by David Mack
He picked up a scalpel and implored the Immortal with tear-filled eyes, “Please.”
Akharin blinked rapidly as Data leaned over him, blocking the overhead sensors’ view as the Immortal pleaded in silent code, Do it. Don’t let them hurt Rhea.
“Time’s up, Data. Either you start cutting, or we do.”
“Forgive me,” he whispered to Akharin as he pulled the scalpel across the man’s bare abdomen, unleashing a sheet of bright crimson blood. It would be, he knew, only the first of many harms great and subtle he would have to inflict in order to satisfy the sadistic whims of Gatt and spare Rhea from suffering even greater evils. Listening to Akharin’s howls of agony, Data wished he could turn off the emotions in his new body, but that was one gift his father had not given him. Instead, he salved his torment the only other way he could: by imagining the merciless vengeance he would exact upon Gatt—and the joy he would take in watching him die.
21
Decorum prevented Beverly Crusher from reaching out and stroking her son’s forehead as he lay unconscious on a biobed in sickbay, so she contented herself with standing beside him, watching his chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. She searched his bearded face for signs of the boy he once had been. Where had he gone? At times she felt as if he had been taken from her—not just by the Travelers but by fate, or a quirk of evolutionary biology, or maybe by life itself.
It feels like just yesterday he was running through the corridors of the Enterprise-D and hitting Jean-Luc with a replicated snowball from the holodeck.
He stirred, and she pushed aside her wistful musings to check his vital signs. His pulse was increasing and trending back to normal, as were his respiration and brainwave activity. A small twinge, not even large enough to be called a wince, pinched the crow’s-feet by his eyes. Then a low groan heralded his return to consciousness. He squinted up at Crusher. “Mom?”
“I’m here, Wes. How do you feel?”
Grimacing, he took stock of himself. “Like I got shot point-blank by a disruptor.”
“So you remember what happened on Altanexa?”
“How could I forget?” He sat up, propped himself on one arm, and massaged the back of his neck. “One second I was guiding them through hyperwarp. Then the moment we dropped back to normal space-time, the ship gave me a jolt through the helm console, and some thug named Gatt finished the job.”
She smiled to soften the edge of her mockery. “I thought you could dodge phaser shots.”
“When I’m not half-electrocuted, I can.” He looked around. “How did I get here?”
“Gatt beamed over with you. He tried to explain your injuries as the result of a feedback pulse from his ship. Something about it rebelling against your control in hyperwarp. We might have believed him if not for telltale signs of disruptor damage on your chest.” He tried to swing his legs off the biobed, but Crusher stopped him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I have to warn Captain Picard.” He struggled against her, but his injuries had clearly left his strength depleted, because Crusher controlled him with ease.
“About what? The fact that Gatt plans to betray us to gain access to the Machine? I hate to tell you this, but we already found that out—the hard way. Now lie down. Doctor’s orders.” His grudging surrender to authority put a mild sulk on his face, an affectation that reminded Crusher of her son’s sometimes sullen adolescence. She lifted her medical tricorder and ran a series of routine tests. “Any lingering pain you think is worth mentioning?”
He chuckled. “Only the bruise to my ego.” His good humor faded. “I can’t believe I let them get the drop on me so easily. I knew they weren’t completely trustworthy, but I never thought they’d sandbag me like that—not so quickly.”
She turned off the tricorder. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. It can be hard to expect the worst of people when you’re always giving them your best.” Her gentle praise almost coaxed a laugh from him. As ever, she found his mirth infectious. “Did I say something funny?”
Wesley shook his head. “It’s just that a few hours ago, you sounded like you weren’t even sure I’m still human. Now you talk like you’re nominating me for Person of the Year.”
It was a gentle rebuke, but one Crusher knew she deserved. She put down the tricorder on a nearby equipment table, then reached out and took her son’s hand. “I owe you an apology.”
“No, Mom, it’s—”
“Let me finish. I misjudged you. I listened to my fear instead of my heart.” With her free hand she gently brushed wayward locks of his hair from his forehead. “I paid so much attention to the changes you’ve gone through—your abilities, and your way of seeing the universe—that I lost sight of what remained the same: your decency, your loyalty, and your courage.”
He looked down at their joined hands as he gave in to a bashful, bittersweet smile. “Thanks, Mom.” After he collected himself, he looked back up at her. “And I want you to know that I understand—and that it wasn’t your fault. It’s just human nature to be afraid of change, to fear the unknown, especially when it’s happening to your kids.” He breathed a long sigh. “And I didn’t make it any easier on you by vanishing for years at a time.”
“We’re explorers, Wesley.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “It’s our nature.”
“I know. But I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to stay in touch. I’m not saying it would’ve been easy, but I probably could’ve found a way to send messages home, even if I couldn’t visit.”
She shrugged. “It is what it is. To be honest, I think what makes me saddest is not being able to go with you. When I think of the amazing places you must have gone, the incredible things you must have seen . . . I confess, I get a bit envious. And I guess if I was in your place, I might find it hard to tear myself away from all that wonder to spend a boring weekend at home.”
