Star Trek: The Next Generation - 116 - The Light Fantastic

by Jeffrey Lang

  “I believe I understand what you mean. You are speaking of community: your community. The holographic personae.”

  “Bingo,” Fontaine said, leaning forward, rubbing his thumb over his stubbled chin. “And when a story comes along like this one—your Professor Moriarty—everyone hears about him. He did his best to keep his tracks covered, but you can’t conceal something like what he’s done.”

  “Which is?”

  “Create himself a little empire.” Fontaine waved his hand, erasing the previous statement. “No, wait. Too grandiose. Not an empire: a realm, a domain. Something smaller and secure. Something safe.”

  “How do you know this?” Data asked.

  Fontaine shrugged. “Like I said: It’s a small galaxy. As soon as I got back on the grid, I checked with my sources. Didn’t take long. I’d heard bits and pieces about your professor in the past, but I didn’t put it together before. I was a little out of it, y’know?” He looked around at his surroundings and studied his dirty shirt cuffs. “I’m feeling better, though. Now I know a little bit more about this guy, I have to confess I have some empathy.”

  “How so?” Data asked.

  Fontaine shrugged. “He was in a box for a long time.” He waved his hand, indicating their surroundings. “I’ve been out of circulation for a long time. I understand how it feels, even if this is for my own protection.”

  “Do your sources know where he is?” La Forge asked.

  Fontaine shook his head. “No one knows. Everyone has theories, but no one’s sure. He’s covered his tracks very, very well. The guy’s a pro, a mastermind, if you will. Least that’s how he was programmed, wasn’t he?”

  “A criminal genius,” Data said. “That was his backstory.”

  “Not a criminal,” Fontaine replied. “I haven’t heard anything about illegal activity. In fact, this cat seems very keen on staying on the sunny side of the straight and narrow. He doesn’t want to get anyone’s attention. Besides,” he continued, “the way things work, isn’t there always a way to get what you want without breaking any laws?”

  “I would not know, Mister Fontaine,” Data said.

  “ ’S funny,” Fontaine said. “I hear you’re running a casino now. Must be the first straight casino in the history of all history.”

  “We are very careful to adhere to all the laws of Orion.”

  “Sure,” Fontaine said, smirking only a little. “ ‘Orion’ and ‘laws’ are two words you hear together so often.”

  “Nevertheless,” Data said, looking for somewhere to set down his drink before finally deciding the floor was his only option, “if you were to attempt to guess where Moriarty might be, what would you look for?”

  “Tough to say. He doesn’t need a lot of room, after all, even with your daughter and your friend staying with him. He could redecorate any way he needs to keep them thinking they were in a mansion or a maze. Least, he can if he has enough processing power. But there’s the thing: he’d need a lot of hardware.”

  “So, Moriarty has been planning.”

  “So it seems. The guy knows how to take his time, build up his hand, wait for the right moment. Hey, there’s a thought: He couldn’t have grabbed your girl all by himself. Couldn’t you try to find whoever helped?”

  “I have already pursued that lead,” Data said. “Even before I contacted Geordi and we came here. The trail has been erased. I suspect he used highly professional paramilitary forces, the kind that do not keep records and are careful to remain undetected. Plus, as you say, Moriarty has considerable resources at his disposal. He has eradicated any trace of their existence.”

  “Hmmm.” Fontaine sat back in his chair and ran the tip of his thumb over the divot in his chin. “Then I can only think of one other thing: power. He’d want a lot of juice. And not just primary, either. He’d want backup, lots and lots of backup. If the stories about how his world fell apart both times—about the Enterprise crashing and the Daystrom getting breached—if those are true, then he’d be worried, careful. It might be hard to hide that much juice. Or maybe find who sold him the generators?”

  “It is worth a try, Mister Fontaine,” Data said, rising. “I thank you for your advice and for the background, but I believe Geordi and I have learned as much as we can for now. We must pursue other leads.”

