“Completely. Different.” He wondered if he sounded convincing.
Outside, the walls of the alien spacedock platform contracted slightly, forming a shroud around the hull of the starship. In gaps between the extended panels of the station, he could see glimpses of the red planet far below and the other AI craft drifting nearby.
In truth, what irritated Ra-Havreii most was the idea that he—and by extension, everyone on the ship—was being belittled by these machines. From what he had seen of this White-Blue construct, it was an impressive piece of work, but it was by no means superior. Advanced, undoubtedly. Intriguing, definitely. But not beyond the reach of Federation science.
It was simply that back home, artificial life was seen as an intellectual backwater these days. When there was so much to explore out here, so many new barriers to break, with new sciences emerging every year, the concept of trying to tinker together a fake brain out of positronic circuits seemed a long way down the list. While such technologies did exist and such work was done, it bore a stigma only slightly less toxic than the science of genetic manipulation. The only thinkers who had made any real advances were men like Ira Graves and Noonien Soong, and even a generous critic would have to admit that their legacies were flawed. Ever since the first computing devices had been created, back to the time of Earth’s Alan Turing, to Kesar of Andor or the Vulcan cyberneticists of Gath, the promise of true, widespread synthetic intellect had been touted as “only a decade away.” Centuries later, that claim was still being made, while history was littered with a dozen failures for every fractional chance success. The core concept of a machine that could think—really think and reason, with all the wherewithal of an organic entity—was not something most people were comfortable with.
Still, it would be interesting to take one of these Sentry machines apart. Just to see what made it tick. Perhaps I could learn something, Ra-Havreii allowed. In the meantime, however, other issues were taking precedence.
He watched as spindly manipulator limbs extended from the walls of the spacedock and began to probe at the wounds along the Titan’s hull. Tool arms with multiple heads rotated to present scanner tips that threw fans of laser light over blast holes; then they shifted to show clasping claws or cutters. Ra-Havreii saw a tender on a rail system arrive with a pallet of metallic sheets, tritanium by the hue and texture. With clockwork precision, the tender’s own arms plucked out a leaf of gray metal and handed it to the “worker” arms. The piece was rapidly shaped and cut to fit before being applied like a patch on the hull. Welding beams flashed brightly, and the Efrosian shielded his eyes.
Another drone, this one smaller and more compact, flitted in among the working arms and gathered up every last piece of scrap with a cone of tractor force, depositing everything it recovered in an elliptical storage bin. Nothing was being wasted, he noted. Not material, not effort, not time. In less than a minute, the first hole had been patched, the rent created by a tumbling fragment of warp nacelle now a seamless part of the hull; only the bare, unpainted metal left any sign that the repair had taken place. The arms rotated again and moved aft, picking at the next damage site.
He looked at the patch, and the face of Tylith, the Kasheetan female, rose in his thoughts. The damage to her would not be repaired so quickly. Although Ra-Havreii had never felt it necessary to say it, he had found the saurian lieutenant to be a competent, if slightly dogged, member of his staff. She didn’t complain, she didn’t question him, she just listened intently and then did what he told her to do. Her insights had been infrequent but almost always valid. Inasmuch as he could, Ra-Havreii had considered her agreeable; but within a day, she would probably be dead, some vital component of her brain broken by a hard fall against a console on the bridge during the engagement with Cyan-Gray.
“Do you understand that?” he asked the moving arms. “Or do you think of Tylith as I would think of an EPS conduit or a warp coil? As a component, a piece of hardware?”
And then he wasn’t thinking of the Kasheetan anymore. He was seeing Melora Pazlar, her delicate face dis-colored by the same bruising, her eyes closed, her life ebbing away.
“No,” he said with determination, ending the thought before it could fully form. “No,” he repeated, this time insisting, silencing his subconscious. The moment made him annoyed and uncomfortable in equal measure. On Efros, the nature of relationships between the sexes facilitated informality as a matter of course, an open attitude that only the Deltans could better. Xin Ra-Havreii exemplified that… or, at least, he had. Melora had changed him. He found his thoughts returning to her at inopportune moments; he found himself considering her in ways that he had never done with other female company. This was such a moment; he thought of the unfortunate Lieutenant Tylith, and suddenly he was afraid that the same fate could befall Melora.
“Doctor?” The voice startled him, and he turned to find Lieutenant Sethe watching him, the Cygnian’s milk-pale face in a flat frown. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Ra-Havreii snapped, with more force than he would have liked. He’d been so compelled by his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the other man approach. “What do you want?”
“You seem troubled,” said Sethe. He was attempting to be considerate, in a rather ham-fisted way.
Ra-Havreii felt his color rise, his cheeks turning dusky. Suddenly, he felt foolish, indulging a moment of pointless worry about Melora when there were matters of far greater import at hand. “Of course, I’m troubled,” he retorted. “Someone broke my ship.” The engineer pushed past the lieutenant and strode angrily away.
