Chapter 25 - Teaser! (Patreon)

The chapter is done, now I just need to finish the polishing.  It's also over 20k words long, so I'm considering moving some of it to chapter 26, but we'll see.  We're going to be doing a lot of tech creation this chapter, so it'll be light on action and more world building, but I do hope you like it!  :-)

___________

Infirmary. Deep Space Nine.

‘I am firmly stuck on the canon path, aren’t I?’ I thought with a sigh, as I reclined on the Cardassian designed biobed in the station’s infirmary while casually glancing around at all of the frenetic activity going on.

If a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, what had my many actions brought about? There were differences, sure, but for someone who hadn’t been working very hard to preserve his future knowledge, I was surprised at how closely events had followed the show. The only possible way to explain it was that the Prophets had been subtly guiding things back to the path that they wanted, which wasn’t a bad thing for Bajor…or for myself, if I was honest about it. It did rankle a bit though. I had a feeling I would have to pick my spots going forward.

Looking around, trying to take my mind off these thoughts, I was struck by how different the station’s infirmary looked from the television show. Of course, it had to be different. Just like the Enterprise’s main shuttlebay was a truly cavernous space that looked gigantic in person compared to the space in the show, the infirmary set depicted on the show was nowhere near the size it’d need to be to realistically provide medical care and services to the station’s entire population.