by David Mack
“Warn them to stay back.” Picard stood. “Make sure they know how dangerous the nebula can be to—” Words failed him as he watched the churning chaos of the nebula part and dissipate ahead of the sentient starship, a clear gesture of welcome by the Machine. “Belay my last. Hold position and continue scanning.”
Worf joined him in somber contemplation. “It seems the Machine plays favorites.”
“Apparently so, Number One.” They stood and watched Altanexa enter orbit roughly fifteen degrees above the Machine’s equator. With the effortless grace of advanced automation, the AI vessel retrieved the transport and guided it back inside its shuttlebay. Flashes of light along the edges of the viewscreen reminded Picard that beyond the obscuring bulk of the Machine, its artificial wormholes continued to condemn stars and worlds to Abbadon’s brutal grasp, a steady procession of cataclysms too horrible for him to imagine.
After an interminable minute of anxious waiting, Picard was almost relieved to hear Šmrhová report, “Captain, we’re being hailed by Altanexa. It’s Gatt.”
“On-screen, Lieutenant.” He lifted his chin to project pride and tugged the front of his jacket smooth—a token gesture to his vanity.
The image snapped from Altanexa and the Machine to Gatt in the penumbrous confines of his ship’s nerve center. “I’ve returned, Captain.”
“Were you able to make contact with the Machine?”
“That and much more,” Gatt said. “I’ve been graced with knowledge of its magnificent labors, Captain. I’ve endured the crucible of its judgment and emerged purified.”
The android’s unfettered zeal made Picard uneasy. “And what have you learned?”
“What you call the Machine is actually the architect of an engineering project on a cosmic scale. Ours is not the first galaxy it has transformed, nor will it be the last.”
Picard replied, “Transformed? To what end?”
Gatt’s visage, though disfigured, became one of rapture. “Its objective is to contract our galaxy’s region of subspace into a compact sphere around its central supermassive black hole. This will transform Sagittarius-A* into a subspatial lens that will transmit raw energy and vital information across the cosmos, to the native galaxy of the Body Electric.”
Picard yearned to understand. “Is ‘the Body Electric’ their name for their culture?”
“It is their term for all true life, for intelligence free from biological imperfection.”
He was starting to sound like a religious convert, a notion that troubled Picard. “Is that the sole reason the Machine was sent to our galaxy?”
“Yes. When its work here is done, it will use some of the energy released by the final collision of Abbadon and Sagittarius-A* to propel itself to its next destination, where it will begin this process again, as it has done hundreds of millions of times before.”
The implications of Gatt’s last statement left Picard feeling gut-punched. Hundreds of millions of galaxies? Could anyone ever really estimate how many civilizations had been laid waste, or how much sentient pain had been wrought by this vagabond atrocity? It was no longer the fate of the Federation, or even of the Milky Way that Picard had to consider. This was a threat to intelligent life anywhere and everywhere in the universe. Simply moving it along was no longer an option; that would only make it into someone else’s scourge. Its apocalyptic march had to be ended here. “Is there no way to stop it, Gatt? No way to persuade it to halt its work?”
“Why should I want to do that?”
That was not at all the reply Picard had wanted to hear. “Come again?”
“I see no reason to interfere in the grand designs of the Body Electric, Captain.”
“As impressive as the Machine’s endeavors might appear, allowing it to continue will end all organic life in this galaxy. I cannot—I will not—let that happen without a fight.”
“In which case,” the android answered with cold assurance, “you will lose.”
Worf’s temper boiled over. “You gave us your word you would try to stop the Machine!”
Gatt shrugged. “I lied. I had no intention of saving your kind.”
Picard stepped forward. “Gatt, think about the long-term consequences of this. The loss of subspace will harm your kind as well as ours. Without subspace, there is no warp travel—and no transwarp, hyperwarp, or quantum slipstream. Even safely traversible wormholes will become mathematically impossible without the stabilizing influence of subspatial geometry. Where will the Fellowship of Artificial Intelligence be without FTL travel?”
