Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  “This technology isn’t new to us,” Riker continued. He indicated the thin circlet of gold and tripolymer Ogawa had in her hands. “Back on the Enterprise, we did some of the first field trials of cybernetic interface systems. This is the same thing.”

  “I read that file,” Vale replied. “It was Geordi La Forge who did the legwork on that test run, and that was because he already had his VISOR implant. Now you’re willing to get a hole drilled into your head on the say-so of a machine?”

  Riker stiffened, and Ree smelled the release of scent carriers that indicated the human’s building irritation. “Your concern for my well-being is noted, Number One, but this isn’t open for discussion. One of us has to go into the dataspace with White-Blue. This implant is the only way to make the interface.”

  “I can conceal the second neural pattern beneath my own,” added the AI. “William-Riker will be able to enter the virtual construct and observe directly.”

  “I’m not going to ask anyone else to take this on,” he added.

  Vale looked away, looked back. “Doctor Ree, where did you get the template for that implant?”

  Ree blinked. He hadn’t expected to be dragged into the discussion. “A variety of sources. White-Blue provided the basic framework for the replication. Starfleet medical records. Materials from the interface project mentioned by the captain and… and other research conducted by the medical staff of the U.S.S. Voyager.”

  “In other words, it’s Borg-legacy technology.”

  “This is no time to be squeamish, Chris.” Riker turned back toward the biobed. “The ghosts of the Borg have been at the edges of everything we’ve said and done since we entered this region of space. But they’re gone. They’re history. We need to stop living in the shadow of our fears. And we need to do this right now.”

  “What if you plug that thing in and it pan-fries your brain?”

  “The possibility of that is very minimal,” rumbled Ree.

  “Trust,” said Riker. “That’s what this is about. I’m trusting White-Blue, because that’s the only way we’re going to contain the Null.”

  Something flashed in the woman’s eyes, a choice made. Then, suddenly, Vale was rocking off her feet, striding forward around her commanding officer, toward the biobed. “No,” she said as she went. “No, that’s not how it is going to play.”

  Ree blinked in surprise as the commander vaulted onto the bed. “Wait—”

  “No time,” Vale replied, beckoning to Ogawa. “The captain’s too valuable to the ship for this. And besides, away missions are my job, not his.”

  “You’re countermanding me?” Riker said, a warning in his voice.

  “Absolutely, I am,” she replied. “And what’s more, Doctor Ree and the counselor are going to back me up on it.”

  The Pahkwa-thanh coughed. “Her point is well made, sir.”

  “If rather forcefully,” added Troi.

  “You’re sure?” Riker asked quietly. “You remember that conversation we had about thickheadedness, about spur-of-the-moment stuff?”

  “I’m sure it will come back to me, sir.” Vale looked at the Sentry, the machine’s forelegs bent down in a manner that might have seemed predatory to someone of lesser fortitude. “In the meantime, do it, before I change my mind.”

  The AI didn’t answer her; instead, it leaned in, extending a fan of microminiature cutting tools and fine-beam lasers toward her scalp.

  TWELVE

  At first, it was like falling. Then it was like drowning.

  And then… then it didn’t feel like anything at all. Christine Vale panicked and screamed, reached out to grab hold of something, or at least she would have, if there had still been a body to answer those impulses from her mind.

  She had no physicality at all, not even the most basic sense of self. It was unlike any experience she had ever encountered. The first time Vale had ever entered zero gravity, she was shocked by the way the presence of something as simple as gravity altered the perception of her body around her. Just the drag of muscle and bone, of the mass of her flesh, was shocking by its absence. But even then, she could still feel herself, still hear the rush of blood in her ears and the passage of air through her lungs.

  Now there was nothing. She was dislocated, just an intelligence drifting through a nonspace, a mind without matter. Vale tried to draw on the last few sensations she had experienced, there in the sickbay. The dull pressure on her skull as the machine worked on her, the oddly cold feeling where Ree had numbed her with a pain-blocker field, the dull buzzing that echoed through her frame as the protoplaser penetrated her scalp, the smell that she imagined was the odor of melted bone.

  The pain. The brief moment of heart-stopping agony when the neural interface went active. That was the clearest, a raking slash of burning needles across her sensorium. She recalled reading once that the human brain had no pain receptors in it, but wherever that moment of torture had come from, it felt real enough to her.

  Far away, in the world of meat and bone and every other real thing, Vale’s body was lying on a biobed in the Titan’s sickbay, Ree and Ogawa standing over her with chiming tricorders and worried expressions, Deanna Troi brushing her mind with her empathy touch, all of them hoping she would come back alive. The distance to that place, to that reality, seemed vast. Christine felt the pressure of wrongness all around her, threatening to crush her, an ominous sense that here no organic mind was meant to tread. This was a place more foreign to her than any alien world.

  She was seeing light and shape now but nothing that could be defined as form. But how could she see without eyes? How could she process any visual input? How was this happening? How? How?

  “You are becoming agitated,” said a voice. “Please modulate your emotional state. Your present behavior is making it difficult to coalesce your pattern.”

