Gowron nodded. “Now, it is finished.” He moved down the hall and slapped the guard on the back.
The other Klingons did the same. They all ignored the body on the floor.
The guard returned his knife to his belt, and Gowron, his arm around the shoulder of the guard, came back down the hall. Riker could not remember ever seeing such a happy, almost fatherly proud smile on Gowron’s face.
Then, as if by a sudden bolt, Riker understood.
“My friends,” Gowron said. “I am now proud to say that my long story has a finish. Admiral Jellico. Commander Sisko. Captain Picard. Commander Riker. Lieutenant Worf. This is Pok, son of Torghn. My first officer.”
Captain Picard stuck out his hand, smiling. “I am honored.”
And as far as Riker was concerned, the captain spoke for all of them.
Epilogue
DINNER.
The meal in Quark’s had been superb. Now they sipped their brandy and relaxed. Around them the normal nightly activity of Quark’s had come up to full speed. But somehow it seemed to avoid their table, as if they were sitting in their own private bubble.
Riker wasn’t exactly sure why the meal had tasted so good. Possibly because he and Dax were finally allowed to finish a meal together. Or more likely it had been her company. And her laughs. He loved it when she laughed.
And when she smiled. And when she just looked at him.
Just a plain enjoyable meal. In fact, at the moment he could not remember a meal being so enjoyable. Tender roast Jibetian duckling. Crisp young sprouts. The finest of Quark’s brandy. He held the memory of the flavors like a treasured gem. He would not soon let go of them.
“You are just sitting there smiling,” Dax said. “A personal joke? Or a private thought?”
“It’s you,” Riker said, leaning forward to get a little closer to her. “For some reason you make me smile.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said, raising her glass. They toasted each other and he sipped his brandy again, letting the smooth, smoky flavor coat his mouth.
“I hear you volunteered to help set up the holodeck program,” Dax said. “Is that true?”
“Very true,” Riker said. “And I’m looking forward to it.”
That afternoon, at the last meeting, Captain Picard had suggested that Gowron’s story of Pok be used as a Federation holodeck program to teach Federation personnel about Klingon customs and culture.
Gowron had loved the idea. No hesitations.
But Admiral Jellico had been a tougher sell. Finally Gowron had offered to be scanned for inclusion in this program and that had swung the admiral. It would be a very worthwhile project. Of that, Riker had no doubt.
“Well,” Dax said, glancing over her glass of brandy at Riker. “Whatwould you like to do now, Commander? It seems we have some time free.”
Riker smiled at her devil-may-care look. Just at that moment a cheer exploded from the Dabo table. He glanced that way, then looked back at her. He could feel the intense grin on his face, and for some reason he had no desire to tone it down.
“First off,” he said. “I would love to play Dabo. I have a feeling I just might break Quark’s bank.”
Dax raised her eyebrows. “You must really feel lucky tonight.”
He reached across the table and took her hand.
Then, smiling, he asked, “Don’t you?”
THE MAKING OF STAR TREK: KLINGON!
by
David Mack
Introduction
The choice of the irascible but always highly honorable warrior race known as the Klingons to be the stars of the latest innovation in CD-ROM entertainment from Simon and Schuster Interactive was no accident, no simple coincidence.
Ever since their first TV appearance in the 1960s original series episode, “Errand of Mercy,” the Klingons have captivated the imaginations of Star Trek fans everywhere. They returned in such memorable episodes as “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove,” among others, and were the first denizens of the Star Trek universe to greet fans at the beginning of the series’ big-screen debut, Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The Klingons took on true depth during the phenomenally successful seven-year run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, fueled by the overwhelming popularity of Michael Dorn’s Lieutenant Worf. With a Klingon protagonist as a regular character, fans were at long last treated to an up-close and personal look at the rituals and traditions of the Klingon people. And with Dorn’s Worf keeping the Klingon mystique going strong on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Roxann Biggs-Dawson’s half-Klingon engineer, B’Elanna Torres, carrying the torch on Star Trek: Voyager, it’s a sure bet that the legend of the Klingons is just getting started.
So, having spread their Empire through the Alpha Quadrant, four television series, and six of the seven Star Trek films as well as countless comic books and novels, the Klingons now have conquered the newest media frontier-the interactive CD-ROM.
The creation of an interactive CD-ROM, particularly one as sophisticated and revolutionary as the Star Trek: Klingon! CD-ROM, is no easy task. It involves the coordinated effort of a great many people working together for many months, and sometimes years, to produce the final product; the best way to understand the origins and history of the Klingon! CD-ROM is to hear it in the words of the people who made it happen.
Preproduction
Like all great accomplishments, the Klingon! CDROM was born from an idea. And the author of that idea was its executive producer, Keith Halper.
