Insanity at 0300

[Archie Phoenix 0]

Archie was seated on the floor beside his bed, where he hoped the air would be more favorable. His uniform tunic was discarded beside him, despite the fact that he’d overridden the environmental safeties in order to set the temperature in his quarters to minus ten degrees. He was starting to suspect that there was something wrong with his sweat glands. He knew that in the presence of great heat the Renazian body was supposed to release sweat in an attempt to cool itself off. His body was doing no such thing, thus he could not cool off no matter how much he lowered the temperature in his quarters.

 

Or was he in his private classroom in the Tower of Mystics on Renazia? Yes, he remembered that it was always very warm in the Samudi Province, and the Tower of Mystics was an antiquated structure with none of the air coolant systems that had long since been made standard in Renazian construction. That was also why he could see the stars -- the Tower was one of the few structures left which offered views of the outside, and it was tall enough that those views eclipsed the rooftops of other buildings.

 

But the stars were never directly outside the windows. One always had to look up to see them. Ah, of course, he was not back on Renazia; he was still in outer space. That window he was looking through was, in fact, a viewport -- as standard on Federation starships as stifling isolation was on Renazia!

 

So why was he so confused? A Federation starship could not be any more different from a Renazian habitation. So why did he have to continually remind himself of which one he was currently inhabiting?

 

Ah, yes, it must have been the people! That had to be it. Everyone here was just as annoyed with him as everyone on Renazia. He fit in here no better than he fit in there. He was now certain that his chief, Lieutenant Semo’ran, was out to get him, probably for offering ideas that were dangerous to the community. And his strained relationship with Betty Black had just come to a head as the two engaged in a shouting match in Main Engineering.

 

Or had she only shouted at him? It was so difficult to recall these things.

 

Betty Black?

 

No, that was someone else. Archie looked down at the PADD he was holding in his hand -- his Archie comic collection. Now he remembered. That was Betty in the comic, and he was sure that Archie had yelled at her in one of these issues. Why had he pulled his collection out again? For guidance, most likely. It had been a gift from one of his favorite instructors at the Tower … no, at the Starfleet Academy. Of course, his Renazian instructors couldn’t have cared less about such things as Human comic books. But his Academy instructors had recognized Archie’s unfamiliarity with the Human race; it was Doctor Mender of the Cultural Studies course who had given him the comics.

 

Why had he pulled them out? What was he looking for this time? Answers to which puzzle?

 

“This is not working out, you know.”

 

At first, Archie barely registered the voice. Was it another whisper in his head or had it come from outside? But, no … the whispers in his head never used that voice. It was such a light and cheerful voice, one that he’d heard so long ago that he could scarcely remember it. He looked up and saw, sure enough, the shadow of a figure not more than four feet tall sitting on the edge of the dining table beneath the viewport, its legs swinging back and forth underneath it.

 

“What are you doing here?” Archie asked, his head tilted in curiosity. “How did you get here?”

 

“I was invited.” The voice answered with a giggle. “How did -you- get here?”

 

“These are my quarters,” Archie said. “I can get in and out as I please. The door opens for me when it senses my approach.”

 

“That’s not what I‘m talking about. I meant, how did you get to where you are now? How did you get to be an adult?”

 

Archie took a moment to consider the shadowy figure that had apparently not changed in size since the last time he’d seen it. “I … grew up.”

 

“-Did- you?” The legs stopped swaying and the figure pushed itself off the table. It stepped into the light, fully revealing a smartly dressed young human boy with neatly combed black hair and searching blue eyes.

 

“Well, -you- certainly didn’t,” Archie pointed out.

 

The boy giggled again. “We’re talking about different things again.” The boy ran forward and dove onto Archie’s bed. He leaned over the side to look down at Archie’s PADD. “Reading those comics of yours again?”

 

Archie gave the boy a confused stare. “How do you know about these? I got them years after we met.”

 

“And you think -I’m- the one who didn’t grow up,” the boy said with a sly grin. “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for in there, Archie. A bunch of pictures and word bubbles can’t answer questions that a childhood is meant to answer.”

 

At that, Archie’s expression suddenly turned very grim. He looked back at the PADD and the tone of his voice grew stern. “I would rather be alone right now.”

 

“Funny,” the boy said. “You said just the opposite to Jordan.”

 

“You don’t know anything about that!” Archie’s voice was rising. He glanced around his quarters. “Is this some kind of trick? Hm? Is this something that Gam’aj is doing?”

 

“The only thing tricky here, Archie, is that you haven’t slept in six days.”

 

Archie shook his head. “No. That’s nonsense. That’s the Doctor talking again; Gam’aj told him all sorts of lies about me. Nobody can go that long without sleep.”

 

“That -is- true, isn’t it?” The boy looked very amused by this whole exchange. “But then, isn’t that a clock over there on that table? And doesn’t 0313 mean ‘after 3 AM’ in the military?”

 

Archie grabbed the sides of his head and looked around his quarters frantically. “No … no … I just don’t feel like sleeping! I’ve had enough of sleeping! I don‘t want to talk about it and I don‘t want to talk about the others!”

 

“Of course you don’t,” the boy replied. “Because you know it’s not working out. You tried to make it work in the Academy -- your first real opportunity to form a friendship -- but you never had the time; you were always so busy studying either your Academy work or the other students. And when you were studying the students, it was never active; you only observed.“

 

“I -had- to learn about your people if I was going to work with them!” Archie shouted at him. “And they had to study too! It’s not my fault if they weren’t interested in putting aside their education to befriend some alien!”

 

The boy hopped off the bed in front of Archie and grinned menacingly at him. Ignoring the outburst, he plowed on, “-So- you figured you would make up for the lost opportunity here on Arcadia, where the bonds would last a lot longer anyway, right? But it’s not working, because you don’t have the experience that you’re supposed to have. You don’t have the experience that I have -- the experience of a -real- childhood!” The boy threw an accusatory finger and tauntingly added, “You never grew up, Archie! You never grew up!”

 

 

Archie plowed into the corridor outside his quarters with a pained yell. He threw himself into the wall facing the door and braced himself against it. As the door slid closed behind him, he looked up and down the corridor. He was glad that it was empty; no one had seen him.

 

With his balance wavering and his cognizance of reality gradually slipping away, he kept his hands on the wall as he stumbled to the turbolift at the end of the corridor. He leaned against the turbolift wall for a moment, his breathing rapid and shallow.

 

It took a while for him to decide on his destination -- both what it would be and whether he really wanted to go there. There was the briefest moment during which he was poised to choose the Shuttle Bay and the command to the turbolift computer was about to issue from his mouth, but the small fragment of his better judgment that somehow remained in tact convinced him otherwise.

 

“ … Sickbay.”