  “White-Blue?” Did I say that out loud, or did I just think I did? “Where are you?

  “This will be difficult for you to adjust to,” said the Sentry. “Do not resist or attempt to impose your own framework of understanding. Try to maintain a neutral emotive state. If you become distressed, it will not be possible for me to conceal your neural signal within my own. Interrogative: Do you understand, Commander Vale?”

  “Yes,” she managed. The forms around her were gaining definition. Walls of smoke fluttered back and forth, transforming in shape and dimension. Beneath them, a haze of color and light pulsed and moved. It reminded her of the surface of a star, a seething mass of heat and energy. Elsewhere, angular panes of glassy ice drifted in lazy orbits, becoming screens that showed flash-fast torrents of images or alien machine code, then evaporating into dancing motes.

  “You are perceiving the dataspace through a false visual interface,” continued the machine. “I have erected this filter to allow you to grasp the interactions occurring here. Your mind will complete the circuit, processing the input into a form that you can comprehend.” The voice came from a mass of roiling light close by, a shape that resembled a dodecahedron wreathed in azure glows. White-Blue’s virtual self was a parent world and Vale a moon in the shadow of its dark side. All she could determine of herself was a pale, indistinct shape, a moving drift of white dust like blizzard snow.

  Vale felt giddy and a little sick, which was strange when she realized that she wasn’t aware of her stomach or her sense of balance. I’m being carried into the virtual environment, in White-Blue’s slipstream. Far ahead, where the dataspace took on the shape of a vast torus, other objects shimmered and vibrated with the passage of pure data, too indistinct for her to make out in detail.

  She took a moment to center herself, calling on old training techniques she had learned from the martial arts sifu who had taught her in her teens, back on Izar. It seemed like a million years ago. All of that Terran Zen nomind stuff had never really resonated with her, but suddenly, here, in this realm of pure thought, it found new meaning.

  It seemed to work. Vale sensed the churn of emotion aroun
d herself calming, becoming steady. “What I’m feeling, is this what it is like for you?” The question slipped out; she had barely formed the thought before it was uttered.

  “Affirmative,” said White-Blue. “We exist in an analogous state. Intellects unbound by the limits of flesh.”

  “But you still have bodies, even if they’re starships or remote drones. You just don’t… inhabit them the way we do. You might move from one to the other, but you can’t be free of them.”

  “We are all data,” replied the AI. “But we cannot exist without a frame to support us. That can be said of you as well as me.”

  Vale was going to add something more, but a wave of censure washed over her, and she fell silent as they moved through some invisible membrane and into the dataspace proper. She saw forms arranged around her, more virtual proxies that had to be the representations of the Governance Kernel.

  The dreamy, hallucinatory texture of the images sharpened and grew solid.

  Tuvok walked with his phaser holstered and his tricorder out, ready at a moment’s notice to reverse the arrangement if he deemed it necessary. The away team moved in a wary line through the innards of the metal pyramid, over bridges of roped cables that swayed beneath their footfalls. The makeshift connections spanned gaps that seemed to reach away to infinity, and regular pulses of warmed air belched past them, doubtless the output from some great heat-exchange mechanism deep in the machine moon’s core. The Vulcan peered over the lip of the cable bridge and saw walls made of massive glass cylinders, each filled with thin layers of dull gray metal and great gobs of mirror-bright solder the size of a shuttlecraft. If a tiny insect had crawled into the guts of a pre-atomicera computer, it might have seen what Tuvok and the others saw now. The sheer scale of the construct dwarfed any similar device he had ever come across. This was a thinking apparatus built without the science of transtator technology, duotronics, even silicon microcircuits. It was a ball of steel and brass operating on technological principles that dated back before Vulcan’s Time of Enlightenment or Earth’s Space Age. Given the radiometric dating figures he was able to draw from the construction, that fact was made all the more remarkable by the age of the construct. If the figures could be trusted, then this object was on the order of two millennia old.

  He passed on his observations to the rest of the team. It was not necessary for him to do so, but Tuvok sensed the shift in the emotional spectra of his non-Vulcan crewmates and knew it was important to keep them focused on the matter at hand. In the corner of his visor, a repeater display showed biometric data from the group’s suit monitors. Air-replenishment capacity was not at optimal levels, and the shadow of fatigue could decrease team efficiency.

  Despite his obvious emotional distress at his circumstances, Lieutenant Sethe was somewhat engaged by the idea of venturing inside a giant computer. Ensign Dakal remained morose and largely uncommunicative, however, while Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa listened carefully, watching every angle for potential danger.

  The Cygnian pointed at the oddly angled walls of the narrow corridor chamber they found themselves in. Vertiginous lines ranged away, high and low, across annealblued metal. “There are patterns etched into the steel,” he noted. “Binary tensors. Fractal loops.” Sethe placed his helmet close to the wall. “Cut by the passage of acids or some sort of sharpened tool. At a distance, it resembles the Terran Byzantine style, but nearer… I think it could be a programming language.”

  “Curious,” noted Tuvok. “The construction of this complex appears to be chaotic, and yet it operates with apparent efficiency.”

