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Paris and Torres are confronted by
aliens who materialize on their shuttle, fire a weapon at the
pair and disappear as quickly as they'd appeared. Although Paris
sustains serious injuries from the charge, Torres recovers
sufficiently to get them back to Voyager. Neelix tells Janeway
that he doesn't know these aliens by name, only by reputation.
They attack any outsider who dares to enter their territory,
swarming in mass like angry insects. Unfortunately, charting a
route around their huge territory isn't feasible, so Janeway
opts to stay on course.
In Sickbay, the Doctor can't
remember how to complete an operation; the Emergency Medical
Hologram's memory circuits seem to be degrading. The only way to
help him is to reinitialize his program, but Torres reveals that
if she does that, all of the memories the Doctor has acquired in
the past two years would be lost, along with much of his
personality. Torres transfers the Doctor's program to a holodeck
recreation of Jupiter Station, where his database originally had
been written. There, they meet a holographic recreation of Dr.
Lewis Zimmerman, creator of the EMH. "Zimmerman" explains the
Doctor's "meltdown" is understandable, since his program was
designed to run for only 1,500 hours.
The crew adjusts Voyager's shields so that the ship can slip
through the aliens' sensor net without being spotted. But as
Voyager proceeds, one of the tiny alien ships fires a polaron
burst that makes the starship once again visible on their
sensors. The "swarm" begins to pursue Voyager and the crew
assumes battle stations. The small ships attach themselves to
the ship and begin draining its energy. Realizing that every
vessel in the swarm is connected at some quantum level, the crew
is able to create an explosive chain reaction that drives them
off long enough for the ship to get through their territory.
With the Doctor's memory degradation becoming worse every
minute, Kes convinces the Zimmerman program to graft his matrix
onto the Doctor's. The procedure works, although it will be a
matter of time before they know if the Doctor retained all of
his memories. |
