So, contestants, today’s puzzler. Given the choice between a very long trip with Julian Bashir in a cramped little runabout, with nothing to do except stare at the same paragraph over and over until her eyes merged to the center of her forehead, would Elizabeth Lense rather:

• a) have Tev torture her with Klingon painstiks for seven hours;
• b) be reincarnated as Tev’s personal Orion sex slave;
• c) play footsie with Tev in the mudbaths on Shiralea VI;
• d) just forget Tev, and stick pins in her eyes;
• e) What, are you insane? Stop wasting my time. Just phaser Bashir, then pilot her own shuttle, thanks, and she’d be as happy as a Ferengi in—

“Elizabeth, have I done something to offend you?”

Let’s go with e. “No, why do you ask?” Lying her head off.

Bashir’s brows tented in a frown. “Because ever since we got the news about the Bentman Prize, you’ve been, well, positively frosty.”

“Frosty? Honestly, I wasn’t aware.” Just shut up and leave me alone, because you really, really don’t want to go there.

“That’s not true,” he said, like he’d read her mind, and then she started to get mad. Bashir cocked his head a little as if she were a species of fascinating bacteria. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

The way he said it, those words…She felt like she was sixteen again. She felt as if they were back at Sherman’s Planet and it was Gold sitting there and not Bashir. Lense felt as if she’d been having this conversation in one form or another for most of her life. All kinds of people—her parents, her captain, not to mention several doctors—asking if there was something she wanted to talk about. Like talking ever made a damn whit of difference. “No.”

He gave a quizzical half-smile. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“I’d…I don’t want to get into it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t matter,” she said, knowing that no, really, it did.

“Anything that’s upset you matters, especially if it’s something I’ve done.”

That clinched it. He asked, right? “Okay. Honestly?” She reeled in a deep breath and said, “I don’t think someone like you should be eligible for the Bentman Prize.”

It was weird watching the way his smile deflated bit by bit, like his face was painted on some big balloon with a slow leak. “Someone like me.” He said it slowly, as if each word was a land mine he had to mince around. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on.” Squaring her padd on her console, she swiveled her seat until she faced him head-on. “You want me to spell it out? Someone who’s been enhanced. Someone who’s had his DNA rearranged so he’s some kind of mental superman. That’s what I mean.”

Color flooded his cheeks. “I don’t know that I understand. What’s my…enhancement got to do with anything?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb. Nobody’s keeping score; nobody’s watching. Don’t play dumb.”

He gaped. “Dumb? What are you talking about?”

“You. You’re such a fake. You were a fake back in medical school, and you’re a fake now. Take that final exam thing…you threw it, didn’t you? I mean, come on; the question was a gimme. But you missed it.”

“Medical school?” Bashir looked genuinely astonished. “Elizabeth, you’re still thinking about that?”

She clenched her jaw hard enough to make her teeth hurt. “Yes, I’m still thinking about that. I’ve always wondered why…no, how you could miss something a blind first-year medical student would’ve seen with a cane. The difference between a preganglionic fiber and postganglionic nerve…who’re you kidding? It’s a snap. But knowing what I know now? My guess is someone was looking at you maybe a little too closely. So, you figured, do something dumb, they wouldn’t wonder anymore. Worked, too. You played people just right and it seemed like it kept on working until Zimmerman showed up and started asking questions. Thing is, I felt sorry for you when I heard about that. Thought, God, just leave the poor guy alone. Not his fault his parents broke the law. But then Commander Selden came after me, and now? I don’t feel sorry for you anymore.”

Then everything came boiling out, stuff she’d stoppered up a good long time: about how she had lost a month of her life staring at the four walls of a dingy little room on Starbase 314 where she got to twiddle her thumbs while they poked and prodded and questioned and sampled her stem to stern. Came up with a big fat zero, too, because—gee, look at that—she was a pretty sharp cookie, and she hadn’t had a single base pair on any DNA strand tweaked anywhere, thanks. And, oh, by the way, while she was sitting around most emphatically not doing her job? A whole bunch of people, including the Lexington’s Captain Eberling, got killed, and for what? Because Commander Selden was a righteous pain in the ass. Because Selden made hunting down people like Bashir something of a mission, and no worries if people died because Lense wasn’t there to put on the save. Gosh, what’s a few dozen Starfleet so long as Selden got rid of Bashir and anyone else who—

“All right, all right.” Bashir held up both hands, palms out. “Enough. I get the picture. I don’t suppose it matters that I didn’t know about any of this; that it happened in the context of a greater paranoia about the shape-shifters; and that I’m not responsible for Selden or that paranoia. But I hear you, Elizabeth, I—”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “‘Elizabeth.’ Like we’re friends. We’re not friends. You don’t even know me, Bashir.”