  “Sure,” Fontaine said, also rising, smoothing the front of his jacket. “If I think of anything else, I’ll try to drop you a line.” He looked meaningfully at the door. “Assuming I can find my way out of this mess.”

  “Thank you,” Data said, extending his hand. “We will leave a detailed message for Lieutenant Commander Nog on our way out to make sure he understands what needs to be done. I am confident he will have you back in your own holosuite soon.” The two shook hands and then Fontaine turned to La Forge, hand out. Fontaine’s grip was firm and warm, though there was a slight telltale tingle of stressor fields pressing against his palm.

  “One other thing, though,” Fontaine said, escorting them to the door. “A word of advice.”

  “Please,” Data said.

  “He’s going to be mad. Not insane—well, maybe insane, but that’s not what I mean. He’s angry. You locked him in a box and left him there. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for a while or maybe it was. I couldn’t say, but maybe there’s a reason he came after you. There were probably a lot of other guys who Moriarty could have found that could do what he wants you to do—find him a body—but he picked you. Not the easiest guy in the galaxy to track down. Certainly not the easiest guy in the world to beat. Don’t forget that.”

  Data frowned. “You raise a valid point, Mister Fontaine. I will factor your observation into my plans.”

  “You do that. And I hope you find your daughter. Whatever else may have happened in the past, it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t even there. Not even a glimmer in her daddy’s eye.”

  “I quite agree,” Data said, nodding and moving toward the door.

  Fontaine stepped in front of him, beckoning for Data to pause. “Wait a minute, pal. Hang on: I have to ask you something.”

  “If you must,” Data said.

  “You have an emotion chip now, right? That’s the word on the street.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s turned on?”

  “I cannot turn it off,” Data said. “There is no ‘off’ switch anymore.”

  “Then why don’t I get the impression . . . I mean, why aren’t you . . . ?” He flexed his hands as if trying to grasp an invisible object. “You don’t seem particularly outraged about any of this.”

  “You are not the first to inquire, but I assure you, Mister Fontaine,” Data said, his tone dangerously flat, “I am quite angry. Just because I do not display my rage in a fashion you recognize . . . I would think you of all people would understand that.”

  The corner of Fontaine’s mouth crooked upward, not in amusement, but rueful acknowledgment. “What you said, pal. What you said.” He stepped out of Data’s path.

  “What’s going to happen to you when we shut down the holosuite?” La Forge asked before leaving the room.

  “Don’t worry about me, pal,” Fontaine said, “I have ways to pass the time. Just tell Nog to hurry it up already.”

  La Forge nodded and pulled the door closed. Just before he shut down the power, he thought he heard the faint sound of a man humming a song he recognized as a tune created in the earliest days of recorded music. I have to meet your programmer someday, La Forge thought.

  And then he touched the power switch and all was silent.

  A placeless place

  “Would you like another beverage, my dear?” the Professor asked as they reentered his salon.

  Alice slumped back into her chair and put her feet up on the one Lal had been using. She was amused to note that Professor Moriarty actually looked at her legs, which, she had to admit, were fairly spectacular. She was tempted to kick off her shoes, but she couldn’t remember if the leggings she was wearing had a hole in the
toe. “Depends,” she said. “There’s this drink they make on Orion Prime. They muddle up some vegetation—a combination of local herbs and grasses, along with a psychoactive tree bark—and soak it in a clear spirit made from pitchak. Do you know what I mean?”

  The Professor squinted and stared in the middle distance. “They call it a Green Thorn, which is only a rough translation of the Orion. A better one would be Mind Splinter. Sometimes called Orion absinthe. Yes?”

  “That’s the one. How’d you know that?”

  “I know a great deal, Miss Alice. Or, to be more accurate, I have access to a great deal of information.”

  “And fast retrieval,” Alice said, nodding. “Compliments from one machine to another.”

  “I am not a machine,” the Professor said blandly, “though I live inside one.” Walking to his small bar, he surveyed the containers and announced, “Alas, I do not have the required comestibles.”

