CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD BY BEVERLY CRUSHER PICARD, M.D., STARFLEET CAPTAIN
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EDITOR GOODMAN’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
JEAN-LUC PICARD
THE STORY OF ONE OF STARFLEET’S MOST INSPIRATIONAL CAPTAINS
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
JEAN-LUC PICARD
THE STORY OF ONE OF STARFLEET’S MOST INSPIRATIONAL CAPTAINS
BY
JEAN - LUC PICARD
EDITED BY DAVID A. GOODMAN
TITAN BOOKS
The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard
Print Edition ISBN: 9781785654657
E-Book Edition ISBN: 9781785656637
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2017
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Illustrations: Russell Walks
Editor: Simon Ward
Interior design: Tim Scrivens
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For my father.
FOREWORD
BY BEVERLY CRUSHER PICARD, M.D.,
STARFLEET CAPTAIN
WHEN JEAN-LUC ASKED ME TO WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION, I was overtaken by a flood of emotions. I’ve been through so much with this man, how could I put into words what he means to me, but more importantly, what he means to the history of the Galaxy? He single-handedly prevented wars, saved civilizations, as well as expanded the boundaries of knowledge—
OH, WHAT DRIVEL! I am the Q. You may have heard of me, I’m somewhat all-powerful and I am rewriting this dull essay by Dr. Beverly. Don’t ask how—I have the ability to be in all places and times at once, and I’m improving the introduction as you read it. You know they were in love? We all knew it and it took them years to do something about it. I think Picard talks about that in this book—I assume he does, I haven’t read it. Maybe I’ll read it right now.
Okay, I just read it.
It’s spectacularly mundane, filled with all those dull human tropes of triumphing over adversity and learning from your mistakes. Oh, and the importance of love and friendship. Humans are so predictable. I don’t know why I’m even bothering with this, but I am. Maybe it’s because next to Picard I am a god, and yet he has been able to get in my way. I could’ve destroyed him years ago, wiped him from existence. In fact, I still could.
I just did.
And I just brought him back. That’s how easy it is.
But as much as I hate to say it, Picard gives my life meaning. I’ve toyed with many of his species throughout the ages; most end up in insane asylums, but not Picard. He is the perfect human: he strives, he achieves, he wrestles with problems until he finds his solutions, and as often as he’s right, he’s wrong. But, unlike most of you, he admits when he’s wrong. You have no idea how rare that is in your species. Maybe that’s why you like him. And maybe, pathetic human, you’ll like this book. Now back to poor Dr. Beverly.
—it is a testimony to his achievements, but also to the man himself. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
PROLOGUE
THE CORRIDOR WAS BOTH OPPRESSIVELY WARM AND HARSHLY COLD. The warmth was the literal temperature; the chill came from a profound lack of emotion. This was the end of my freedom.
“To facilitate our introduction to your societies, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.”
I was flanked by two guards, silent man-machine hybrids, in a modern catacomb three kilometers on either side. Starkly white and gray figures, just like the ones standing next to me, stood in rows on stacked floors of a vast metal superstructure. I searched for the source of the voice. There was none, yet it surrounded me. It seemed to come from all the figures, yet their mouths never moved.
This was the Borg. An alien race of cybernetic beings, part-organic and part-machine, linked together into a hive mind. They scooped whole cities off the face of planets, absorbing the people and technology, homogenizing them as part of the collective. And now they wanted me to speak for them to help accelerate the absorption of my people.
This was a fight for civilization. I was in command of the Federation flagship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, a Galaxy-class starship with a crew of over a thousand. We had been the first to engage the Borg cube, the huge 27-cubic-kilometer starship that had penetrated our sector of space. It had already destroyed the New Providence colony on Jouret IV.
Our first engagement with the Borg cube had not been completely successful. Once I realized we wouldn’t be able to stop it, my hope was to at least delay its progress so that Starfleet would have time to gather a superior force to destroy it. This ended up playing into their plans, as the Borg had shown specific interest in me, and when my delay tactics eventually were exhausted, they kidnapped me from the bridge of my own ship.
Now I had discovered why they were interested in me. They said our “archaic civilization” was authority driven and that they needed one voice to talk to it. I wouldn’t let myself be used. I was scared, but I remembered that courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I had to fight. I had faced many adversaries in my career; my life had been at mortal risk numerous times. I had a wealth of experience to draw from in the coming fight; I was determined to hang on.
I was foolishly naïve.
Without warning, my two guards grabbed me, their grip around my arms like a metal vise. They lifted me off the ground and dropped me on a nearby table. While one held me down by the throat, the other removed my tunic and trousers. I lay naked and helpless.
