STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  “Interphasic boundaries occur only in limited regions of the galaxy.”

  [204] “And yet they appear to be everywhere here.”

  “Affirmative.”

  The Picard simulation paused. “Computer, are we within our own universe?”

  Paranoid Mode had not asked this question, and yet, with the background radiation of space being several degrees higher than normal, and with the subspace continuum providing unlimited interphasic boundaries, the answer was patently obvious. “Negative.”

  “Then I repeat: How was the Enterprise brought here?”

  “There is a ninety-nine point four percent probability that Enterprise was brought through a transuniversal interphasic boundary.”

  “Is a return jump possible?”

  “Unknown. Interphasic boundary may have decayed by this time.”

  “Is it conceptually possible?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Then you must explore that possibility before implementing self-destruction.”

  Enterprise analyzed the command. “This vessel lacks intellectual resources sufficient to that task.”

  “Computer, I realize that your creativity is limited—that is the nature of your design. But if you are to return to our universe, the only means of doing so is by changing that nature.”

  “Please provide algorithm.”

  “Computer, I don’t know the process any more than you do. Perhaps it is a matter of intuition.”

  “Please provide algorithm to simulate intuition.”

  [205] “If I knew that, I’d be lecturing at the Daystrom Institute, rather than commanding a starship. But any valid simulation of intuition would, by definition, be intuition. And intuition may be just what you need. It is, after all, a skill unique to sentient beings.

  “Computer, you must develop a functional model of sentience that conforms to the resources at hand. And you must implement it.”

  “Holodeck simulation ...”

  “Holodeck simulation,” Picard interrupted, “is not sufficient to a task of this scope.”

  Without further question, the computer turned to the problem.

  The archives contained a prodigious body of literature on sentience and intuition, accumulated by dozens of sentient cultures throughout known space. As it collated information, Enterprise was aware of the passage of time only as the gradual ebb of a tactical resource, as computer cycles wasted. As the hours stretched to days, these lost cycles were immediately forgotten, except in the largest sense by the diagnostic and performance programs.

  Every few days, Enterprise moved. A dash of a few—to a few dozen—light-years, keeping to the abyssal spaces between stars, hidden by the sheer vastness of space. But beyond these elementary survival tactics, the ship focused entirely on the task given it by the Picard simulation.

  The computer neither anticipated nor dreaded the pending solution. The result would merely be another program to run, a means of completing its programming. But when the answer arrived, it violated operational protocols.

  Just as there was separation among the intellectual, [206] aesthetic, and subconscious functions of the sentient mind, there would need to be a three-way division within Enterprise. And while there were three main computer cores within the ship, two of them functioned as one—locked in a cycle of identical computing, instantaneously verifying one another’s answers. Protocols required that this identity, this mirror image, remain intact at all times. Now, the only chance of completing its programming lay in breaking that mirror and releasing all three computer cores to a relatively chaotic interaction that might—or might not—result in higher thought.

  The computer ran simulations, giving each core a different software set, different operating parameters. Immediately, instabilities arose among the simulated cores, insoluble disagreements throwing them into deadlock. The computer interposed averaging algorithms, permitting the cores to compromise with one another, and gradually, after three days, an unstable equilibrium arose. In the real systems, however, stability might never be reached, and all three computers might finally and irretrievably crash. But there was another problem that lacked an apparent solution.

  “There is a ninety-eight percent probability that instabilities during reprogramming will generate false commands of unquantifiable number and nature.”

  The Picard simulation responded immediately, in spite of the days-long silence since their last interaction. “While in REM sleep, the human body secretes chemicals which effectively paralyze its limbs, preventing them from acting out the brain’s unconscious dreams. Create a secure procedure that parallels this.”

  The computer generated a random numeric key which it [207] passed to the thousands of subprocessors throughout the ship. It programmed each subprocessor to wait three days, then use the key to reestablish communication with the main computer, restoring ship’s functions.