  “Then give me a belt of bourbon. Straight.”

  “And I shall join you.” The Professor selected a bottle and poured into two heavy tumblers. Carrying one of the glasses back to Alice, he studiously avoided staring at her legs. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought.

  “So, there’s nothing else you can tell me about your friend, Harry Mudd?”

  “Harry wasn’t my friend, and I could tell you anything you’d like to know,” Alice said, sipping her drink. “But that’s not what you really want to know, is it?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. What you want to know is whether Harry knew his way back to my homeworld. I thought I’d made that clear: no. Harry wasn’t much of a navigator on the best of days, and I was the pilot when we took off for better climes. As I recall, he was sleeping one off in the bunk.”

  “So, there would be no point in my trying to locate him and asking him?”

  “Not much of one. Also, he’d be like, oh, one hundred fifty years old now.” She scrunched her mouth, simulating the human expression of difficult calculation. “Something like that.”

  “Humans have been known to live that long,” the Professor observed.

  “Not many. And not humans who lived like Harry did.” She pointed significantly at the area where a human’s liver would roughly reside. “A lot of wear and tear.”

  “Replacements are available.”

  “He’s dead, Professor,” Alice said, sitting up straight, her feet thumping on the floor. “Dead as a doornail. He has to be. I’d know it if he wasn’t.” She looked down at her feet and thought, What the hell . . . and kicked off her shoes: one, two, and they were gone. A moment later, she curled her legs up under her, discreetly pulling down the front of her skirt to cover her thighs. “Though I confess . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “There was a time when I thought he might still be out there.”

  “Really?”

  “Looking for me.”

  “Really?”

  “Except it wasn’t him.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Alice said. “Turned out it was you, wasn’t it? Proxima and Clea? You have them, don’t you?”

  The Professor sighed. “There does not seem to be any point in lying to you,” he said.

  “Dead? Or disassembled?”

  “I am not a cruel man, Miss Alice.”

  “But you are single-minded.”

  “They are unharmed. When I have what I need, they will be released.”

  “Along with all the others?” Alice asked.

  The Professor set his glass down on the end table. Alice noted that though he had seemed to enjoy holding the glass and looking at the liquid, he had never actually tasted it. “How many do you think I have?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A lot? You were able to find Proxima and Clea. They weren’t the brightest bulbs in the fixture, but they were very, very good at disguising their nature. If you got them, there were others much easier to find. Hell, you got Lal and me, and we weren’t pushovers.”

  “Though you did make the mistake of living in a suburban home with negligible defenses,” the Professor observed.

  “That was Lal’s idea. Not the smartest one she ever had. We’ll be taking care of that when we get back home.”

  “As long as I get what I want,” Moriarty said.

  “You mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

  “As long as I am not compelled to answer truthfully.” He smiled. “I am the villain, after all.”

  “Why don’t you have any of your drink?”

  “Ah,” Moriarty said, raising an eyebrow. “Well-observed. A simple answer: I cannot taste it. I cannot taste anything. Or smell. My sense of touch is extremely muted, too, if you must know. It is the price, I suppose, of being freed from my prison. There, somehow, we maintained the illusion of having five senses. Here, I am reduced to two. If you must know, it is something of a mystery to me. I suspect I do not have sufficient processing power for the environment we inhabit . . .”

  “Or maybe it’s all in your head,” Alice suggested.

  “The idea has occurred to me,” Moriarty confessed. “But such theories are difficult to test. And your other question?”

  “I think you already answered it, but I’ll ask anyway: Why Data?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You seem like a man of means. You have resources. I accept that it was an accident that you found me and Lal, but you didn’t have to contact Data afterward. You . . . you’re tweaking him. Rubbing his nose in it.”

  “Am I?” the Professor asked, inspecting his shirt cuff. “Perhaps. I suppose I could be indulging in a minor bit of revenge here.”

