by David Mack
Paralysis sets in as darkness falls. Not a physical infirmity, mind you, but a psychological one. Try as I might, I can’t conceive any reason to get up. Archeus is only a short walk away, through the forest, but I have no desire to go back. What’s left for me in the Federation? Perhaps nothing at all, unless by some outrageous miracle Starfleet stopped the Borg. Why should I go back to a quadrant littered with burning worlds? And if it survived, how widespread is its damage? How incalculable were its losses, both military and civilian?
Even if the situation is far less dire than I fear, what can I do now? I’d invested all I had in that lab on Yutani IIIa. All the raw materials I needed, the equipment, the generators . . . it cost me everything. It was to be my magnum opus, and it’s gone up in smoke. I’ve made myself a persona non grata on Orion these days, and I can’t think the Ferengi would be very happy to see me on their metaphorical doorstep. I admit, for several seconds I was tempted to risk falling prey to the whims of Starfleet and the Federation government by revealing myself to them in the hope that they might give me a lab and the resources I need to start over; with a team of assistants, I might be able to reproduce my work in three months instead of twelve.
Then I remember what has happened to nearly every new technology developed under the allegedly benign auspices of Starfleet. The horror stories of the inception of the Genesis Device, the conspiracies surrounding the phasing cloak on the Pegasus, the numerous abuses of sentient AI rights, their officially sanctioned crimes against the Bak’u . . . the list goes on and on, I assure you. I have no desire to add my name and inventions to that shameful litany.
I disengage my temporal reconciliation circuits and surrender myself to the vagaries of time and space. My thoughts run in circles as part of my brain ticks its way through picoseconds, and my body lingers, immobile and exposed to the elements, as days bleed together. The sun rises at my back, throwing my shadow down across the valley. It sets before me, its apparent arc shifting infinitesimally as the new Eden makes its elliptical journey around its star. Rain slashes down from black-bellied clouds, and lightning rends the landscape; mist shrouds the valley in the minutes preceding the dawn; great flocks of avian reptiles wheel and turn in beautiful, complex formations, their passage across the sky nothing less than poetry come alive.
Days become weeks, and I remain amid the ashes, which even now are washed away with every passing squall, blended into the surrounding soil or carried off by the wind. Nature makes its slow but inexorable advance to reclaim the lot around the villa, and I bear witness, an observer of infinite patience. In the not-so-distant future, creeping vines, spreading grasses, and opportunistic mosses and fungi will make short work of the burnt wood. A decade from now, there will be hardly anything left to suggest a house ever stood here.
Maybe, if I am lucky, this planet’s aggressive flora will consume me, as well.
Despair has made a statue of me. It holds me here, mute and motionless, anchored to the ground by my guilt. I’ve failed my sons yet again. I know B-4 can’t have much longer, a few years at most, and that I’m squandering precious time, but I no longer have any idea how to help him. I had the perfect plan, one that could save him and Data both, but it’s been taken from me, and I have nothing else. Just like when Lore stole Data’s emotion chip, I’ve failed to plan for the worst, for the unthinkable. I forgot to have a backup plan, and it’s my sons who will pay for it.
Then a thought occurs to me. I remember that for all of Vaslovik’s tendencies toward reclusive behavior, he has always lingered along the periphery of civilization because he needs it. That hasn’t changed. I’ve lost all my resources to the Borg’s invasion . . . and so has he. All the ancient wealth he once accessed at will, all the great interstellar corporations that provided him with technology and raw materials, the Byzantine web of lies he’d spun decades in advance to enable himself to move undetected through civilization—those things have also very likely been destroyed, or at least badly compromised, by the Borg’s rampage through Federation space. I’ve been forced to rebuild my secret life in seclusion, and it’s not just possible but highly probable Vaslovik has been compelled to do the same. This might be the only time his defenses will be down for the next century; I’ll never have a better chance to find him.
