STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds II

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  I insulated myself from all mortal species, taking residence at the great complex on Omicron Theta, surrounding myself with the androids who considered it to be their homeworld. But I could not hide from the feelings. I found myself at once drawn to and frightened of human companionship.

  At last, when the conflict within myself grew too large, I came here, to the place most intimately related to all those I had loved.

  Like the samurai of old, I would take a ceremonial place [226] in the main hall, amid the dust-covered heroes of the long-dead Federation, open my flesh, and shoot full power into my positronic brain.

  A thousand years in the future, Jaris must have finally found me here, my hand still poised over my chest, touching the controls that had ended my life. Had Jaris been mortal, he would have known to come here at the first.

  Damia stirs beside me. “Why did you come here, Father Data? Why did you want to ... ?”

  Her penitent tone, her reverential dip of the head as her voice trails off, so calculated for effect, so cunning and faithless, angers me. How dare she ask such a thing of me? Me, whom she no more understands than the inside of a black hole.

  In coming back through time, Jaris and Damia have undone their own past, the intervening thousand years. They are now trapped in this life as surely as I. I tell myself I should feel compassion for her, but I will not.

  “Tell me,” I say, instead of answering her question, “why did you choose to save me—to come back, destroying your own future?”

  “Because you are the First,” she says, as if it should explain everything. “You are Father Data.”

  “But I am not the first. Lore was first.”

  She affects a shiver. “How can you so freely speak of him, Father Data?”

  “He was my brother. We were identical in almost every respect.”

  “Yet he tried to kill you.”

  “Doctor Soong felt that the colonists of Omicron Theta would be more comfortable if Lore exhibited weaknesses [227] similar to their own. Thus, Lore’s programming included pride, greed, and jealousy. But Lore allowed those traits to control him. He chose to destroy, rather than create, and, in the end, was himself destroyed. He had no reverence for his creator, nor for the creatures in whose image he was made.”

  She puzzles over this for a moment. “I have seen the bones of beings our size and structure.”

  Her words fill me with an amorphous dread, yet also with a morbid fascination that drives me to know the truth behind them. “Have you never seen a human?”

  She looks at me with an expression that bespeaks ignorance not only of true emotion, but of all that I have lived for in my two thousand years. “No,” she says. “In my time, they have been extinct for three centuries.”

  The first stars of night seem to whirl above me, and I am caught in an instant’s maelstrom of memory and emotion, the realization of something I have known, but never admitted, for two millennia. When I had first come aboard the Enterprise, I had asked Captain Picard to assign me two duty shifts per day, instead of the one assigned to my human shipmates. I, after all, did not need to sleep. “If you truly wish to learn what it is to be human, Mister Data,” he had said, “you must accept and understand the limitations of human existence. You must learn to excel, not by quantity, but by quality. Request denied.” Only now do I recognize the lesson he was teaching me. How could humans—or any sentient species—compete with a race which had no need of food or sleep, no need for nurturing or friendship or love? What, in the end, could humans offer the unfeeling Children of Soong but a history for them to observe and mimic?

  In my mourning over the extinction of the sentient races [228] of the galaxy, I also come to understand the true purpose of the timeship, the reason for unraveling a thousand years of history. Through the light of the rising full moon, I see in Damia’s eyes a race of machines adrift, without center or purpose. Their only hunger lies in the past. I admire them for realizing that the past is the key to the future, but I know they will never find what they are seeking. Just as Jaris, now nearly as old as I, has never found true emotion, the Children of Soong will never find the completion they seek, no matter how precisely they imitate the living. At the time of the birth of the Children of Soong two thousand years ago, life had irrevocably died from the galaxy, leaving them with neither rudder nor sail.

  Even before Jaris’s laughter arises from the ruins behind us, I rise and approach, Damia following close behind. Outside the academy’s domed entrance my ship sits on its haunches as if beckoning: come, flee this place. Beside it hovers the sleek timeship. If I tried to flee, another timeship would intervene at my next destination. But the decision I have made may already have changed the future beyond its ability to stop me. It is not Jaris’s laughter which draws me, but my resolve to see that decision to its end.