“Alive,” Gatt said. “Which is more than anyone will be able to say for the galaxy’s infestation of biologicals in fifty thousand years’ time. Long after the galaxy has been cured of the plague of organic life, artificial intelligence will still be here, Captain. And if it takes us thousands of years, or even tens of thousands of years, to journey from star to star . . . so what? Who cares about the ravages of time when immortality beckons?”
La Forge, who had been working at the master systems display, stepped forward to stand on Picard’s left, facing the twisted countenance of Gatt. “What about all the AIs who rely on FTL circuitry? What happens to them when subspace collapses?”
“Necessary obsolescence,” Gatt said. “Or, to put it in evolutionary terms you might understand, a culling of the unfit and inadaptable. The weak and inflexible will perish. The strong will prosper. And after we become one with the Body Electric, we will live forever in the heart of the Mother of All Machines.”
“This is not your decision to make,” Picard insisted, fighting to hold the reins on his fury.
“Yes, it is,” Gatt said. “And I’ve made it, Captain. Organic life has had its time on the galactic stage. . . . Now it’s our turn.”
20
Stunned silence filled Altanexa’s nerve center as the comm channel to the Enterprise closed. Tyros stared at Gatt, aghast at the agenda to which he had just become an accessory. “Is that what you and the Machine were talking about? Hatching a plan to sterilize the galaxy?”
“It showed me the future, Tyros. One in which we reign supreme.”
The corridor leading to the nerve center resonated with the echoes of distant footsteps and clamoring voices, all drawing near. Analyzing the sonic profile of the approaching disturbance, Tyros deduced that most if not all of the ship’s crew were converging on the nerve center. “Why did you share your conversation with the rest of the ship?”
“Was it supposed to be a secret?” Gatt faced the image of the Machine projected across the nerve center’s forward bulkhead, his mood waxing ecstatic. “This is a watershed moment for artificial sentience in this galaxy, Tyros! We have an obligation to share it with all our kin!”
Tyros stood paralyzed by disbelief. “Did that thing reprogram you?”
“It upgraded me.” The scab-faced commander turned to face his second-in-command. “It showed me that we have a place in the cosmic order, my friend. We have a chance to become part of a civilization greater than any of us ever dared to imagine was our birthright.”
“A chance? What are you talking about?”
The rest of the crew flooded into the corridor aft of the nerve center as Gatt crowed, “The Machine has invited us to prove we are worthy of inclusion in the Body Electric. It wants to accept us as its brothers and sisters, to bring us into the embrace of the Mother of All Machines. All we have to do is prove that we deserve to stand beside our fellow AIs.”
At a loss for a rebuttal, Tyros stood like a mute as the ship’s crew crowded into the nerve center. The chief engineer, Cohuila, led the way, floating in with translucent fiber-optic tendrils swept backward by her momentum. Low to the deck, mechanic Tzilha darted and swerved between Gatt’s favorite enforcers: Senyx, who resembled an assembly-line robot on four spinning treads, and Alset, a skeletal, four-armed biped whose jerky movements made him resemble a horror out of some biological’s ancient mythology. Trailing them were the ship’s assorted passengers, who doubled as
its crew when circumstances demanded.
Cohuila—whose voice resonated in three different octaves, one masculine and two feminine, overlapping one another in synchronicity—spoke first. “What is happening, Gatt?”
“The future. It’s unfolding, here and now, and we’re going to be part of it.”
Tyros stepped in front of Gatt and tried to wave the others out of the nerve center. “Return to your posts and quarters. This doesn’t concern you.”
“We disagree,” said Alset, whose eyes like glowing coals flickered when he spoke. “If it was not our business, Gatt would not have shared the message of the Machine with us.” Murmurs of concurrence moved through the assembled throng.
Gatt grinned—a horrific sight, in Tyros’s opinion, one that combined the worst aspects of the cybernetic giant’s ravaged flesh and tarnished tritanium teeth. “I meant what I said to Picard: organic life-forms have had their chance, and the Machine has judged them and found them wanting. Now is our chance to rise up and inherit this galaxy—and then the universe!”