After lingering motionless in the ashes for fourteen weeks, two days, six hours, thirty-three minutes, and nineteen seconds, I blink. Then I stand, turn, and walk back to Archeus.
It’s time to go home.
OCTOBER
2383
23
The last breaths of winter twist unseen between the buildings of New Glasgow on Galor IV. A cool breeze wafts over the dermal sensors of my left forearm, prickling the skin with gooseflesh. I barely register the sensation as cold, but my body is made to mimic natural human reactions. Around me, a few other patrons seated at some of this café’s other sidewalk tables shiver and adjust their scarves or hunch their shoulders forward against the thermal shift. I pick up my demitasse of raktajino with a twist of Kaferian lemon zest, take a long sip, and pretend to lose myself in the day’s headlines on my personal padd.
Hidden behind a well-padded visage with brown and mild eyes, I project an air of almost beatific calm. In fact, I do such a fine job of impersonating a normal person that no one can see I’m panicked, desperate, and running out of time and ideas.
It took me more than four months to make the journey back to Federation space after I left Vaslovik’s abandoned paradise. When I returned, I was at first relieved to find that the Borg’s insane jihad had been stopped, and that the Federation still existed. Then I learned, little by little, of the true scope of the damage and casualties this region of space had suffered. Almost every Class-M world or moon within a hundred light-years of the Azure Nebula had suffered some form of assault by the Borg. Many, like my own moon, had been sterilized without putting up the least resistance. Others made futile efforts at self-defense. Only a few were fortunate enough to be spared the full brunt of the Borg’s assault. When the crisis was ended, more than sixty-three billion sentient beings had been slain, on neutral worlds as well as on planets of the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire.
Those that survived counted themselves lucky . . . until the shortages began. Hundreds of billions of people had been turned into refugees, and with nearly forty percent of Starfleet’s ships destroyed, the Federation’s ability to maintain order was stretched to its limits. The greedy and the cruel wasted no time in capitalizing on the misfortunes of the displaced. For the first time since the twenty-second century, the peoples of Earth and its closest allies knew the sting of want, the harsh realities of an economics of scarcity rather than surplus. Hard lessons to face so soon after a tragedy of this scope, but that’s the way life is: arbitrary and uncaring.
Still, I have to give credit where it’s due. Even with sharply limited resources and widespread troubles, Starfleet has done a fine job of maintaining order and facilitating the rebuilding efforts on several worlds, and the current Federation government has risen to the challenges of the day with more finesse and keener acumen than I would have expected. With each day, the Federation recovers a bit more and the spectre of a grim future retreats.
If only my recent efforts had been so fruitful.
I’ve spent more than two years looking for any trace of Vaslovik. I’d thought it would be easy to reacquire his trail. Many of my news daemons and Trojan horse programs remain in place at various financial institutions, and I’ve only recently encountered some difficulties circumventing Starfleet’s new security features on its communications network. I expected to find ample evidence of Vaslovik acting through his many personas to shore up his holdings and ensconce himself and Juliana in a new redoubt. Instead, I find all his previous channels have gone silent. Most of his alter egos and fictional heirs have been declared dead, as their residences of record were on worlds annihilated by the Borg invasion. Those that might reasonably have been expected
to escape, however, have also vanished and been declared legally dead. His assets have been reclaimed by planetary governments and the Federation for humanitarian purposes.
It never occurred to me until now that an epic catastrophe such as this might have been a boon to Vaslovik. He’s proved repeatedly to be smarter, better prepared, and more forward-thinking than anyone expects. Perhaps he foresaw the possibility of a disaster such as this and made preparations to use it as cover for his final exit from the interstellar stage. It sounds outrageous, but it’s the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. I don’t believe for a moment that he and Juliana fell prey to the Borg, or to anyone else. They must be somewhere. Just not any of the myriad places I’ve looked for them, unfortunately.
