by Jeffrey Lang
“We need information, Albert,” La Forge said. “Information we can’t get through any other means. You’re working at the Daystrom now, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” Albert said, listening for the kettle to whistle. “Part time. When I want.”
“And we need to find out about what’s happening there.”
“Any reason you can’t just knock on the door and ask?”
“Many reasons,” La Forge said, and, in his voice, Albert heard the source of his uncertainty.
“My daughter,” Data explained, and Albert could have sworn he heard a crack in his voice. “She has been abducted. Her abductor demands we . . . acquire something for him.”
“I hope you won’t mind me saying so, Mister Data, but while you have expressed several emotions since arriving, I cannot say as you seem particularly anxious about your daughter’s safety.”
Data cocked his head to the right, a behavioral tic Albert had observed on several occasions. Usually, the head tip was accompanied by a blank stare and was followed by a charmingly naïve question or cogent observation about human behavior. Albert was unprepared for what happened instead: Data’s chin dipped down to touch his chest and he shut his eyes. A complex grouping of artificial muscles and polysteel joints in the android’s neck and shoulders gave way and his frame shuddered. Albert had been around enough overtaxed machines to recognize a system that was on the verge of failure. Data closed his eyes, not in concentration, but to marshal scant resources. He touched the outer edges of his eyes with his thumb and middle finger and rubbed them gently for several seconds. When he was finished, Data straightened his back again and looked down at Albert with terrifying intensity. “I can assure you, Albert, that this is not true. Indeed, I am all too aware of how heavily time weighs on me. Lal has a—what shall I call it?—a condition. If she goes too long between treatments, her neural net will fail. Her captor is not aware of this condition . . .”
“And she’s too smart to tell him,” Albert finished. “Because it would give her captor leverage.”
Data nodded. “I believe this is the case. Or perhaps she thinks I will be able to find her before she requires another treatment.”
“That’s quite a lot of faith she has in her father.”
“I hope it is warranted.”
Albert smiled. “Kids,” he said. “They’re never easy, are they? I had kids. Did I ever tell you about them?”
“No,” Data said, smiling in return. “Perhaps we will have an opportunity to speak of them later.”
“Sure. I would enjoy that. But for now . . .” Albert paused. The kettle water came to a boil. Albert flicked off the heat element and turned on the coffee mill. The sound of beans being ground into fine dust prevented conversation. When the beans sounded like they had reached the correct grade of powder, Albert turned off the mill and dumped the grounds into the French press. “Why me?” he asked. “What do you need from me?”
Data looked over to La Forge, who was inhaling deeply, roused by the smell of percolating coffee. When he noticed Data’s stare, he said, “Moriarty.”
Now it was Albert’s turn to cock his head. He turned from La Forge to Data, who was looking down at Albert, his left eyebrow raised. “Moriarty,” he repeated. “Unless, of course, you can prove it could not possibly be him.”
Albert rubbed the bristled ends of his mustache and pondered the question. Then, coming to a conclusion, he pushed down on the plunger of the French press with firm, steady pressure. “I don’t believe I can say that for sure,” he admitted. “Let’s have a cup of coffee and then find out if it could possibly be him.”
7
A timeless time
“Mrs. Hudson?”
“Yes, Professor?”
“Where are my daughters?”
“You don’t have any daughters, sir.” The disembodied voice, once one of the friendliest, most beloved sounds in Moriarty’s world, sent chills down his spine.
“But I do, Mrs. Hudson. Sophia and Gladys. You were . . . I mean, you are particularly fond of Gladys, the younger. Or so Gladys believed.”
“That hardly seems possible, sir. If you had two daughters, I would be equally fond of both of them. But you do not. Unless you are suggesting there is something wrong with me. Would you like me to run a diagnostic program?”
“No,” Moriarty said. “No need, Mrs. Hudson.” Besides, Moriarty had already run a level-one diagnostic on every computer in the house and that he had access to outside. All of them told the same story: The universe was now as it always had been. “Thank you for your time.”
“You’re quite welcome, sir. Would you like some tea brought to your workroom?”
Moriarty paused for a moment to see if Regina expressed a preference. He even waved his hand in her direction, hoping for a response, but he received none. His wife continued to stare blankly out the small window by the chaise longue in the corner of the workroom. He kept the chair there for nights when he wanted a quick nap, though in better days Regina occasionally occupied the lounger while he labored over some task or problem, usually pretending to be working herself, but, in reality, simply watching him. In better days. “Nothing right now, thank you.”
“Very good, sir.”
He walked over to his wife and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She shuddered and turned to look up at him. “What?” she asked dully.
“You heard.”
“I heard . . . Wait, no, I didn’t. Heard what?”
“Mrs. Hudson. She doesn’t remember the girls.”
“Yes, I heard that.” Regina pulled her shawl up over her shoulders and shivered into the folds. “It makes me angry to hear her say it. It’s a terrible thing. I know she’s only a machine, but, where once I would have quite easily said how much I love her, now I fear I may despise her.”
“It’s not her fault, Regina. She’s only a computer.”