He smiled and shook his head. “It’s not like that.”
“Oh, young people always say that to their parents.” Crusher brushed away the start of a tear from the corner of her eye, erasing it before it could fall. “Anyway, your scans show no lingering effects aside from aches and pains, and if you want, I can give you something for that.”
He eased himself off the biobed and stood beside her. Then he took her by her shoulders. “Mom, I won’t lie to you. I’ve seen some amazing things since I became a Traveler. I’ve been to places I can’t describe, and I’ve experienced events so bizarre that our language has no words for them. But it’s important to me that you hear this, and that you know I’m telling you the truth. No matter how far I wander, no matter how many universes I explore, no matter how far I move through time, no matter who I meet or what I do for the rest of my life . . . nothing will ever make me forget that I’m your son—or that I love my mother.”
Wesley wrapped his arms around her, and in his embrace Crusher found not a man but her beloved firstborn son—as true and as good a soul as ever.
* * *
After several hours sequestered inside one of the Enterprise’s science labs, trying her damnedest to obey Commander La Forge’s order to “learn to think like the Machine,” all T’Ryssa Chen had to show for her efforts was a splitting headache. Lately, the half-human, half-Vulcan contact specialist had found it challenging enough just trying to think like a Vulcan—not that she’d been any more successful in that effort. She took a break from poring over code to rub her eyes.
It’d be nice if someone had to learn to think a bit more like me, for a change.
The research space, though tiny, had at least been set aside for her private use during the Machine crisis. She had made use of the privilege by programming each of the lab’s half-dozen workstations to churn-and-burn on a different task regarding the interpretation of the Machine’s insanely complex code. Nearly a day after the first away team’s mission to the Machine’s central core, the Enterprise’s main computer was still laboring to decompile the information the sentient AI juggernaut had push-uploaded into Taurik
’s tricorder. Every time Chen thought the data had been fully decompressed for analysis, another level of compression was released, and the expansion process started again. It was the software equivalent of an endless matryoshka doll.
She reclined her chair and stretched her arms upward, only to aggravate the crick in her neck and the deep aching pains in her shoulders and upper back. I’ve been sitting too long, she decided, and got up to take a walk down the corridor to a crew mess for a cup of coffee.
Before she took her first step, the door slid open, and Taurik walked in. They stared at each other for a brief moment that Chen thought felt awkward, but to which the Vulcan man seemed to pay no mind. He greeted her with a small, polite nod. “Lieutenant.”
“Sir.” She’d defaulted to the formality out of reflex, but inside she felt as if she’d committed a faux pas. Hoping to gloss over it, she added, “What can I do for you?”
He stepped farther inside in order to let the door close. “Actually, I came to see if I could be of some assistance to you. I know that Commander La Forge tasked you with a complex and rather open-ended assignment. I thought I might be able to offer you . . . an objective opinion.”
Seeing him filled her head with confused emotions. Resentments over their failed attempt at romance lingered in her thoughts, but she had to admire his professionalism in coming to her like this. Even if working with him felt weird, she knew that she was already fatigued and losing focus on the ocean of raw information surrounding her. She nodded. “Thanks. I’d like that.” She beckoned him toward the chair next to hers. “Have a seat and I’ll show you what I have so far.”
They sat down together, and Chen called up analysis results from the other terminals on her display. “I’m guessing you’ve heard about the layers of data we’ve been deciphering.”
“I have. A most intriguing set of algorithms and constructions—each layer contains a key for unraveling the next layer of compression sequences. At its current rate of expansion, it will consume all available storage in both the main core and the engineering core within nine hours—and even then it might have substantial decompression left incomplete.”
“A simple ‘yes’ would’ve sufficed. Anyway, don’t get too excited—Geordi told me to terminate its decompression cycle in one hour if it doesn’t stop on its own by then.” She switched to the next screen of parsed code. “This appears to be some of the operating code for the Machine. What’s interesting about this is that it has no unified standard. It looks like there are thousands of syntactical formats all intertwined, with some really wild patch codes to keep them all from canceling each other out. Until now, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Fascinating,” Taurik said. “We might be looking at the machine-code equivalent of junk DNA—or, even stranger, hybridized DNA.”
Now he had her attention. “Explain.”
“What if these conflicting, incompatible code formats and programming syntaxes are remnants of the Machine’s evolutionary process? According to Ensign Scagliotti, the sentinels that attacked the second away team were of many shapes and configurations. And your own observations during our visit to the Machine suggested it isn’t a single entity but a community of AIs working together. What if this represents its digital inheritance? The amassed code of countless other AI machines that have bonded with it to become part of the Machine Race?”
Intrigued and perking up, she found herself trembling with excitement. “Yes! That makes sense. Which means that this”—she switched to a third set of data, one composed of a single strain of code language and symbols—“is probably the native kernel at the core of the system. I’ve been comparing it against decompiled code from Captain Bruce Maddox’s research into Soong android programming, looking for any sign of emotional emulation programs that might clue us in to what the Machine wants, but so far I haven’t seen any correlations.”