I tried haunting the financial centers of Bolarus IX, even though I was embarrassingly conspicuous among the cerulean throngs of Bolian financiers in their white suits. Thinking that Vaslovik and Juliana might stick to the edges of Federation territory rather than venture too deeply into its space, I visited all the border worlds on which Vaslovik or his other personas maintained business fronts: Syrma, Rhaandar, Ascella, Cebelrai, Nusakan. On each world I was met with the same story: missing chief executives and owners, confusion, whispers of state receivership, and then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the seizure of assets by local authorities.
Everywhere I looked, the financial empire of Vaslovik turned to vapor. On Penthara, a fleet of his cargo ships and automated construction vessels was commandeered by Starfleet; on Zibal, mines he owned under several aliases were reclaimed under the doctrine of eminent domain; and on Kostolain, his continent of automated factories was repurposed for the creation of terraforming technology, by order of the Federation’s Department of the Interior.
Before the Borg invasion, I could have proved not only that Vaslovik had existed under many other identities, I could have documented what he owned and where. Now, I would be hard-pressed to prove that Vaslovik himself ever existed at all. This might well be the greatest sleight-of-hand deception I’ve ever seen, written on a nearly galactic scale.
I can’t pretend any longer to be his pursuer. He has long since slipped from my grasp. Whatever I’m going to do now about B-4 and Data, I’ll have to do it without his and Juliana’s help. There’s no more time to waste; B-4’s neural net could start to degrade at any time. I have to devise some means of getting to him inside the Annex here on Galor IV. Unfortunately, since the Borg invasion and the rise of a new rival—an alliance of interstellar powers known as the Typhon Pact—the Federation in general and Starfleet in particular have become justifiably security-conscious. Breaking into the Starfleet Annex before the invasion would have been difficult; now it verges on the impossible. Several key defense systems have been upgraded, I suspect there have been changes to its interior layout, and the entire building is now rigorously shielded against sensors of all kinds.
If not for the fact that I don’t trust Starfleet any more than I’d trust the Romulans or the Klingons, I could just walk up to the front door and knock. But I fear that would end badly for me, and possibly far worse for my son. Still, I should be grateful to Starfleet for one thing if for nothing else: thanks to Maddox’s impassioned legal argument in defense of B-4, my sole surviving son, my three original prototypes, and the remaining components of Lore’s body have all been transferred from the Enterprise to Maddox’s care here at the Annex, at B-4’s request. All my extant work has been gathered in one place: a state-of-the-art neurocybernetics research laboratory. For the first time in ages, it feels as if Fortune herself smiles upon me.
Let’s hope the feeling lasts long enough for me to save my boy.
JANUARY
2384
24
There’s an old saying on Earth—and I’m paraphrasing here—that if you give a million monkeys a million word processors and let them type randomly for some arbitrary but ultimately ridiculous span of time, those apparently immortal primates will reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare. I’ve never had occasion to test this assertion, but after three months of laboring in vain to penetrate the new firewalls at the Annex, I’m wishing I had a few million of those monkeys to throw at the problem.
That’s not to say I’ve been wasting my time on Galor IV. I’ve established numerous aliases and safe houses, installed dozens of backdoor codes for rapid site-to-site beaming using remote commands to the planet’s transporter network, and passed my downtime inventing something new to help me achieve my goal of reaching B-4 undetected: nanite spy-flies.
My flies are marvels of nano-engineering. Too small for organic beings to see and silent to biological ears, they are also phase-shifted by .002 millicochranes when deployed—just enough that, coupled with their nanoscopic size, they are practically undetectable to most security scanners. I’ve created several dozen of these remote-programmable tiny drones to go where I currently cannot: inside Maddox’s lab at the Daystrom Institute Annex.
Now I pass my days and nights inside a rented apartment on the edge of Talburgh, the closest town to the Annex. Each day a few of my flies escape the Annex, and I send in a few more to take their place. I dispatch them in rotating squadrons of twelve, but I don’t expect all of them to reach their intended destination. A strong wind can knock them off course for days, which has made my collection of actionable intelligence a rather hit-and-miss affair.
