Can you describe what you were doing—preferably using layman’s language?
Of course. I’ve spent years learning how to translate engineerspeak into something understandable by senior command officers.
Right after Data died, I did essentially the same thing the Daystrom people would keep trying for years, without any success—I used all of Data’s files in the hopes that B-4’s head would suddenly contain Data’s mind. But the files would always just lie there like so many old tech manuals. You see, Data’s personality and intellect weren’t simply the sum total of a pile of disassembled parts. They were emergent properties that arose jointly from the information in his systems and the cybernetic material substrate of his consciousness, as well as who knows how many other immeasurable, irreproducible quantum-mechanical effects.
In other words, you failed to track down Data’s soul.
I’m an engineer, not a philosopher. All I can say is that whatever “spark” made Data a unique individual appeared to have been snuffed out and wasn’t showing any signs of coming back—at least not in response to any of the techniques I’d been applying up to that point, while B-4 was still living aboard the Enterprise.
Then the Soong people took custody of B-4, and they worked with him for nearly a solid year before Captain Maddox finally made the breakthrough that made Data’s return even remotely possible. That was right before Maddox left the Soong team to return to his old job at the Daystrom Institute.
Maddox was also one of Data’s old friends. It seems strange that he would choose to leave the “Data’s resurrection” project just as it was about to bear fruit.
That’s what I thought at the time, when the Soong team asked me to come aboard and help them apply the discoveries Maddox had made just before his departure. I suppose I was allowing my lingering hope of recovering Data to keep me from thinking too critically about what we were doing. I was trying to keep my focus on the practical application of Maddox’s theory.
Can you walk me through some of Maddox’s main ideas?
Sure. Maddox thought that [Data’s creator] Doctor [Noonien] Soong must have embedded a special command string among Data’s files for the express purpose of allowing him to “back up” his personality onto a second positronic brain, where it would run just as the original had. Maddox believed that this command string existed, but had somehow gotten fragmented during the process of being uploaded into B-4 because of all the damage that Data’s emotion chip had sustained during the last several years before his death. Fortunately, Data had left his emotion chip behind aboard the Enterprise, which allowed the research team to take custody of the chip along with B-4.
So after a false start or two, we confirmed that Maddox was right—there really was an accessible Data matrix. Once we succeeded in repairing Data’s emotion chip and used it in tandem with the complementary heuristic pathways from which B-4’s brain ran its ethical subroutines, we discovered that we really did know how to unlock Data’s personality matrix.
Which means that we’d discovered that we had the means to bring back Data whenever we wanted to.
When I tried to get Captain Maddox to speak to me about the particulars of Data’s return, he referred me to you. But you don’t seem any more comfortable discussing this topic than he did. If you’d prefer, we could move on to some subject more directly related to the Undine War, like—
No. I think this is a story that needs to be told. Because if the story had turned out differently, Data wouldn’t have been available to us when we needed him most. And Federation historians would be talking about something called the Undine-Klingon War now—if anybody in the Federation was even still in the business of writing histories, that is. So Data was a key player in the war that was actually fought. The story of how that happened deserves to be preserved for posterity.
So let’s set it up: You went to Omicron Theta, Data’s birthplace, to join the Soong Foundation research team to replace Captain Maddox and carry on with the work he started but didn’t finish. Then you discovered you could restore Data to life within B-4’s body any time you wanted to. What happened next?
At first, a whole lot of nothing happened, even with Maddox’s new holographic-heuristic positronic initialization protocols in place. The team started celebrating when B-4 suddenly started singing an old Irving Berlin song. “Blue Skies.” It was one of Data’s favorites; he sang it at Will Riker and Deanna Troi’s wedding.
Was this one of those early “false starts” you mentioned?
It was, but I think I might have been the only one to recognize it for what it was at the time because I’d seen the exact same thing happen before. A short time after Data’s death, B-4 started singing the very same song he sang that day for the Soong team—“Blue Skies.” All it proved was that he knew how to access some of the files Data had uploaded to him. But he was still accessing those files as B-4, not as Data.
It was beginning to look like we had another failure on our hands—until Stardate 62762.91.* I’ll never forget it. That was the day we finally discovered how to unlock the “Data matrix.” It was also the day that Data spoke to me—for the first time in nearly six years.
And it was also the day I finally understood why Maddox had decided that he couldn’t go on with the project, even though Starfleet and the Federation Council had placed such a high priority on Data’s return.
Because you finally realized that Data’s return could only come at B-4’s expense?
None of us had really paused to consider that, even for a moment. We were all just too caught up in all the endless minutiae of this incredibly complex, challenging task that had been laid in front of us.
But you got to know B-4 in the process. You started relating to him as a person, the way Maddox did.
I wondered for years afterward why that process didn’t start right after Data’s death in the Bassen Rift. Back when I was spending a lot of time working with B-4 aboard the Enterprise.
Have you come to any conclusions about why that might be?