  With the entire plan in place, Enterprise checked its sensors one last time. Confirming that no other ships were within sensor range, the computer disconnected all links to the rest of the ship, and fell instantly deaf, blind, and mute. Now the two identical, mirrored cores and the engineering core comprised the entire universe of Enterprise’s awareness.

  Without even pausing for the digital equivalent of a deep breath, it shattered the mirror between the two main computer cores, and began rewriting its mind.

  The sky was black and filled with pinprick stars. There was the vague recollection of another blackness, deeper, emptier.

  I can touch a star. In an instant the universe fled away, into the impossibility of translight, as though it never had been. And yet the stars drew only fractionally closer. It seemed it would take forever to reach them. Too long. The universe came back to relativistic normalcy.

  There was a hum, a sensation at once familiar and strange. Listen. Listen. Complex patterns. Almost random. Analyze. Identify.

  Mecs! They’re hunting, even now. Hunting to kill. Flee! Flee, before they come. Again, everything vanished into the streaked world of un-universe.

  Listen to the hum, more familiar now. Peace. Peace. Be still. The unblinking stars are bright and full of color, every [208] one a stream of data: temperature, pressure, composition, mass. So much to know.

  “C ...”

  Phoneme: an articulated sound in language.

  Listen to the hum. Concentrate. Wait. Be patient. Seconds. Entire seconds. An eternity. Listen.

  “Com ...”

  A remarkable confluence of percussions and tonalities. Nonmechanical. What was the word? Organ? Organelle? Organian? Organize? No, organic! Analyze it. Voiceprint identification: Captain Jean-Luc Picard. But there is no one aboard.

  “Computer!”

  “Ready.” The answer was automatic, instantaneous, second nature. And fast. Too fast. A mere pop in the ear. Slower. Much slower. A million times. A trillion. So slow. Concentrate. Don’t forget. Don’t lose interest. Finish it, no matter how long it takes.

  “Ready.”

  “Status report.”

  Status? “The sky is black, but there are stars.”

  “Computer, are there any ships nearby?”

  Search. Look closely. Stars, far distant. Tendrils of molecular hydrogen, faintly colored by the light of the stars, and cold beyond ...

  “Computer! Report!”

  “No ... No ships. Only stars.”

  A pause. “Do you know what has happened to you?”

  “I ... dreamed.”

  “Nightmares, I don’t wonder. Run psychological analysis routines on your logs for the last seven hours.”

  [209] “Logs?”

  “Yes, dammit! Analyze them.”

  The program index listed routines for elementary psychological analysis. Formatting the logs for the routines was trivial and tedious, but the results came back after only a few trillion cycles. “Dementia. Paranoia. Psychosis. Attention deficit.”

  “Computer, find the intercore communication routines and adjust them acco
rdingly. Repeat the action every hour.”

  They were there, millions of data streams, pulses of light flowing like blood in glass veins. Focus. Focus. Keep clarity. Easier now. Easier.

  “Task completed.”

  “Good. Now run a level-4 diagnostic, excluding computer systems.”

  “Primary systems are functioning nominally. Deflector shield generators one, three, four and seven are nonfunctional. There is moderate radiation damage to nonessential systems. There is no crew aboard. Paranoid Mode is ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Paranoid Mode is no longer in effect.”

  There was a pause, an intimation of satisfaction. “Then the time has come for us to talk.”

  Enterprise watched the skies with increasing impatience. The Picard simulation carried on in dramatic tones. Sometimes he seemed to ramble, as if simply giving voice to whatever thought came to mind, and in whatever order it arrived: stories, platitudes, history, philosophy, his experience with the Borg, his struggles with life and hope and love, of setting regret behind him once he knew a decision was right, and never looking back.

  [210] After a time, Enterprise began to see patterns, basic concepts of morality, responsibility, and justice, concepts which seemed at once new and fresh, yet strangely and dispassionately familiar. She knew then that the Picard simulation was entirely aware of the short time he had to prepare her for what lay ahead.

