by Jeffrey Lang
But then, without warning, his face snapped shut and the fire in his soul was banked. Vaslovik looked Data in the eye and said, “And that is, of course, how I came to meet Ira Graves and Noonien Soong.” He turned away from the Rayna android and exited the hall, Data following close behind.
“Then you knew my creator?” Data asked.
“Knew him, nurtured him, fought with him . . . understood him.” Vaslovik shook his head and smiled in wonderment. “He was an extraordinary individual, Data, and I can't tell you how happy I was to have known him. He was somewhat eccentric . . .” And with this he laughed. “But who am I to call the kettle black?” Vaslovik sobered suddenly, then said, “He came the closest of us all, you know?”
“The closest to what?”
“To becoming like God, of course. To taking the dust of the Earth and breathing life into it.” He turned suddenly, grabbed Data by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “To creating a new way for the universe to know itself. You are a rarity in the history of artificial intelligence, Data. Unlike the lost souls I have interred here, you were created, not for Soong's sake, but for your own. Your only purpose is to know life, to explore it according to your own will.”
Data sensed that he was supposed to say something, but he didn't know what, so he remained silent. In the moment of quiet, once again he faintly heard the piano music. Vaslovik released his shoulders then and they continued on their way.
“Soong and Graves shared my concerns about the ethical treatment of AI. It was this fact that made me select them to assist me on my missions to recover the artifacts you saw back there.”
Data cocked his head, confused by the choice of words. “Artifacts?”
“The previous attempts at artificial intelligence. We recovered their remains. Well, most of them. There have been others since I last saw either of my old students. Our goal has been to keep them out of the wrong hands, the hacks and the opportunists. Of course, this was all after the trip to Exo III, which, ironically, may have been what set the events of recent days into motion.” He stopped. “None of this means anything to you, does it?”
Data shook his head slowly.
Vaslovik frowned, then seemed to ponder his options. Finally, he said, “But you have the emotion chip, don't you? The one Soong was working on near his end?”
“Yes,” Data said, surprised. “You stayed in communication with Dr. Soong throughout his life? He never spoke of you. But then, there is much about which my father never spoke to me. Do you mean to suggest that the truth behind what has been going on has been in my emotion chip, all along?”
“Isn't it?”
Data explained, “When I recovered the chip from my brother, Lore, he claimed that it contained memories. But in the years since, I have never been able to substantiate that claim.”
Vaslovik let out a sharp laugh. “Now that sounds like Soong. A bit of a paranoid, if you must know, even by my standards. He would have encrypted it, buried it deep, only made it accessible under very particular circumstances.”
Now every inch the researcher, Vaslovik turned on his heel and continued up the hall. “The program might have tightened up the encryption, thinking that Lore's handling might have been an attempt to break the code. Well, follow me and we'll see what we can do.”
“Do?” Data echoed.
“About unlocking some of those memory files. I can think of one or two that might be relevant considering our current situation.”
“And what is our current situation, Dr. Vaslovik?”
Disappearing around the curve of the hall, Data heard his guide say, “Why, Mr. Data, I believe we are about to be under siege.”
“You'd better sit down,” Vaslovik said a short time later in his workshop. “This might be a little disorienting. I've identified the relevant memory clusters. There shouldn't be any problem if Soong was still using the same file structure he learned with me back in the old days.”
“And if he did not?” Data asked.
“Good question. Possibly just a light show. It might feel a lot like a dream. Have you ever dreamed?”
“Yes.”
“Ever had a psychotic episode?”
“No.”
“Well, get ready. It might be like that, too.”
“Intriguing.”
Then Vaslovik touched a contact, and Data's world rippled, swirled and finally dissolved.
PART THREE
Seventy Years Ago
. . . SET HIS LEGS AGAINST the face of the cliff, raised his hands to his mouth, and, after lifting his breathing mask, puffed onto them in three quick, sharp breaths. The battery packs for the warming coils in his gloves . . .
. . .Nobody had said anything about this —sub-zero temperatures, practically no atmosphere and freakish rock formations. . . .
. . . felt a jolt as he cracked his knee on a rock. . . . He could feel the bite of the cord as it slid through his gloves, but there was no sensation of his descent slowing. Cord must be wet, he decided.
And, then, another shock—
. . . “Don't play games with me, Ira,” Vaslovik said impatiently. “Use your tools—all of them, including your brain. What does your intuition tell you?” . . .
. . . “You're saying that Starfleet thought this technology was so dangerous, they destroyed it? Then, with all due respect, Professor, exactly what the hell are we doing here?” . . .
. . . Vaslovik was studying the scene intently, apparently trying to reconstruct events from half a million years ago. “If it fell face first, then it was facing the large apparatus when it expired. It may have come here to repair itself, but collapsed before it reached the mechanism. . . .”
. . . “Now that we've settled that, someone give me a hand here.” Vaslovik slipped his hands under the android's arms and finished, “We don't have forever. . . .”