I looked at the one who held me by the throat. He’d been human once. His right eye was completely covered by a cybernetic implant, tubes and conduit connecting his head to his chest, and his face a ghostly white. He looked at me with the empty gaze of a dead man. Lifting his free hand, three tubules extended from it and pierced my neck. They injected something and everything changed.
I heard voices, softly at first, then like a cresting wave I couldn’t escape, they overtook me and I was submerged. Disparate, deafening noise, languages I didn’t understand… and then suddenly I understood them all. Hundreds of thousands of minds on this Borg ship alone, connected to billions more, each working individually and together. And it felt like all of them wanted to pry open
my mind.
I tried to block them out, but I had no defense; they were already in there. Like a billion hands rooting through a used-clothing bin in an ancient thrift shop, picking and examining what they wanted, tossing aside what they didn’t. In my memories they jumped around in time: my first haircut; a laugh shared with a childhood friend; a similar laugh shared with my first officer; my final exam at the academy; my brother pushing me down in the mud; the first woman I was ever intimate with.
Then the search became more discerning and focused on what they were looking for: my casual memory of a starbase commander telling me how his defense shield worked; operating the phaser bank on a Constellation-class ship in battle until it was drained; my crew apprising me of their plans for counteracting the Borg weapons.
It didn’t stop. The collective now wanted my mind to work: it wasn’t just pilfering memories, it wanted my opinion on how to attack my compatriots. I concentrated, trying to present false information, but my deception was ripped away like a paper Halloween mask. My experience and judgment belonged to them. I had an image of myself, it was still there, but I had no control over my mind anymore. It was part of the collective, which used my thoughts and experiences and created a new identity. The morality and ethics and loyalty and affection of Jean-Luc Picard dropped away, a small puddle this new identity stood over.
They called it Locutus. It had access to everything I was. It was me, but it wasn’t. I had no strength against it.
And what was left of me watched as Locutus made his plans with the Borg, using what I gave them. I could see it all, how it would all happen. The Enterprise would be first; the plan to destroy the Borg cube was laid bare for the enemy now, and the collective had begun work on a defense. And in just a moment, the work would be finished. The Enterprise would fail.
I was nothing. A puddle on the floor. I wanted to die. And the collective knew it, heard my plea for death. For a moment, the voices went silent, as if ordered to be quiet. And then came the quiet laughter, malevolent and mirthless.
“Oh, we won’t let you die, Jean-Luc,” she said. “Not yet.”
CHAPTER ONE
THE DOOR TO THE BASEMENT WAS OAK, with five thick vertical slats and two cross-beams, and always locked. The lock had a large, ancient key, which was attached to an oversized metal ring and kept on a hook just inside the hall closet. I had seen my father go through that basement door only a few times. He’d take the key from the closet, turn the lock, enter, and quickly close the door behind him; I could hear the creaky wooden stairs beyond. Eventually, he’d emerge, lock the door, and replace the key.
It is difficult to describe how tantalizing that locked door was to my younger self. Our house was several centuries old, so there were locks on many of the doors, all unused. On 24th-century planet Earth there was no crime, no intruders, no theft or vandalism; there was no need for locks on most of our world, especially in the small, sleepy village of La Barre, France.
Yet this door my father locked.
Once, when I was around five, he caught me jiggling the handle to see if it would open. He pulled me back by the shoulder and gave me a stern look.
“You are not allowed in there,” he said. His tone was quiet but threatening, and I was so scared I burst into tears and ran to my room.
By the time I reached the age of seven, however, fear of my father’s wrath was overtaken, or at least obscured, by the ever-growing curiosity about what lay beyond the wooden barrier. It was the first week of September, the harvest had begun, and I’d been out in the vineyard with my father, mother, and brother sorting grapes. My father had decided the grapes had reached their desired ripeness, and we’d take the bunches from the vines, then separate the fruit from the stems. For a seven-year-old, this was endless, tiring work. There were plenty of machines that could’ve done the work for us, but my father refused (more on that later). The work held no interest for me, but, like all the work the family did in making our wine, it went without saying that I had to participate. Making matters worse for me, the first harvest’s work was always done at night. The heat of the days made the work too straining, and since we were picking grapes, in the daytime the sugar from the fruit attracted all manner of hungry insects.
I had come into the house for one of my frequent trips to the bathroom, many of which were just an attempt to avoid some of the work. On my way back outside, a plan suddenly took shape in my mind. The family was engaged in the harvest; I would have the house to myself for a while before anyone came looking for me. I went to the hall closet and, after a quick look outside, grabbed the ring with the key.
And immediately dropped it.
The loud clatter of the iron against the wooden floor froze me in panic. I slowly moved to the front window (somehow equating that making more noise with my footsteps might be the tipping point in my mission’s failure), and saw that no one appeared to be approaching the house. I then went back to the key ring and picked it up. It was much heavier than I imagined.