What can I tell you? No plan is perfect.
It was also necessary to sacrifice a bit of resolution in order to ensure my flies wouldn’t be detected and inadvertently lead Starfleet—or anyone else—back here to me. Consequently, my flies record only basic vids with low-quality audio. Complex sensor data was too much to ask. They could have transmitted real-time updates from inside the Annex if not for the facility’s high-powered scattering field. Intended to block unauthorized transporter beams, the field is also quite useful for obstructing unauthorized signal traffic. In order to transmit their recordings back to me, my flies have to first get out of the Annex and move clear of the interference. Maddox is a bit of a recluse, so the front door—the only way in or out—doesn’t open very often. As a result, the news I gather from my flies is sometimes days old by the time I’m able to download it and perform my analysis. It is, to put it mildly, a less than ideal situation.
Sequestered behind locked doors and drawn curtains, I sit and wait for the soft beep of my control console, which I use to program the flies with their orders and retrieve the vids they send back. The long hours in between I fill with mental labors, writing software patches for my own mind, updating my own programming, and preparing an upgrade for B-4.
A soft tone rises from the console. I swivel my chair and confirm that Fly 47 has cleared the field. I download its vids and put it into standby mode. It has made another thorough reconnoiter of the Annex’s interior, and it’s the first of my flies to successfully carry out my instructions to follow Maddox himself into his private laboratory. Unlike the austere empty spaces of the Annex’s ground floor, Maddox’s lab is stocked with new computers and tools. He is with B-4, who sits beside him like a child told to stay out of the way while grown-ups work. An optronic cable links B-4’s brain to a long bank of high-power computers.
Working with slow precision, Maddox carefully dismantles the positronic brains of my first three failed prototypes. The display screens behind him are jammed with code I recognize from my early days on Omicron Theta. After all these decades, Maddox is finally unlocking the secrets of my operating system for positronic brains. Good for him. It’s about time.
It doesn’t surprise me that Maddox has no use for Lore’s remains, since they no longer have a positronic brain for him to study. But I do find it interesting that while he seems to have spent a great deal of time and effort taking apart my failed prototypes, he seems to have made no attempt to dismantle the one other android in his lab that was ever completely operational: Lal.
What’s staying his hand? Is it sentimentality? Some old pledge
to Data that I was unaware of? Or could it be that B-4, despite his tragically limited capacity for understanding the world around him, simply refused Maddox permission to touch her? I suppose it’s possible that Maddox is just being thorough, trying to make certain he’s learned all he can from the earlier prototypes before he moves on to a more advanced model based on Data’s own matrix, but part of me would like to believe that this man who argued so adamantly for B-4’s rights might have a shred of decency in him, after all. I wish there was some way to know for certain what’s in his heart, but I don’t know how to program a nanite fly to tell me that.
The screens of code that surround him and the real-time status readings from B-4’s brain, on the other hand, I understand all too well. My son’s neural net is becoming unstable, and the degradation is already accelerating. Maddox is doing everything he can think of, but I know the dead ends he’s driving himself into, the false starts that will look so promising until he meets their fatal flaws. If I don’t reach B-4 soon, it will be too late. For a moment I consider going to the Annex, turning myself over to Maddox, and entrusting myself to his conscience. But then I remember that he still wears a Starfleet uniform and is bound by an oath of duty. Who knows what he would do if confronted with my existence? But does that really matter now, when so much is at stake? Wouldn’t that be a risk worth taking?
I’m still weighing that question as I review the vid file. Maddox turns to a smaller terminal beside his workbench and opens a comm channel. “Maddox to Annex Ops.”
I hear a man’s voice reply; it sounds hollow and distant. “Ops. Go ahead, Captain.”
“Send a priority signal to Captain Picard and Commander La Forge on the Enterprise. Request they proceed here at maximum warp, and tell them it’s an emergency.”