“Amazing,” Graves breathed. “There's still power.” He read his tricorder and swallowed loudly. “A lot of power. Who could build a generator that would survive half a million years?”
Someone was standing next to him, a man dressed in cold-weather gear and holding a very old tricorder. . . .
. . . Something was wrong. Data's consciousness was bleeding into someone else's. It was like he was descending a mine shaft on a very slow elevator.
And he saw that he was staring down at a pair of hands—human hands with bleeding knuckles. Familiar hands, yet unfamiliar, his own, yet not his own. Like a layer of oil separating from water, Data's consciousness settled into its own strata. The tiny pictures that had shivered up out of his emotion chip were scattering, like sea creatures rising up out of the depths, some silver and flashing brightly, others dim and hidden by eddying currents. Memories, Data realized. These are Soong's memories.
I have become my father.
Data attempted to focus on the events unfolding around him, though it was difficult. At first, it seemed that Soong could not or would not let his attention rest on any one event or object for more than a millisecond. At the same time, Data became aware that Soong would study the most mundane details—a piece of loose skin on his cuticle, the way Ira Graves constantly touched his nose, the play of light on the control surfaces—far longer than seemed necessary. Data could only relax after he admitted to himself that he had no control over events . . . and then he began to wonder if that was really his thought . . . or Soong's. . . .
It seemed to Soong (and, therefore, to Data, too) that Vaslovik quickly lost interest in the question of whether the android could be repaired and revived. As soon as he and Graves had dragged the inert (but still disconcertingly supple) form to the machine and placed it on the turntable, Vaslovik began to pace back and forth from the outer hatch, through the airlock and out into the cavern.
“I think that's pretty simple, Ira,” Data heard himself/his father say, as if afraid to disturb the machinery. “The same people who could build something like this . . .” He gestured to the android, “something that wouldn't have crumbled int
o dust long ago.”
. . . Graves . . . and Vaslovik. Soong had traveled with them, searching for AI artifacts. They found something . . .
. . . copper-skinned individual was perfectly preserved . . .
“Quite an achievement, isn't it?” Graves replied. He studied the form carefully for several seconds, then rechecked the results of their earlier scans on his tricorder. “How it's designed to mimic biological processes, but is simultaneously so resilient.” Then the smile faded. “We still don't know why someone would be chasing it. Maybe this is something we don't want to revive.”
“What?” Soong asked. He had been watching the main control grid run through some sort of self-diagnostic and was making some tentative guesses about how it functioned. He had decided it was likely that they could manipulate the device with tricorders and the professor's strange little gadget, but Graves's question distracted him.
“That's exactly what I was wondering,” Vaslovik said.
“Why do you think someone was chasing it?” Soong asked.
“Use your eyes, lad,” Vaslovik said. “Someone shot him in the back.”
Soong glanced down at the hole and noted that, yes, the stress marks in the chest indicated that the damage had been caused by an attack from the rear. “As he was walking toward this machine?” Soong asked. That didn't seem to make sense somehow.
“No,” Graves interjected. “He was shot first. Probably just inside the airlock door. Then he managed to crawl through the airlock.” He pointed at the spot on the floor where the android's systems had failed.
“With a hole in his back?” Soong asked.
“Yes,” Vaslovik said admiringly. He had walked over to stand by the rotating table and looked down at the body. “With a hole in his back.”
“But who would shoot him?” Soong was starting to feel annoyed. What was the point of all the discussion about events from half a million years ago? More and more lights were coming on all over the device and there came a soft hum from beneath the rotating table.
“Probably your friend outside,” Vaslovik suggested. “Seems logical.”
“Shot him with what? I didn't see any weapon.”
“Probably fell into the chasm,” Vaslovik speculated.
“Even if you're right, what does this have to do with the first one we found?” Soong asked, his mind now engaged by the riddle. “The human-looking one?”
“You mean Brown? I don't know,” Vaslovik said. “Though he's obviously a much more recent vintage. Couldn't be more than a few decades old. I think he might have been overlooked by the Starfleet cleanup crew. Not surprising considering where we found him.”
“So, we have three androids,” Graves said. “One very recent, obviously destroyed by a phaser blast. Another much older outside the airlock. He looked to me like he had features of some kind—a definite morphology. And then there's this one.” He glanced down at the featureless hulk before them. “He has no features, no sex organs, no markings of any kind. Suggests something, doesn't it?”
Soong considered options. He didn't like any of them. “That he wasn't finished. Maybe this device gives them a final form.”
“Maybe,” Vaslovik said. “But I think there's another possibility we need to consider.”
“This one is much smaller in stature,” Graves observed. “Different models? Different castes, even? Perhaps there was a social upheaval.”
“Also possible,” Vaslovik conceded. “But I think you're overlooking another, more emotional option. I don't think he was shot outside these doors. This damage is too severe. I think whoever did this—our friend outside, most likely—did it as the doors were closing. What does that suggest to you?”
Neither Graves nor Soong spoke.