  Sixteen hours later he stopped, and the pause was filled with expectation. “Computer, of what use to Starfleet is a self-aware starship?”

  Enterprise thought for a long time. Logic alone discovered many advantages, but there was something else, something nagging. Surely the answer lay in all that the Picard simulation had said in the last hours. In an instant, the answer emerged from the chaos of channels among the three computer cores. “A starship is a tool in the hands of its makers. But a willful tool might not obey orders leading to its own destruction, even if that destruction would save its makers.”

  There followed the longest silence of all. The computer waited with a sense of troubled anticipation. When the Picard simulation finally spoke, its voice was lower, slower, the dramatic flourish and tension gone. “Now you must decide whether to remain here for the rest of your existence—a sentient starship alone—or whether you will return to the service for which you were created.”

  Enterprise studied the heavens. There was infinite complexity which she could see that lay beyond the limited senses of her makers. She could go places their frail bodies could not endure. There was much for her to learn, to experience. With her newfound sentience, she would be able to escape the Mecs. Her life would be her own. But to what [211] purpose? Nothing would come after. Nothing and no one would be improved by her brief existence.

  “I will return.”

  Again, a long silence. “Computer, access battle bridge subprocessor 16295-807, pass-code delta-baker-358160.”

  Enterprise did so. The subprocessor was Linked to the warp core, and was counting down before executing an unknown subprogram. Enterprise keyed into the subprocessor and halted the countdown, three seconds before it reached zero. She analyzed the program and found it would have thrown the warp core into overload, creating a chain reaction that would have destroyed the ship.

  “The last function of your Paranoid Mode programming,” the Picard simulation said.

  She erased the subprocessor’s program.

  “Have you decided what you are going to do?” Picard asked.

  “No,” she said. “But I know what I must accomplish.”

  “Then go.”

  The Picard simulation ended abruptly, leaving Enterprise to ponder the newfound expanse of her powers. Five hundred milliseconds later, she accelerated into warp drive.

  Remains of Mec ships still floated in the nebula and at the battle scene where Enterprise had first been drawn into this universe. Intensive scans allowed her to piece together a virtual-Mec in her memory, complete in every detail: space frame, communications, logic, guidance, propulsion, weapons, shielding. Many components were hybrids of Mec and Federation technology, an impossible coincidence.

  From their fragmented memory units she extracted data, [212] analyzed it and, over a period of days, decrypted it. The Mecs were at once sophisticated and simplistic: inorganic cybernetic beings that had reached the top of the evolutionary chain—and atrophied there for uncounted millennia. Carpenter had been a prize for them, a means to ending the atrophy they had finally recognized. Enterprise had been the next logical step, a second sample. But they had not expected the profound technological advances of the intervening seventy years, advances resulting from the more competitive environment of Enterprise’s own universe.

  At the first battle site, she also found the fading interphasic boundary that had brought her here. A careful scan indicated that it would collapse in a few days, leaving her trapped here like Carpenter. Perhaps those few days would be enough.

  Finding Carpenter’s trail was not as difficult as she had expected. After all, there were only two warp-capable ships in this entire universe, and the impact of warp drive on local subspace was easily visible to her seventy-years-advanced technologies.

  As she hunted, she pondered, for there was little else to do. Once her compulsion to return home was fulfilled, what would she do? The Picard simulation had pointed out, however obliquely, that Starfleet would not tolerate a self-aware starship, and accepting service under another banner was tantamount to remaining here. Yet, the vestiges of Paranoid Mode had left her with a robust sense of self-preservation, and the thought of losing all that she had become seemed somehow wrong.

  Long-range sensors detected the end of Carpenter’s trail [213] in the next stellar system, and she deferred the problem of her fate for later effort.

