404 Error - EMH Not Found

Posted on Monday, 3 May 2021 - 1:08pm by Emerick

Mission: Operation: Neu Reich
Location: USS Standing Bear | Sickbay
Timeline: MD 4

Alone once again, a program and nothing more. That was how the Standing Bear's holographic medical program felt or at least how his advanced personality subroutines made him experience. This was not a loss of a patient, it was the loss of a shipmate who he had once been frustrated with, to the point that their budding friendship was mowed down with his sharp diagnostic precision. Eyelaya was dead. All that was left behind was a flesh and bone she'll that had been placed in 'cold storage' before being handed over to the Chief Medical Officer of Starbase 21.

Emerick had wrestled with Eyelaya's death for the past few days. They had never quite patched up their friendship before then. Over a year into the Starship's journey, and he had managed to not only ruin a friendship, but lose the opportunity to heal it. Biological life forms were complex and as wonderful as they were terrible. What was he to do now? She was gone, she was never going to come back to mend their strained friendship.

Doctors Rose and Alexander would be back in a few days time, having made a difference even a small difference on P'Jem, but Emerick was a hologram, confined to the starship and In a worse case scenario where holoemitters were entirely offline, he was null and void. No amount growth and expansion of his program and unlocking of subroutines was ever going to change that. He was not flesh and blood. He had no rank. He had no true position. He simply was a holographic tool with a programmed personality that from time to time stepped outside the predetermined box he was built in.

There had really only been two people to stop and take time to get to know Emerick as Emerick, not as an Emergency Medical Hologram: Doctor Ryan Rose and Chief Petty Officer Eyelaya. He had lost Eyelaya in every way humanely possible, and Ryan? Their friendship was something Emerick found himself cherishing, if a hologram could cherish. Yet part of him had always wanted more, to explore more with Ryan Rose, but that path was full of briars, and he learned quickly that Ryan was never going to go down that road with Emerick. They were friends, that was that.

It was probably one of the more difficult decisions that Emerick had ever had to make, especially in regard to himself. It was, however, the only choice he thought that he had. He could either tinker around and reset his program to it's initial settings, erase the past years worth of memories and familiarities with the crew, but eventually they would mention Eyelaya, Ryan would try to befriend him, and Emerick or whatever name he'd choose to go by (if he chose any) would leave him operating like an amnesia patient.

They had underestimated their emergency medical hologram. The less Eyelaya came in to run a diagnostic on him, the more he became a physician who self-diagnosed and sought to treat himself. He cleared out subroutines to learn and adapt, acquire more technical knowledge about his own programming. It was initially in order to be more helpful, less of a strain on engineering and operations personnel. Now? Now, it was just a means to liberate himself from the guilt that plagued his program. He was sick. At least sick was the best way he could describe it, and there were treatments for it, but he wanted a cure when none existed.

Everything was set up. It was all in place. Messages were recorded onto a PaDD and marked to be delivered to each specified individual upon attempts to reactivate the emergency medical program. Emerick stood up from Ryan's desk, touched the surface of it and thought about his friend who would often sleep underneath it. "Goodbye, my dear friend."

Emerick closed his eyes as if he were going to feel something, but he knew it was a painless procedure. It would be as simple as deactivating his program, except this would be the last deactivation if everything had gone as planned. "Computer," he said to his arch nemesis. "Terminate the program Emergency Medical Hologram," he said clearing his throat.

He knew the computer was not about to let him go easily, but he had found the code to do it. He tapped into his audio subroutines and modulated his voice to mimic that of his creator Doctor Lewis Zimmerman. "Authorization Zimmerman Alpha-One-Zero-Omega."

The computer recognized the old, archaic, yet still proper code. The voice recognition was fooled. The USS Standing Bear's EMH flickered into deletion.