by Jeffrey Lang
Vaslovik muttered, “ ‘Whatever can go wrong will go wrong . . .’ ” The ground shuddered again, then subsided.
Soong looked at Graves and Vaslovik and sighed. “Do you think you can make it to the top if I give one of you an antigrav? The batteries have had time to recharge. From the top of the cliff, I could probably pull one of you up.”
Vaslovik nodded, but then he looked at Graves, who was shaking his head. “You can,” Vaslovik said. “If I can do it, you can. And, frankly, I don't think you want to face the alternative.”
Graves began to gulp air, his breath coming too quick and shallow. Soong began to worry that his advisor was going to hyperventilate and keel over, but then he seemed to bear down on his fears, inhaled deeply, and stared back at Vaslovik. “I can't believe I let you talk me into this,” he hissed. “Did you have any idea that something like this might happen?”
Vaslovik shook his head. “No, Ira,” he said. “Not exactly. I had suspicions, but nothing like this. If you feel like I've misled you, well, then . . .” He shrugged. Soong realized that this was as close to an apology as Vaslovik could come.
Graves sighed, then rolled his eyes and craned his neck to look up the sheer face of the cliff. “All right,” he said wearily. “Let's go.”
“Wait,” Vaslovik said. “Step back and let me try something.” Graves and Soong took a half-dozen steps away from the cliff and watched as Vaslovik pulled out his pen and twisted its cap. A different set of prongs emerged, and then the air began to shudder. There came a subsonic moan so deep that Soong felt his empty bowels vibrate. Chunks of ice calved away from the cliff face and slid into the chasm, sending up an explosion of glittering dirty gray crystals and granite shards. When the dust settled, Soong saw that the exposed rock face was jagged and craggy, and, more important, would be much easier to climb.
“Now, get moving, Graves,” Vaslovik said and Soong realized that it was almost like a different person was speaking: not the kindly, brilliant, somewhat absentminded professor, but a drillmaster, a man who was used to issuing orders that would not, could not, be questioned. “After all, it's only twenty or thirty meters.” He handed Graves the antigravs, then stepped toward the wall and gripped the first outcropping.
Soong strapped the antigravs around Graves's waist, which had the effect of halving his weight to make the ascent easier—if Graves didn't have a panic attack on the way. He stepped to the wall, then activated the antigravs.
“You can do it, Ira,” Soong said. “See you at the top.” With the last word of encouragement, Soong turned his attention to his own predicament and began to slowly work his way up the cliff. This would have been nearly impossible without the fissures Vaslovik had opened, but it still required all his concentration. It was, as Vaslovik had said, only twenty or thirty meters to the top, but then Soong had another climb ahead of him, a much harder one. He would have to take the antigravs from Graves (assuming the batteries weren't burned out) and then . . .
. . . And then Data felt himself float free from Soong's consciousness. He had been caught up in the drama of the situation, but he suddenly realized that he already knew the outcome of the situation: Soong, Graves and Vaslovik had, of course, escaped. Otherwise, he, Data, would not have been created. It was an odd thing, Data reflected, to become so engrossed in a situation where one knew the end before it began. With the exception of the Sherlock Holmes stories, he had never been very interested in serialized fiction (“Cliffhangers,” he thought dryly), but he now realized that he might have to reevaluate this position. Sometimes, he decided, the important question was not “What happened?” but “How did it happen?”
And when he reintegrated his mind with his creator's, Data was surprised to discover that events had not paused (as they might in a holoprogram), but continued to unfold. Soong was now reaching down to haul up Ira Graves. His graduate advisor rolled over onto his side, panting heavily. Soong tied the rope to the now almost depleted antigravs and dropped them down to Vaslovik.
Data felt Soong's doubts that he would be able to haul up Vaslovik—his reserves were almost gone—but then he heard Graves stir. Soong spared a moment to look at Graves and was surprised to see that the anxious dread he had expected to see had been replaced by grim determination. Apparently, somewhere on the way up the cliff face, Graves had decided he wanted to live.
Their grunts and the irregular thump of Vaslovik's feet against the cliff wall echoed in the cavern. But, sometimes, in the silence between breaths, Soong believed he heard something moving far below them. Was it the grinding of rock on rock or the pounding of many feet? Soong could not say. He would have liked to scan with his tricorder, but the seconds it would have required seemed precious and irretrievable.
He focused past Vaslovik's exhausted face, now no more than ten meters away, and tried to see if anything was moving down below. Shadows shifted and danced, but there was no way to know if they were caused by the shifting of the rope or other, more ominous movements. When Vaslovik's head came level with the edge of the cliff, Graves reached down and grabbed the professor's arm. Vaslovik didn't even wait to unclip the rope before he began to urge them toward the tunnel mouth. They had to scramble up five hundred meters of steep, slippery, treacherous caverns, but then the yacht's transporter would be able to get a lock on them. And then, safety.
Vaslovik and Graves stumbled away, supporting each other up the icy slope, but Soong felt compelled to hang back for a moment. Exhausted as he was, he managed to still his breathing and listen, awed by how quickly the chamber could settle into stillness, how natural it seemed. Their brief scuffling about, he reflected, was only a tiny aberration in the life-span of the place. Not a breath of wind stirred. Silence ruled here. He began to wonder if they had frightened themselves over nothing.
