Torvig’s confusion showed in the wrinkling of his nose, and it warred with a sudden burst of curiosity. Just before Doctor Ra-Havreii had told him to come down here, the ensign had seen a yeoman arrive in main engineering and proffer a note to the Efrosian—not an electronic padd, he observed, but an actual slip of replicated paper. Whatever had been written on it had started this chain of events, and Torvig found himself both eager to see where it led and concerned in equal measure.
The corridor terminated in a small antechamber, a wide airlock similar in design to those along the exterior of the Titan’s hull, often used for the docking of travel pods or those rare occurrences when the starship was required to make a hard seal against a space platform. This hatch, however, led from the bottom of the saucer into an auxiliary craft that nestled flush with a configured landing bay. It opened to him and gave Torvig leave to step aboard the La Rocca, the captain’s skiff.
As far as he could recall, the ensign had no knowledge of the skiff actually being deployed; most missions requiring the use of an auxiliary craft were undertaken by Titan’s array of shuttles. The La Rocca was closer in dimension to a Starfleet runabout, almost a starship in its own right, and far roomier. But that said, as he entered the cabin, it now seemed cramped, every seat taken by a member of the command crew.
“Where’s the chief engineer?” said Commander Vale. She, like Torvig and everyone else, wore no combadge.
The ensign blinked. “He told me to come. In his place.”
“Typical Xin,” said Lieutenant Commander Pazlar. “He hates meetings.”
“I’m not fond of them, either.” Captain Riker sat in the pilot’s chair of the skiff. The seat was turned to face into the cabin, and out the canopy behind him the curve of Titan’s primary hull could be seen overhead, like a stark gray-white sky. Commander Troi sat in the copilot’s seat, while Vale and Pazlar were at the operations stations. Only Tuvok stood along with the ensign.
“We should begin,” said the Vulcan, and after a nod from the captain, he moved to activate a portable device resting against one of the bulkheads.
“Sir, is this about the computer—?” Torvig began to speak, but Riker silenced him with a shake of his head. It was then that the ensign noticed that most of the skiff’s internal systems were powered down; only a library terminal and a life-support monitor were functioning.
“You may experience some minor discomfort, Ensign,” noted Tuvok.
Torvig wasn’t sure what he meant, but in the next second, the device came on with a train of blinking indicators across its surface, and the Choblik stumbled as if he had lost his balance. He caught himself and shook his head. From nowhere, an unpleasant buzzing hum sounded through his audial augmentations, and there was a blurring effect across his optical implants.
“Sorry, Torvig,” said Commander Vale. “That’s a localized EM-field generator. The interference effect is going to disrupt some of your bionic implants.”
“I, uh, see.” He blinked at the device. It was essentially a jamming system, capable of disrupting electronic functions such as data transfer and monitoring. Immediately, he understood that it had been deployed by Tuvok as a countersurveillance precaution.
“We can’t take any chances,” said Riker. He tapped a few controls, and Torvig heard the faint thud of magnetic bolts securing themselves. “There. We’re now isolated from all the systems aboard the Titan. The EM emitter will put a bubble of white noise around the La Rocca, so anyone who wants to listen in to what we have to say will be out of luck.” He sighed. “This is a little more cloak-and-dagger than I would have liked, but I hope you all understand the need for security.”
“Better than a dark, cold corridor,” muttered Vale.
“Ah.” Torvig nodded to himself. “This explains the paper notes. Anything committed to a padd would be machine-readable by the Titan’s computers.”
“The low-tech but direct method is sometimes the best,” said Troi.
“The same with our combadges,” said Pazlar. “They could also be co-opted, that’s why Pava took them.”
Torvig felt a small thrill. The clandestine nature of the meeting was exciting in its own way. But then he considered the deeper meaning of the reasons behind it, and the emotion died away, replaced by a nervous fear. If they were taking precautions like this, on their own vessel, then the situation had to be grave. A worrisome thought suddenly occurred to him. With all of them here aboard the La Rocca, if Titan’s computer wanted to rid itself of the captain and the other officers, all it would take would be an override of the skiff’s docking controls to eject it into space. He swallowed hard and pushed the idea away.
“Let’s get down to this,” said Riker. “We need options, and we need them quickly. This situation is spiraling out of our control. The Sentries have rolled over our concerns, they’ve damaged any trust we were building with them, and now they’re backing us into a corner.”
