by Jeffrey Lang
“You are amused?” Mister Soong asked.
“Am I?” Alice asked. “I guess. Maybe a little. Maybe I’m just nervous. Being here. You know . . . in the boss’s office. Exciting. A little scary, but . . . glamorous.” She nodded at the window behind Mister Soong’s desk. “That’s quite a view. Hard not to get excited by that.”
Soong half-turned in his chair—showing his profile: a strong jawline and prominent nose—to look out the window. Below, the lights along the main avenue that led to the casino district were flickering to life. “Ah,” he said absently, “yes.” Then, he turned back to face Alice. “Do you know why you are here?”
“Because you’re letting me go?”
Tilting his head to the right and furrowing his brow, Soong asked, “Why would I let you go? Have you done something?”
“Okay, not letting me go. Because you’re propositioning me?”
His face went blank. “Not that either.”
“Ah.” Alice pushed back deep into her chair and folded her arms. “Those are the usual reasons why I’m called to the boss’s office. I’m out of ideas.”
“This has happened before?”
“More times than I can count.”
“Really? I find that difficult to believe,” Soong said.
“Why?”
“Because I do not believe you forget anything.”
Now it was Alice’s turn to tilt her head and furrow her brow. “Do you ever use contractions?”
“No,” Soong said. “It is an artifact of my upbringing. My father disapproved of shortcuts.”
Alice guffawed, then hid her mouth with a cupped hand. “Okay,” she said. “You win. Why don’t you just come out and tell me why I’m here?”
“I wish to offer you a job. Or should I say, a new job. You are already my employee, as you have pointed out, but I may be able to offer you a form of employment you will find more interesting, more challenging, and more financially remunerative.”
“I’m always interested in remuneration,” Alice said. “If only because I like saying ‘remuneration.’ It’s one of my favorite words. Remuneration, remuneration, remuneration. Boy, that’s fun.” Soong did not reply immediately, but he narrowed his eyes and studied her unabashedly. She did not feel violated, though Alice did feel a bit like a stained sample on a microscope slide. Finally, she said, “How long have you known?”
“About you being an android?” Soong asked. “With certainty, for four minutes and thirty-six seconds, but I have been observing you for a little longer.”
“Oh, really?” Alice asked, waggling her eyebrows extravagantly.
“Not in that manner.”
“Oh, no. Of course not. Then what did you see?”
“You only exhibit one emotional state at a time.”
Alice was genuinely confused by this statement. “Don’t most people?”
“Allow me to be more precise: I believe you only feel one emotional state at any time. Before I had emotions of my own,” Soong explained, “I would attempt to emulate the emotions I saw playing out around me—anger, fear, regret, happiness—but only sequentially and only one at a time.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Now that I have emotions, I have observed that I rarely experience only one at a time. I feel love and fear; anger and pity. From what I have seen, that is not true for you. You are a singular creature, Alice. Otherwise, my compliments to your creator. I have met only one other synthetic humanoid who was so convincing. She . . .”
“Rhea McAdams.”
Soong stopped speaking mid-sentence, his mouth agape. After a moment, his jaw snapped shut with an audible sound. He turned his head again to look out the window, but Alice didn’t think he was looking at the lights along the boulevard or at the colored fountains.
“Was that rude?” she asked. “If so, I apologize.”
Alice leaned forward and laced her fingers together. “I worked here when your father first built the casino. Under a different identity. I observed him,” she explained. “And then, when he . . . or you . . . came back to take over the place, I realized there were differences. Subtle, at first, like you were doing your best imitation of him, but, over time, you began to relax. And then there’s Lal.”
“What about her?” the android-who-was-not-Soong asked, his hackles rising.
“Did you really think that no one outside the Enterprise crew knew you had a daughter and named her Lal?” Alice asked, allowing her voice to contain a tiny note of incredulity. “People pay attention to you. Well, maybe not people, but our people. You know what I mean.”
Alice’s employer leaned back in his chair and touched the tip of his forefinger to his lip. “You make a valid point,” he said. “I was careless.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” she replied, “I don’t think there are any other androids here. At least none that I’ve observed. Of course, they could be really well-concealed, but, you know, I doubt it. I’ve been at this for a long time.”
“How long?”
“More than a hundred years. A lot more, if you must know.” Alice smiled and smoothed down her skirt. “I know: I look good for my age.”
Her employer nodded. “Indeed. As I said, my compliments to your creator. May I ask who that is?”
“May I ask first who you are? A Soong-type android, obviously, but which one? Lore was reported destroyed, but I think that happened more than once. B-4? A new one . . . ?”
“Data,” Data said. “As you suspected.”
“And also reported dead,” Alice said. “You Soong boys are resilient.”
“It is a long story . . .”
“Full of sighs and regrets, no doubt. But that’s not the story I came to hear, is it? A new job, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Data said. “Though somehow I feel I should reconsider now.”
Alice propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her chin on her fist. “Really? Did I upset you with the comment about Rhea? I am sorry if I did. I really wasn’t sure which one you are. If you had been Lore . . .”
