REGINALD BARCLAY

TROI: I've decided to ask Captain Picard for a temporary leave of absence. To spend some time with an old friend.

BARCLAY: Oh, Deanna, you, you, you don't, you don't have to do that.

TROI: Try and stop me.

TROI: So let's start from the beginning. How did you come to be involved with Pathfinder and Voyager?

BARCLAY: I’m not, uh, sure I can talk about it.

TROI: Do I need to make a call to Captain Picard?

BARCLAY: I’m sure that won’t-Won’t be necessary.

Do you remember hearing about Prometheus?

TROI: That was the incident on the Romulan border wasn’t it? When we first found out Voyager was on the other side of the Galaxy.

BARCLAY: Right! When that happened, I was still on the Enterprise. It started out as a day like any other.

Even though it had been over half a year since the Borg Attack, we were still in spacedock. Given how much of the ship the b-Borg had converted. Starfleet were apprehensive giving us approval for deep space missions again.

TROI: I remember. Geordi was pulling Borg components out of tertiary systems for months.

BARCLAY: We had to come up with a way of stopping their autonomous regeneration process. Until we did that, every time we removed something it grew back. Our first idea was to-

TROI: Reg. Prometheus.

BARCLAY: Right, right… Geordi came to find me in a jefferies tube. He told me I had a classified priority transmission and that I needed to drop what I was doing to go and, uh, answer it.

It was from Starfleet Intelligence. Do you remember after that uh… Proto… Morphosis. Syndrome. On the Enterprise?

TROI: How could I forget. Didn’t Beverly name it after you?

BARCLAY: Un.. Fortunately. Yes.

After that, I felt I needed to take a bit of time away from the Enterprise.

I accepted a temporary secondment to Jupiter Station to run stability and integration tests on Doctor Zimmerman's Emergency Medical Holographic program before it was deployed on starships.

Starfleet Intelligence contacted me because a hologram they said was claiming to be Voyager’s EMH was claiming he had helped the EMH MK2 on the Prometheus fight off the Romulans to regain control of the ship.

TROI: Two medical holograms? Against a Romulan boarding party?

BARCLAY: That was the reaction they had! So they asked me to verify the, uh, story. I was obviously still on the Enterprise and the neutral zone was days away at maximum warp. So I had to do it over subspace.

Which was no easy feat

TROI: I’m sure they were very impressed

BARCLAY: They were.

I spoke with Voyager’s EMH directly while running my diagnostics. Oh Deanna. I hope you get to talk to him one day.

TROI: Is he anything like Dr. Zimmerman?

BARCLAY: Perhaps… A little too much.

TROI: Then I’ll pass, thank you.

BARCLAY: Suit yourself… But he really is an incredibly interesting hologram. He had thousands of hours of up time, and his matrix had been augmented beyond practically all recognition. I was able to access his matrix identifier string and confirm he was from Voyager. But there was also a second string in there, from the diagnostic program I developed at Jupiter for EMH field maintenance.

TROI: I bet that raised a few eyebrows

BARCLAY: It turned out his matrix had almost destabilised so Lieutenant Torres drafted the diagnostic matrix on top to reinforce it.

He also told me that a radiation surge once caused him to hallucinate me!

TROI: I bet you loved that

BARCLAY: Well, in the hallucination I was trying to convince him to destroy his program so, uh, not so much.

…

Anyway, after I had verified he was who he said he was. I needed to make a report directly to a war room at Starfleet headquarters.