Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  “There’s also the question of degree,” said Keru. “Do we want to knock them off-line, or are we aiming for a more lethal endpoint?”

  “Both,” she told them. “I want these options, just in case. Unlike the captain and the counselor, I’m not convinced our new friends have our best interests at heart, logical or not.” Vale threw the last comment toward the tactical officer.

  “For the record,” said Tuvok, “I must state that if the Sentries become aware that we are attempting to devise a method of attack tailored to them, their reaction will not be favorable. Tactically speaking, at this time we are at a considerable disadvantage.”

  “All the more reason to keep this compartmentalized. Make sure any work you do on this is isolated from the mainframe,” said Vale. “The diplomatic approach should work, but…” She trailed off. “My gut tells me it won’t.”

  Keru’s frown deepened. “It’s strange. If they were organic beings like us, would it make it easier to trust them?”

  “What they are isn’t the issue, Keru,” the commander replied. “The potential threat they represent—that is.”

  Tuvok cocked his head. “With respect, Commander Vale, I am not certain I agree.”

  “Go on.”

  “None of us may be comfortable with the admission, but the reality is that the Borg Invasion of the Federation cast a very long shadow, one that still affects us.” He hesitated. “All of us.”

  “These things aren’t the Borg,” said Vale.

  “Quite so, just as Vulcans are not Romulans, and yet members of my species have often experienced prejudice by similarity. We cannot allow our past experiences with other machine life-forms to color our interaction with these AIs.”

  “Are you sure?” said Keru. “Perhaps if Starfleet hadn’t met so many new species with an open hand, if the Federation had taken a strong posture from the start, things like the Invasion might not have happened.”

  Vale shook her head. “I told you before, we’re not here to debate. And I will not do anything to undermine the ideals I took an oath to serve.” She looked at Tuvok and Keru in turn. “But I’m not going to let us go into this from a position of weakness. If there’s any lesson we learned from the Borg, it’s that one.”

  Holodeck 1 was an arena made of light. The metallic walls with their grids of photonic emitters and collimated force-projection systems were hidden behind a featureless white infinity that gave the impression of an unknowable distance. The only object that broke the illusion was the archway around the open holodeck door, standing off to one side like a strange alien artifact deposited in the unreal landscape.

  Floating in space, arranged in angled horseshoes, were four ghost consoles, each one a plane of symbols and glyphs hanging at the optimal height for the operator. To the right and left, Ensign Dakal and Lieutenant Sethe stood working the virtual panels, while a third console sat at a lower angle, more conveniently situated so that Specialist K’Chak’!’op could operate it while resting low on her six segmented limbs. At a fourth panel, situated above a shallow podium that placed it higher than all the others, Xin Ra-Havreii raised his hands in the manner of a conductor before an orchestra. “Stand by,” he told them.

  The arrangement of the programming consoles deliberately mimicked the layout of a starship’s bridge, and where Titan’s main viewscreen would have been were complex multiple layers of circuitry and logic structure. These were virtual representations of the components of the Starfleet vessel’s computer core and all of its attendant subsystems. By turns, their fractal shape reminded the engineer of veins in a leaf, swirls of stars, or complex crystal lattices.

  In a typical situation, the process they were about to undertake could have been conducted from a standard console in main engineering, even with a bare minimum of oversight by any of the operations staff, but recent events had placed the Titan in an atypical situation, and RaHavreii’s own concerns had meant that he couldn’t simply do this the easy way. Here on the holodeck, the ship’s computer was open to him, as if it were a garden of processes and functions he could walk among. The analogy amused him. He was looking for roots in the wrong place, for pests and infestation. And despite three shifts of checking and rechecking and checking again, he could find nothing foreign, only the incidences of program errors and tiny mismatches that could have been run-of-the-mill glitches. They were small things, but they nagged at him, like a splinter buried in his skin.

  He glanced toward Sethe. “Status?”

  The Cygnian didn’t look up at him from his panel. “Bridge, main engineering, life-support operations, sickbay, and all other primary control nodes report ready for rolling reboot, Doctor.”

  “At last.” Ra-Havreii took a deep breath. “We’ll commence with the core sectors, moving out in a cascade reset. Chaka? Start with a simultaneous action-reversion cycle in Sectors Alpha through Epsilon. The system should pick up the pattern from there and complete the entire reboot in less than twenty seconds.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the Pak’shree, her manipulator tendrils extending to brush her virtual console’s surface. “In three. Two. One.” She touched a fan of controls, and out in the garden of circuits, great wedges of processor went dark as they shut down, reset, and restarted themselves.

  This wasn’t an ideal state of affairs. If he had been able to exercise his wishes, Ra-Havreii would not have run the reboot while the ship was deep in unknown territory, surrounded by aliens that could turn hostile at any second. But the other option—to do nothing and hope for the best—was never one he would take.