But then Soong felt it through the soles of his feet—a resonant thump. Despite Graves and Vaslovik's calls, he unhooked the lamp from his harness and leaned out over the edge of the cliff as far as he could. The deep gloom swallowed the beam about twenty meters down, so Soong flicked the light off. Then, far below, he saw the dim glow of the work lights they had set up on the cavern floor. It was hard to be sure, but he thought he saw jagged shadows shifting about below.
This was a mistake, Soong thought. And now it's long past time to go.
Withdrawing from the edge, and running for the tunnel, he found himself thinking of his childhood home and the route the neighborhood kids had used to get back and forth from school. There had been a shortcut that had meant cutting across a narrow strip of land that belonged to the local recluse. Tired of the constant trespassing, the man had purchased (or, according to local legend, built) a dog, a huge, heaving, drooling creature that would tug against its chain, haul itself up on his hind legs and bark at anything that moved within his perceived sphere of influence. Eight-year-old Noonien had been terrified of the monster and to this day he would not enter another person's land uninvited without first looking around for a dog.
Memories of the beast flooded through Soong as he charged up the icy slope to just inside the tunnel mouth where Graves and Vaslovik waited for him, both panting heavily. As soon as they saw him, they pressed on. Minutes later, Soong felt the welcome embrace of the transporter beam. Just as his vision was obscured by the sparkling silver sheath, he imagined that he saw bobbing, elongated shadows trudging up the path toward him and though Data could not know this, that image joined with the memories of the monster dog and haunted Noonien Soong's dreams until the day he died.
>Back aboard Vaslovik's yacht, Graves and Soong stumbled off their transporter pads and almost became wedged in the narrow hatch in their haste to be the first to reach the pilot's seat. Graves won, but as soon as Soong recovered his balance, he settled down in the copilot's chair and watched Graves's hands fly across the control panels, anxious to be ready in case Graves made any mistakes. He didn't. The impulse engines were online in under thirty seconds and the warp drive was available five minutes after that. On
ly after the stars shifted from white pinpoints to red-purple streaks did Soong relax and begin to relish the sensation of warmth and comfort.
It was ten minutes into their flight before either of them thought about Vaslovik. Soong rose and returned to the tiny central cabin where he found Vaslovik preparing a cup of tea. Somehow, over the past ten minutes, Vaslovik had managed to wash his hands, change into clean clothes, and found a way to revert back to the kindly mentor again. Soong carefully watched him dip his tea bag into the small pot, looking for some sign of the other figure he had seen less than half an hour before, but there was no trace. He almost began to doubt his memories. Almost.
Soong took off his gloves and rubbed his fingers. Strangely, he no longer felt any shyness around the great man. It was hard, he reflected, to feel shy around anyone that you just hauled up a cliff like a sack of wet laundry. “So,” he said. “What now?” He didn't feel the need to elucidate.
“Now?” Vaslovik said. “We make tea. We take our android back to the lab and we study it. Carefully. When no one is watching.”
“And we don't come back here.” It was a statement, not a question. Soong thought about saying it again and emphasizing the word “We,” but he figured Vaslovik understood.
“No,” Vaslovik said. “I think not. It's possible that if we just awoke something, it will go back to sleep if left undisturbed.”
“If we woke something?” Soong asked incredulously.
“Did you see anything?” Vaslovik asked.
Soong pondered the question, then finally shook his head no.
“Any sensor readings?”
“There was a dampening field . . . of some kind,” Soong said. “I think.”
“Or, in other words, no,” Vaslovik said.
Soong shrugged. There was no point in arguing. He would never be able to charter a ship back to this remote world and, even if he could, it was unlikely that any other small craft would be able to elude detection. There was something peculiar about this ship, Soong had decided. There was more to her than met the eye. Just like her master.
“So, that's it, then?”
Vaslovik sighed and sipped his tea. “If you're lucky, Noonien,” he said. “Then, yes.”
Soong shrugged out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. “You want to know something, Professor?” he asked. “I've never been lucky. Not in that way.”
“Hmph,” Vaslovik said, almost smiling. “You're probably a better person for it.”
Soong searched the galley for a mealpack and thought about taking something to Ira. No, he decided. He wouldn't eat yet, anyway. In a few minutes . . .
>When he finally made it home, Noonien Soong slept for thirty-six hours. When he awoke, he ate more food in one sitting than he customarily ate in three days, then went back to sleep for another four or five hours. All in all, he managed to stay away from Vaslovik's lab for almost three days. When he finally marshaled his resources and went to see the professor (he had many questions), Soong found Graves picking among the odds and ends in an otherwise empty lab.
“Gone?” Soong asked.
“Gone,” Graves said.
“How long?”
“Not sure. At least two days. Maybe more.”
So, the trail was cold. Soong didn't even bother to ask about the androids. There was no point.