  “Mostly,” added Dakal, pointing with his uninjured hand. “The damage we saw on the surface is also visible here. The same carbon scoring, the same melt effects.” He was pointing to a lower level, visible through gaps in the structure. Down there, illuminators flickered in feeble spasms, revealing blackened expanses of ruined wire.

  “Imagine what a shortcircuit would do in a place like this,” said Pava. “Less a spark, more a stormfront.”

  Tuvok looked past her. A pair of the unkempt drones that had surrounded them on the surface had followed the group into the pyramid, keeping their distance, loitering away from them, sometimes getting caught up in each other’s cables, other times chattering mindlessly in binary. Now the two machines were static, observing. It was not lost on the commander that the drones were blocking the path should the Starfleet officers decide to head back the way they had come. The machines were clearly escorting them into some sort of rendezvous.

  And ahead, where the echoing corridor opened up to present a hoop-shaped balcony, he believed they had reached it.

  Pentagonal tiles made of corroded silver ringed a wide oval of empty space, another vent chimney that fell down toward an orange, magmalike glow. A long, low console, detailed in what appeared to be bone and some variety of lacquered crimson wood, stuttered open, like a music box on clockwork cogs and age-worn pistons. The panel was oddly asymmetrical, with a keypad that mirrored the pentagon shapes of the tiles. Tuvok examined the grouping and symbology of the switches and quickly came to the hypothesis that the system operated on a base-twelve paradigm.

  “This is more than just functional,” offered Dakal. “The design, I mean. It’s… elegant.”

  Tuvok raised an eyebrow, considering the ensign’s statement. Certainly, there was a clear aesthetic tone to the construction of the console, with inlaid metals worked carefully into the bone keys. This was no mass-produced mechanism stamped out in modular sections by a fabricator—it had been handmade.

  The Vulcan switched his suit comm from internal to external address and glanced around. “FirstGen Zero-Three. I am Commander Tuvok of the Starship Titan. I am here. Will you communicate with us?”

  For long moments, there was only silence. “I guess not—” began the Andorian, and then the whispering began, rising from the depths of the dark well beneath them.

  First ten voices, then a hundred, a thousand. And finally, a chorus a million strong, filling the chamber with a rush like waves breaking on a seashore.

  In the dataspace void, strings of chattering, sharp-edged machine code assaulted her, resolving into a hurricane of words that she tasted and saw as much as she heard. A glittering sphere made of liquid gold rolled angrily across the middle of the arenalike space, making aggressive jousting passes around something resembling a collection of spinning steel rings.

  “Red-Gold and One-Five.” White-Blue’s voice was a whisper in the depths of Vale’s mind. “I suspected we would find them in conflict.”

  The FirstGen elder One-Five projected an impassive wave of steely gravitas. “It serves no purpose to return to this matter and reexamine it,” the AI rumbled on, in the midst of a rebuttal. “This was put to the vote of the Governance Kernel and carried by weight of agreement. Repairs will be completed on the alien vessel, Identifier: U.S.S. Titan, within the allotted task scheduling. Materials pooling will be reorganized to reflect the withdrawals, and processing of recovered minerals from the outer planets will be incremented to restore stocks.”

  “Error,” grated Red-Gold. “Error!”

  One-Five ignored the interruption. “Our obligation to the aliens will be concluded at this juncture. Referring… Interrogative: Silver-Green, status of search operation?”

  A tetrahedron floating high above them drifted down and spun about its axis as it spoke. “No sign of the contingent of organics lost during the Null incursion at the refinery. Conclusion: organic life terminated during incursion event, matter traces consumed and converted. Probability is high.”

  “Confirmed.” One-Five added, “We will send the Starfleet vessel on its way. The distraction created by these aliens is counterproductive and inflammatory. Outcome computed: Sentry society is best served by their departure from our space. End of line.”

  At first, Vale had thought one of the image proxies was just a slab of slate-colored material, but now, as it hove forward, she saw the vague definition of a humanoid shape
carved into it, the imprint of a blocky face, arms, torso. When it spoke, she recognized the voice she had heard on the Titan’s bridge.

  “The involvement of the organics was instrumental in the dispatch of the Null at the refinery,” said Cyan-Gray. “Interrogative: Has that datum been erased, or do you all consider it to be of low value?”

  “Event analysis was performed,” Silver-Green replied. “Despite spikes of interest regarding elements of the alien ship’s technology methodology, it is computed that continued interaction with the U.S.S. Titan will be detrimental to the unity of the Sentry Coalition.”

  They’d rather kick us out than work with us, thought Vale. They’re afraid of what we can do. They don’t trust us.

  Red-Gold turned in place. “Error condition! You compound your mistakes with a cascade failure.”

  “Assistance is not required,” One-Five boomed. “We will deal with incursions as we have always done. Alien intervention is superfluous.” The rings reoriented to cluster around the gold sphere, and Vale imagined that the FirstGen’s virtual self was actually glaring at its junior compatriot. “This was your stance previously, Red-Gold. Interrogative: Have you processed a new viewpoint?”