• • •
The message came an hour or so after the Titan had been corralled inside the spacedock platform. As before, it was terse and to the point, a demand masquerading as a request, in Riker’s eyes, but one they were ill advised to ignore.
The machines wanted to meet them. The signal originated from the nearest of the artificial moons, one of the “FirstGen,” as White-Blue had called it. The wording was clipped and formal, a call for the repatriation of their fellow artificial intelligence and an offer to address the crew of the Titan directly.
Riker forestalled an argument from Vale by immediately placing his own authority on the away mission. He let her quote the same regulations that he had thrown at Jean-Luc Picard on a dozen or so occasions, and then he returned with the same counter that the Enterprise’s commanding officer had used: “Captain’s prerogative, Number One,” he told her, watching her jaw set as she realized he wouldn’t back down on this. And he wouldn’t, not an inch. Even if they were talking about machines, forms of life so alien that they shared nothing in common with an organic creature like William T. Riker, he still wanted to see them with his own eyes. See them face-to-face, if such a thing were actually possible.
Vale wanted a full security detail to beam down to the meeting site first and secure the location. The captain disagreed. He would take his wife, in her capacity as Titan’s chief diplomatic officer, Lieutenant Commander Pazlar as science officer, and two security staff. There was no telling what reaction a more aggressive posture would get them.
His first officer immediately insisted on Ranul Keru and the big Orion, Dennisar, and when Riker arrived in the transporter room, he wasn’t surprised to see that the chief of security and his petty officer had come armed for bear.
Radowski checked their transporter signatures for the third time and secured the lock-on link that would enable him to yank them back to Titan the instant anyone pushed the panic button. Then, at a nod from his captain, the young man sent them down to the surface of a thinking machine.
Five humanoid figures and a squat cylinder of alien technology materialized in a humming swirl of light.
“Titan, this is Riker,” said the captain, tapping his insignia. “Down and safe.”
“Copy that, Captain.” Christine Vale’s voice was laced with interference but still clear enough to hear her unconcealed displeasure. “Be careful. Titan out.”
/> Keru and Dennisar were already taking up ready positions, each covering a sector of the long, low hall they found themselves in. Nearby, Melora straightened in her g-suit and raised a tricorder, scanning the environment.
“Atmosphere is a match for conditions aboard the Titan. I read a protective energy bubble surrounding the area. No radiation seepage,” she reported. “They must have scanned the ship before we arrived and set up an environment for us.”
Riker nodded. “It’s a good start.” He glanced at White-Blue’s core module as the device gave a crackling buzz.
“What…” began the machine, and it sounded almost afraid. “Interrogative: How did this transit occur?”
“You mean, how did we get here?” said Deanna. “We were invited by your people.”
“Negative,” said the AI. “Working. Internal clock has not been tampered with. Matching local beacon.” It paused, colors flickering. “Interrogative: I have just experienced an instantaneous relocation from your vessel to this site. How did this transit occur?”
“They don’t have transporters,” Melora said immediately. “Just as we suspected. There was no evidence of any transporter technology or transporter-derived technology in the wreckage.”
“We have a mechanism that can temporarily reorder matter into an energy pattern,” explained Deanna, “then project it to another location, where it can be reassembled into its original form.”
“What, you don’t have those?” Keru threw in the comment. “Maybe we’re not the poor cousins after all.”
Riker gave the Trill a look, and the other man turned away.
White-Blue’s indicators blinked. “That is… an alarming sensation. But a most ingenious system. I would like to understand the theory and process.”
“Didn’t you sift through our databases?” Riker said casually.
“There was not enough time for a full traverse,” admitted the AI. “You will recall we were under attack at that point.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” said the captain, taking a moment to give the locale a look.
“Perhaps we can discuss an exchange of knowledge,” Deanna was saying.
Riker nodded, only half hearing her. At first, he had thought they were standing in some kind of annex, perhaps a screening room for new arrivals. At one end, out under the faint haze of the atmospheric shield, he could see a flat oval platform—a landing deck. They had expected them to arrive in a shuttlecraft. As he looked down and saw that the pale pearl-colored floor beneath him was actually a frosted glasslike substance, the captain realized he had misunderstood the dimensions of the place.
They were a long way up, standing in the middle of an enclosed bridgelike structure, suspended between two narrow towers several thousand feet above the surface of the constructed planet. He swallowed hard, dismissing a momentary head-swim of vertigo. The towers were the tallest of a city-sized collection of minarets, columns, and decked platforms that reached up from a plain of bronze. Impossibly regular canyons ranged away, sliced at right angles into the distant surface. Looking down, Riker could pick out more detail—things that looked like massive Tesla coils half concealed under the shell, magnesium-bright sparks of power lancing between them; aircraft, too small to be seen as anything more than darts, flying in square formations between the towers; and shimmering lines of neon that moved through the city’s “streets” in long trains. Riker was reminded of the surface of a crude piece of twentieth-century circuitry he had seen in a museum vid, a metallic panel studded with components and tracks of solder.
