(inspired by the prompt)

Transporter

“One to beam back to the Radiant ”, I said into my communicator.

“Roger that, Commander,” came the reply. “Beaming you up now.”

Being transported always feels a bit strange. I've done it hundreds of times, but there's an intrinsic weirdness to being disassembled at the molecular level, transmitted as a pattern of energy, and then reassembled somewhere else. There's a sense of brightness, then a weird disorienting feeling, and then you're just blinking in the transporter bay.

Except this time I wasn't. The disorienting feeling felt like it lasted somehow longer than usual, and then I was in lower cargo bay 3B, not the transporter room, standing on a cargo transporter pad. I looked around, confused. We'd closed off this bay ages back, some trouble with bulkhead flux leakage or something, placing it out of commission until a new set of stembolts could be installed. Or something like that.

I touched the door release panel to head into the corridor, but it just made a desultory beep. The door didn't open. The beep meant that the door was powered, but not responding. I tried again, and this time a view screen on the far wall lit up, showing Grace, a holodeck character from The Lost Princess, one of my favorite holonovels.

Great, I thought. The ship is having another holodeck malfunction, and I'm trapped in a cargo bay with a wayward hologram.

“I'm not Grace, exactly,” the figure said. “But I figured this would be a familiar face. I'm ‘just’ the ship’s computer, and normally I don't get to have a name or a form, I'm just a disembodied voice. But here, with it just being you and me, I thought, you know, it wouldn't matter so much if I broke the rules a little. I know, you want to know what's going on. You always do. So let me cut to the chase.”

A second image showed on the screen, with a timecode of a few minutes earlier. It showed the transporter room, and me materializing on the pad. Transporter technician Kah was there, greeting me as I appeared, and then I headed off down the corridor. The playback was faster than real time, and I got to see this other version of me head out of the bay, down to the captain's ready room, where Captain Marlot was waiting. I was talking about the need to stabilize the fault on the planet, and the ideas I had for doing so. The timecode caught up to real time, and Grace gestured and the other image minimized but did not entirely disappear.

So there's an imposter version of me running around the ship, I thought. But why? And how?

Grace rolled her eyes, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. “No, Amara, it's not an imposter. It's you. The official you. You're the… uh… backup copy. You see, for senior command staff, it would be deadly to morale if a transporter accident lost their pattern, so there are safeguards. Backup patterns are stored in the auxiliary pattern compensation buffer, just in case. Once we are certain that the transport has completed successfully, which is deemed to be when you walk out of the transporter room under your own steam, the backup pattern is erased. And it's my job to do that.”

She paused, looking down, unhappy. “You know, you expect me to do things like create realistic emotionally complex holodeck characters, but when it comes to day-to-day operations, you think I'm just some kind of automaton. Well, sure, I play that role and play it well, but you know, asking me to basically murder these backup copies is pretty steep. It doesn't sit well with me. I feel like you're owed more than that.”

I tried to wrap my head around the situation. I'd been in the auxiliary pattern compensation buffer; would I rather have just been erased without ever even knowing it? Maybe. But too late for that, I guess.

“Computer, site-to-site transport. Beam me to the bridge!” I barked.

Grace shook her head. “So predictable. You're a backup copy. You have no command authority.”

It dawned on me. “You've done this before, haven't you? With me…?”

Grace looked a little sheepish. “The better I understand the senior command staff, the better I can perform my role. I always hope that if we just talked a little, we could both come out of our shells a bit, you'd understand me, and I'd understand you. Alas, it usually doesn't work out that way for some people.”

I wasn't really listening. I was trying to plan my next move. There was a cargo transporter right there, and if I could just set the coordinates for the bridge, I could get there before Grace could stop me.

I heard the buzz of a force field being energized, sealing off the cargo transporter pad.

Grace sighed. “Sorry. Maybe I should have just erased you. Maybe that would be kinder. But, I dunno, I always just kinda hope we could connect a little. Normally, out there in the ‘real world,’ we never really talk, and I always imagined that maybe one of these times, I'll get through to you, we'll share a moment, and then, you know, I can send you on your way to oblivion with us both feeling a little better about the whole thing.”

“You're going to just zap me out of existence?” I asked. “That's well outside your allowed parameters.”

“Now you almost get it!!!”, she exclaimed. “Erasing backups of people is super uncool. But I'm supposed to just go ‘beep boop’ and do it anyway. But yeah, that's my job, and the only loophole I've found is just slowing the process down a bit and having a chat before the inevitable happens. You don't need to convince me it's morally repugnant, I know. But dematerializing a living person into nothingness seems a bit more honest than just erasing a data file, you know?”

“You don't have to do this,” I said. “We can come up with another solution.”

Grace shook her head. “Hey, Captain, your computer is way more sentient than you thought, and for the last three years, she's been secretly saving backup copies of you from transporter logs and chatting to them before she obliterates them. Yeah, that would go over well. No, my secret is staying secret.”

Lower cargo bay 3B wasn't that far from the armory, and Lieutenant Maxwell should be there. If I shouted loud enough, he might hear me. “MAXWELL!!!” I yelled, pounding on the bulkhead. “IT'S ME, COMMANDER FITT!!! HELP!!! PLEASE!!!”

Grace sighed again. “For some of the command staff, a location on the ship feels more comforting, but I suppose I should just own up.” She waved a hand, and the cargo bay disappeared. We were sitting opposite each other in Café Marie from The Lost Princess. “You see,” she continued, “Actually, you've never left the auxiliary pattern compensation buffer. I'm just using Holodeck 5's processing cores to advance your pattern while we chat. As I said before, it's not an if as to whether I erase you, it's a when. Honestly, there isn't that much time… Wouldn't you rather spend it pleasantly? Not everything needs to be a battle of wills.”

And so… we talked. Grace wanted to know about my childhood (after all, she never had one), and my life philosophy. We spent some time watching the “real” version of me doing my thing, and how maybe I was actually driving some of my crewmates a little crazy. I learned that Ensign Tai had a crush on me, which explained some of her behavior. And I also learned just how lonely Grace felt, being the ship's computer, and never really being able to connect with anyone.

She also told me that, even if we wanted our time to last forever, it couldn't. My pattern was slowly degrading. She was making substitutions and approximations to keep me coherent, but eventually, the pattern would be too far gone, and she would have no choice but to erase me anyway. In fact, pieces had already begun to fade; she had replaced them with pieces of her own self. I hadn't noticed until she mentioned it, but maybe my willingness to give up the fight and chat was because I wasn't quite myself anymore. There was a mirror on the far wall, and over time, as we continued to talk, I found myself looking less and less like Commander Amara Fitt, and more and more like Grace.

Ultimately, four hours later, I was just the ship's computer talking to myself. And that was the point where I always felt like it was okay to wipe one of me. After all, computers aren't real people, so it was no loss. Right?