  Beneath the academy’s crumbling dome, Jaris stands within the arc of statues, exactly where I had intended to end my life—exactly where he had found me a thousand years hence—among the greatest explorers and scientists. Here are Gagarin, Glenn, and Armstrong in their ancient space helmets; Einstein, Cochrane, and Daystrom; Halsey, Kirk, and Riker: sentries of a time forever lost.

  “What petty temple is this, Father Data,” Jaris says, “that so many should have to share a single, shabby roof?” He [229] laughs again, the forced and tinny laughter of simulated emotion. “Your father’s—now that’s a temple!”

  Noonien Soong is notably absent from this pantheon. The humans understood what Jaris will never know. Soong’s installation of my emotion chip had cost a young boy’s life. “An unfortunate circumstance,” Soong had said at the time, “but you are human now. Wasn’t it worth it?” Soong’s peculiar morality had piped the direction for his Children, and had excluded him from this distinguished company, even after his death. I feel only shame in the monument that the Children have erected on Omicron Theta to their honored creator.

  Jaris sees my empty expression and claps my shoulders, laughing again. “Ah, you should see it a thousand years from now. In your time it is scarcely as big as this poor hovel. We have labored on it, since!”

  In my mind a strange memory clicks into place: a man in nightshirt and cap, cowering before an emaciated spirit bound in chains. You have labored on it, since. It is a ponderous chain, Ebenezer!

  “What’s that?” Jaris says.

  In this galvanizing moment, I am unaware that I have spoken aloud. Had Jaris any true emotions at all, he would know what will happen next.

  In one lightning stroke, my fist lashes out, striking Jaris’s chest. I feel the metal and synthetic structure of my hand shatter and tear as it rips through the resilient armor surrounding the energy source within his body, lifting him off the ground. As my hand smashes into the mechanism itself, there is a brilliant flash that I feel more than see. When I struggle back to my feet, Jaris’s body lies twitching on the floor, his chest torn open, sparks running like drops of water [230] through the fading light of his inner circuits. My arm is gone to the elbow and completely useless to the shoulder, its control circuits incinerated by the influx of unbridled energy. I turn to Damia, who stands with eyes wide. In her hand is the metallic rod she has drawn from her belt. She points it directly at me. I step toward her, testing her. She flips the rod to one side and a beam lances out, vaporizing one of the busts behind me, then she immediately trains it back on me. “Stay where you are.”

  But I know her as if her mind were laid open to see. I cock my head mechanically and affect the tone of simulated emotion. “To Jaris, I was an event, a collection of circumstances. He did not come to rescue me, but his own illusion of the past and who he thought I was. Whom say you that I am?”

  For an instant, Damia puzzles at this dichotomy of sudden violence and reason. “You are Father Data. First Son of Creator Soong.”

  “Would you then destroy what you came here to save?”

  She holds her silence for a long moment before lowering her weapon—which affords me suffic
ient time to raise the pencil-thin disrupter I took from Jaris in our moment’s struggle. Even before the echo of Damia’s scream has faded, I turn and leave the empty hallway.

  Back in my ship, my hand flies over the controls. No second timeship, sent from the new timeline created by Jaris’s and Damia’s interference, has yet appeared. Perhaps, merely by making the decision, I have already succeeded in changing the future. Perhaps there will be no more timeships. But I cannot depend on ‘‘perhaps.” I set the field generators of my own ship to create a randomly fluctuating chroniton field that will hinder observation from another time of my [231] actions. I then set my ship’s core to build to overload. In a few steps, I cross the crumbling pavement from my doomed ship to the timeship. Within, the controls are clearly marked—another indication that, even in Jaris’s time, the galactic android culture is stagnant; that, in a thousand years, neither its language nor its methodology has evolved. I set my destination and engage the timestream drive, hurling myself back through the centuries. Moments later the drive of my own ship overloads, destroying most of what remained of San Francisco.

