Yes, it is once again abominably late 🙈 In my defense, as of today I am on sick leave, so I have some time to gently coax my sleeping rhythm back into a more acceptable time frame.
But for now: Here is another snippet!
I keep jumping wildly between WIPs. This one also goes into the Emil-prompt-collection, though this is Rios's chapter (which I just started now). Or it will be, eventually. Sometimes you need to spend 500+ words pondering the nature of the medical emergency (hologram)...
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For the seventh time in the last twelve hours, Emil called up the neurological readings on the biobed’s display and studied them intently. He could have simply let his programme interface with the ship’s medical systems (and somewhere in the depth of this code, this connection was being established to verify his visual input). But the motions of manually checking on his patient had something… calming, perhaps.
Of course, as a hologram, purpose built for medical emergencies, he did not need to perform calming actions for himself. He did not have emotions that needed to be addressed, not in the way his organic patients did. But in the year since his first activation, the EMH had found that his behavioural and socio-affective algorithms did benefit from performing certain actions that, in a human, might have been considered emotional regulation.
If anyone asked him, he could always say that he was gathering the data visually to calibrate his autonomic diagnostic algorithms. If he ever found himself disconnected from the ship’s various systems due to a technical emergency, he would have to deal with whatever crisis demanded his attention by solely relying on his perceptive subroutines.
Not that anyone would ever ask. Ian might give him a knowing look, but none of the other holograms were fully aware of the extent to which Emil could or couldn’t draw information directly from the ship’s computers. And their captain… well.
Emil looked down at the lifeless form of Captain Rios and heaved a deep sigh.