“The idea came out in a title meeting that we had nearly two years ago,” Halper recalled. “We wanted to create a suitable follow-up to the Star Trek: The Next Generation: Interactive Technical Manual (Simon and Schuster Interactive’s best-selling “virtual tour” of the Starship Enterprise 1701-D, which Halper also produced). To match the success of the Interactive Technical Manual, this new CD-ROM would have to be authentic and visually riveting, and take the medium to bold new places. That’s what Star Trek fans demand. Unlike the technical manual, however, we wanted this CD-ROM to use characters and plot and high action: We wanted it to have the feel of an interactive television episode.
“When we did the Interactive Technical Manual, one of the things we learned was that an interactive product allows us to explore in detail things which can be presented only superficially in a linear format,” Halper explained. “For example, when we see Picard’s quarters in an episode, we see it for maybe ten seconds and it just flashes by. There’s a lot of detail in that room. The books on the shelves were chosen with care. We know that Picard reads the British empiricists and the German rationalists, like Kant. That’s the kind of stuff you can’t see in an episode, but it adds to the flavor of the room. In an interactive product we allow you to wander around and explore the space and learn more about these people and see some of the more subtle details, maybe learn something new about them that wouldn’t have been possible in another way.
It was obvious to me that “this story have to be about the Klingons. When we first saw the Klingons, we got to know them only superficially. They were this violent, aggressive, warlike species, and there’s really nothing very good about them. That’s pretty much all we ever saw of them in the original series…. During Star Trek: The Next Generation we came to know a lot more about them. Through Worf, we get to see that they’re actually this noble, honorable race, and that their warlike tendencies actually have a logical basis and form the root of their culture. But that’s the kind of stuff that we learn only over time and upon examination.
“We thought that in an interactive product, we could again allow users to do something analogous to wandering around the rooms—that we could allow users to wander around in their culture, to understand the books that are on their cultural shelves, and to understand who they are in a more profound way.
“So, for instance, when you’re wandering around in the living room and stop and click on a statue, and the Klingon computer voice talks with reverence
about the intertwining circles of the fulfilled and unfulfilled blood oaths on the statue, the blood-oath circles, that’s really interesting and that says something kind of profound about the Klingons that you haven’t seen in an episode. There isn’t time in an episode to go into this kind of detail. In an interactive program, we can put tons of detail in there and allow users to poke around and find it and teach themselves.”
With the focus set firmly on Klingons, the next step in the genesis of the Klingon-themed CD-ROM was to develop a story that would form the core of a complete “Klingon-immersion experience.” And after that would come a teleplay—one unlike any written before.
“Liz Braswell, my associate editor, and I conceived originally of a sort of Hamlet-like story in which there were two brothers who were fighting over a kingdom,” Halper said. “One of the brothers is killed and then his son avenges him. Of course, we know that a Klingon Hamlet wouldn’t be troubled by all kinds of indecision like a human Hamlet.
“Keith … got the idea and I helped write one of the original scripts for it when we were still trying to decide how to do this ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style of computer game,” Braswell added. “There were several evenings where we were on our hands and knees, writing up dialogue, cutting and pasting it on the floor to show where different story threads went.”
From that spark the torch was lit and passed to the husband-and-wife writing partnership of Kristine Katherine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. Rusch is the author of more than twenty novels and currently serves as editor of the renowned Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She received the 1994 Hugo Award winner for Best Professional Editor for her work at F&SF. Smith has authored fourteen novels and numerous short stories, and was the winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1989.
“We did the story that inspired the script, and now we are doing a novelization of the script, in which Gowron initially tells the story of Pok in Quark’s bar,” Smith said. “From that telling, the Federation decides to set up the holodeck program, and Gowron agrees to take part.”
Rusch and Smith’s story was only the first step in a long process of rewriting that would continue even during production.
“Essentially, we handed Hilary Bader this big pile of storylines and outlines and sketches and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Hilary, we need a script in three weeks because we have to start building sets,’” Halper remembered with a grin. “And Hilary really rose to the task. Hilary’s wonderful. She’s done probably a half-dozen episodes of the various Star Treks. She was recommended to me by Suzie Domnick of Paramount Licensing: She was experienced and could come through in a pinch. And Hilary did come through.”
“The writing was unusually rushed,” Bader recalled. “There wasn’t a lot of time for endless rewriting. I wrote the first draft, which went to Ron Moore [Ronald D. Moore, Deep Space Nine producer and Star Trek: Generations scriptwriter] for comments. Ron came in with a lot of ideas for changes. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time to implement them. I knew I couldn’t have a second draft done by the first day of shooting without rushing through it and I didn’t want to do that. So I made sure Director Jonathan Frakes had the first two days’ worth of script before the shooting began, then I was able to finish the rewrites on the rest of the script while they were shooting the first few days.
“Because there are always problems with a script that don’t become obvious until you are shooting it, I was on the set the entire time,” Bader added. “If there was a problem, something I wrote couldn’t be shot a certain way, or Jonathan Frakes wanted to include some character in the scene who wasn’t written in, he’d ask for an on-the-spot rewrite.
“I have to say, the two weeks of shooting was the most fun I’ve ever had in Hollywood,” Bader confided. “I felt much closer to this project than I have to anything else I’ve ever written.”