“My God.” He looked as if she’d slapped him in the face. “So now I’m your enemy? Elizabeth, that’s irrational, that’s—”

“What, crazy?” Oh, that just burned her. Gold, Bashir, people, her whole life…everyone treating her like someone who needed care, so much understanding. Poor Elizabeth; she’s so fragile. Like she was some crazy woman ready to crack an airlock without a helmet. “I came by my degree honestly. I came by my brain honestly.”

“God, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. First Trill, now this; I can’t fathom this run of bad…” Sighing, Bashir pinched the bridge of his nose between his right thumb and index finger as if he were very weary. Like she was just one more thing in a series of spectacularly bad things heaped on at once. “Look, I was six bloody years old. Everything that happened when I was a child was utterly out of my control, and, enhanced or not, I still have to work hard. And I fail, I make mistakes, I bollix things up more than you can imagine, and a good deal more often than just in medicine. We both must. We have to because we’re only human. I’m just a person, Elizabeth. Whether I’m theoretically better, what’s the difference? What counts is what we do with what we’ve got.”

“Yeah, right. Except we’re going for the same prize. I’d like to see a level playing field myself. Gee, what’s it like to succeed all the time? Must be kind of nice.”

“Oh, completely. But, you know, people are so very uncooperative; they’re so fallible. They insist on dying before you can do a damned thing, or their feelings for you change and then—” He broke off and stared at his fingers knotted in his lap. When he looked up, his eyes were bright. “Would you like me to withdraw? Oh, wait, no, I can’t now, of course, can I? What was I thinking? Because then you’ll blame me for making it all too easy. I’m really in one of those no-win scenarios, aren’t I? I do nothing, you hate me. I do something, same result. Or you blame me, and that comes out to the same thing. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that there’s absolutely no guarantee that things on the Lexington would have worked out differently even if you’d been there. Maybe you’d have been killed.”

“Unlikely. Sickbay’s a pretty secure area.” A lie. That first shot blasted a chunk out of the Lexington’s sickbay and took out virtually her entire staff, and she was wondering just what the hell was wrong with Starfleet engineering specs, that they couldn’t reinforce sickbay better than that.

“But not impossible.” He paused. “Since we’re being so very honest, then I’d point out that you’re making me out as some sort of monster: your personal scapegoat for all the failures you’ve had, real or imagined.”

She wasn’t expecting that. “What? I haven’t failed. I’ve never failed,” she said, knowing she was lying again. (What, after all, was her paper about? Not one of her more shining moments, that was for sure. And why had she written about Dobrah? Was it because Dobrah was unfinished business? Because thinking about him was like a claw ripping her heart, making it bleed?) “This isn’t about me. Let’s just stay on point, okay?”

“No, let’s not. What, did you think I’m your personal punching bag? Not on your life. You give me far too much psychological importance.”

“So you’re my counselor now?”

“Stop that,” Bashir said. “You may be narcissistic and more than a little grandiose—”

“And you’re not? Fancy that, the great Julian Bashir, Frontier Doctor—”

“But you’re not a stupid woman,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “So don’t act like one. You want to hang something on me, go right ahead. But this isn’t about my competency, or even my enhancements. This is about you. This is about your competency.”

“My competency’s not the issue here.”

“The hell it isn’t. Now maybe without my enhancements, I’d have been a big zero. Just a nit. But it takes more than intelligence to make a person. No amount of enhancement can change fate, Elizabeth. You can’t control everything. The universe will do what the universe will do.”

She knew it was cruel and wrong, but she said it anyway. “Gee, I wouldn’t know about the universe, not being perfect and all.”

His face seemed to crumple. He looked away. She stared at him, every muscle quivering, her brain screaming that she was being unfair, that she was narcissistic, and Bashir was right.

No, that’s wrong. You’re a doctor, you can’t have doubts. In an emergency, you act first, have second thoughts later. You have to believe in the rightness of your constructions, or else everything falls apart.

Bashir let go of a long sigh. “You’re wrong, Elizabeth. Perfection, real or imaginary, has nothing to do with fate, and I’m not perfect. Never have been, and never will be. I’m not a freak, not a monster. I make mistakes all the time. I’m human, and I have feelings to hurt.”

She never had a chance to reply. Later on, she wondered what she’d have said and thought. It would probably have been something just as cruel because she didn’t want to cut him a break. Couldn’t afford to because being kind meant taking a good, hard look at herself and she sure as heck wasn’t going to do that. But, right then, she never got the chance.

Because in the next instant, the computer screamed, and everything went to hell.