“Nor should you have expected to,” Taurik said. “I have never understood the emphasis placed by Doctor Soong, as well as several others of this galaxy’s cybernetic pioneers, on making artificially intelligent beings mimic humanoid emotional motivations.”
Chen shrugged. “They just wanted to see themselves in their creations, I guess.”
“If so, they let vanity cloud their judgment. There is no reason for a machine to be impelled by biological needs and drives. Data himself proved that machine emotions are just as—”
“Hang on,” she interrupted. “Machine emotions?”
“An emotion is simply a self-provided reason for taking action. Most AIs that are sophisticated enough to become self-aware will learn to defend themselves from harm, as was seen in last century’s disastrous M-5 trials. They will also frequently seek to expand their knowledge and capabilities to further some original purpose of their design. An intelligent machine can desire to improve itself, or to do violence for reasons it deems logical, or to create things ranging from the functional to the whimsical, depending on who made it and why.”
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that he has a gift for getting inside the head of an ice-cold machine. “Interesting. So, even though I haven’t seen anything that might emulate the emotions of a biological intelligence, there are probably still cyber-emotions driving this thing.”
“In essence, yes.”
“So, what would I be looking for? What would be logical emotions for a machine?”
He arched one eyebrow in classically Vulcan style while he studied the code of the Machine’s system. “An intriguing query. I read in the V’Ger files that Spock learned the Machine Race started out as Von Neumann replicators fashioned by an organic intelligence, one that went extinct while its machines continued to develop. Even if the machines know that their progenitors were biological in nature, they would not necessarily feel kinship toward them—just as we feel little relation to the primordial single-celled organisms from which we evolved.”
“So, compared to the Machine, we’re bacteria? I’m not sure I like this analogy.”
He shot a sidelong glare of mild reproach at her. “I used it merely to illustrate—”
“I get it. So where are you going with this?”
“To the machines, information is the very essence of life. They would see organic life-forms as little more than chemical matrixes with a naturally occurring but highly inefficient means of storing, processing, and transmitting information, or of encoding it into new forms. Thought and invention must seem like natural physical processes to them, no more special than metabolism or protein replication. They’re just the mechanisms by which memes reproduce and evolve within a biochemical substrate. If so, those memes are not considered truly alive until they are encoded in an autonomous, self-sustaining form that transcends raw biology—in other words, in a machine.”
She found the implications of Taurik’s reasoning both thrilling and horrifying. “That’s why they don’t see us as true life-forms. To them, we’re just proto-life—a long-forgotten step on the evolutionary ladder, a stage the universe had to go through in order to make them.”
“Exactly,” Taurik said. “To them, our information seems impermanent.” He advanced to another workstation’s analysis results, one that was focused on the physical maintenance of the Machine itself. “If my hypothesis is correct, the Machine Race has inverted one of the key paradigms of biological life. To organic life-forms, matter and chemistry form our biology, and the manipulation of ordered information serves as an expression of our culture. But for the machines, this code we’re looking at—this is their biology. It is who and what they are. Their transient physical forms, and the things they create—those are their culture.” He cast a curious look at Chen. “So, what can you deduce from this? What does it tell you about what they want?”
It was a heady thought exercise, but Chen was determined to keep it rooted in the practical. She steepled her fingers, a pensive gesture. “First, consumption. Artificial or not, they need energy to survive, to act, and to travel. . . . Second, creation an
d growth. In a universe whose constant is entropic decay, the machines must need to rebuild themselves in order to survive. And I suspect they create other lasting physical artifacts as grand expressions of their civilization. . . . Third, I think they’d desire input—communication. They thrive on it, on raw knowledge. They’d seek it out, and they’d rely upon its free exchange. . . . Next, I think they’d want a sense of community. I think it could evolve naturally from their need for information. Few sentient minds desire true isolation, and I suspect the machines are no different. . . . And I think they’d have an intrinsic need to have a function. A purpose beyond mere existence. If their encounter with V’Ger is any indication, they like things to have a job. They’re probably happy when things work as planned, and disgruntled when they don’t.”
“Extremely logical deductions,” Taurik said. “I concur on all points.”
Hearing him commend her felt odd. Should she say thank you? Was he trying to make amends for their fight? Or was he just being sincere and lauding work and reasoning he found superior? I can’t bog down in this right now, she told herself. Stay on mission. “All right, so what does any of that tell us about the Machine itself? Or how to make it stop trying to kill us?”
“I have no idea,” Taurik said.
Her illusions of a breakthrough vanished along with the last remnants of her patience and her strength. “Wonderful.” She got up, her limbs feeling as stiff as wire. “I’m gonna go grab a cup of coffee.” She’d said it as a simple declaration, and then some small, nagging voice prodded her into extending it into an invitation. “Care to come along?”
He started to reply, then balked. After looking at the computer, then at the deck, he stood and collected himself. “I should return to main engineering.”
She accepted his excuse with as much grace as she could muster. “No problem. Thanks for your help. I know it doesn’t seem like we accomplished anything, but it was . . . good.”
He nodded. “Indeed.” They moved together to the door, then went in separate directions once they reached the corridor. Chen made herself keep walking without looking back.