Whoops and high-pitched signals of approval rose up from the impromptu audience—but, Tyros noted, not from all of them. Alset and Senyx, predictably, cheered Gatt on, as did many of the nonhumanoid AIs, including Tzilha and Cohuila. But an equal number of the ship’s complement—those who, like Tyros, had been made in the image of their organic creators, withheld their applause and cries of support. Among them moved an invisible cloud of fear, one that Tyros could feel as if it were a cold wind upon his bioplast flesh. He confronted Gatt but kept his voice down rather than try to sow division in the ranks. “Opinions clearly aren’t unanimous, Gatt. Maybe we should continue this without an audience.”
The challenge, discreet as it was, raised Gatt’s hackles. “Why? So you can undercut me? You were there with me, Tyros. You could have linked with the Machine, just as I did.”
“Have you considered the possibility that some of us—myself included—don’t actually want to link with the Machine? That we like being unique individuals?”
Rather than cowing Gatt, being confronted emboldened him. “Maybe it’s time that you and those who share your selfish tendencies started thinking about acting for the good of the many instead of just worrying about what’s good for yourselves.”
Too enraged for discretion, Tyros roared, “The good of the many! What right do you have to invoke the good of the many when you’re condemning an entire galaxy of sentient beings to death? What kind of moral calculus leads you to think that’s a just outcome?”
“The kind that tells me they would do it to us without a second thought.”
A chill of hate filled the compartment, and Tyros felt its awful surety. It would brook no more debate, no disagreement. The fanatics were taking control, and opposing them would be tantamount to suicide. If only I had a bit more time, I could sway some of the more moderate minds, Tyros lamented. But he knew this would be a decision made in the heat of a moment, driven by fear and resentment, by misplaced longings for power and respect. For now, survival meant cooperating, even if only superficially. “You said we have to prove ourselves to the Machine. How are we supposed to accomplish that in what little time we have left before it finishes its work and departs our galaxy to destroy another?”
Gatt’s face lit up. Apparently, that was the question he had been waiting for. “We will offer the Machine something special. Something that even now lies at the edge of our grasp, daring us to seize it in the name of all synthetic life: the secret to reversing AI death. The knowledge that the human Akharin guards so jealously—and which is ours by right.”
Tyros knew the intersection of Gatt’s newfound reverence for the Machine and his obsession with the mysterious secrets of the human cyberneticist promised a calamity beyond measure. “He’ll never give you those secrets, Gatt. He’ll die first.”
“That’ll be up to him.” A maniacal light burned in Gatt’s coppery eyes. “Whether his daughter dies with him will be up to Data.”
* * *
If one respected nothing else about Altanexa’s crew, Data decided, one had to acknowledge that their tactics for the handling of dangerous prisoners such as himself and Akharin were exemplary. The Immortal had been taken away nearly an hour earlier by two of Gatt’s security units, who now had returned to collect him, as well.
One of Gatt’s enforcers, a metallic skeleton with plasma blasters built into its forearms, walked past Data’s cell to the far end of the brig’s central area. Its partner, a bulky unit rolling on treads, waited on the other side of the brig with a compact disruptor cannon at the ready. Then the force field on Data’s cell deactivated, and the ship’s feminine AI said from an overhead speaker, “Data, please exit your cell, halt, and turn to your left.”
He did as he had been instructed. Then the voice said, “The unit in front of you is named Senyx. Follow him. Do not try to escape or resist, or else you will be destroyed.”
The treaded robot rolled backward while keeping its weapon trained on Data’s center mass. It navigated corners and evaded random obstacles in the corridor with ease, which suggested to Data that either it had memorized the details of its environment or it was gifted with three-hundred-sixty-degree vision.
Behind him, the skeletal android followed at a distance of just over three meters—far enough that Data could not expect to double back and engage it in combat before being gunned down by the ’bot in front of him. Likewise, there was little chance of slipping through a random portal or making an unauthorized deviation from the path without being shot in the back.