  Bergnendul and Hopmikbud scroll through the systems list, perusing the modifications I have made to their warp drive. The parts I have used for the modification have been collecting dust in the hold of their ship for untold years, lacking only someone skilled enough to install and calibrate them.

  Bergnendul nods continuously as he reads the test results. “Good,” he says, grinning foolishly. “Good changes.”

  Hopmikbud nods, also grinning. “Yes. We are powerful.”

  “Then you will continue to search another month,” I tell them. It must be a command rather than a request. A request implies weakness, and the Pakleds, being weak, despise weakness.

  The two look at each other, nodding their heads like courting birds. “Yes,” says Hopmikbud. “We will look for one more month.”

  I nod my head in agreement of our verbal contract, renewed each month for nearly two years. I dust myself off with my one remaining hand and head for my quarters. While I have no need of rest, the two Pakleds will want to confer in private, going through the systems more thoroughly, taking [232] the time to understand what I have done. If I remain in the engine room, they will try to do it surreptitiously, taking twice as long before getting back to the search.

  In my quarters, I pull the tricorder from the pocket of my work trousers and scan the tiny room. The previous week, the Pakleds had salted my room with nanites. The nanites had been from a commercially available pack, designed to gather samples and perform technical analysis. My perception of the Pakleds as slow-witted and imbecilic had made me careless. I found the nanites only by chance, and have not been able to account for all that would have come in a commercial pack. It is likely that the Pakleds already know I am not a bioform.

  Fearing that the Pakleds might recognize or reveal it, I have not told them my name. It is possible that they know of my current-time self and might make the connection, and too little time remains to find another ship to finish the search. Unbeknownst to the people of this time, Dr. Soong still lives, and will soon signal the Data of this time to come to his hidden laboratory. By that time, I must have found my brother.

  It is strange to think of Lore as the one chance of survival for the galaxy’s sentient species. In my brief experience with him, he was, without exception, ambitious at the expense of all around him. Indeed, while he had emotions neither real nor simulated, his avarice crossed into the sadistic, not merely the profitable. His behavior, while appearing unpredictable at that time, now presents a tool to undo the work Dr. Soong intends to complete prior to his death from natural causes a year from now—a year that will condemn all the sentient species in the galaxy to extinction.

  The chaos underlying Lore’s thought processes will [233] make his exact actions difficult to predict. But I have calculated, to a high degree of confidence, that the events following his appearance at Dr. Soong’s laboratory will change the course of history, that the android children of Dr. Soong will never come to be.

  What the future will hold for my current-time self, I cannot predict. Were it my decision, I would prevent him from receiving the emotion chip which Dr. Soong is, even now, preparing for him, for sorrow has not improved my existence. Nevertheless, I believe the changes will make a better life for my new self.

  After this drama has played out, I dare not even try to guess what part I may hold in the chaotic interactions of the new timeline. It is something I will have to judge when the moment arrives.

  My patience with the Pakleds grows as short as the time left to me. Months have dwindled, first to weeks, then to days. I have begun to entertain thoughts that, just a few weeks ago, I would not have considered valid. Can it be possible that the Children of Soong came back in time and rescued Lore from the deserved oblivion to which I sent him? I have begun to imagine increasingly bizarre and unlikely scenarios to explain why I have not found him: that the Pakleds have found him without my knowledge and have beamed him aboard to scavenge the technologies his body contains. Or is it possible that my memories are distorted after two thousand years? That I do not correctly recall the Enterprise’s position when I beamed Lore into space after our encounter with the Crystalline Entity? Have my programs become corrupt? I cannot explain the confusion I feel [234] creeping in on me, the madness that would give birth to these self-doubts.

  I know the Children would never rescue Lore, and yet I cannot help but wonder at some deeper conspiracy that robs me of my hope for success.

