Control

by David Mack

  “A Faraday room or its equivalent,” Douglas interjected. “Do you have that?”

  “I do. This suite is secured in just such a manner. And I am capable of modifying a padd to restrict its ability to transmit on unauthorized frequencies.”

  “Good,” Graniv said. “Then we can get started.”

  The meeting was put on hold while Data made the necessary hobbling changes to an Orion knock-off of a padd before engaging his suite’s most robust signal-suppression protocols. Then his guests inserted a simple data chip into the padd and showed him the source code for an eavesdropping and clandestine counterintelligence AI called Uraei.

  It was ancient. Primitive. Deeply flawed. But also powerful.

  When they showed him it was everywhere, it became ­utterly terrifying.

  “This is quite remarkable,” he said. “Where did you find it?”

  “Long story,” Graniv said. “Have you seen it before?”

  “Never.” He noted the nervous stares of his guests and intuited their concern. “You’re all wondering whether this code string has been embedded in my own matrix. I can assure you, it has not. My father harbored a lifelong distrust of large institutions, even those as seemingly benign as Starfleet or the Federation. Consequently, he insisted on writing his own software and firmware, and manufacturing his own components. My system contains no trace of Uraei.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Douglas said. “So, can you help us?”

  He set down the padd on an end table. “That depends. What do you wish to do?”

  “Reverse-engineer it,” Bashir said. “So we can monitor its activity.”

  Douglas continued, “And use it to track the movements of, and communications between, everyone controlling it or being directed by it.”

  “Without getting ourselves killed in the process,” Graniv added.

  Data weighed all of that against the danger and mentally simulated a few thousand different scenarios to test their likelihood of resulting in catastrophe. “That will be difficult,” he said, choosing to err on the side of understatement. “Uraei is complicated, and as you have pointed out, nearly ubiquitous. Tracking its behavior on comnets and in subspace frequencies without alerting it to our intentions will pose serious challenges.”

  Bashir leaned forward, his countenance dire. “But can it be done?”

  “With time and effort . . . possibly. I will need the help of my friend Shakti.”

  Graniv asked, “And what are her qualifications?”

  “She is an advanced artificial superintelligence existing as a distributed consciousness—partly here, partly aboard my ship, Archeus, and the rest in a secure location.”

  Douglas shook her head. “Can’t beat those credentials.”

  Bashir stood. “Best guess, Data: How long before we can tap into Uraei?”

  “Unknown. But Shakti and I will start work immediately and let you know when we find something. Until then I suggest you all make yourselves comfortable.” He cushioned his bad news with a nervous smile. “I suspect this might take a while.”

  Twelve

  A full day passed while Data and Shakti labored in semiseclusion to dissect and reverse-engineer Uraei. For fear of attracting attention on Orion, Bashir, Sarina, and Ozla Graniv spent their time sequestered inside the penthouse suite and did their best to keep out of the android’s way while he worked.

  Graniv used the hours to scrawl ideas in a replicated antique-style notebook, while Sarina spent the day skimming news channels on the comnet for . . . well, Bashir had no idea what she was looking for. He could only imagine she was soaking up information and waiting to see if her enhanced intellect forged unexpected connections between seemingly disparate facts.

  For his own part, Bashir welcomed the downtime as an opportunity to catch up on his reading. In spite of the time he had devoted in the past year to covert intelligence field work, at heart he remained a doctor. As such, he was perpetually curious about recent advances in surgical technology, pharmaceutical engineering, and various aspects of medical practice. Even reading at the accelerated pace enabled by his own genetic enhancements, he could never keep up with the flood of new literature being generated in every sector of his profession.

  He was deep into a treatise on the therapeutic value of using cross-species retroviral gene therapy to reverse telomere degradation in humanoids, while suppressing the generation of potentially fatal regressive proteins, when the old-fashioned hinged twin doors to the suite’s library swung open and Data emerged to announce, “Shakti and I are ready to run our first test.”

  Bashir set his padd on the living room sofa. Graniv returned from the bedroom clutching her pen and notebook. The voices of Federation News Service anchors, which had been drifting through the open doorway of the suite’s vid room all afternoon and evening, went quiet. Seconds later Sarina emerged and wasted no time crossing the room toward Data. “Let’s do this.” Before he could respond, she slipped past him into the library.

  Data looked taken aback by Sarina’s brusque passage. He dismissed it with a frown, then said to Bashir and Graniv, “Please join us.” He waited beside the library’s double-wide doorway and ushered Graniv and Bashir inside. As they found seats on either side of Sarina at a long conference table that stretched down the center of the room, Data closed and secured the doors. “Just a precaution,” he told Bashir, who had noted the locking of the portal with mild concern.

  A silken female voice with a refined London accent wafted down from speakers hidden in the ceiling. “Welcome, everyone. My name is Shakti. Are you all ready?” The AI seemed aware of the trio’s awkward nods and continued, “Very well. Let’s begin.”