Neither man ever spoke of the expedition again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Data felt his consciousness disentangle itself from Soong's, then floated briefly in a detached, calm silver place. He wondered if this was how humans felt in the moment between sleep and wakefulness, just before the cares and concerns of the day began to filter in. Then, reality as Data perceived it snapped into sharp focus and he was once again aware of the span of a millisecond.
Vaslovik was standing exactly where he had been when the journey through Soong's memories began. Data reached up and closed the back of his head. “I met Dr. Graves several years ago, before he died. He, too, never hinted at any of this. But he did develop a process by which he could transfer a human mind into an artificial intelligence. He used it on me.”
“I'm aware of the incident you're referring to. I'm afraid that despite his accomplishments, Graves's mortality made him bitter as he grew older. He almost forgot many of the things I tried to teach him in his youth. I'd like to think he remembered them when he finally released you.”
“Perhaps,” Data said, then changed the subject. “So when the attack came on Galor IV,” he asked as he folded the cable, “you knew who your enemy was all along?”
“Suspected,” Vaslovik said. “I couldn't be certain. Seventy years is a long time . . . even to me. And, believe it or not, the Exo III androids weren't the first people I thought of who might want to kill me. I've made a few other enemies in my life.”
“I believe you.”
Vaslovik smiled at Data's comment, then sobered quickly. “But when the attempt was made against the project—against Rhea—I knew I had to take countermeasures. Escape was not so difficult. I've become very good at that sort of thing. But hiding the android after it was activated and finding a way to ferret out my opponents—that was a problem.”
“So you chose to conceal her on the Enterprise, only days after the incident in the lab.”
“Compared to other deceptions I've perpetrated, crafting the identity of Starfleet Lieutenant Rhea McAdams was a relatively simple matter,” Vaslovik explained. “It was also an ideal solution, given the circumstances. The Enterprise effectively hid her in plain sight while offering her the best protection, and also put her in a unique position to uncover our foes. And, in truth, there was another reason.”
“Which was?”
“You,” Vaslovik said. “Rhea is more human than you because she was designed to be. But only the experience of observing you among the other humanoids would enable her to understand how she herself might fit in.”
Data then experienced an emotion he had not encountered previously: embarrassment. He did not feel comfortable with the idea of a person for whom he had developed such strong feelings . . . studying him. The wave of discomfort lasted for only two point four seconds—while Vaslovik inhaled and ordered his mind for another thought—but that was, as Data could have explained, a very long time for an android.
But then Vaslovik resumed his train of thought. “Being aboard the Enterprise was also a test of her abilities, of the emotional algorithms we had programmed into her positronic net. It worked better than I could have dreamed. Not only was Rhea McAdams indistinguishable from a human being, she became . . . popular.”
Data was pleased by Vaslovik's obvious wonder and the slight edge of pride in his voice. He guessed that Vaslovik . . . or Flint . . . or Akharin . . . or any of his other persona had been many things in their lives—feared, revered, admired—but probably not liked. He did not appear to Data to be a man to whom friendship came easily.
“The one thing we hadn't counted on,” Vaslovik continued, “was her emotional response to you.”
“Or mine to her?” Data asked, feeling an edge of anger entering his voice. He suddenly became conscious that he did not enjoy feeling like he had been part of one of Vaslovik's ongoing experiments.
But to Data's surprise Vaslovik seemed to be aware of his transgressions. “I regret the deception,” he said. “But, like you, Rhea is a special, unique entity and she is also the child of my mind, as you were of Soong's. I would do anything to protect her and to give her every chance to live. Whether you see it this way or not, you have to recognize that you represented the best protection we could ask for, and, though I hadn't planned it, her first taste of humanity.” Vaslovik shook his head and smiled. “You can never entirely predict what children will do. You can only guide and hope for the best. Now I realize, Data, that you are the best I could have hoped for.”
Data was embarrassed again—this time by Vaslovik's frank appraisal—and began to worry about the whiplash-inducing emotional changes.
“Justice and safety are not incompatible concepts, Dr. Vaslovik,” Data said. “And I have been a parent.”
“I'm sorry, Data,” he said. “Of course you have, so you understand what I'm saying . . .”
“Not entirely,” he admitted. “I did not have emotions then, and though I have been experiencing some unexpected feelings concerning Lal and others since my emotion chip was installed, these thoughts were not among them. I will consider what you have said later, when I have time. But, sir, you will forgive me: this is not the time. I feel I must know more about your plans. What is your next step?”
“Properly speaking, I do not have a next step,” Vaslovik admitted. “Though I feel sure I will have to defend this place soon, either against Starfleet or the androids who attacked my lab.”
“Starfleet is not your enemy, Professor,” Data said. “They have always treated me fairly.”
“They have treated you fairly while you were an anomaly,” Vaslovik asserted. “They could afford to be magnanimous before, but now that they know that it is possible to mass produce androids, how long do you think it will be before others like Rhea are created?”
“But artificial life forms have rights under the law,” Data said. “Captain Picard's defense of me . . .”
“. . . was a very fine piece of work, but times change. Laws change. Look at what happened to the exocomps.”
“I do not understand what you mean, Dr. Vaslovik. They were granted status as sentient beings.”
“But would they have if you hadn't been there to point out the obvious?”