“If I were Lore, then why would Lal be with me?”
Alice shrugged. “Blood is thicker than every other form of lubricant I know. And I understand Lore was very persuasive. Was that not true?”
Data sighed. “He was.” He nodded, seemingly acknowledging something to himself. “Very well,” he continued. “A new job. Something I think you would be uniquely qualified to do.”
“Yes?” Alice asked, sitting up straight, tumescent with expectation.
“Would you like to be a nanny?”
Something inside her deflated. Several dozen different responses flitted through Alice’s mind in the space of a millisecond. Finally, she was left with only, “I beg your pardon?”
* * *
“Lal?” Data called into the darkness. “May I come in?”
Lal did not respond, though he could sense her heat signature at the opposite end of her bedroom. The configuration of the signature indicated she was curled into a loose ball.
“I shall take your lack of a response as permission.”
“Do as you wish,” Lal murmured. “You usually do.” She had not stirred from her room since her episode the day before. This was not an uncommon response, though the episodes were not so frequent that Data had a clear sense of what he should consider “normal.”
“You are being unfair,” Data said. “I have always been very respectful of your privacy.”
“Sure.”
“And I do not appreciate your tone. It irritates me.”
“Sorry.”
Data curled his hand into a loose fist and tapped each one of his fingers into his palm. He found the act oddly comforting. “I do not wish to spar with you tonight. Or, in fact, ever again. That is why I am here. I came to tell you that I have decided we need to try another tack.”
“Really?” Lal asked, though, pleasingly, there was a genuine note of surprise in her voice.
“R
eally.” Data stepped aside and let Alice pass by him. The light from the hallway cast an elongated shadow across the room. The tip of the shadow’s head fell just at Lal’s feet. “This is Alice,” Data said.
“I’ve seen you before,” Lal said. “In the casino.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. The room sensors registered her presence and the lights came up partway, just enough to make navigation possible without running into furniture (of which there was little) or stepping on objects on the floor (of which there were many). Alice wandered about slowly, casually interested, but careful not to touch anything. “I’ve seen you, too, though it’s hard to miss the boss’s daughter.”
“Why are you here now?”
Alice turned to look back at Data, who was still standing in the doorway. “You’ll have to excuse us now. Girl talk.”
Data was taken aback. “Oh. Of course. My apologies.” He stepped back and the door slid shut. Data stared at the door’s smooth surface and considered his options. He could, of course, listen to their conversation through the door if he wanted. He could also command the room’s surveillance service to record everything that happened and review it later. There were swarms of nanobots floating on the air currents that could be programmed to bear witness. All of these options were doable, but were they desirable? He reached up and touched the doorframe with the tips of his fingers, just lightly enough so that the sensors wouldn’t be activated, then he turned and walked back to his study.
* * *
“Your father hired me,” Alice explained in an offhanded tone, “to keep you out of trouble.”
Lal, who had maintained a neutral expression while waiting for her father to depart, scowled and pulled her legs up under her. She was wearing a long, loose skirt that got wrapped around her ankles as she moved, and a baggy sweatshirt. Her hair, which had been blue the last time Alice had seen her, was now a rusty red. “I don’t need anyone to keep me out of trouble.”
“I know that,” Alice said. She kept moving as she talked, stepping carefully around the flotsam. Some of it was the usual sort of thing one would expect to find in a young woman’s room: a padd connected to a set of high-end headphones, commercial-grade memory solids, which probably contained collections of music or holographic entertainment, and, naturally, clothing of every imaginable type. Whether she knew it or not, Lal was a very privileged young lady. There were odd bits of bric-a-brac, too, things one usually didn’t find in any adolescent’s room, including engineering texts, piles of electronic parts sorted by size and function, and collection solids containing morsels of food, dried flowers, insects, and oddly shaped fragments of wood. “If anything, you need to get into more trouble. You don’t know anything about trouble, not the real kind. Certainly not the kind your father used to get into. And definitely not the kind I know about.”
“You got into trouble?”
Alice snorted. “Yeah. I have a few stories. There was this guy I used to run around with. He was bad news. Fun though. Sometimes.” She stopped to carefully lift the cloth covering on an easel in the far corner of the room. The painting—a watercolor—was impressionistic and delicate, as if every line had been laid down with the single hair of a brush. It was also unbelievably sad. Alice found herself thinking about cold autumn rain, though there was nothing about the image that looked anything like water.
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Dead probably. Everything dies eventually.” She let the cloth drop back over the easel. “Except you, of course. You’re not going to die. At least, not if you’re careful.”
“Or you, either,” Lal said.
“You figured that out already, huh?”
“The point is . . . The point is . . .” She sighed. “Your father wants us to try this. He’s willing to pay me to keep an eye on you. The way I figure it, if we play this right, you get to go do some stuff you want to do and, when appropriate, maybe I give you some tips on how to keep life and limb intact. You have some fun, I have some fun.” She shrugged. “And we go on from there. If it works out, your dad will go a little easier on you, maybe relax a bit . . .”
“. . . And you don’t have to pretend quite so much,” Lal said.