  A bookcase at the far end of the conference table sank into the floor, revealing a wall-sized viewscreen. It snapped to life with a computer rendering of a complex system of some kind. It reminded Bashir of a brain’s synaptic network. He turned an expectant look toward Data. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It is, indeed. We are observing Uraei’s actions in real time.”

  Graniv squinted at the viewscreen. “What’s it doing?”

  Sarina answered with ominous certainty, “Thinking.”

  “Quite correct, Ms. Douglas,” Shakti said. “The activity charted here represents what we’ve detected in this subsector. Uraei has almost no presence on the surface of Orion, with one notable exception.” The image on-screen switched to the capital’s street map, with a white-hot splash of light in a single isolated grid. “The Federation Embassy.”

  Graniv was horrified. “Look at that. Near-total saturation.”

  “A correct assessment,” Data said. “Shakti, widen to a full sector scan.”

  “A ‘please’ would be nice.”

  “My apologies. Please expand to—” The image on screen switched before he finished the request. “Thank you.” To his flesh-and-blood guests he continued, “As you can see, Uraei’s web is just as active across an entire sector. This is an increase in its effective operational range of nearly an order of magnitude, with no sign of lag in its response times.” He faced the screen. “Shakti, please widen the scan to show all known sectors in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.”

  Another shift, this time to display all of known local space plus several of its frontier sectors. Encompassed in the broadened perspective was the entirety of the United Federation of Planets and its closest neighboring powers, including the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassian Union, the Tzenkethi Coalition, the Breen Confederacy, the Ferengi Alliance, the Gorn Hegemony, and many other powers of varying sizes and influence. Woven through them all was a complex network that blazed with rapid transactions.

  “As you can see,” Shakti said, “Uraei does not operate in isolated pockets. It appears to be a distributed consciousness, operating on an interstellar scale.”

  Data added, “More
than a passive eavesdropper, Uraei is engaged with the flow of information at every level throughout known space. It is in a constant state of flux, receiving input and coordinating responses—all in the guise of a benign router of data packets and encryption keys. It is just as widespread as you had feared—and possibly far more capable than any of us imagined.”

  A gravid silence filled the room for a moment while every­one pondered the import of what Data and Shakti had documented. Confronted with the chilling portrait of their previously invisible enemy, Sarina eyed it as if it were a wild animal loose in the room. “Now that we can map it, can we tap into it? I want to track all its controllers and assets in local space.”

  “I think that would be unwise.”

  She clearly disliked Data’s answer. “Why?”

  “We still don’t know how Uraei protects itself,” Shakti said. “Right now we’re just observers, using the system’s own routing protocols to monitor its traffic. Tapping the system would entail an active intrusion.”

  Bashir nodded, then looked at Sarina. “Maybe she’s—”

  “We need to try,” Sarina said, talking over his gentle counsel. “Nothing big, nothing dangerous. Just dip our toe in to test the water. That’s all.”

  “Very well,” Data said. “Shakti, proceed when ready. And please—be careful.”

  “I will, Data. Thank you.” A scroll of machine symbols traveled up the left side of the viewscreen as Shakti added, “Commencing network code injection.”

  Less than two seconds later the viewscreen pulsed with a white flash of light. The vast web of signals it had charted degenerated into scrambled pixels and static, then a sharp bang echoed behind walls on either side of the screen, and smoke rolled out of the ventilation ducts. Overhead, a plasma conduit ruptured and rained searing phosphors on the conference table.

  Bashir bolted from his seat, fearing for the safety of Data’s friend. “Shakti?”

  “A moment, Doctor,” Data said. “The overhead speakers are offline.” The android pivoted away for a moment. A birdlike tilt of his head suggested he was reacting to something only he could perceive. Then he shot a reassuring look at Bashir. “Shakti is unharmed. She was able to dump this node of her consciousness back to my ship before Uraei’s feedback surge hit her server module.”

  More worried than ever, Graniv leaned in to ask, “Feedback surge? From Uraei?”

  “I am afraid so,” Data said. “It reacted far more quickly than Shakti or I expected. Worst of all, there is a high probability it now knows where we are and what we sought to do.” He walked to the library’s double doors, unlocked them, and swung them open wide. With a peculiar geniality he added, “I suggest we all prepare for a swift departure.”

  • • •

  Some nights were made for hard work, others were made for recreation. Tonight was the latter, and Lal was determined to make the most of her playtime. Her musical studies often required her to listen to as many as a hundred unique compositions at once for the purpose of comparative analysis, but this evening she was listening for pleasure, so she cut the number of simultaneous playbacks to twenty-three, ranging in style from Terran jazz to Klingon opera and Bajoran folk.

  Her left hand and eye were devoted to her practice of ancient Vulcan brush calligraphy, while her right hand and eye were focused on her latest impressionistic watercolor painting, a portrait of her “grandmother” Julianna Tainer rendered from equal parts memory and inspiration.

  If only I had been made with another pair of hands I could be practicing my knitting, she lamented. Perhaps someday I will rebuild myself in a more efficient nonhumanoid form.

