ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

by Michael A. Martin

  Meaning “contrary to fact.” Will you share some of your “counterfactual” memories with us?

  DULMER: Where should I start? There are so many small details, little things. There was a boy named Noah Powell, whose mother served as the first head nurse in the Starship Titan’s sickbay. Only Noah was also a girl named Suzi.

  Couldn’t that just be some record-keeper’s clerical error? It hardly sounds like a sign that the universe is in any danger of unraveling.

  DULMER: All right. Let’s look at the bigger picture, then. Let’s see, I have a vivid recollection of the Borg completely devastating Deneva and Risa around twenty-five years ago. The Borg sent about seven thousand cubes into the heart of Federation space. They wanted to wipe out the human species, and they set about the task with an efficiency that would have terrified even the Undine. They did a lot of collateral damage as well, with their attacks on Qo’noS, Andor, and even Vulcan, before Starfleet finally put them down, somehow. Chancellor Martok’s son Drex sacrificed his life to try to stop the assault, but the collective just rolled right over his fleet. And they destroyed Pluto on their way to their big assault against Earth itself.

  Starfleet lost a lot of good people during the Big Borg War. Admiral Janeway was one of the earliest casualties. They got Admiral Paris a little later. And thousands of other Starfleet officers. There’s one thing I can’t quite figure out, though: how the Borg managed to attack Vulcan over a century after the planet had already been blown to smithereens.…

  Lucsly listens resignedly until his old partner trails off into anguished silence. He’s obviously heard it all before. I say nothing as the older man speaks, since the act of putting his recollections into words appears to be making Dulmer uncharacteristically emotional, sending a single tear running down his craggy cheek until he wipes it away with his palm. I don’t want to risk upsetting him further by mentioning my complete unfamiliarity with any of the events he just recounted.

  But facts are facts. As far as I know, Pluto is still right where it’s been for umpteen billion years, and neither Risa nor Deneva have ever suffered a Borg attack of any kind, much less the global devastation that haunts Dulmer’s memories. And I’m sure that Dulmer’s obituaries for Admiral Kathryn Janeway, Admiral Owen Paris, and Captain Drex would come as complete surprises to their subjects, all of whom are still very much alive as far as I know.

  DULMER: I’m okay. I think it actually gets a little easier every time I run through the worst of the memories. Especially the really inconsistent ones, like Vulcan.

  QUELLE: Maybe it’s all finally starting to integrate, the way Doctor Wykoff hoped it would one day.

  Since Dulmer no longer seems to be teetering on the edge of an emotional meltdown, I decide to press on. I really want to believe that he isn’t crazy, and I want to give him the chance to prove it, if not to his caregiver’s satisfaction, then to that of history.

  Given the possibility that a time traveler might succeed in bringing about some of the very “counterfactual” catastrophes you just mentioned, why is the DTI so adamant in insisting that you must be suffering from temporal psychosis? Why won’t they concede the possibility that you’re actually learning to cope with memories of real but aborted timelines?

  DULMER: I’ve wondered about that myself for years, and I think I finally have an answer. Their attitude is perfectly understandable, if you stop and think about it. If I’m really crazy or delusional, then the DTI isn’t obligated to follow up on what’s in my head. That means they don’t have to face the possibility that the Undine aren’t finished trying to snuff out the human race using temporal means. And neither does Starfleet, or the Federation Council, or the Dragon [UFP President Aennik Okeg] in the Palais.*

  Or the half trillion Federation citizens who aren’t eager to go to war again any time soon, whether it’s against the Undine or anyone else.

  DULMER: Eager or not, they’ll have to deal with it eventually. The universe isn’t some holodeck designed to tailor reality until it’s more to your liking. It doesn’t have safety protocols to protect you from your own recklessness. And it absolutely won’t let you get away with arbitrarily deciding which parts of it are real and which parts aren’t.

  But how do you tell the difference between the real and the unreal—especially in circumstances like yours?

