End notes (originally posted 8/3/20) This is a comics adaptation of my most-commented chapter story from the Usenet era of internet fanfiction, posted to alt.drwho.creative and to alt.startrek.creative, and archived on my original fanfiction website here, in March 2001 - yes, as I never pass up the chance to say, before the airing of the seventh season Star Trek: Voyager episode Author! Author! which treated the same themes. I had grown unsatisfied with the failure of Voyager crew to experience any character growth in their perspective on hologrammic beings despite their experiences including having one as a cherished crewmate. At this writing I don't recall that Author! Author! assuaged these feelings significantly (or much about it at all besides the ore mining thing, and that originated earlier in Life Line) and certainly it didn't move me to modify the element of this story suggesting the crew's apparent failure on our screens is an artifact of the events on our screens being not actual events but as if an in-universe broadcast drama began being produced from the ship's logs once Pathfinder went online. In 2016 during the annual The Hero of Three Faces summer hiatus, I took on the comic strip adaptation of In Thy Image as a summer project in honor of Star Trek's fiftieth anniversary year, to be The Hero of Three Faces' season premiere in the fall. However as soon as I got to the courtroom scenes I seemed to lose interest. Though I love courtroom dramas and though my fanfiction stories which are courtroom dramas are some of my own favorites, I didn't seem interested in drawing one. On the anniversary date itself I updated at The Hero of Three Faces with an abridged version of as much of In Thy Image as had been drawn. Shortly afterward on Inauguration Day 2017 I gave myself cause never to have Captain Sisko appear in The Hero of Three Faces in-panel or out-panel again, which I thought must be the end of the idea of adapting In Thy Image into triangle figure comics. Then in January 2020 the first episode of Star Trek: Picard dropped and I suspected issues of A.I. rights were going to get very topical and relevant so I took it up again. To accomodate the Sisko thing I've made this technically a separate project from The Hero of Three Faces, in a different subdirectory on the site and with different color page background and all. But selected scenes of this having appeared over there, it's established that these events are part of that continuity, without breaking the Sisko rule over there. The title In Thy Image is taken from the working title of Star Trek: The Motion Picture; which in turn was adapted from a script for Roddenberry's unrealized middle-70s Star Trek: Phase II revival television series which was scrapped mid-preproduction when the studio decided to move the franchise from tv to movies; which in turn was adapted from a script for Roddenberry's unrealized early-70s postapocalyptic Earth series Genesis II (or Planet Earth) for which, like Star Trek, he shot two pilots but which, unlike Star Trek, never did sell. (Unless you count Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda which was rather a post-apocaplytic space opera series, whose protagonist also was a man named Dylan Hunt displaced into his future by a time stasis accident. Roddenberry Studies 101 can be a trip.) My Usenet-era fanfiction was set in a crossover paradigm wherein everyone lived in the same universe, rather than on different planes reflecting between each other as fiction like in The Hero of Three Faces. An artifact of this was that the incarnation of the Doctor in the original prose version was not the Doctor's eighth incarnation [Paul McGann] from the 1996 movie, but a "ninth" incarnation [Rowan Atkinson] from the 1999 Red Nose Day telethon sketch The Curse of the Fatal Death. The Curse of the Fatal Death at the time of this story's original composition was the most recent video version of Doctor Who and I had adopted its primary incarnation of the Doctor as the Doctor's current incarnation in my prose and cartoons. Though my current fanfiction's continuity does embrace an incarnation of the Doctor from Curse of the Fatal Death, it's a different one, the thirteenth [Joanne Lumley] rather than the ninth; and, for reasons that would be tedious to read or to relate, in the current The Hero of Three Faces continuity, no Curse of the Fatal Death incarnation is extant at the chronology point when Voyager returns to the Alpha Quadrant. So this crossover features the official, contemporary, eighth incarnation of the Doctor. Story notes "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!": what McCoy retorted when Kirk wanted him to heal the injured Horta in Devil in the Dark. "the Louvois ruling": reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Measure of a Man in which Data is judicially determined not to be property but a living being. "You tried the last time": the Doctor in the flashback here refers to the events of my Usenet-era crossover Toy Story (suggesting those events or similar also occurred in The Hero of Three Faces continuity): Kirk demands that the Doctor refrain from violating the Prime Directive and refrain from interfering with their antagonist's plot because it's an internal matter on the planet, so the Doctor instead acts to assist the antagonist, converting what was an internal matter into an alien threat, on which Kirk's duty compels him to act. Afterwards Kirk moves to arrest the Doctor but is talked out of it. In this flashback from the events of In Thy Image to events shortly after Toy Story we see how, the next time Kirk and the Doctor conflicted over noninterference, Kirk beat the Doctor to turning the tables. EDIT 7/25/22: The events of Toy Story are now explicitly included in The Hero of Three Faces continuity in this cartoon. "from Naraht to Nog": Nog on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the first Ferengi in Starfleet. Naraht was the Horta crewmember of the Enterprise -prime or -A in Diane Duane's licensed novels, an offspring of the character who caused McCoy to deny bricklayership. I don't incorporate elements of "expanded universe" continuity into my fanfiction's continuity without a really, really good reason; in this case, it's that the alliteration was irresistable. "Including me!": I don't remember years later why I felt, when I first started drawing this story, it was important that the JAG should add "including me" when