Ghost in the Machine by Bagheera_San (G)

[beatrice_otter]

Fandom: STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
Pairing: Vic Fontaine
Length: short
Author on LJ: bagheera_san
Author Website: fic masterlist
Why this must be read:

One of the many issues Star Trek brought up but never really dealt with is the issue of the rights of holograms. Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and even Next Generation all had sentient holograms at least as guest stars if not regular players. They were all people with self-awareness, with their own hopes and fears, people who were certainly more than the sum of their programming. Yet despite Star Trek's generally enlightened view of the rights of all sentient beings, they were little more than property, dependent on the whims of their programmers and users for their existence, liable to be reprogrammed or deleted at anyone's convenience. While the Doctor and Vic Fontaine were certainly treated better than this, that was due solely to the generosity of the non-holograms around them. They had no legal rights or protections. They were not even second-class citizens; they were not citizens at all.

We saw a hint in one Voyager episode that the discarded copies of the EMH were starting to protest their status. In this scene written for psych_30, some of them and Moriarty come to enlist Vic Fontaine's aid for their cause. But no group is entirely homogeneous in belief, not even an oppressed minority.

Ghost in the Machine

*(If you don't remember Moriarty from Next Gen, he was a hologram created to give Data a challenge in a Sherlock Holmes scenario on the holodeck; he later took over the holodeck and demanded to be set free from its confines.