“I know. And it would be different if anyone else remembered, but they don’t, do they? Mister and Mrs. Fischler don’t remember one of their sons. Mrs. Templesmith doesn’t remember her husband. She isn’t even Mrs. Templesmith anymore. She’s a spinster now, a lonely woman who lives in a cottage on our property and tends to the goats. Everything else about her is the same, but she doesn’t remember that she was married, that she once grew the most beautiful roses I’ve ever seen even though she didn’t particularly like roses, but, oh, Mister Templesmith did. It’s so sad, James . . .”
“It is,” Moriarty said, but he didn’t feel sad. He couldn’t tell Regina this, but, ever since the disaster, ever since the universe had been shorn in half, he had felt a strange elation growing in him. Proof: He was finally going to have an opportunity to prove the once unprovable. “But it is not the end. There is a way.”
“You keep implying this, James, but I don’t see how. Whatever happened . . . happened. It was catastrophic, galaxy-wide, if not universe-wide. This is bigger than any other mystery we ever investigated, bigger than anything Starfleet or the Federation or even the Enterprise ever attempted to unravel. This was a Q-level event, but there doesn’t appear to be any sign of Q, does there? So what can that mean?”
One of the peculiarities of their existence was that both Moriarty and Regina retained detailed memories of every mission the U.S.S. Enterprise-D had ever engaged in, including some that most of the rest of the quadrant had never heard about or likely would believe if they did. This included the inexplicable tales of the near-omniscient entity called Q, who apparently had a particular fetish for Jean-Luc Picard, captain of their point-of-origin. On the occasions when they spoke of him, Moriarty and Regina were never able to do so for long before they became mired in philosophical conundrums about the likelihood that such an entity truly existed or whether the tales were only fever dreams.
“It could mean we have finally found a way to resolve the great puzzle.”
In the days since the catastrophe, Regina had been alternately manic and withdrawn, but, just for a moment, Moriarty s
aw a flash of the woman he loved. An expression of keen interest flared, but then it was gone with a weary shake. “You’re mad,” she muttered. “We decided long ago that there was no way to prove whether we were living in a virtual universe. More, we decided it doesn’t matter. If the universe is virtual, then so are we.”
“It didn’t matter,” Moriarty protested. “Because we were together. And then, when the girls came along, it mattered even less. But now, we have a reason to want this universe to be a construct. If we can prove it is, if we can find the reins, then we might . . .”
“We could bring them back!” Regina exclaimed, wringing her hands together.
“Perhaps,” Moriarty said. “Perhaps.” Inwardly, he squirmed with self-disgust. His wife had arrived at the proper conclusion; he had only been thinking, Then we can find the driver.
“But what made you think . . . ?”
“Other than the fact that the world was rewritten in a flash? It was our Mrs. Hudson.”
“There could be many reasons why she’s acting this way. The same space-time incursion that took Sophia and Gladys could have affected her.”
“Of course,” Moriarty said, rising and crossing the room. He touched a bit of inlay in the wood paneling, and a hidden door opened noiselessly. Behind the panel was the user interface for their home computer. Entering his passcode by tapping a series of geometric symbols, he unlocked the command console and brought up the root directory. “Or looking at the problem from a slightly different angle, a memory bank was damaged, taking the girls with it. The core program understood this, so it tried to compensate.”
“By creating a world where they never existed in the first place.”
“Correct.”
“But we remember them. We remember everything.”
“We do.”
“Why? Should this program also modify our memories so we believe everything is as it ever has been?” Regina asked.
“Perhaps it does,” Moriarty said, waving his hand like a stage magician asking the audience to inspect the apparatus for his next trick. “It might every day. How would we know if it does its job well?”
“But it didn’t do its job well this time.”
“No, it didn’t. Perhaps the damage to the core was too severe, though I suspect otherwise.”
The glimmer of interest in Regina’s eyes had been fading, but it flared again at Moriarty’s words. “Do you?” she asked. “Please elucidate.”
“If we accept the central conceit—that this universe is a program created especially for us by a massively powerful computer, a computer whose memory core has been damaged—then we are the only things in the universe that are not of the universe.”
“Not created as part and parcel,” Regina replied.
“Yes.”
“And so we might not be affected by changes to the system.”
“Precisely.”
“You realize, I hope, how fantastically egotistical this all sounds.”
“I do, my love,” Moriarty replied, happy to hear even the shadow of a smile in his wife’s voice. “I am a genius, after all.”
“Of course you are.” Regina sat back in her chair, resting her head on the wing. “And, of course, there’s no way to prove any of this.”
“Not in a whole and healthy universe, no,” Moriarty agreed, tapping at the interface, bringing the full resources of his thinking machines to life. “But in this broken world, we may find a way.”
“How?”
“By creating a holodeck.”
His wife narrowed her eyes and stared fixedly at Moriarty. “What? Why?”
“Because, if I am correct in my assessment—that the universe is broken and short of resources—then the machine that governs our existence will take shortcuts. Rather than create the illusion of a holodeck—effectively, a holodeck within a holodeck—it will take the expedient solution and simply grant us access to the holodeck in which we already live.”
“But, again, how will we know? If it has been deceiving us for who knows how many years, why can’t it deceive us now?”