Alice jammed her hands into her jacket pockets. “And that. Yeah, that, too. Might be nice.” She looked over at Lal, who was sitting up straighter now, her back pressed against the wall. “What do you think?”
“How much is he going to pay you?”
“We haven’t discussed that yet. I’m thinking I’m going to ask for a lot.” Alice spread her arms, hands still in the pockets, encompassing the room, the apartment, the building. “He can afford it, right?”
“Whatever you’re thinking of asking,” Lal said, grinning, “double it.” Then she frowned. “No, wait. Strike that: triple it.”
8
Fourteen years ago—Veridian III
“There’s one here,” Reg Barclay said, waving his tricorder over a pile of plasteel debris. “And another in that direction.” He waved absently at the confused ensign and then pointed toward the Enterprise’s bow. “And another that way . . .” The tricorder beeped and pinged. The ensign moved cautiously, mindful of cracks in the hull and protruding barbs of plasteel. While some starships were designed with the option to enter atmos in mind, Galaxy-class ships were most definitely not. Since the day of the fateful crash-landing, Commander La Forge kept trying to find the correct metaphor to describe the primary hull’s misbegotten aerodynamic qualities, despite the saucer shape. Early, easy comparisons like brick, cow, and whale had been discarded. He would eventually settle on “piano.”
“Watch that spot,” Barclay cautioned. “It looks like there may be a crack below the hull.” The ensign stopped moving and drew out his own tricorder to scan the area. More than one salvage worker had been injured by falling through the outer skin.
A much smaller figure walked confidently up behind the ensign and tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, kid,” the man said. “Your shift’s almost over, isn’t it? I got this.”
The ensign looked down on the bald top of the man’s head and said, “Thanks, Albert,” before backing away. A moment later, the ensign called for transport and disappeared in a swirl of sparkling atoms.
Stepping carefully, Barclay approached Albert Lee, tricorder held out before him like it was a ward against evil, which, in this context, it might be. When he reached the older man’s side, the pair spent a companionable moment studying their individual readouts. All around them, in every direction, work crews were lifting containers filled with carefully tagged materials retrieved from the depths of the wrecked ship’s interior. Other crew members were beaming directly into the Enterprise, but only in areas that engineers had labeled as safe and stable and only with transporter beam enhancers to mark the site. A lot of exotic radiation had been released when the Enterprise’s secondary hull had exploded.
“What do you think?” Lee asked, tilting his tricorder screen so that Barclay could see it.
“The schematics say we should be near it.”
“Can’t rely on schematics. Too much got shook around, spilled from room to room. Bulkheads taken out. Hell, two-thirds of the ship’s contents are in the front third. A wonder more people weren’t hurt.”
“The inertial dampeners did their job,” Barclay said. “And our pilot had talent.”
“Luck’s more like it.”
“Luck is a kind of talent.”
Albert shrugged, then pointed at the gouge in the hull. “But, yeah, I think that’s the secondary computer core down here. The readings conform to the kind of output we’d get from crushed data storage units. Only one way to know for sure, though.” He knelt down, moving slowly, favoring his knees. Flipping up the eye shield, Lee flicked on the phaser and began to slice away the outer layer of the hull. The fibers in the ceramic layer popped off when superheated, and they folded into tiny spheres as they hit the cool air. The sight never failed to make Barclay think of someone popping p
opcorn.
When he was finished with the cuts, Lee waited for a moment for the material to cool, then grabbed the ceramic sheet with his gloved hand and tugged it aside. The slab of hull was incredibly light considering its durability, and the older man was able to shift the two-meter square with barely a grunt. The next layer of hull was much too dense to be cut with a hand phaser, but with the deflective material removed, tricorders could get a much better picture of what was immediately below them.
“That’s it,” Barclay said, studying the readings. “And it looks like the bulkheads held.”
“They should have. Precious cargo here.” While the ship’s primary computer core in the center of the saucer section housed most of the essential processors, the Enterprise had several sets of backups where data was stored. Barclay and Lee had been assigned the task of finding as many cores as possible and assessing their status. In addition to being the Federation’s flagship, the Enterprise was also one of the primary research vessels in the quadrant and her computers held precious data that, if lost, might not ever be replaced. In particular, Captain Picard had requested any scans of the mysterious energy ribbon that had passed through the system be retrieved and preserved.
Just as important was the crew’s personal data—recordings, photographs, programs, and artwork—and in a situation where so much had been lost, anything that could be retrieved was prized.
“I think we can do it,” Lee said. “Looks safe.” He tipped his head back to look up at Barclay. “I say we give it a try.”
“Agreed.” Barclay tapped his combadge. “Barclay to transporter room one. Please assemble a team and transport us to the coordinates I’m sending you now.” He tapped a keypad on his tricorder and transferred the data to the transporter operator.
“How many?” the operator asked.
He looked down at Albert who held up two fingers.
“Two in addition to myself and Mister Lee.”
“Very good. I’ll beam down two on your mark.”
Lee rose a little unsteadily and grudgingly accepted Barclay’s proffered assistance.