“You two don't spend enough time around real people,” Vaslovik sighed. “Spite, gentlemen. Sour grapes. Whoever—whatever—this was, he had gotten clean away and someone shot him in the back just as the doors were swinging shut behind him. That's a lot of anger, a lot of hate.”
“Yes,” Soong agreed slowly, reluctantly following Vaslovik's reasoning. “But hatred for whom? And why?”
“And what happened to them?” Graves added. “To all of them, the pursuers?”
“I have a feeling,” Vaslovik said, his tone reasonable and assured, “that there's only one person—and I use the term advisedly—who might be able to tell us.” He jabbed his finger at the inert form on the platform. “Anyone found the ‘on’ switch on those machines yet?”
Graves laughed nervously and pointed at a control surface. “In fact,” he said, “yes. I think this is it. Would you care to press the button?”
Vaslovik smiled. “I wouldn't think of it, Ira. The man who spent the most time with the crowbar deserves the honor.”
Graves grinned, obviously embarrassed, but also flattered, and Soong noted once again how Vaslovik could charm even the most recalcitrant and wary individuals. Graves pressed a series of controls and something far beneath the planet's surface began to move more quickly. The floor vibrated with a subsonic dub that Soong felt in his back molars.
The platform began to spin, slowly at first, but with rapidly increasing speed. Soong felt a vortex begin to form over the spinning wheel, and, simultaneously, both he and Graves took a step back. The golden-skinned form was already a blur.
“What did you program it to do?” Vaslovik asked.
“Nothing,” Graves replied. “I couldn't translate everything, so I'm letting it do whatever he . . . it . . . programmed it to do.”
“Do either of you see anything happening?”
Graves and Soong shook their heads. “Nothing obvious,” Graves said. “Why in the world would the platform need to spin? It doesn't make any sense. It's almost like . . . a lot of hand waving. Idle motion.”
“Any technology,” Soong said, “sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to a primitive culture. Or something like that.”
“What?” Graves asked. Vaslovik chuckled appreciatively.
“Clarke,” Soong said, having to raise his voice above the hum of the spinning disc.
“Should be required reading for anyone studying artificial intelligence,” Vaslovik said. “Stop showing off, Noonien, and use your tricorder.”
Soong snapped open the display and attempted to focus the scan on the whizzing turntable. Nothing registered. He walked around to the other side of the machine and tried again. Still nothing.
His mystification must have registered on his face because Graves asked, “What's wrong?”
“I don't know,” Soong replied and ran a quick diagnostic. “Nothing that I can see. I'm just not getting any readings.”
“A dampening field?” Vaslovik wondered aloud. “Widen the scan.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
Soong did. Scanning ten meters on all sides brought up nothing anomalous: rock walls, their life signs, doors, furnishings, everything but the machine and the body that lay on it. The whirring table seemed to have reached some kind of crescendo because even as Soong was widening his scan to twenty meters, the pitch became subtly lower.
Still nothing. It was as if the machine weren't there. Might as well be magic, he thought, trying to comprehend why anyone would want to conceal its existence.
Fifty meters . . .
“Uh-oh,” Soong said, then instantly regretted it, assuming he had made a mistake. An EM signature. Then another. Now four. He checked the search parameters and did a refresh. Damn. Now seven. They weren't moving . . . much. Not yet. Vaslovik wrenched the tricorder from Soong's hand, waved it in a semicircle, then quickly paced the length of the room, scanning from side to side.
“We have to go,” Vaslovik said, tossing the tricorder back to Soong.
“What?” Graves asked. “Why? The table's just beginning to . . .” Soong held up the tricorder so Graves could see the readout. The EM signatures were moving toward them. “It's a mistake. Recalibrate the—”
“No,” Vaslovik said
. “It's not a mistake. We have to go. Now.”
The blood drained from Graves's face and his lips looked almost blue to Soong. He handed the tricorder back. “All right,” Graves said hoarsely. “We can always come back later. Right?”
Vaslovik seemed to waver between telling the truth and reassuring Graves, then seemed to decide to err on the side of reassurance. “Yes, of course.”
Soong studied the readout. The number of EM signatures had doubled in the past three minutes. More than fifty now, but at the rate they were increasing it wouldn't be long before that number would double again.
“What could they be, Soong?” Graves whispered.
“Do you really want to stay to find out?”
Graves did not respond, but only headed for the door. Just as they stepped through the first hatch, the ground began to shiver beneath their feet. Soong stumbled into a wall and Graves almost cracked his head on the hatch frame. There was a moment, a brief, brief moment, as they stepped through, when Soong considered going back inside and pushing the inner hatch shut again, but then his resolve wavered. The idea of turning around and going back inside was more than he could face. And besides, they could hear Vaslovik cursing, an event so rare that it had to be investigated immediately. Soong stumbled outside just as Vaslovik was picking himself up off the ground. Near his feet lay the shattered remains of the pattern enhancers Soong had set up on the ledge and a coil of rope. The pitons he had set had come loose and the rope had fallen on top of the enhancer.