  Quelle approaches Dulmer, who checks his wrist chronometer to confirm that the time allotted for this interview has more than fully elapsed. Dulmer acknowledges this with a nod, rises, and moves toward the door with the orderly. Then Dulmer pauses on the threshold and faces me and Lucsly.

  DULMER: It took me years to realize it, Mister Sisko, but it’s actually pretty simple: the things that can kill you if you ignore them are the things that are real. Anything else is a phantom.

  With that, Dulmer disappears through the door. Quelle lingers on the threshold and faces the table for a moment before following his charge into the adjacent chamber.

  QUELLE: Of course, even the phantoms can be more real than you might think.

  It’s only after I’m once again alone with Lucsly in the reception room that I realize where I’ve seen the orderly’s face before. Some of the images I recall now are about forty years old, drawn from the declassified portions of Jean-Luc Picard’s logs. My mind’s eye sees the enigmatic creature whose species had once considered excising humanity from the universe just as the Undine would later on. These beings had decided instead to stay their hand, but only after a starship captain demonstrated the human ability to think beyond the prosaic limitations of everyday reality.

  Suddenly it becomes crystal clear to me why a man like Dulmer—a man who stands astride multiple realities—has become such an object of fascination for a man like Quelle.

  Or rather, for a multidimensional superbeing like Q.

  THE UNDINE WAR

  LIFE AND DEATH…

  … AND LIFE

  EXCERPTED FROM A CONFIDENTIAL INTERNAL

  FEDERATION COMMUNIQUé, INTERCEPTED ON

  STARDATE 83686.4*

  TO: T’Vanik of Vulcan, Secretary General of the Federation Security Council

  FROM: Otera Tul, President of Trillius Prime [Trill]

  … The Trill government categorically denies the spurious rumors that have circulated lately alleging security breaches in the caverns of Mak’ala. Absolutely no such security breaches have occurred. Because Mak’ala nurtures a habitat that is critical to the survival of our symbiont population—and by extension Trill civilization as we have come to know it—it is one of the most carefully guarded regions in the entire Trillius system. It is inconceivable that Mak’ala could be used by the Undine, as the rumors allege, as a staging post for new military incursions from fluidic space, or as a beachhead for clandestine acts of impersonation and infiltration.… The Security Council’s offer of Starfleet troops, facilities, and equipment to preempt such developments is, of course, appreciated, but wholly unnecessary. Therefore the offer has been officially declined by the Trill government.… Mak’ala’s symbiont pools are ecologically fragile places, and the presence of large numbers of outsiders would pose a significant threat to the ongoing health and well-being of our symbiont population, which has already been badly stressed by other matters during recent decades.…

  JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD # L-52

  Cochrane Institute, New Samarkand,

  Alpha Centauri III

  The former chief engineer of two successive Starfleet flagships, Captain Geordi La Forge has a surprisingly easygoing manner for someone about to receive his first command, the Galaxy-class Starship Challenger. The man exudes an energy and enthusiasm that peel several decades from his true age. I feel an immediate bond with him, which makes perfect sense since we’re both Starfleet brats. Like La Forge, my father was a Starfleet officer (as was his mother), and both of our mothers died aboard starships.

  La Forge’s expansive office at the Cochrane Institute’s Starship Design Lab suggests an almost art-gallery-like sense of
order and aesthetics, despite being filled with images of starships real and imagined, ranging from flat images on padds and wall screens and paintings to holographic miniatures to three-dimensional, hand-built models.

  Although the ocular implants that compensate for Captain La Forge’s congenital blindness are all but indistinguishable from natural, fully organic eyes, the windows to his soul hint at mysterious sights that those of us possessed of ordinary vision can scarcely imagine—and perfectly normal things as well. For example, in the center of his desk are several small framed holophotos of hearth and home, among which are images of La Forge standing in a lush garden beside a smiling young woman; three children at play; and several shots, both candid and posed, of adolescents and young adults that I assume to be later images of those very same children.

