Reinitializing the EMH

Lieutenant Barker shuffled from out of the service conduit and stood up. He looked around the empty sickbay, surveying the damage that was caused during the Borg attack. Turning back to the panel that he'd just been working on he, reactivated it and announced.

"Computer, Activate EMH."

The image of the EMH appeared, but remained still. Chu reached out a hand and tried to push against the image. It was solid, so the efforts of the past six hours had been worth it. Before that, Chu had tried the same maneuver and fell straight through, hitting the floor rather hard.

*This is no good.* He thought.

He'd volunteered to try and get the EMH back on-line, with the loss of Doctor Barbara Clairidge, the Leviathan would be needing the EMH more than ever. Soon the Leviathan would be too far into the Beta quadrant to allow Starfleet to send a replacement.

He'd spent the last two days on the project and still the EMH was not full on-line. When the Xavier entity that had come aboard was exorcised from the ship, all the holographic systems had been fried. Holodecks, the holo-communicator on the Bridge and the EMH had been unavailable ever since.

It had taken an engineering crew nearly a day to replace all the holo-emitters in sickbay. Since then, all Chu had been able to do was to get this lifeless image of the EMH to appear. He couldn't find out why the computer system was not being interfaced with the holo-emitters.

"Computer, run a level one diagnostic on all computer interface systems."

<Diagnostic will take two hours to complete.>

*Time to get something to eat*

Leaving sickbay, Chu headed for the turbolift.

Mess Hall USS Leviathan

Walking into the mess hall, Chu looked around. There were very few people there, it was after all early morning (Very early). He walked to the replicator and ordered a plate of Palamarian sea urchins and a glass of water.

He spotted the Captain sitting alone, but thought better of joining him.

Everyone aboard knew that the Captain and the Doctor had become close and the thought of having to kill someone you care about, even when you knew it was the right thing to do was always hard.

Instead he sat with one of the Ensign's from Stellar cartography and spent an hour or so talking about how the mapping systems were progressing whilst he finished his sea urchins and drank his water. As he waited for the turbolift to arrive to get back to sickbay, Chu was aware of someone beside and just behind him. As the turbolift doors opened, Chu walked inside and was joined by the Captain.

"Captain." Lieutenant Barker said rather awkwardly acknowledging the presence of the Captain.

"Bridge." Devore announced.

"Sickbay." Chu said.

"How are the repairs to the EMH going ?" Captain Devore inquired, realizing that Chu felt awkward around him, almost everyone was at the moment.

"Not too good sir. I'm running a level one diagnostic on all the interface systems now to see if I can find the problem, that's where I'm heading back to now."

"Well keep at it Lieutenant, I am sure you can solve the problem."

The turbolift doors opened.

"My stop I guess Sir."

Chu stepped out of the lift car and walked towards sickbay.

Sickbay USS Leviathan

"Computer status of level diagnostic."

<The diagnostic will be complete in two minutes and twelve seconds. Mark>

A couple of minutes later the computer announced that the diagnostic was complete.

Chu sat at the computer console and looked over the results. He saw that the whole bio-neural data network was filled with dead bio-neural gel. In several places, the network paths were totally blocked by this debris. This had happened either by the presence of the Xavier entity or by the tachyon burst that was used to remove him from the ship caused it.

Either way it was going to be hard to remove, once neural gel died it became a thick, sticky goo, most of the dead gel could be removed by filtration. However, where the gel had caused blockages, the only solution would be to replace the blocked length of network. From the diagnostic, twenty sections were totally blocked and until these were replaced, the removal of the remaining dead gel could not begin. It would take at least a day to replace them all.

*Lieutenant Hansen is going to love me for this. I think I'll wait until tomorrow until I tell him what I have found*

Chu noticed that he's left the statuesque figure of the EMH on.

"Computer, deactivate EMH."

He left sickbay and headed for his quarters on deck eight, to rest until the start of his shift