  The scroll and painting were coming together nicely, which made Lal confident enough to free up more of her positronic net’s processing power for the contemplation of recently discovered gravimetric anomalies detected in the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, the Milky Way’s nearest neighbor in the Local Group. After all, how much brainpower did she really need to compose a critical literary thesis on the work of Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If it took her twelve minutes instead of ten to complete her doctoral presentation on the subject, would anyone but her and her father even notice?

  She accessed her house’s link to the Orion comnet and downloaded an advanced self-instruction module on the Ancient Hebitian language. Some high-profile scholars at the Daystrom Institute and the Raxan Foundation had recently issued competing papers arguing that all the known languages of the Cardassian and Bajoran species were derived from Ancient Hebitian—a tantalizing proposition Lal was determined to test for herself later that night, right after the hour she had set aside in which to learn and master the art of sushi preparation.

  An encrypted signal triggered the quantum transceiver embedded in her positronic brain. The only beings who knew of its existence or its unique quantum resonance frequency were her father and his trusted AI Shakti. It was Data whose transmitted voice filled her thoughts.

  {Lal, we must leave Orion immediately.}

  She was vexed and made no effort to hide it. [Why must I give up my private time just to take an unscheduled trip with you?]

  {This is not a vacation. Leave your things and make a clean exit.}

  Lal understood the words clean exit meant this was a life-or-death crisis. Something had happened, and now they were in danger. [I understand, Father. I’ll be ready in sixty seconds.]

  She regretted the need to abandon her house. A private residence was one of the few vestiges of autonomy her father had allowed her as part of her maturation, but even this privilege had come with conditions—the most extreme of which Data had just exercised.

  One positronic pulse from Lal started a cascading wipe of all the memory chips and storage systems in the house. Every device in her home, from the replicator to the entertainment node, was made to hold tiny bits of data about their users. Data had taught her that such information could be exploited by their enemies if they acquired it—so with his help she had rigged every piece of technology in her house to self-destruct at her silent command.

  She picked up the painting of Julianna from its easel and carried it out the front door as she unleashed her second wave of destruction: a storm of nanites, programmed to devour every atom of her house and all its contents, from furniture to clothes in the closets and the curtains on the windows. Afterward, when nothing of the house remained, the nanites would turn against one another as subatomic cannibals until only one remained to execute its end-of-line command:

  DISINCORPORATE.

  In another five minutes there would be no proof Lal had ever been there. And that was as it needed to be. If her father said it was time to pull up stakes, she trusted him.

  By the time Lal reached the street outside her front door, the gutted husk of her former residence was already falling in upon itself, surrendering without a fight to the nanites’ hunger. She tucked the painting under her arm and activated her transceiver, using the general frequency that would reach both Data and Shakti.

  [Ready.]

  Shakti replied, «Stand by for transport to Archeus.»

  By the time Lal felt the grip of the transporter beam and saw the first shimmering of its dematerialization field, nothing remained of her little yellow house but memories and dust.

  • • •

  Never in her life had Ozla Graniv packed a bag with such haste. She had always prided herself on being an organized traveler, one whose articles were folded taut and stowed with no daylight between them. Tonight she forced the few things she had taken from her travel bag back inside without regard for how they fit, so long as the bag closed. As soon as she heard its locks click into place, she took it in tow and strode out to the living room to meet Bashir and Douglas.

  There she found Data, who had altered his appearance to one more rugged than that of his bartending persona. His light brown hair was loose and
fine, his face clean-shaven. He had attired himself like a common laborer—scuffed work boots, faded trousers, an untucked shirt of natural linen beneath an open black jacket. In one hand he toted a small ruck.

  At the same time, Bashir and Douglas returned from their own bedroom, each carrying a slim pack diagonally across their back. The doctor offered his hand to Data. “I guess this is where we say good-bye.”

  “I am afraid not,” Data said. “The three of you must come with me or die.”

  Graniv recoiled. “Are you threatening us?”

  Data’s trademark courtesy never wavered. “Forgive me. I phrased that poorly. Shakti has noticed a pattern of suspect activity on the main floor of the casino. She and I concur there is a high probability that operatives sent by Uraei have arrived and mean to do us all harm.”

  She wondered why the obvious answer eluded him. “Can’t we call the police?”

  Douglas and Bashir traded grim, knowing looks before he said, “By the time those agents do something the police can act upon, we’ll most likely all be dead.”

  “Or permanently missing,” Douglas added.

  “Correct,” Data said. “It is highly unlikely any of you would be able to reach public or private transportation to the starport without being intercepted. And if you did, our foes are almost certainly awaiting you there as well. At this time, your only viable means of escape from Orion is aboard my ship, Archeus.”

  “Our foes?” Graniv felt as if her whole world was being pulled out from under her. “Who? And on what authority? Are we talking about Starfleet? Federation Security?”

  Her questions made Bashir visibly uncomfortable. “Not exactly.”

  “So you can’t say who poses a threat, but you think we should run for our lives?”

  “Ms. Graniv,” Data said, “I suggest we table this discussion for a less precarious moment.” He checked his internal chrono. “I estimate our visitors will reach this floor in approximately ninety-one seconds.”