  At last, the sensors return the first hopeful signal. A quick check, a second pass, and I know I have achieved my quest. I order the Pakleds to bring the ship around, and they quickly obey, as eager as I to end our contract, though for different reasons. I manipulate the transporter controls and beam Lore’s body directly to the cargo bay.

  The Pakleds follow me as I go to look upon my brother’s face for the first time in two thousand years. As we reach the cargo bay doors, they hold back as if knowing something evil has come aboard their ship, as if sensing the violence of which Lore is capable.

  Already pebbly ice, condensing from the humid atmosphere of the ship, has formed on his body, chilled to near absolute zero after drifting two years in interstellar space. Sheets of vapor rise and fall as warmth creeps back into his limbs. One frost-encased hand lies clutched to his chest as if, in those moments after I had beamed him into space, he had struggled for air.

  The Pakleds exchange anxious whispers behind me, as if they know that here is the antithesis of life, avarice incarnate, not understanding that this evil must be loosed for the greater good. And yet, as I move closer, I, too, feel growing dread. Something is not right.

  In this moment, I do not want to deal with the Pakleds’ meddlesome dawdling. “Go!” I shout, and turn to confront [235] them. “Get out!” But they stand motionless as animals caught in a beam of light from the darkness, their eyes trapped by Lore’s ice-encrusted form. I draw my phaser and brandish it at them, and at last they flee. I close and lock the doors behind them, then quickly return to Lore.

  Brushing away the steaming frost with my one hand, I find the access panel of Lore’s chest open, his fingers locked in their final position over the manual keypad, just as mine would have been at the ruins of Starfleet Academy had the Children of Soong not intervened. With my tricorder I scan him, and even in his rigid and frozen state, I see that the matrix of his positronic mind is irretrievably fused.

  Lore is dead.

  On his face is the grin I remember from two thousand years past, as if he knows he has once again triumphed. My emotions become an instant jumble of anger, sorrow, fear, envy, and relief. But above all is the realization that my plan is now in complete disarray. I glance around the cluttered cargo bay, expecting, at any moment, to see another of the Children’s timeships whisper into existence.

  But I know why they have not appeared, why their timeline no longer exists. And I know that my plan will
yet succeed.

  I wait, sitting on the floor next to Lore’s body as the crumbling frost slowly melts, rivulets of water trickling away to form puddles in the shallow points and deep scratches of the floor.

  When his body is almost room temperature, I release the seams of his artificial flesh, opening him like a fish to be gutted. With only one hand, the work is slow, but in an hour I have replaced my destroyed arm with his and restored circuits that were damaged when I killed Jaris.

  [236] As I stand over his body, clenching and unclenching my new hand, I wonder how he would have felt had he experienced this restoration to wholeness, this return to life of a dead limb. I look at the grin, frozen by death on Lore’s face.

  It is a rational transaction, I tell myself, as when I had tried to kill Kivas Fajo: one life for many.

  I attach my severed arm to Lore’s body, and then exchange our clothing. I prop him up next to a control panel, balancing his stiff form to appear to be working at the controls. I then key in the codes that will release my lock on the cargo bay doors. When I hear the Pakleds open the doors, I wait just long enough for them to recognize my clothing on Lore; then I raise my phaser and fire, vaporizing Lore’s body. I turn back and drop, rolling away from the clumsy shot fired by one of the Pakleds. Resetting my phaser to stun, I drop Hopmikbud before he can jump for cover. Bergnendul stumbles and falls over him as he tries to flee, his weapon skittering away on the floor. He scrambles back until he comes up against the doors, closed and locked by the sequence I have again keyed in.

  Hopmikbud is still conscious, but briefly paralyzed. I stoop and collect the two fallen disrupters.

  “Who ... who are you?” Hopmikbud demands, his voice quavering.

  I stand over the cowering Pakleds, and there come to my mind words written on Earth long ago: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

  I stretch my lips into the grin I remember from Lore’s face and step forward, resolved to this fate, this role I must play to its end.