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As Chakotay lies in sickbay,
struggling to communicate with aliens with whom he is linked, he
flashes back to the events that brought him there. He is in a
boxing holodeck simulation when he is knocked out. Shortly
after, Voyager is pulled into chaotic space, where the laws of
physics are in flux. Shear forces may destroy the ship unless
they redesign their sensors to work inside the disturbance.
Suddenly, Chakotay begins hallucinating and hearing voices from
the boxing ring calling to him. When he swings at Tuvok, he is
subdued and taken to sickbay.
Voyager locates a ship adrift
with no lifesigns aboard. Its last distress call reveals the
captain began hallucinating just like Chakotay. The Doctor
surmises Chakotay has a genetic marker for a cognitive disorder,
and the dead captain had a similar experience when the protein
insulation in his neural pathways was stripped. All of it is
apparently caused by chaotic space, and Chakotay insists on
taking a vision quest to learn more. Attached to a cortical
monitor, he suddenly finds the aliens communicating through him.
They tell him Voyager entered chaotic space through a trimetric
fracture, and they must alter their warp field to escape.
When he can no longer hear the aliens, Chakotay re-enters his
vision quest at the suggestion of the Doctor. He sees his
grandfather, who suffered from the same auditory and visual
hallucinations to which Chakotay is predisposed. Scared of
becoming a crazy old man, he is continually pulled back to the
holodeck boxing ring and an unseen opponent named Kid Chaos.
Stuck in the vision quest, Chakotay is suddenly interrupted by
the Doctor, who takes him back to sickbay.
In the Astrometrics Lab, Seven of Nine finds a pattern in the
form of an isolinear frequency. Janeway realizes it is a
nucleotide resonance frequency designed to activate DNA. She
believes the aliens may be on a perceptual wavelength unknown to
the crew, and their senses must be altered in order to
communicate. Given this chance to make first contact, Janeway
allows Chakotay to go back to the boxing ring, where he thinks
the aliens are trying to tell him something.
Back in the ring against Kid Chaos, Chakotay begins piecing
together the instructions he is receiving. His fear of losing
control almost causes him to block out the voices, but the
Doctor convinces him he must give in to it. Once the aliens tell
him how to modify the deflector, Chakotay carries out the
directions on the Bridge as the graviton shear quickly
increases. Suddenly, Voyager's sensors set the correct course,
and the ship is returned to normal space. |
