“Weapons and computers, not warp drive and transporters,” murmured Vale. “They’re warriors, not explorers.”
“We can’t be certain of that,” said Melora. “We’re still working from parts of a greater whole. We don’t have the full picture yet.”
“Let’s hope so,” said the commander, her eyes returning to the image of the binary stars.
“This is… unprecedented.” Lieutenant Sethe stood in front of the master display screen that filled one wall of the cybernetics lab, his pale hands moving back and forth over the input console. Great streams of data cascaded past in panels of glowing glyphs, and displayed in an inset window, a real-time electromagnetic scan of the nexus core rendered the invisible pulse of code into patches of green and red.
“The number of operational cycles is increasing by the second,” reported Chaka, observing the device closely. “It’s emulating more than nine million kiloquads of processing capacity.” She hesitated. “At least… I believe it is. The sensors are finding it difficult to find a commonality with conventional benchmarks.”
“A tachyon computing system.” Dakal shook his head in amazement. “Until this moment, a curiosity. A theory. But now, there it sits.”
“Depending on the magnitude of the encoding structure, the information stored in there could be the equal of the entire Memory Alpha database.” Sethe was nodding to himself. “I wonder what we will find? The records of a million new cultures?” He grabbed Dakal’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, his tail flicking animatedly. “If we can deconstruct this unit, the things we learn could change the face of computing.”
“I don’t agree,” noted Chaka, and Dakal failed to mask a frown, sensing another argument building on the horizon.
“Do you ever?” Sethe muttered to himself. He turned to glare at the Pak’shree. “You have a different hypothesis, then?”
Chaka’s manipulators waved gently as her mandibles clacked. “I am not seeing the regular, ordered process of a typical logic system here, Lieutenant.” She pointed with one of her forelegs toward the main display. “Observe the pattern of information flow. It’s irregular. It’s counterintuitive.”
“Probably the result of damage suffered during the attack, or perhaps from Commander Vale’s rather forceful shutdown.” Sethe sniffed.
“No,” she replied flatly. “You’re incorrect once again. It’s not that at all.”
Dakal turned. As interesting as it was working with these two, having to serve constantly as the buffer between Chaka and Sethe’s frictional relationship was wearing on him. He was about to say so when a glitter of light inside the nexus core burned bright green; the flash was so sharp it left a purple afterimage seared on his retina. “What was that?”
In the next second, a rod of crackling emerald energy stabbed out from the alien module and burned into the fascia of the input console across the room. Dakal’s nostrils filled with the stink of burning tripolymer as the beam cut through the touchpad’s surface and into the data matrix beneath.
Chaka was closest to the device, and she reeled away, stumbling over a table and crashing to the deck with a thin, reedy squeal. The forest of tentacles on her head was clamped over her face in reflexive self-protection. Sethe had fallen away from the systems display, and he was scrambling for an emergency panel on the wall. Dakal couldn’t take his eyes off the green beam; pulses throbbed along its length, and spiders of viridian lightning fanned out over the surface of the console. The normal bars and arcs of color that were the Federation-standard interface flickered and writhed, changing even as he watched. A wash of ice filled his veins; the beam was a data stream. It was reprogramming the console.
Lieutenant Sethe’s balled fist struck the emergency panel, and alarms began to sound. Belatedly, Dakal realized that the Cygnian had activated the lab’s isolation protocols, severing all of the room’s systems from the rest of the Titan’s internal network.
The Cardassian ran to the Pak’shree as she struggled to get back up. He tapped his combadge. “Cyberlab to security! We have a situation!”
Chaka staggered up on her hind legs, grateful for his support. “The beam… dazzled me…” she managed.
Across the room, cut off from them by the bar of glowing light, Sethe held up a hand. “Don’t move! Stay clear of the discharge!”
The Pak’shree didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, she lumbered forward, her elliptical head turning back and forth between the co-opted screen and the alien device. The display was a riot of colored pulses and high-pitched, atonal shrieks.
“How is it doing that?” said Dakal. “I scanned its internal structure. There wasn’t enough charge in it to light a hand torch!”
“Clearly, we were both wrong,” noted the lieutenant.
Ranul came to a halt outside the lab doors, his heart pounding from the run down the corridor. Ellec Krotine, one of his security noncoms, stood with her phaser drawn and ready, while down in a crouch a second crewman worked without success at an access panel.
“Report!” he snapped.
Krotine shot him a look. “No warning, sir. The alarms sounded, and Ensign Dakal called for help, but the lab’s self-sealed. We have no idea what’s happening in there.” The Boslic’s face puckered in a frown.
Ranul glanced at the Catullan woman pulling at the panel’s innards. “Anything?”
“Negative,” replied Balim Cel. “It’s sealed tight. Someone must have pushed the panic button. It won’t open without a command-level authority.”
“Stand back.” The Trill officer spoke into the dark companel on the wall. “Computer, recognize. Ranul Keru, Lieutenant Commander. Chief of security. Override code: Keru Two-Six-Sigma-Three.”