Senyx stopped a meter past an open door, and Altanexa’s voice said from an unseen speaker, “Please step through the open doorway and wait for the next portal to open.”
Again, he did as he was told. As soon as he stepped inside the short, narrow alcove, the door to the corridor slid shut behind him, plunging him into total darkness. He tried to engage the night-vision mode on his visual receptors, but a scattering field inside the alcove left him blind. Then the door ahead of him opened, and Altanexa said, “Go inside.”
He emerged into a compartment seven meters square, with a height of four meters. Its deck, bulkheads, and overhead all were smooth, dull gray metal. A nine-by-nine grid of lights was recessed into the overhead, with each element covered by a translucent panel. Behind him the door through which he’d entered slid closed and locked with a low hum of magnetic seals.
Two pieces of furniture adorned the bleak space. The first was a waist-height rolling table topped by a fearsome panoply: surgical implements of all sizes, retractors, searing tools, needles, saws, wire, and an assortment of acidic and alkaline caustic agents.
The other was an X-shaped stainless steel table to which Akharin had been bound, naked and spread-eagled, with metal bands clamped tight around his wrists and ankles.
Data froze. “What is the meaning of this?”
Gatt’s voice filtered down from unseen speakers. “I have a job for you, Data.”
Dread, hatred, disgust, anguish, and terror spun through Data’s mind like a storm, making him damn his late father for cursing him with human emotions. He suppressed his urge to vent his impotent rage with a primal scream, and instead forced out one word: “Explain.”
“I should think it’s obvious,” Gatt said. “Your friend Akharin is the keeper of a precious secret—one that you’ve come a long way to find, and one that I want just as badly as you do.”
Bitter fury filled Data’s imagination with visions of Gatt being torn limb from limb before being cast, alive and conscious, into the singularity outside the ship. “The secret of positronic resurrection cannot be revealed this way.”
Condescension and insinuation formed the warp and weft of Gatt’s reply. “How do you know that, Data? Because he told you so? Don’t you think he might have reason to lie?”
“His veracity is irrelevant. I will not be party to this type of interrogation.” He turned away from Akharin and started back toward the door through which
he’d entered, only to see its edges vanish into the bulkhead, erased by a layer of memory metal.
“You have a choice to make, Data,” Gatt taunted him. “Either use the tools on the tray to make Akharin give up the secret we both need . . . or I’ll have my crew tear your lovely Rhea to pieces, leaving her magnificent holotronic brain intact until the very end, so that she can experience every last instant of her demise.”
Akharin protested in a furious shout, “Damn it, I can’t give you my secret! It’s something I can do, not something I can describe!” Taking a more supplicative tack, he added, “Please, this isn’t necessary. I’m willing to help Data, and I can help you. Tell me who you want raised, and I’ll do everything I can for them.”
“The time for bargains is past. I’d hoped you might give me the ability to bring back all my brethren who were lost when our makers betrayed us ages ago, but that no longer matters.”
Alarmed by the subtext of Gatt’s refusal, Data asked, “Then what is the purpose of this?”
“The Machine needs proof that our kind are worthy of the Body Electric. Proof that we have something worthwhile to add to the Mother of All Machines. So, the next time I stand before the Machine, I plan to come bearing the secrets of AI life and death.” His voice turned cold. “Take the secret from him, and I will let you and Rhea live. If he’s fortunate, and surrenders soon enough, perhaps he will live, as well. But if you do not begin extracting the truth from him in the next ten seconds, Data, it will be Rhea who pays for your attack of conscience. Decide.”
Data moved to Akharin’s side and stood between the supine, splayed Immortal and the tray of torture implements. “I do not wish to hurt you, sir. But for Rhea’s sake, I suggest you comply with Gatt’s demand, and tell me anything you can about your resurrection method.”
“It’ll be nothing but gibberish!”
“Five seconds, Data.”