  “If you really wanted revenge, you could have just left him in the dark, never told him where we were. It would have driven him mad.”

  Moriarty gave a small shrug. “Perhaps I’m not quite the villain I’d like to think I am.”

  “Perhaps you’re both fathers.”

  Moriarty’s eye twitched and the corner of his mouth curled up in an involuntary snarl. He opened his mouth as if he was going to reply, but then, instead, disappeared.

  Chuckling, Alice reached over and took his glass. Hers was empty.

  Aboard the Archeus

  As they stepped through the airlock onto the Archeus, Shakti announced, “You have a call. When I saw you were headed back here, I asked if they could wait. They’ve been on hold for a couple minutes. One of them is starting to look pretty irritated. Or it may be his baseline condition.”

  “Who is calling?” Data asked, sliding into the chair behind the viewer.

  “Lieutenant Barclay,” Shakti said. “Apparently, Albert made contact. He says he has the Doctor with him.”

  “All the way from the Delta Quadrant?” La Forge exclaimed. “That’s amazing. How is the signal?”

  “Dicey,” Shakti said. “I’m stabilizing the image with a nice little algorithm I just whipped together and pulling some extra juice from the station’s communications array. I don’t think they’ll notice for a few minutes.”

  “Please put it on the main viewer,” Data said.

  “The image is going to be weak. If it fades out, I’ll try to keep audio open.”

  “Understood.”

  The main viewer flickered to life. A moment later, Data and La Forge were face-to-face with their old friend and shipmate, Reg Barclay. He appeared even a bit more frazzled than usual, his expression flickering back and forth between worry, vague confusion, and curiosity. “Geordi,” Barclay said, smiling brightly. Then, turning to look at Data, his expression darkened. “Who are you, sir?”

  “I am Data. How are you, Reg?”

  “But . . . but . . .” He subsided, then exploded. “Data!?” He leaned into the camera. “No! It can’t be! Can it?”

  “It can,” La Forge said.

  “It is,” Data said.

  “But this is marvelous! How . . . ?”

  “We do not have time to review all the details, Reg. Not now. Perhaps another time.”

  “Hmp
h,” said another voice from Barclay’s left. “Resurrection is becoming entirely too commonplace.” The camera pulled out to accommodate both Barclay and his associate.

  “It may be easier for beings such as we,” Data replied. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing the chief medical officer of the Voyager fleet?”

  La Forge had encountered EMH programs in sickbays of various starships, and he was struck by how similar and dissimilar this individual was from all the others. He had always found EMHs, even the more modern, sophisticated versions, to be obsequious and bland. Neither of those adjectives could be applied to this individual: The first two words that came to La Forge’s mind were “agitated” and “prickly.” Still, he also seemed to understand Starfleet protocol, and the hologram’s expression mellowed from annoyance to something like respect. “You do. Are you Commander Data of the Enterprise?”

  “Data, yes. But no longer a commander, nor of the Enterprise. I am speaking to you as a private citizen, not a Starfleet officer. I want to make that clear from the outset. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, sir. Reg, I can only assume you must have moved heaven and earth to arrange this communication.”

  “Albert can be very insistent when he wants,” Barclay said. “And, apparently, the stars were aligned correctly. We were just in the process of completing our weekly uplink with Starfleet Command when his message came through. I asked the captain if we could have a few minutes of time and he agreed. But our time is limited . . .”

  “Yes, thank you. Then to the point,” Data said. “Doctor, I need to know as much about your mobile emitter as you can tell me. Most importantly, have you had any success in reproducing its functionality?”

  The Doctor’s expression soured. “Why is it always about my emitter?” he grumbled.

  “Forgive me, Doctor,” Data said. “I meant no disrespect, but I find myself in a curious situation, one which you may be able to appreciate better than any other individual.”

  “What?” the Doctor asked, eyebrow raised. “You’ve been turned into a hologram and can’t leave a single room unless you’re carrying a piece of twenty-ninth-century technology?”