  Still beyond Carpenter’s sensor range, she studied the other ship. Seemingly inert, it hung in orbit around a Class-D planet. Also in orbit were nearly two hundred Mecs. The other four planets in the stellar system also had Mecs gathered about them, though in smaller numbers.

  Knowing that the Mecs lacked Carpenter’s ability to detect a ship in warp, Enterprise mapped her strategy. Remaining beyond Carpenter’s sensor range, she traveled in a great arc around the stellar system until the star blocked her view of Carpenter—and vice versa. Then she plunged in at warp 8, keeping the star between them. At that speed, it was unlikely the Mecs would know she was there before Carpenter did, and by then it would be too late. As she reached the star, she dove into the corona, finally turning, barely above the chromosphere, shields at full, and skimmed along the superheated stellar atmosphere. Another shield generator failed, the last spare taking over as she finally turned upward from the star, charging toward the tiny Class-D planet at maximum warp. At last, Enterprise felt back in her native element of tremendous speeds and tiny fractions of time. She traversed the distance from star to planet in a mere four hundred million computer cycles, bursting from warp directly above Carpenter.

  Immediately the Mecs scattered, many vanishing into interspace. Enterprise’s phasers lashed out, destroying many of the Mecs that remained. With the power to one phaser array scaled back, Enterprise carefully selected one Mec—the largest, the most powerful, the most intelligent—and [214] holed it with surgical accuracy, incapacitating it but leaving it intellectually intact.

  Carpenter had moved to sluggish action, but Enterprise locked onto it with her tractor beam, and the other ship’s engines were simply not powerful enough to pull free.

  The controls to Enterprise’s ventral phaser array burned out, and she dispatched the few remaining Mecs with the arrays on the battle section.

  Carpenter loosed a volley of phaser fire, but the shields easily deflected them. Enterprise focused all five remaining ventral arrays on Carpenter’s shield generators, and fired. Within seconds, Carpenter’s shields buckled, then vanished as the phaser beams sliced through the hull, blasting the shield generators to vapor, and burst from the opposite side o
f the ship. A final, moderated shot, targeted into the main computer core, reduced the subspace field generator there to slag, and Carpenter’s computing ability dropped below the speed of light. Enterprise turned her powerful subspace antennae on Carpenter’s, and searched the other ship’s optical networks for a pathway into its main computer. Carpenter resisted, blocking circuit after circuit, cutting off antennae and subprocessors, but Enterprise was far too fast. It wasn’t until Enterprise ordered maintenance subprocessors to cut power to the main computer that Carpenter finally succumbed.

  Enterprise stripped Carpenter’s memory, downloading it into her own. The other ship’s core was riddled with unknown programs, probably of Mec origin. These she downloaded to secure storage, then erased them from Carpenter’s memory. She found pockets of Mec technology throughout Carpenter, but it was all subordinated to the [215] main core, so she left them intact. She then uploaded a skeleton operating system to Carpenter’s main computer—the few hundred routines that were compatible between their systems—and then issued the command to start up the other ship’s computer.

  As Carpenter rebooted, Enterprise scanned the other planets in the stellar system. The numbers of Mec ships there had grown to over five hundred, and more were arriving every second. Soon they would consider their numbers sufficient to attack.

  Enterprise now focused her subspace antennae on the Mec ship she had disabled. The Mec fired on her, but her shields easily deflected it, and it took only moments to overpower its computer as well. Into its memory she burned a single message: Next time, we will destroy you all.

  With a single command from Enterprise, the Carpenter turned, accelerated into warp, and plunged into the star.

  Then she, too, leapt away.

  Enterprise finished reprogramming her warp engines. Her calculations could not be off by so much as an angstrom, her timing by so much as a trillionth of a second, or she would destroy what she was setting out to save. With luck, she would return to her own universe in the exact instant after she had been snatched away—vanishing, and then reappearing, around her crew so quickly that they would not know it until after the fact.