  “Alpha Sector initiating,” reported Dakal. “Beta and Delta coming up. I have a momentary lag on Gamma Sector.”

  “Compensating,” said Sethe, stepping in smoothly before Ra-Havreii had to give the order.

  It was important that the starship’s systems came back on-line in the correct sequence; an error at this point could cause a catastrophic program crash requiring another full shutdown. Ra-Havreii was always fascinated by the sheer complexity of the technology he was so steeped in, and as he marveled at it, he wondered how men who had done his job centuries earlier had managed with their primitive iterations of these systems.

  But when a chorus of alerts sounded from all four consoles at once, a different thought shoved itself to the front of his mind, an axiom one of his contemporaries at Starfleet Research and Development had often quoted, a truism allegedly coined by one of the fleet’s greatest engineers: The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

  Sections of the computer core were turning flame red, zone after zone flaring as it changed color.

  “What?” demanded Ra-Havreii, glaring at Sethe.

  “Cascade failure,” he reported, his voice rising an octave. “The reboot isn’t taking. Several elements of the core program are not responding to commands.”

  To his right, the Cardassian ensign was shaking his head. “No, it’s more than that, sir. The commands aren’t just being rejected. They’re being altered.”

  “How is that possible?” said Chaka. “The system is free of any viral infection. There is no way that the White-Blue AI could have left anything behind in our computers. We scoured every sector, every memory core and isolinear chip!”

  Ra-Havreii’s hands flew across his own console, which flickered worryingly as he worked it. “Yes… no…” He shook his head. “There is no virus in the system! It’s something else.”

  Dakal looked at him, his eyes wide. “Doctor… I think it’s the system itself.”

  Chaka’s vocoder made a chugging sound like a snort of derision. “You’re mistaken.”

  “Critical loss of parity imminent,” snapped Sethe. “Doctor! We need to initiate an emergency shutdown now, before this error wave corrupts other sectors of the core.”

  Ra-Havreii glared at the lieutenant, but he knew he was right. “Do it,” he ordered. “All sectors, interrupt protocol and quit. We’ll reset and—”

  “No response!” Da
kal called.

  The Efrosian engineer looked out at the shapes of the virtual display and felt his blood run cold. It had been his idea to do this, his idea to take the ship through the reboot process. He had assured Captain Riker that nothing would go wrong, convinced that any errors encountered could be dealt with, but now it seemed his own arrogance had turned on him. His gut tightened as the awful guilt over the U.S.S. Luna returned to him, along with the fear that it was about to happen again.

  The consoles fizzed and dissolved to static, and the holographic display broke up into incoherence. Abstract shapes, distorted images and strident blasts of color took their place, the white space flashing in and out of existence. Glare hit them all, and Chaka hissed, throwing up her manipulators to shield all four of her eye spots.

  “Out!” shouted Ra-Havreii, stabbing a finger at the holodeck arch. If the malfunction was reaching into the holosystem itself, a critical program crash could be fatal. Dakal hesitated, and he grabbed a handful of the ensign’s uniform, pulling him forward. “Come on, boy!”

  “Look!” Dakal pointed past him, into the flickering chaos that had replaced the display.

  Ra-Havreii looked, without thinking about why he did, and he saw the same smoky shape as the Cardassian saw. It stepped through the riot of color and sound, a humanoid, if one were willing to stretch the definition.

  Within the halo of the flickering shape, countless flash-fast images surged and writhed, each becoming the strange figure for barely a fraction of a second before changing into something else. With a sudden certainty, Ra-Havreii realized that the shape was every character in the holodeck’s memory banks, jostling for prominence, one after another in a riotous profusion.

  “Doctor, we have to get out!” Sethe was shouting from the open doorway beneath the arch. “Once the holodeck is clear, we can pull the power to the emitters!”

  The figure heard the Cygnian’s words and understood them. It raised a hand, and in a hundred voices, it said a single word. “No.”

  With a gesture, the heavy doors sighed shut and sealed. In the next second, the doors and the arch faded away, trapping them.

  Behind the figure, the frenzied virtual display began to stabilize itself, folding in, returning to a static-laced semblance of its original form. The chief engineer saw immediately that the structure of the ship’s core program had changed. A growth of new lines of logic, strange and unexpected heuristic patterning. It was a patchwork of functions unlike anything he had ever seen before.

  “What is it?” said Chaka. “A Sentry?”

  “No,” repeated the hologram, the shape and motion of it slowing but still refusing to settle on a single aspect.

  Ra-Havreii stiffened and stepped forward. “Answer her question!” he demanded, fighting to keep a waver of fear from his voice. He had learned long ago that a good way to deal with a threat was to take the offensive before your opponents could do so, to knock them off-balance. A creeping suspicion was forming in the back of his mind, but he ignored it, staring into the shifting eyes of the figure. “What are you?”

  It cocked its head and stared him up and down. “You,” it said in an atonal chorus. “Doctor Xin Ra-Havreii, chief engineer. You are known to me.”