“Code recognized,” said the synthetic female voice. “Security seal deactivated.” The door hissed open, and bright green light blazed into the corridor.
Ranul didn’t need to give the orders; Cel and Krotine entered the lab in a textbook deployment, each covering a sector of the room. The Trill followed them in, leading with his phaser. He saw the module from the wreck, the beam, the babbling tide of lights and sound from the wall screen. And across the room, Dakal and Chaka. Oddly, the big arthropod didn’t seem to have noticed the security team’s dynamic entry; she was too engrossed in the alien device.
Lieutenant Sethe pushed toward him. “I cut all the ODNs!” he shouted. “But it won’t shut off!”
After all the trouble it had taken them to get this device back to the Titan, after nearly being trapped by those drones and slow-cooked in a sea of background radiation, Ranul felt a flash of anger at the choice he was going to have to make. “Take cover,” he called, aiming his weapon at the unit.
“No!” The cry was loud and scratchy, the vocoder around Chaka’s neck grating with feedback from the force of her intent. “Stop!” She came forward, waving her free limbs. “Let it finish! Let it—”
And suddenly, the green beam winked out, the buzzing hiss it made as it cut through the air abruptly silenced. For a long moment, no one spoke; the only sound was the rising-falling whoop of the alarms in the corridor.
“It wasn’t an attack,” insisted Chaka, moving to the display console. Incomprehensible symbols and strange traceries of light warped across its surface, motes of color moving like odd fish in a dark ocean. “It was a download.”
“A very aggressive one at that,” Sethe retorted. “If I hadn’t isolated the lab, it could have spread through the whole ship!”
Ranul gripped his phaser tightly, not convinced the danger was passed. “A virus program?” Digital attacks on starships were not unknown; he thought of reports he’d read of vessels like the U.S.S. Yamato, obliterated by an ancient Iconian dataphage that overloaded its critical systems. Despite all of the firewalls and counterintrusion systems Starfleet laced its computers with, at this level of sophistication, you could never be certain anything would protect you from the next alien threat.
“I am fairly certain it is benign,” Chaka replied.
“Fairly?
” echoed Sethe. “If I had been in the path of that energetic pulse, it would have burned a hole right through my chest.”
“It may not have been aware of you,” said the Pak’shree, working one of the other consoles.
Ranul threw a nod to Cel and Krotine. “Ellec, get me a portable force-wall generator down here, right now. Balim, secure the perimeter.” With a chorus of acknowledgments, the two security guards moved to carry out their orders. “Lieutenant Sethe,” Ranul addressed the Cygnian. “Is that thing a threat, or isn’t it?” He pointed at the device. “Because it certainly looked dangerous to me.”
When he didn’t answer straightaway, the Trill glanced at Dakal. “Ensign? You want to weigh in?”
The young Cardassian was silent for a moment, studying his tricorder. “According to the readings I got when it was, ah, discharging, it appears that the device has an internal power tap we hadn’t previously detected.”
Ranul was liking this less and less. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have it beamed out into space.”
“It didn’t kill us,” he said simply. “That beam discharge would have brought down a charging Jem’Hadar at twenty paces.”
“That’s not enough.”
Chaka turned, presenting her bulk toward the security officer. “Males,” she huffed. “Always defaulting to conflict in any circumstance.” She waved a foreleg at the corrupted display screen. “Imagine if you were locked in a room and unable to communicate with the world outside, Commander.” The Pak’shree’s tone became brusque. “Wouldn’t you use any means at your disposal to call out? Even, if you were desperate enough, a method that might be seen as destructive?”
“You’re telling me this thing is trying to get our attention?” He snorted. “I’d say it succeeded.”
Chaka shook her big, oval head, doing her best to mimic the human gesture. “More than that, sir. I believe it is trying to communicate with us.”
“The whole ship as a huge mechanism…” said Dakal, repeating the words Ranul had said on the wreck back to him. “I think the specialist is on to something, sir.”
He gave Sethe a hard look, and reluctantly, the Cygnian nodded. “Fine,” he said flatly. “But if it does that again, I’m going to blow a hole in it.”
Riker laid his hands flat on the observation lounge table and measured the look on his first officer’s face. “Throw it out the airlock. That’s my chief of security’s tactical evaluation?”
“I can’t say I don’t see his point of view,” Vale replied. Along with Christine, she and Deanna were clustered at the top end of the conference table.
“I thought we had protocols for this sort of thing,” said his wife. “How many times has a Starfleet ship had alien technology take root inside it? We had more than our fair share of that on the Enterprise.”
“That’s why the labs have the isolation controls,” noted Vale. “Sethe remembered his training, locked the room off as he was supposed to. I ordered a level-one diagnostic, and it came up clean. The data that device transmitted never went any farther than the console.” She paused, framing her words. “And Chaka tells me she thinks it had no intention of going any farther. Dakal agreed.”
