."
Jezra. "We need-"
Rigon. "Another-"
Kohnia. "To survive."

"That is my purpose here. I can loan you a measure of my own fortitude... how can I assist?" Alex' head spun slightly from the rapid change of images but she blinked a couple of times to clear it and her voice was slightly insistent.

Rigon. "We are-"
Sialle. "Memories of past-"
Jezra. "Experience."
Yarem. "Must see-"
Jedex. "To make."

A couple of voices from different hosts then spoke at once. "Show."

Alex nodded, closing her eyes and focusing internally. She jumped slightly as she felt the environment around her responding to her own thoughts. The world around them faded back to the liquid silver across which ripples spread, emanating out from Alex. Slowly, brick by brick, the walls of a medieval style fortress constructed themselves with Alex at the center of the guards. Several moments passed where everything seemed to blink in and out of existence and with each return the image of the medieval fortress shifted to different forms from across the eras of time until finally they flickered to the appearance of a Starship Shield around them and then settled back to the Medieval Fortress. Only when everything had solidified did Alex open her eyes again and look to the figure that represented the symbiont.

At first, the shift in environment came with a little resistance, but it quickly dissipated as Siv fought their own instinct. Being the last mental image who had spoken, Jedex looked around at the fortress. His image was of a younger man, easily in his prime and with the physique to match.

The mental image then shifted to Jezra, that younger version of her with longer hair. "I think it's possible," she said to her invisible conversation partner. She then closed her eyes, as if in deep concentration. This place is safe to the temporary one. Secure.

Around them, the image Alex had produced warped, the walls and structures bending as if the entire thing were a reflection in a pond. A few seconds passed before the silver field returned, only this time there was a sense of direction. Jezra's hands reached for Alex's in a silent ask for support as the scenery continued to shift around them.

Flashes of pale blue rippled through the silver. They weren't alone, but it also wasn't danger. Deep in the silver were teardrop-like shapes, slowly moving through the field as if time meant nothing. There were six of them in total. Each quiet flash of blue from them was as familiar as recalling a story. One was smaller than the rest, like it was still growing, still learning. That one's stories weren't finished yet.

The sense of direction shifted, creating a feeling of moving upward, and soon the two breached the surface of a pool. Jezra's clothes had changed into cream-coloured robes, as had Alex's. The water they emerged from was opaque and milky, and the six shadows moving in the water turned out to be symbionts. A dim, blue-green glow illuminated the caves around them, yet instead of eerie it felt... secure. Like visiting home for the first time in years.

"We keep them safe here..." a memory of a voice whispered by. It was of a Guardian, only the familiar sensation didn't come from the mental image of Jezra. It came from all around, as a memory that predated any experiences beyond the Caves of Mak'ala. "Our role is to protect them and care for them..."

"... safe here..."

Alex took a step back; watching past the pools at the environment beyond, watching as things began to settle and calm. She opened herself fully, letting every single sense inform her as to what was occurring around her.

"The symbionts know they can always come back here," the Guardian continued. The memory began to fade at the edges, but it was different than prior memory shifts. There was a sense of finality. Another figure entered the caves; another Jezra, in the same cream-coloured robes Alex was wearing. This Jezra was the short-haired version, and her presence felt distinct from the surroundings. But her image was barely visible, like a ghost trying to take shape. The caves around them continued to fade as more of her image appeared.

Jezra looked to Alex and gave a simple nod. Thanks to Alex's link, she could sense what was going on, but she couldn’t see where she was going. To her, she was still in the crumbling rooms of her own mind, but she was being led through the pieces. The place that held her fear of the unknown was too far away to reach.


Alex continued to watcb for just a moment longer to ensure that Jezra was now safe from whatever assault she had been the target of and for the briefest moment the image of an old Vulcan relic flashed through the void and a feeling like that when you are holding a rubber band that snaps without warning rocked her. She took a step back away from everything, her mental shields slamming shut like steel emergency doors and turned to look out into the blankness, peering through the newly established caves.

A Guardian guided the real Jezra to one of the pools next to the one tha crewt Alex was standing in, and he guided her hand toward the liquid surface. Her semi-transparent fingers disappeared beneath the surface but didn't create ripples. Jezra's brow furrowed in confusion, knowing she was supposed to be feeling something but unsure of what. After a few seconds, her image became opaque enough for her fingers to start displacing the liquid, and she blinked and looked around, as if seeing the caves for the first time.

The mental image of Jezra that was near Alex had dissipated out of existence, and Siv's presence shifted to their surroundings. Despite the fading imagery, the space was very much alive, and as Jezra stepped into the pool, a sensation not unlike a shielding embrace warmed the air.

Leave. It wasn’t spoken, nor was it harsh. It was a presence that persisted as the caves grew distant.

At the felt command Alex slowly became aware more fully of her own body and she offered a brief wave to Jezra before letting herself retreat and return to her own self where she snapped awake with a start, sweat upon her brow...

---

Lieutenant J.G. Jezra Siv
Chief Medical Officer
USS Astrea


Lieutenant Alexandra Blackstone
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Astrea

 

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