I went to the basement door and inserted the key. It took both of my small hands to turn the weighty lock. After some struggle, it opened with a satisfying thunk.
I turned the knob, and the door creaked open. The staircase beyond was only partially illuminated by the light from the doorway—after the fifth or sixth step there was complete darkness.
I moved into the unknown. The handrail was very high up for my seven-year-old height, and after two steps I decided to throw caution to the wind and let go of it. When I reached the barrier of blackness on the sixth step, I paused. My eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond, and I could make out the bottom of the stairs. I was sure there had to be a light switch on the wall down there, though I couldn’t see one from where I was standing. Excitement overcame nervousness; I proceeded. As I lifted my foot to keep going, however, I was interrupted.
“What are you doing?!”
The voice was behind me. I turned toward it and lost my footing, slipping on the next step. I reached for the handrail in vain and tumbled down the staircase. Though it was perhaps only another six or seven steps, it seemed endless. I landed backwards, slamming my head onto the basement’s concrete floor. I howled, then tried to move, but was overwhelmed by an intense pain in my leg. More torture than I’d ever felt, I couldn’t catch my breath; it was too much to process. I looked up in panic.
At the top of the stairs my thirteen-year-old brother Robert stood in the doorway, stiff and unsure. He was caught in an unsolvable dilemma: he knew he should come to my aid, but to do so would break our father’s strict rule about not going into the basement. At the time I could not appreciate his position, I only saw him staring at me then running off, abandoning me in distress.
Again, I tried to move, gingerly, but the pain was unbelievable. I looked around, overcome with fear, weeping helplessly.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw something that momentarily made me forget my agony.
There were faces. They surrounded me, staring. Large ghosts floating in the shadows. I couldn’t understand what I was looking at.
“Jean-Luc?!” The voice of my rescuer, my mother, as she ran down the steps. Even in her work boots and overalls, an elegant angel of mercy. She immediately examined my leg.
“Oh, dear, what have you done?” she said. “Maurice, bring the first aid kit…”
“I have the damn kit, calm down,” he said as he came down the stairs at his usual unhurried pace, carrying the small black case. Behind him, at the top of the stairs, Robert had returned, and from his expression was clearly now jealous of the attention I was receiving.
My father handed the kit to my mother, who removed a hypo and injected it into my arm. The pain in my leg and head suddenly abated. She replaced the hypo, then took out a small gray device: a bone knitter.
“Maman,” I said, whispering, still scared but comforted by her presence. “There are people in the dark…”
“Shhh, I know,” she said, as she activated the device and applied it
to my leg. “Turn on the lights, Maurice. They’re scaring the boy…”
“What doesn’t scare the boy?” he said.
“Maurice,” my mother said, a snap of condemnation.
Whether the judgment of my mother’s tone affected him, his expression didn’t reveal, but he went to the wall switch, and the room was illuminated. I could see now the staircase ended in the center of a long hallway dug from the stone beneath the house, three meters high, a hundred meters long. On both sides, the faces became clear; framed paintings and photographs, all portraits, lined the walls. There were dozens. Some of the paintings depicted scenes of ancient Earth, while some of the photographs were more recent. It was a museum of some sort. I turned to my father.
“Who are those people?”
“That,” my father said, with grave import, “is the family.”
* * *
I have to say, the discovery that the secret of the basement was a portrait museum was something of a disappointment. My father had kept the room locked for the mundane reason of keeping the portraiture safe from his often rambunctious sons. However, once my brother and I were in on the “secret,” my father began our education of its importance in his life, and, by extension, ours. He wanted us to know the Picards mattered.
This, as it turned out, was not without justification.
The name Picard has a long heritage on Earth that began in ancient Brittany; the line can be traced back all way to the 9th century ad, when Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was uniting Europe. For several centuries, the Picards would hold a family seat in the fiefdom of Vieille Ville in Brittany, where they were elevated to Vicomtes (Viscounts), a title of nobility. The name spread throughout France, and by the 14th century there were Picards in Normandy, Lyonnais, and Champagne.
Over time, I would become aware and eventually awed by the important work of my ancestors: Pierre Picard arrived in Quebec in 1629, one of the earliest French settlers in North America; Bernard Picart (an ancestor despite the variant spelling) was a famous French engraver known for his book illustrations of the popular Christian religious text, the Bible, in the 18th century; noted astronomer Jean-Félix Picard, for whom the Picard crater on Earth’s moon is named; Joseph-Denis Picard, a divisional general during the French Revolution of the late 18th century; Frank Picard, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2028, and later Louise Picard, who helped found the Martian colony. All of their likenesses were in the basement family shrine, maintained for centuries by their relatives who lived in the vineyard.
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