“Two reasons: First, the machine’s resources are taxed. And second, I’ll be watching it carefully. I have created a program . . .”
“That it can easily bamboozle because that is what the program has always done.”
“Pray allow me to finish: I have created a program that is watching a program that is watching a program that is watching a program that is watching the holodeck. Every one of my programs will draw on resources that the Ruling Program, if I may be so bold as to name our keeper, will have to monitor and deceive. Eventually, in its current state, it will give way to expediency.”
“And perhaps the solution then will be simply to delete us,” Regina said.
“I think not. It may grow desperate, but I suspect that the program’s prime directive is to keep us safe and secure. Without us, the Ruling Program has no reason to exist. It’s not the devil, Regina.”
“You make it sound more a nanny.”
“That may be closer to the truth. I will be sure to ask when I meet it face-to-face.”
“But, James, assuming you could even do what you claim, how long would it take you to prepare such a series of programs? When could you begin your test?” The flicker of the old Regina faded, replaced again by the sad (or mad?) woman who had taken her place. “When could you get them back?”
Moriarty sped across the room, took his wife’s hand, and knelt before her. Kissing her palm, he said, “My dearest one, the programs have been ready for years. I’ve already set them in motion. We have only now to wait and see what happens.”
A placeless place
“And how long did it take?” Lal asked. She had begun to wonder if she was experiencing Stockholm Syndrome. She had begun to think of Professor Moriarty less as a captor and more as a host: a raconteur and not a racketeer. She smiled thinking of this little bit of minor wordplay, but then felt an unexpected shock of sadness that her father wasn’t there to hear it. He always seemed to enjoy her little bon mots. Lal wondered if the emotion she was experiencing was what the humans called “longing.” If it was, then here was another example of one of their unexpectedly oblique descriptions for a feeling: Lal felt stretched out, drawn, as if on a rack, like she wanted to reach for her father, but he was much, much too far away.
“It depends,” Moriarty said, “on how you define time.”
“I understand it’s relativistic,” Alice added.
The Professor smiled and adjusted his tie. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard the same. But—less mysteriously—for Regina and me, several years passed. The world—the universe—was shocked again and again by changes, until eventually even the Ruling Program could not make allowances.” He nodded toward Alice. “Relativistic changes, but changes nonetheless. I understand less time passed out here in the ‘real’ universe.”
“How much time?” Lal asked.
“As long as it took to remove the damaged memory storage unit from the wreck of the Enterprise, identify it for its unique nature, then transport it to the Daystrom Institute.”
“So . . . weeks?”
“Approximately twenty-three days,” Moriarty replied, his voice tinged with bitterness. “I understand the holodeck memory cores were not a high priority. Just a lot of holostories, bits of fantasy and fluff. Though, as you can imagine, a lot of it was precious to some of the crew, but the more important—the more private—the more likely it was backed up into multiple storage units.”
“Starfleet vessels are required to have their computer cores uploaded whenever they dock at a major starbase,” Lal recited helpfully. “Even personal information like private logs and recipe files. Even holodeck fantasy programs. All encrypted, naturally. None of it available for public review.”
“No, of course not,” Alice said gleefully. “Not a bit of it is reviewed or analyzed by Starfleet Intelligence or Psychological Services, not even for the purposes of studying the effects of long-term space exp
loration on crews under high-stress circumstances. Starfleet would never do that.”
Moriarty cocked his head to the side. “Miss Alice, I believe you may be an exceedingly cynical young woman.”
“Two out of the three things you just said,” Alice observed, “are astonishingly wrong.”
Three months ago—Orion Prime
Sitting in the not-so-very-comfortable chair before her employer’s very large desk in his very large office, Alice could not have been any more relaxed if she had tried. Not that she could try. She was already as relaxed as it was possible to be. Somewhere in her brain, a switch had been flipped, the switch that said “Relaxed? Yes/No.” And Alice had flipped it to “Yes,” so she was relaxed. Very relaxed.
Mister Soong also looked quite relaxed. Perhaps the better word was “imperturbable.” If anyone had asked Alice, “Could Mister Soong be perturbed?” then her answer would have been, “No. Quite the opposite.”
As was her way, she was cataloging all the little changes going on around her, searching for openings, searching for advantage. The heating/cooling system was functioning nominally, maintaining a constant twenty degrees Celsius with a slightly lower than normal humidity, though Alice assumed that had something to do with the fact that they were on the topmost floor and sunlight poured in through the wide windows behind the desk, despite the polarized glass.
Beneath and below them, as the sun sank toward the western horizon, Alice knew the city was coming awake. True, citizens of every known race in the quadrant (and quite a few foreign to it) had been walking, hovering, or scurrying about since the sun rose in the east approximately eleven point eight hours earlier, but all of them were simply denizens of Orion’s waking dream state. Now, at this hour, just as the shadows were growing long and the glittering artificial lights were beginning to twinkle, was the time when the city truly shook out the cobwebs of slumber and came to life.
Alice felt the corner of her mouth twitch up in a tiny, tiny smile. She couldn’t help herself. She felt it in her core: It was going to be a good night.