“Hilary has a natural affinity for interactive scriptwriting,” Halper said with genuine admiration. “She developed a scripting format—because one didn’t exist—which we undoubtedly will use on future projects. It really worked, because it was something that told our programmers what they needed to know, and at the same time it looks a lot like a film script. Now, we’re going through a traditional production process, so we needed something that [the production crew] knew how to work with. We didn’t want to surprise the guy doing opticals or the people setting up lighting. They need to look at a script and say, ‘Well, it doesn’t really hang together because the scenes don’t read chronologically, but I can follow these instructions.’ And I thought it was just brilliant.
“In addition to that,” Halper continued, “Hilary has a very light touch; she’s very funny and she breathed life into these characters. I can’t credit her enough; I think that she did a lot in a very critical situation.”
But while the writers and producers toiled over the glamorous task of penning the script, the project’s technical experts and developers were being coordinated by associate producer Elizabeth Braswell. There was a Language Lab CD-ROM to be developed and new technologies to be explored before this ground-breaking endeavor could begin production.
At the top of the list for new technology was the Duck Corp’s innovative offering, TrueMotion, the latest advance in full-screen, full-motion video, which Duck’s Stan Marder describes as “a set of algorithms to compress video and audio where the resulting playback equals or exceeds what the average consumer sees on television…. Except it has the digital attributes so that you can, for instance, ‘branch’ the video, which you can’t do any other way, and you can add all kinds of functionality to make the video itself totally interactive.”
Duck also developed another new technology in tandem with TrueMotion, called comprending. “It’s an amalgam of two words, and it means ‘compression rendering,’” Marder explained. “What it allows you to do is real-time compositing on the fly. What we bring to the table is the ability for the end user to manipulate the comprended image on his own.”
Marder offered an example of what that means: “In the movie Forrest Gump, when Tom Hanks goes over and shakes hands with Kennedy, we know that didn’t really happen. When we watch this, we sit passively and watch that happen. We don’t control Tom Hanks’s movement. Comprending allows a developer to create in his program the ability to control the actors, control what is happening on the screen-in other words, move video around independently.
“So what we allow the developer to do is create a video and then manipulate that video over other video. It’s a very powerful technology in the right hands. You can do amazing things with it.” Comprending also allows “hot zones”—layers of digital information that will prompt a response on the screen from the “video sprite” cursor to alert users that there are data to be found.
Another scientific advance critical to the Klingon! CD-ROM was the development of a speech recognition system that would be able to help teach users to speak Klingon—which is a far more daunting proposal than it might sound. For that, Simon and Schuster Interactive looked to Dragon Systems, one of the world’s leading developers of voice-recognition software, and its resident Klingon-languages pecialist, Mark Mandel.
“When Liz and Keith were looking for people to do the speech recognition for the Klingon! CD project,” Mandel said, “Shawn True, who is adminstratively in charge of this end of the project here at Dragon, told me that when he was asked by Liz if we would be interested in that, and he was able to answer off handedly that we had a major Klingon linguist on our staff, he could hear her jaw hit the floor.
“As it happens, I am a linguist—a language scientist—and a science-fiction fan. And I’ve been studying and playing with the Klingon language for about three years or so. So I got a great kick out of it.”
Armed with cutting-edge science and their own enthusiasm, Mandel and his colleagues took on the Herculean task of developing the core software of the Klingon! CD’s Language Lab. “This wasn’t just a Klingon recognizer we were developing,” Mandel expla
ined. “The purpose of a normal recognizer is to take speech input to direct some activity or to put a word on the screen and eventually on paper or fax or whatever…. The Klingon system had things turned around because our mandate for this system was to create a pronunciation tester. Every time you say a word, it knows what word you’re supposed to be saying. And the objective is to correct your pronunciation.
“So that meant we knew the word you were trying to say. But I had to figure out how to detect mispronunciations—and, furthermore, do so in an intelligent way. We’d never been faced with that sort of an issue before and we did not have the time of the resources—either in terms of money, personnel, or native speakers—to do this the proper way…. What we did was try to anticipate ways people might mispronounce a word. So what we did was record various kinds of anticipated mispronunciations, along with the correct pronunciations. So our speakers had to produce not only correct Klingon pronunciations, but also mispronunciations, things that they’ve spent years learning how not to do. And as the experienced Klingon speakers told me after their recording sessions, that was the hardest part—getting the mispronunciations right.”
The inclusion of the Language Lab CD-ROM obviously was motivated by the undeniable popularity of the Klingon language itself. “The [Klingon] language is so beautifully designed that it’s actually fairly simple to learn,” Braswell commented when asked what made this faux-alien tongue such a hit with fans. “There aren’t twelve different cases or tenses. It’s a very logically constructed language, because it was created artificially instead of organically. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you make up a secret code to speak with your friends. Well, Klingon is like a bigger version of that code, where you know that only other people who like the same thing you do”—in other words, Star Trek—“speak this language. I also think there’s the ‘Oh my God, this is so cool, this is a totally made-up language!’ factor to consider.”
Star Trek: Klingon! Page 14
