It felt strangely liberating to voice aloud the thought he’d tried so hard to avoid for the past two days. “At the rate I’m declining, by tomorrow I’ll probably no longer be able to function as the ship’s chief medical officer.”

“You don’t know that,” Ezri said.

“I can feel it, Ezri.” He decided that now wasn’t an occasion that called for a stiff upper lip. “I believe I’m…reverting. Regressing to what I was before Adigeon Prime.”

Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “Before you were genetically enhanced.”

“I can’t begin to explain it,” he said, nodding. “But somehow our encounter with the alien artifact has begun…undoing my genetic resequencing.”

She seemed to mull that over for a moment before responding. “It sounds crazy, but it fits. Nog and I are reverting, too, if you think about it. He’s become the two-legged Ferengi he used to be. I’ve been turned into the unjoined Trill I was before the Destiny brought me together with Dax. And you’re becoming…” She trailed off.

Slow, plodding, uncoordinated, dumb Jules Bashir.

Jules. He had repudiated that name during his childhood, after his parents had, in effect, repudiated him—when they’d had his DNA illegally rewritten when he was only six years old. Whatever Jules might eventually have accomplished left to his own devices had been rendered moot from that point on, forever after consigned to the shadow-world of roads not taken. Inaccessible mirror universes.

He vividly recalled the day, three short years ago, when he had taken his parents to task over this. Facing the very real possibility of dismissal from Starfleet because of his illegal genetic alterations, he had wished that Richard and Amsha Bashir had never taken him to Adigeon Prime, that they’d instead simply allowed nature to take its course with young Jules, for better or for worse.

That errant wish now appeared to be coming true—and the brutal reality of it horrified him. He realized now that it meant the loss of abilities and talents which he had come to take for granted over the better part of three decades. The loss of what he sometimes feared were the only things that gave him value as a human being.

The loss of self.