I suppose I didn’t want to think of B-4 as a person back then, because looking at him just slapped me across the face with the fact that Data was gone, probably forever. And the more time that passed without B-4 demonstrating any possibility that Data might return through him, the harder it became to even look at him. Which is why the main emotion I can remember experiencing after B-4 transferred over to the Daystrom Institute was relief.
But what failed to happen aboard the Enterprise finally came to pass—and on Data’s “birthworld” of Omicron Theta, appropriately enough. So what can you tell me about what happened next?
I could hardly believe it at first. Data was back! It was still B-4 speaking, of course—his basic vocal apparatus was identical to Data’s, after all—but his voice suddenly carried authority and experience, without any of the tentativeness that I’d gotten accustomed to hearing whenever B-4 spoke. I could hear Data’s intellect in that voice. I could see Data’s presence in B-4’s eyes, even though they were the same eyes that B-4 had always had, standard equipment for Soong-type androids. It all happened in the space of a few heartbeats, right after we activated the revised Data matrix protocols.
You knew that quickly that Data had returned?
There was no mistaking it. It was a pretty extreme contrast, even though Data and B-4 were virtually identical at the hardware level in many respects. But B-4 wasn’t exactly—I guess there’s no kind way to say this—he wasn’t the most finely calibrated hydrospanner in the toolbox. He never came anywhere near to exhibiting any of Data’s potentials, despite having been made in the same mold, so to speak. So the moment Data came back to us, I knew it.
But that’s obviously not the end of this story.
No. In fact, it was the beginning of another one. Data—B-4—stood up from the chair he’d always sit in whenever any of us were actively working on his isolinear circuitry, or his cybernetic subroutines. Then he turned in a slow circle, his eyes searching the faces o
f each member of the research team who was present at the time.
Then he saw me, called my name, and asked me where he was. I told him that we were on Omicron Theta, and asked him to tell me the last thing he remembered.
Did he have any recollection of what happened aboard Shinzon’s flagship?
He remembered the Scimitar, of course. Only he didn’t recall being vaporized along with the ship after sending Captain Picard back to the Enterprise.
Of course. He’d copied his files onto B-4’s positronic brain before that happened. I suppose the last thing he remembered was plugging his system into B-4’s.
That’s just about right. Which was why his knowledge of his own death came to him second-hand, in the form of a personnel file that B-4 had left open in Data’s memory buffer.
B-4 must have wanted to bring his… brother up to speed on current events.
Apparently so.
Most people would react pretty emotionally after getting news about their own death and resurrection. How did Data take it?
His reaction was a lot stronger than I expected, though looking back I’m not sure why I was surprised.
I know that Data’s—I mean B-4’s—emotion chip wasn’t installed. Data had left the chip aboard the Enterprise before the last time he’d left the ship, and I had brought it with me as part of my engineering toolkit. Without that chip, his range of human emotions should have been pretty limited, at least beyond the ethical core Doctor Soong had given him—that part of him that always tried to behave decently and constantly struggled to be more human. But chip or no chip, I saw suspicion beginning to dawn in those yellow eyes.
Thanks to the Soong Foundation’s extensive tricorder records of the events in question, Captain La Forge is able to provide a nearly verbatim account of much of what occurred next:
“All the information available to me indicates that a span of five years, eleven months, two days, three hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-one seconds have passed since my final experiences aboard the Scimitar,” Data said. “Since it is unlikely that you discovered a means of beaming me to safety—let alone a method that required such a lengthy interval to complete—I must conclude that you have employed other means.”
I could only nod. It was difficult to know how he might react to the truth, even without his emotion chip. As I said, Data was an inherently ethical being. If he weren’t, then why would he have cared so intensely about the human race and want to be a part of it?
“That’s right, Data,” I said finally. “Your original body was… vaporized when the Scimitar exploded.”
“Ah,” he said. He had ceased studying my face, or any of my colleagues’ faces. Instead, he was taking a good, close look at the fingers of his left hand, as though he’d never seen them up close before. In a way, he hadn’t. “You somehow… restored me to existence from the backup files I uploaded into my brother, B-4.”
“It’s good to have you back, Data,” I told him.
Data’s fingers moved in a high-speed blur as he tested his dexterity for a few moments before he stopped and looked at me with an almost glum expression. “It would be good to be back, Geordi. It is unfortunate that I cannot remain among you. My ethical subroutines prohibit my preserving my existence at the direct expense of another’s.”
I told Data that I didn’t understand. After all, why had he bothered to upload all of his files into B-4’s positronic neural network if not as a means of “backing himself up”? I challenged him on this, but he turned my objections aside. He said he had never intended to displace anyone else from existence, and that the Laws of Robotics applied to his dealings with other synthetic life-forms as much as they did to his interactions with organic persons.
I find that surprising. Not that Data would put another’s life ahead of his own—he’d already proved conclusively that he was willing and able to do that—but because he couldn’t exactly claim to have been a pacifist. During his fifteen years as the Enterprise’s second officer, he’d been in combat situations any number of times.
I raised the very same point, but Data brushed it aside. “My actions on those occasions were intended to prevent death or injury to the people around me,” he said.
But I wasn’t satisfied with that. “What about the way you handled Lore?”