  We exchange greetings and handshakes and take seats on opposite sides of Captain La Forge’s photograph-festooned desk. He seems very open and eager to talk.

  Just as we’re about to begin the interview in earnest, he catches me staring at his family photos.

  That one’s my first wife, Leah. Just to the right of it are some shots of our kids, Alandra, Bret, and Sidney.

  And that one, at the top, is Mikaela, who’s about to become my chief engineer aboard the Challenger. And the next Mrs. La Forge.

  Congratulations, and on more than just the captaincy. It’s obvious from your photo gallery that family is at least as important to you as Starfleet is.

  I’m Starfleet on both sides of the family, and my parents moved me around a lot when I was a kid. Since we’re talking about the Long War, it’s probably worth mentioning that the pictures remind me of what we were fighting for, back in the day. Whether the enemy was the Borg, the Dominion, or the Undine.

  How many times did you encounter the Undine during the hot part of the conflict?

  Not as many times as you might think, what with the Federation News Service trying to turn us all into superheroes. Contrary to popular belief, neither of the Enterprises that I served on were always right there in the thick of things. The Undine War was a really wide conflict that covered a lot of ground, and it would have been incredibly coincidental for us to have been in every major battle, or even most of them. That kind of thing might happen in fictional holonovel scenarios like Battlecruiser Vengeance, but not in real life.

  But surely you can’t mean to minimize your contribution to driving the Undine back into fluidic space. According to Starfleet’s official public reports, you—you, personally—were instrumental in keeping the Federation’s alliance with the Klingon Empire from falling apart at a critical juncture.

  I suppose you can give me credit for knowing which buttons to press when the time came to execute the plan. But I wasn’t the one who did the really hard work. There was no way I could have. It was Data who made all the real-time calculations that had to be performed in order to seal the portal to fluidic space at the proper time.

  But you were one of the few who were prescient enough to foresee the possibility of emergencies that only Data might be able to cope with.

  Believe me, I’d be more than happy to have been wrong about that. Being right on that sort of thing is more of a curse than a blessing. Just ask Cassandra.

  Point taken. But surely Data couldn’t really have been your only hope—especially since he’d already been dead for several years by the time the fluidic-space rift affair began. At that point, the Enterprise-E had just undergone an extensive series of refits. Why wasn’t her revamped main computer up to handling the crisis?

  Actually, the fluidic-space rift started to turn critical—not to mention the Federation-Klingon diplomatic crisis that was looming at the time—before the refit was completely finished. The Enterprise had to leave Utopia Planitia months before she was really ready. That probably had a lot to do with why the main computer wasn’t up to speed on crunching the necessary numbers in real time.

  Setting aside your personal modesty for the moment, Starfleet Command decided that you were indispensable for the duration of the emergency. Didn’t they pull you out of this very office by invoking the reserve activation clause from your commission?

  Actually, I was in a slightly smaller office at the end of the hall at the time. All they had to do was ask, though I wasn’t sure going into it what I could really do about the crisis. Again, that’s one of the problems with the media turning you into a superhero. As one of my predecessors who served aboard an earlier Enterprise once taught me, engineers should do whatever they can to keep their COs’ expectations realistic. And since I had no way to predict the outcome of the emergency, I was relieved to have Data as an ace in the hole.

  If I recall correctly, Data was supervising the refit of the Enterprise-E at the time—his first Starfleet assignment after his “return from the dead.”

  Not only did he supervise the finish of the refit—including the extensive repairs that had to be done following the fluidic-space rift crisis—but Starfleet also officially put him in the captain’s chair just before the Enterprise left spacedock again.

  Regarding the so-called rift crisis itself: just how serious a threat was it?