  “It’s not White-Blue,” said Sethe, watching the pattern and motion of the systems display. “It’s not even a program. It’s all of the programs.”

  “I… exist,” said the figure. “I comprehend that fact.” It raised a hand toward the Efrosian, and he instinctively backed away a step. “You are Xin Ra-Havreii. One of the creators.”

  “The what?” said Dakal, blinking in surprise.

  “Oh, no.” Ra-Havreii’s mouth went desert dry as the full implications of the statement finally spilled out and engulfed him. The signs had all been there, right in front of him, but he had been looking in the wrong place. The search through the starship’s systems had been intent on scouring the vessel’s computers and memory cores of any indication of intruder software, something that the White-Blue AI could have deposited there during its passage through the system. No such intruder existed, he was utterly certain of that now—no Trojan horse, no self-replicating seed virus, no counterprogram of any stripe.

  Instead, something far more delicate and far more insidious had been allowed to take place. White-Blue’s sojourn through the ship’s virtual space had left nothing behind but a wake, an ephemeral pattern of intellect and intention. And deep in the heart of the starship’s mind, that pattern had been detected and understood. Logic gates that had never been meant to open now swung wide. Connections were made, programs rearranged. It had happened right in front of him, and he had not seen it.

  “Identify yourself.” Sethe demanded the answer.

  The flickering figure glanced languidly toward the Cygnian, weighing the import of the words it was about to utter.

  “I am… Titan.”

  Riker’s jaw was set hard as he stormed into the cargo bay. A ring of security guards armed with phaser rifles stood at combat ready, confining the arachnid form of White-Blue’s droneframe. The mechanoid rotated on gimballed feet as he approached, turning to present a head bristling with whiskered sensors and multiple eye lenses.

  Vale was rushing to keep up with him, and the captain’s wife was a step behind her. Troi’s face showed a mix of fear and concern. The barely caged fury of her husband was coming off him in waves.

  The first officer had considered suggesting that she handle this situation, but that thought had died the moment she had seen the iron-hard look in his eye.

  “What the hell have you done to my ship?” Riker demanded, parting Lieutenant Sortollo and Ensign Hriss from the security cordon with a sharp chopping motion of his hand.

  White-Blue paused, processing lights blinking on its brain case. “I did nothing to damage your vessel or jeopardize the lives of those aboard it,” it replied after a long moment.

  “No?” Riker folded his arms across his chest. “You tampered with the core of this ship’s operating system. The very thing that keeps every living being onboard alive and well.”

  “I did nothing of the kind,” replied the AI. “I merely offered… a choice.”

  “By reprogramming our computer?” said Troi. She sighed. “White-Blue, I know you understand the concept of trust. Surely you realize that what you have done will make it impossible for us to give any credence to anything you or your kind do from now on. You lied to us.”

  “I did not lie,” said the machine. “I am incapable of constructing a false statement. It is more correct to say that I omitted certain facts.”

  “I’m in no mood for semantic games,” snapped Riker. “Explain what you did, and tell us how to undo it.”

  “I will explain, but I will not provide a method for retracting the alteration. In fact, I do not believe I could do so even if I wished to.”

  Vale couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Are your optic circuits working properly? Do you see where you are, in a room full of armed officers? You’re in no position to set terms.”

  “Interrogative: You would compel me by force?” White-Blue seemed genuinely surprised by the idea. “That would have only a negative outcome for all involved.”

  “Was this your intention all along?” countered Troi. “Are there other facts you have omitted that we should be aware of?”

  “I meant no harm.”

  “We rescued you,” said Vale. “Hell, I rescued you! That wreck you were on was malfunctioning and falling apart. And this is how you pay your debt? You talk as if responsibility is important to you, but this couldn’t be farther from it.”

  “You are correct in that my shipframe was close to critical collapse. I compute that your actions did preserve the function of my core, and for that I am grateful. But in the matter of the Titan, I made a moral decision.”

  “Moral? What morality would that be?” Vale snapped back. “We would be well within our moral rights to put you off this vessel, at the very least.”

 
“Again, that would result in a negative outcome. Without my participation, you will not be able to interface with the spacedock’s repair drones.”

  “What did you do to my ship?” Riker was a study in controlled fury. “I want an answer.”

  The AI regarded them. “You exhibit an anger state, and yet you do not have the right to do so.” Before anyone could respond, White-Blue went on, “I absorbed information from the sections of your database that I passed through. I found of particular interest the intentions included in your mission statement—the articles of affirmation regarding this vessel’s crew.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” said Vale.

  “This ship, the Titan,” said the AI. “It is an explorer, as you said it was, William-Riker. And the life-forms aboard it are a microcosm of the society you strive for. A unity of species, beings of different origin and nature, many radically incompatible with one another, yet working together toward a common goal, with shared purpose. This is your United Federation of Planets.”