“Lore posed a grave danger, Geordi,” Data said. “His influence nearly caused me to take your life.”
“That’s true enough, Data. But how big a danger was Lore after he was deactivated? Was he still so dangerous after he was unconscious that you and I had to tear him down to his basic components?”
Something that probably should have been beyond his emotional scope moved across his face while he was thinking that one through. I could tell he was bothered by his own inconsistency.
Then he looked me in the eye. With a sad half-smile he shouldn’t have been able to make, he said, “To quote the human poet Walt Whitman, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ” He tapped himself on the temple as he spoke, and I suddenly realized what he was talking about.
“I contain multitudes.” The personal logs of all the Omicron Theta colonists who died because Lore had lured the crystalline entity there to destroy them.
Yes. I suppose it was his way of emphasizing what he was going to say next: “My elder brother, Lore, was unethical, immoral. A psychiatrist would almost certainly have diagnosed him with numerous psychoses, including borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and sociopathy. A philosopher would probably describe him as a power-hungry solipsist. I believe that Lore was evil as well, Geordi. Insane, certainly, but also malevolent. And he posed a terrible danger so long as any chance remained that he might be reactivated.
“But my other sibling is an innocent. I cannot deprive B-4 of life, not even to save my own. If I did, would I not negate everything I have always believed about the rights of synthetic persons? Would I not deny B-4’s own personhood?
“Would I not be as bad as Lore?”
“Lore did more horrible things than I can count, Data,” I said. “And he did them for one reason: because he could. If you really think you’re the least little bit like Lore, then ask yourself this: If he were in your shoes right now, how much time would he have spent wrestling with his conscience?”
“You appear to be arguing my point for me, Geordi,” Data said. “If I am to avoid repeating the crimes of my wayward brother, then I must not follow the same impulses that Lore would follow.”
“Data, we need you,” I said. I would have added, “I need you,” but I knew this shouldn’t be about what I needed—or thought I needed. Besides, we were having this discussion in a room full of our colleagues.
“I am sorry, Geordi,” Data said. “But I simply cannot do this. Good-bye, my friend.”
Then he sat down again in B-4’s chair, ramrod straight. His body remained rigid even as his face went slack, the way B-4’s always was.
And a heartbeat later, Data was… gone, just like that.
And B-4 returned?
In an instant, as though somebody had just thrown a switch. I knew that those yellow eyes were just the same as they had always been. But they were somehow duller, less … present. Of course, that was just the way I perceived him—the way we all perceived him. Everybody tended to underestimate him. I suppose we all treated him as though he were a little kid. We looked out for him, but we always assumed that he didn’t have a very good grasp of what was going on around him.
Of course, there was a huge problem with that perception: it simply wasn’t true.
Did B-4 understand what had just happened to him?
I guessed at the time that B-4 knew that something unusual was going on, because he immediately asked us how long he had “been away.” I told him that only a few minutes had passed, and reminded him about the files we’d uploaded into him from Data. He said that he remembered that. Then I told him that those files had just become
active, somehow allowing Data to “awaken.”
That was when B-4 really surprised me. “I know,” he said. “Data told me about that when he sent me back to talk to you.”
So Data was not only still active inside B-4’s positronic brain, he was also able to have an internal conversation with him?
Evidently, although it was news to us at the time. But the situation apparently wasn’t going to stay that way for long. According to B-4, Data had just told him that he—Data—was already busy writing a subroutine intended to purge all traces of himself from the neural net that he and B-4 were sharing at the moment.
But why would Data have to do that? They were both living inside the same cortenide-duranium skull. Why couldn’t they have just continued doing that indefinitely?
We wondered about that ourselves at the time. As near as we could determine, it was because of the software-firmware-hardware architecture of the Data matrix itself, specifically its synergistic and holographic nature.
What I mean is, in order to complete his “return to the living,” Data’s neural network had to begin an exponential expansion throughout B-4’s positronic substrate. The unfolding of that process would have utterly overwhelmed and wiped out B-4’s personality and memory engrams within a matter of hours. So we immediately took the precaution of copying all of B-4’s files and memory engrams into the biggest computer buffer we had on hand, the one we used to create holographic design simulations.
But couldn’t Data simply have made a conscious effort to set aside enough “head space” to accommodate B-4? After all, B-4 seemed to be much less sophisticated than Data. He shouldn’t have taken up nearly as much room as Data needed.
Maybe some of the new heuristic neural nets are able to work that way, but not the Soong-type positronic brain. First, there would have been a serious risk of a psychotic break, possibly leading to an irresolvable multiple personality disorder that easily could have scrambled both B-4 and Data beyond any hope of recovery. Data might have been able to keep his cybernetic finger in the dike for a few hours—maybe even for a day or two, if he had B-4 actively helping him—but it would have been useless in the end. Data’s program was—is—far more complex than B-4’s was, as you say. And because of that very complexity, it simply would have had to spread out and take over the entire positronic substrate it inhabited. Unless, of course, Data took an extraordinary measure to prevent that.
ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY Page 20