“I must admit, this isn’t what I expected,” said Deanna. She approached one of the angled walls that came to a point over their heads. More panes of milky windows looked out and up into a sky dominated by the baleful red eye of the Demon planet. She traced her finger over a fine working of lines etched into the metal supports. “I thought it would be just… functional. Sheer lines, no variation. But this is…”
“Aesthetically pleasing?” offered Dennisar.
“Data painted pictures,” Riker reminded his wife.
“Maybe this is a Sentry’s idea of artwork.”
Melora touched the surface of a window, scanning it with her tricorder. “That’s interesting. This isn’t glass. It’s a form of force-grown crystal, actually a different kind of metal.” Suddenly, she jerked up in surprise. “I think we have company.” The Elaysian pointed.
Outside, eight small craft approached. They resembled the minnowlike vessels that had shadowed the Titan on its arrival, and arranged themselves with speed and precision to circle the landing platform. Ringlike frames emerged from the edge, and each ship dropped into an open cradle. In unison, iris hatches opened on the ships, and a disparate group of mechanical forms exited, one from each craft. They crossed the platform and moved in toward the away team.
“It’s a robot parade,” murmured Dennisar.
No two of the machines were alike. Riker searched for any commonality between them and saw very little, perhaps some similarity here and there in pieces of design or framework but nothing that suggested uniformity or even a preference for bilateral symmetry.
One was a large gold sphere with a glowing red band around its equator, moving on a humming impeller field. There was a steel-colored construct resembling the skeleton of a snake; an ornate thing of convex lenses and brass; a gray tetrahedron the height of two men, clicking forward on clawed feet; a battered and pitted ovoid on heavy wheels; a delicate frame like two tripods around a brass cube; and finally, a mechanism that resembled a humanoid form but with a head that emerged from the chest rather than the shoulders. The machines filed into the chamber and halted, all except the spherical one.
It drifted closer, lights collecting along the point where the band faced Riker’s group. “White-Blue,” it began, “your existence was considered terminated.”
“Red-Gold,” replied the other AI, “that designation was premature.”
“We have digested the linguistic data/communications protocols of these wetminds,” it continued. Riker thought he could detect a note of arrogance there. “Simplistic but nuanced. It is an amusing diversion.” The device called Red-Gold pivoted, and Riker got the impression that it was sizing him up. “Interrogative: Where is your vessel, organic?”
“My name is Captain William Riker,” he replied. “And my ship is up there.” He jerked a finger at the sky overhead.
“We arrived here by means of matter transport,” White-Blue responded.
“That technology is theoretical,” said the tripod construct. Its voice was high and tinny.
“Not for us,” answered Deanna. “I am Commander Troi.”
“I am FirstGen Zero-Nine, active remote,” it replied. “You are of the alien coalition known as the United Federation of Planets.”
“That’s right,” said Riker. He introduced the away team one by one, watching the machines carefully.
“It is difficult to believe your technology surpasses ours in any area,” ventured the egg-shaped AI.
“And yet here we are,” said Melora.
A shimmer moved across the windows, and they became opaque with static. “The organics possess matter-transport science.” The voice echoed from the walls as the windows became streams of strange text, a cascade of odd lettering that resembled Terran cuneiform writing. “I witnessed its operation. Those who wish to share the data may do so. Processing.”
A split-second reading peaked on Melora’s tricorder as the constructs froze briefly. “They’re talking,” she noted.
The transfer of information was almost immediate. “Instantaneous data transmission,” said Riker. “Faster than we can register.”
“They run on a different time scale from ours,” said the science officer. “Fractions of nanoseconds to process information. The older designs of AI are slower, maybe even close to human levels of operation, but newer versions, their… clock speed could be tens of thousands of times faster than ours.”
“I am FirstGen One-Five, c
ore initiator of the Governance Kernel, active Sentry, actual. We greet you, Captain Riker, and the Titan.” The voice was heavy and stentorian.
“He’s not going to join us in person?” asked Keru.
“I am all around you, organic,” it replied.
“It’s the whole planet, boss,” said Dennisar, gesturing around. “It’s one big computer.”
Keru frowned. “If that’s so, then why are these ones so much smaller?” He nodded at White-Blue’s nexus core. “There’s a whole AI in there, right?”
“Consider the difference between the genetic coding in your organic molecules and your full-grown form,” offered the snake machine, speaking for the first time. “The core pod is a seed of intellect.” It gestured at itself with the tip of its tail. “These forms are remotes, a proxy construct. I am SecondGen Black-Silver, and my core resides in orbit aboard my shipframe.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 12