speaking of non-Federation-citizen members of Starfleet, but I do vaguely remember that I had a reason. "When Commander Data later chose to reproduce himself": Data had a daughter in The Offspring. The EMH acquired the mobile holoemitter in the 29th century in Future's End Part II. B'Ellana Torres altered the EMH's program trying to get him to perform a genetic alteration on her unborn daughter in Lineage. The former Maquis crewmembers mutinied under the influence of brainwashing in Repression. The EMH's daydreaming was exploited and he began development of Emergency Command Hologram protocols in Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy. Dr. Chaotica appears in three episodes centered on The Adventures of Captain Proton, the season five recurring holodeck program. The original version of this story on my website and as posted at Usenet calls the character "Lord Chaotica", and no one reminded me it's actually Doctor Chaotica till I was drawing this and had to look at his Memory Alpha page for art reference. The JAG still calls him "Lord" when addressing him in this version because she's buttering him up. The EMH's holographic family appeared in Real Life. The episode closes with the death scene of the child mentioned here, which the EMH has been persuaded to attend by Paris' argument that failing to complete the run of Torres' subroutine would deny himself exactly the pain and the support that is the experience of having a family which the EMH had set out for. Yet the holographic family never appeared on Star Trek: Voyager again. Sometimes in my fanfiction a one-off screen character, or a recurring screen character who vanishes suddenly, who was very important to our heroes is posited to have remained actively important behind the scenes (e.g. see commentary below on Michael Sullivan), but the EMH's holofamily didn't interest me enough for that and here I've passed that disinterest to him. Michael Sullivan appears in two episodes centered on the season six recurring holodeck program, Fair Haven and Spirit Folk. In Fair Haven Janeway develops feelings for Sullivan to the degree that she modifes the holoprogram to make him more interesting and less married, and becomes concerned at how attached she is becoming to a holocharacter; the EMH persuades her to pursue it but by allowing him his flaws as one must allow in a relationship between organics (see also this The Hero of Three Faces cartoon). In Spirit Folk Sullivan is projected outside of the holodeck for diagnostic analysis of a malfunction in the holoprogram and one of the effects of the malfunction turns out to be that Sullivan can unexpectedly perceive the starship environment around him when he wasn't supposed to be able to. In the original prose version of this story I called him O'Sullivan because I got it wrong; also I had Fair Haven as one word. It was with the airing of the two-parter Flesh and Blood, depicting the rebellion of intelligent holograms created by the Hirogen with Federation technology Voyager had given them because the Hirogen were using the holograms to hunt for sport, that I now first remember feeling the characterizations of the Voyager crew were not adequately keeping up with the impact of their longterm experiences involving holograms in the series overall. Though perhaps I'm wrong and they wouldn't have advanced as I was expecting. Human beings have blind spots. Retconning continuity inconsistencies by implying the events on our screen are not actual events but are recreations for popular entertainment in-universe is something I first brought into my fanfiction, pre-internet, for the original Star Trek to address Klingon physiognomy issues. Voyager is the only other Star Trek series I've felt over the years necessitated it and, though there are several instances in The Hero of Three Faces when dialog about fiction-plane reflection science tells us that the reflected fiction isn't always accurate, in The Hero of Three Faces continuity for Voyager it remains that the whole series falls under a layer of inaccurate fiction-reflection before it even departs its own plane (and it remains true for the original series too though not for the Klingon thing cuz there's onscreen rationale for that now). Kes left Voyager in The Gift and returned for one episode in Fury. In Fury her motivations and actions during her return are very different than are reported in my story's dialog here. The EMH hallucinated that he was his creator Lewis Zimmerman and that Kes was his wife in Projections. Kes and Torres worked and failed to expand the EMH's storage capacity without losing his memories to date in The Swarm. Memory Alpha doesn't have a Starfleet serial number for Sisko so I had to invent one. "Hitler, and Caligula, and Li Quan": Li Quan or Lee Kuan was one of the Earth historical figures Spock listed in The Patterns of Force as comparable to Hitler, the only one from later than the 20th century. (I was sorely tempted to replace one of the names in this 2020 version of my story with a certain name from the early 21st century and I'm not certain why I didn't.) "there'll be mistakes made initially, even fatal mistakes": this line of dialog has appeared in the story since the original version in 2001. It was not added after Star Trek: Picard started streaming, when we learned of the snyth attack on Mars and its repercussions. Which isn't to say the Doctor didn't already know. Time travel. The epilogues however, obviously, were scripted during and after Star Trek: Picard season one. In the final scene Janeway is wearing the same insignia as does the commander, Starfleet in Star Trek: Picard. Initially I was going to give it only four pips, assuming five on an admiral's insignia means commander, Starfleet. But four pips has always meant captain not admiral, so I let Janeway have five. If you happen to know that five pips on an admiral's insignia does mean commander, Starfleet then you may presume that Janeway is now CinC after the forced resignation of CinC Clancy whose head of security was a Romulan agent but, more importantly, who had the audacity to be the first person ever to say "fuck" to Jean-Luc Picard. EDIT 1/8/22 Today I belatedly noticed I'd only had the five-pip insignia on Janeway in the final panel of the final scene when, of course, I meant to have it in all panels. Fixed now. Kes is indeed wearing Jedi robes. Chaotica is dressed as Hamlet to imply he's become an actor. Thanks for reading.