Determination and Free Will

[Semil 0]

Free will wasn’t all it was determined to be.

 

Semil rubbed the isolinear chip between his fingers. He stared at it with his weak, amethyst-colored eyes. It was a very tangible symbol of his treason. It was very “solid”. His lips turned up with bitter amusement.

 

It was not his first act of disloyalty to the Founders. When he had first learned it was the Hundred who had awakened him, he could have defied them. There had been no termination implant available, but he could have fled and let their Jem’Hadar cut him down. But the New Link had planted a “greater sense of free will” in him, they claimed. He was now truly an agent for himself. The Hundred were the embodiment of all he had been genetically trained to revere. They spoke and asked him for his obedience, while the Founders had turned and sealed themselves away from their own servants. In their absence, was it disloyal to heed their heirs? Was it better to wage war on them as Keevan and other self-serving Vorta had done?

 

Semil sneered at the thought of the Council and their inept stewardship. If it hadn’t been for the converted units and cloning facilities of the Hundred, the whole of the Dominion might have been lost to the Scorpiad. Striking back at the invaders had been the noblest expression of his faithfulness.

 

His devotion had not wavered, but he wondered how pure his faith remained. To keep the Federation as an ally, he had revealed that the Dominion had violated treaty and left a covert communications station behind in the Alpha Quadrant. He had told them the great secret Keevan had been hiding: their gods had abandoned their hidden homeworld and were gone. This news alone should have let the Hundred assume rightful control of Dominion space, but the upheaval alone could spell doom in the face of the Scorpiad threat.

 

Now Semil was engaged in preserving the very reminder of their last ill-fated war. He was about to exploit the Dominion’s illegal communications array, exhausting huge energies, to warn the Alpha Quadrant of a Scorpiad strike on Deep Space Nine. He would expend his limited force of Jem’Hadar to dislodge the invaders from a target he didn’t even care about. Instead of letting the wormhole and its meddlesome users remain bottled up, he would become an instrument of its salvation. If he didn’t, the Scorpiad would multiply, the Allies would atrophy, and there would be no Dominion for the Hundred to inherit. He had little choice.

 

So much for free will.