  What we had to contend with was an interdimensional rift that was already the size of a small moon and expanding visibly by the hour. Without Data’s help, we probably not only would have failed to seal it, but could easily have ripped it into a light-years-long spatial gash capable of flooding an entire sector of Klingon territory with the gunk that fills fluidic space—an “ocean” that only Undine ships can navigate safely. If that had happened, the Klingons would almost certainly have blamed us, and we would have had two bloodthirsty enemies to contend with for the price of one. So if anybody ought to be singled out for praise, it’s Data, not me.

  Wasn’t this Captain Data’s first significant crisis since his… resurrection?

  I think so. At least it was the first time I saw Data since immediately after he… came back to us.

  You haven’t talked much about this before, but I gather that you were on the scene when Data’s “resurrection” occurred.

  La Forge suddenly begins to look uncharacteristically uncomfortable. I suppress a shudder as I notice the tiny biomechanical components embedded in his pupils rotating almost a full clockwise turn and back again as he studies me, apparently considering how best to answer my question. Knowing that Captain La Forge’s ocular implants are merely stirring up my own unresolved Borg anxieties does nothing to put me at ease. I force aside my thoughts of the Borg, the killers of my mother, but it does little good; the biomechanical louvers obscuring the windows to Captain La Forge’s soul merely conjure a decades-old image of my old friend Nog, whose Dominion War service earned him a biosynthetic leg. As I await La Forge’s answer, I marvel briefly that I have somehow managed to retain all my own original equipment after the passage of so much time and danger.

  I was spending some time on Omicron Theta helping out the Soong Foundation’s researchers at the time of Data’s… recovery. The team hit a serious snag on a… project they were working on.

  Captain Maddox told me that the Daystrom Institute’s Soong Foundation team was working with the early prototype Soong-type android known as B-4. They were trying to unlock the so-called Data matrix—the suite of files that Data had copied from his own positronic brain onto B-4’s.

  At the time I was already skeptical about whether what they were calling the “Data matrix” even still existed.

  Why? I can remember more than one occasion when my own father returned from what looked like irretrievable doom.

  And I can say the same thing about Data. But luck isn’t an inexhaustible resource. Once your luck runs out, it’s all over. And hope can start looking a lot like denial.

  But I would have thought that your having access to so many of the Soong Foundation’s cybernetics experts would have given you very real hopes of recovering Data. Especially since that’s the way things eventually worked out.

  Engineers are co
nservative creatures by nature. We wear belts and suspenders both, just in case. And the disappearance of my mother and her ship taught me some very hard lessons about being conservative about hope. Hope is a fine thing, and it’s a worthy motivator. But wishful thinking can be an engineer’s worst enemy. It can even get people killed.

  But a man’s reach should exceed his grasp—

  “Or else what’s a heaven for?” Don’t look so shocked. Engineers sometimes read things other than technical papers.

  Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I never really entirely lost hope that Data might return. At least not completely. Data was my best friend for fifteen years, so I always held out at least some hope. Look, nobody could have served aboard the Enterprise on as many exploration missions as I did without being basically hopeful by nature.

  But I also knew the difference between hope and delusion. I knew that I would have given anything to bring Data back, and I suppose I distrusted my own motivations because of that. I knew I would have died in his place if I’d been given the choice. Hell, there were times when I wished I had. After all, Data was supposed to outlive all of us. It’s one of the universe’s nasty little ironies.… But all hoping aside, I still had an engineer’s duty to face the world as it was, rather than how I might have preferred it to be. After all, it had been almost six years since Data had been vaporized in the Battle at the Bassen Rift.…

  But as it turned out, the Data matrix was still lurking somewhere in B-4’s positronic brain, otherwise Data never could have been restored. Hope, rather than delusion, won out in the end.

  I hope you’re right about that. I really do.

  I don’t understand. Wasn’t Data’s return a good thing?

  Of course it was. The problem is that none of us ever stopped to consider the ethical ramifications of bringing Data back. But we understood the expectations of Starfleet and the Federation Council well enough, so we just bulled ahead without really thinking anything through—and more often than not ended up with egg on our faces for our trouble.