Tymber Dalton - Out of Bight, Out of Mind

She did not sleep.

Later that night, after she was certain her men deeply slept, Emi slipped out of bed and dressed, grabbing her handheld as she headed toward the main hatch. By the time she reached the sim lab, Graymard was waiting there for her, dressed in jeans and an Arizona Cardinals T-shirt.

She stopped short at the sight, not used to seeing him in anything but a uniform and a lab coat. “Thank you for coming back,” she softly said to cover her initial confusion at his appearance.

He offered her a tired smile. “I’ve been staying here in one of the guest suites since we started the process. I didn’t want to venture too far afield and not be available to you.”

She felt guilty over that, that his life was upended over her. “I’m sorry.”

He waved her apology off. “Don’t be. This is part of my job. I’m not married, and my dog doesn’t care where we sleep as long as I feed and walk him on time.” He kindly smiled. “I know we were never what one could call close before, but I’ve been rather fond of you since the day you first walked into my office for your initial interview. Seeing how you interacted with Aaron, Caph, and Ford in the sim only reinforced that opinion.”

She blushed. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

“I’ve prepared the playback series you asked for. Are you sure you want to do this alone? You don’t want to wait for Donna or your men to accompany you?”

She nodded. “I know it’s going to hurt. But I also know it didn’t really happen.”

He shrugged. “Very well.” He led her over to the closest sim bed and helped get her settled before he attached the sensor leads to her forehead. He put a button in her hand. “I’ll start you out as an observer. I won’t immerse you until you tell me to. Remember, if it’s too intense, hit that button and everything will pause and you’ll feel like you’re standing in a sim room watching it instead of being part of it.”

She nodded, holding a deep breath as he closed the lid of the sim bed, waiting to let it out again until she sensed him move away toward the control console.

She closed her eyes and waited for Graymard’s countdown to begin.

His soft voice filtered into her consciousness. “Sim to begin in three…two…one…”

Mentally she opened her eyes and found herself standing on the bridge of the Tamora Bight . In the command chair, she saw herself sitting there, reading with her legs drawn up under her. Emi felt her own heart jump and begin to race as her sim-self sat up at the sound of an alert beep. With shaking fingers, her sim-self reached over and touched the screen, where a message box popped up.

Emi took a deep breath and softly spoke. “Full immersion mode.”

Graymard immediately replied, although her sim-self didn’t react. “Full immersion mode, commencing…now.”

Emi experienced a brief moment of disorientation as she found herself now seated in the command chair and reading the alert message. Her heart raced as adrenaline flowed through her body.

She relived the events as they had originally happened to her in the first sim, struggling to remember that it was just a sim, even as the very first one had been.

Still, the emotions, the fear felt real.

The terror.

The grief, thinking she was going to lose Aaron to an alien. That he voluntarily went to his death to save their lives.

As the four of them stood in the Grantz executive vessel and received the ultimatum that one of them would stay or all of them would die, Emi didn’t care that it was a sim of a sim.

She had started to plead with Aaron to reconsider his decision when everything went black. She felt a rush of air against her face and heard the outraged voice of a man screaming.

“…you goddamned motherfucker! We told you we didn’t want her going through this part alone!” Ford.

She opened her eyes to see Ford leaning in over her, his face filled with worry as he started removing the sensor leads from her forehead. “Babe, are you okay?”

She burst into tears as he gathered her into his arms and helped her sit up. He cradled her against his chest, his anger at Graymard white-hot and volatile.

“She’s an adult, Ford. She asked for this.”

“We fucking told you! You promised!”

“Please don’t be mad at him,” she whispered. She felt Ford’s anger begin to settle, to shift from supernova to violet, then orange, eventually settling into the hot grey of embers, stable but able to be stoked at a second’s notice. “I asked him to do this. I needed to.”

A little more of his anger dissipated as confusion crept in. “Why, babe? We told you how rough it was. Why would you want to go through this alone when we could help you? Especially since technically it didn’t happen.”

“I needed to.” She sat back and wiped at her eyes as she met his blue gaze. Some of her recalled past still felt hazy, as if she’d watched it in a sim.

“But why?”

For the very reason she’d suspected, and the painful sim experience had confirmed. “I had to feel it,” she whispered. “I had to feel the pain.” It wasn’t the only pain that now flooded her soul. “I needed to feel it. I needed it to break through the final barriers.”

Graymard still stood by the console. He nodded to her. She knew he understood.

She returned her focus to Ford. “I needed to feel what grief did to me, deep inside me.”

Ford slowly shook his head, confusion now further dampening his fading anger. “Again, why?”

She took a deep, hitching breath. “Because it was the only way I could make the neural connections and remember what happened and how it felt when I lost my parents.”

Recovering the remainder of her memories was an agonizingly emotional process, but one Emi refused to shy away from. With the combination of the sim sessions, guided meditation tricks, and a lot of crying on the shoulders of Donna and her men, Emi quickly struggled her way through it to the amazement of Graymard and his staff.

And since having met other F’ahrkays without feeling the same darkness she had before, she realized more than ever how spot-on her empathic senses had been about Kayehalau and his intentions.

Her men swore to never challenge her again on that point.

They wouldn’t dare. Not after what happened.

The ISNC and DSMC also instituted new regulations that trained empaths could overrule the assignment of a crew member to a ship of less than ten permanent crew members without other cause. More than ten members, the captain and medical officer, if the med officer wasn’t the empath, also had to sign off on the refusal.

Five months after returning to New Phoenix and three months following the night of Emi’s breakthrough in the sim, what few holes remained in her memories amounted to little more than the smallest of moth-made wounds in the largest of tapestries.

In other words, she could live with it.

With her skills completely intact, and her knowledge of the Bight ’s systems as strong as ever, Graymard cleared her to resume her duties. She asked for, and was granted, an extra week to take care of a few Earth-based errands.

Emi and her men, along with Donna and her men, and Yanna and Pabo, had a quiet celebratory dinner at the same expensive hillside resort with the great view that Emi and her men had stayed at before leaving on their first mission.

Before they started eating, Aaron held his champagne glass up in a toast. Emi looked into his sweet, brown eyes and enjoyed the flow of love from him as well as Caph and Ford.