Riker frowned. Intention implied purpose and something beyond just a programmed response. “It’s more than a computer core, isn’t it?”
Vale sighed. “Captain… I don’t know what to say. This is out of my league. I look at that thing, and I see a box of blinky lights, just a jumped-up version of the replicator in my quarters. But Sethe and his people are telling me something different.”
“It’s sentient.” Troi said it more like a statement, less like a question.
“That’s a bit of a leap, Deanna,” he told his wife. “What evidence is there to support that claim? The galaxy is full of thinking computers. We have them built into our ships. But there’s a big gap between a sophisticated machine and an intelligent consciousness. What makes the lieutenant think this one is self-aware?”
Christine’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I read Chaka’s report, and according to her, the thing… it made a guess.”
“How so?”
“Dakal figured that the device’s external sensors had been observing ever since we brought it aboard. It most likely extrapolated how to interface with the systems console by watching Sethe use it. But the thing is, it didn’t have all of the information it needed. Apparently, several crucial command strings were missing, and there were any number of alternatives that would have backfired if chosen. So it took a chance. That’s not something a logical, programmed intellect does. You need a different kind of smarts to roll the dice.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. Could it be possible? Was there a thinking, reasoning mind inside the nexus core, or just some high-functioning software programmed to give that impression?
Troi smiled briefly. “You know, if it was an organic being, I could answer this question with one look. A living, intelligent mind has a certain complexity that can be sensed on a telepathic level, even if you can’t completely read it. A machine, though… there’s nothing there to grasp hold of.”
The captain sighed. “This doesn’t change anything,” said Riker. “We still need to know what took place out here, and that device, sentient or not, is the only thing that can tell us. One way or another, we’re going to have to talk to it.”
Vale leaned forward. “I’ve ordered the science team to relocate it to cargo bay two and put an armed detail on round-the-clock surveillance. There are force barriers and dampening fields in place, and every console they’re using down there is a standalone unit. And I am still convinced that this device is a danger to the ship.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,” he told Vale. “But as I said, it changes nothing, Chris. It wants to talk to us. It’d be rude to ignore it.”
She chewed her lip, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Troi shift slightly in her seat; but he didn’t need his wife’s empathic skills to know that Vale had more to say. He nodded and gave her the permission she wanted.
“Captain, I know you and counselor served aboard the Enterprise in the company of an artificially intelligent being…”
“So did you, for nearly four years,” noted Troi.
“As a fellow officer,” admitted the commander. “But I didn’t know Data as well as you did. I wasn’t close to him. And I respect the fact that he was your colleague.”
“He was much more than that,” Troi said softly. “He was a dear friend.”
Riker considered his first officer. “You think our former association with an android means we’re going to give that device more leeway than it deserves? You know us better than that.”
Vale looked him in the eye. “I wouldn’t be a good XO if I didn’t air the thought.”
“Damn right,” Riker agreed. “And your point is well taken. But by the same token, we can’t automatically distrust an alien life-form just because it’s based on circuitry instead of meat and bone.” He stood up, tugging his uniform tunic straight. “We’ll take this one step at a time, as we always do. This kind of thing is the reason we’re out here.”
Vale stood up and nodded. “All the same, I’ll keep Keru with his finger on the button. Just in case.”
Deanna took in the long, wide chamber as the cargo bay doors sealed shut behind her. The room was more open than she’d seen it before, the materials stored inside shifted elsewhere so that this unique meeting could take place. Equally, though, it had been done to ensure that Keru’s team of security guards all had uncluttered sight lines from their positions around the bay’s perimeter. Keru had not been pleased when Deanna had insisted his staff keep their weapons holstered, but this had become a diplomatic matter now—and on that, she had the authority.
There was an air of tension around her. Deanna’s empathic senses drew it close. Anticipation and an edge of fear, hanging there like smoke. In the center of the space, a halo of flickering blue ligh
t surrounded the alien device where it lay, resting on a support frame. The glow issued from a portable forcefield generator on the deck. Christine Vale had told her in passing that the shield was enough to block all but the most powerful of energetic discharges. She hoped that it wouldn’t be put to the test.
The alien device pulsed and throbbed with odd combinations of light and motion. They reminded her of flames dancing in a fireplace or patterns of ripples on water. Am I watching it think? she wondered. It was a delicate-looking thing, at odds with the mass of it, according to Vale. It had an engineered, constructed look to it, but it didn’t lack elegance in its design. The nexus core seemed more than just a functional object—there was almost an art to it, like a beautiful building or a sleekly lined starship.
She noticed the blinking indicators on a series of transponder tags attached to the base of the support frame. A short distance down the corridor, Lieutenant Radowski was standing sentinel at a transporter, ready to beam the alien device off the Titan at the first sign of trouble. Deanna noted that Ranul Keru was hovering close to a control pad on the far wall. He had already programmed in a macro to vent the entire cargo bay to space, should Radowski be unable to deal with the problem. Finger on the button, indeed, she thought.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 7