“There’s only so far they can go before we start pushing back,” said Vale. “They must understand that?”
“I genuinely believe they are well meaning,” said Troi, countering the commander’s sharp tone. “But admittedly, they are applying their charity with a good deal of force behind it.”
“Where I come from, we’d call that intimidation,” Vale noted grimly.
Torvig observed the interaction between the two humans with interest. Both females displayed admirable qualities, great courage, and strength of character, and yet both of them had personas that stemmed from uniquely different cultural upbringings and life experiences. Troi’s empathic nature informed everything about her; even here and now, in this difficult circumstance, she was attempting to act in an even-handed manner, bringing the opposite viewpoint to the fore. By contrast, Vale stayed firmly hawkish in her comportment, the defense of her ship and her crewmates first and foremost in her mind. Neither was wholly correct or wholly mistaken in her position, he reflected.
“We need to set boundaries, to make it clear what we are willing to tolerate,” Troi replied. “The Sentry AIs may never have had to deal with organics like us before, and they may not know how to behave around us.”
“Their attitude could be construed as patronizing,” said Tuvok. “They clearly believe themselves to be superior.”
Riker gave a thin, humorless smile. “That’s not something we do well with.”
“Indeed,” agreed Tuvok. “When my species first became involved with humans from Earth, the cultural disconnection between our two races was frequently the source of some friction.”
“They’re not superior to us,” Vale said flatly. “No one’s got the moral high ground here. They have better computer technology, maybe, but that’s about it.”
She glanced toward Torvig, and he nodded. “That is correct, Commander. The AIs do appear to have made some innovations that our science has not, but on a broader scale, the Sentry civilization is technologically comparable to the United Federation of Planets.”
The captain shifted in his seat and stood up. “If this were just a normal first-contact scenario, we could swallow our dented pride and leave it at that.” He paced the length of the cabin and halted. “But this goes beyond showing a little cultural arrogance. They’re not thinking of us as equals. They’re not showing any interest in our concerns. That’s no basis for any kind of trust.”
“Pardon me, sir,” said Vale, “but I think that ship has sailed. What White-Blue did—”
“Are we even sure what he did?” Troi broke in.
“What that machine did was tantamount to an attack on this vessel,” concluded the commander. She folded her arms. “I think we need to move toward a stronger, more aggressive posture. It may be the only thing they understand.”
“That kind of thinking is how wars start, Commander,” said Troi.
“Do we have a combative option?” Pazlar asked quietly. “We took a beating going up against just one of those shipframes. There are hundreds of them out there.” She gestured towar
d the canopy and the space beyond.
“There is a possibility,” said Tuvok. “Lieutenant Commander Keru and I have researched some alternatives. Given time, I believe we can configure an offensive weapons package designed specifically to work against the Sentries.”
“How?” said Riker, leaning forward.
“A dekyon emitter.”
“Dekyons are subspace particles,” said Pazlar. “Temporally unstable as well.”
Tuvok nodded. “They are also capable of affecting the processes of positronic neural pathways, such as those found in the thought centers of advanced artificial intelligences. I believe a tuned dekyon-field burst could render a Sentry remote or high-level frame inert.”
Torvig frowned. “That would work on the SecondGen AIs, but what about the larger ones, the older ones? Their systems work on outdated, preduotronic technologies like variable-state circuits and electrical valves.”
“The FirstGen AIs are the more primitive in terms of functionality, that is true,” said the Vulcan. “The size of their constructs and the comparative human equivalence of their speeds of thought process appear to confirm that. The mobile AIs, those we have seen using the shipframes, possess systems based on more contemporary science.” He paused. “The dekyon-burst strategy is not a complete solution,” admitted the Vulcan. “It is a work in progress.”
“What else do we know about them?” said Troi.
Pazlar brushed a thread of hair from her face and straightened, pulling her g-suit taut. “The paucity of resources in the worlds of this system explains why CyanGray’s first instinct was to scavenge the debris of White-Blue’s ship on our first encounter. She might have done the same to us if we had been destroyed…”
“Few resources… the apparent threat of a constant enemy, this ‘Null’ they spoke of.” Riker thought aloud. “All that means the Sentries have little ability to ‘reproduce’ or expand the numbers of their species. That goes a long way to explaining their behavior.”
“I’d call it paranoia,” said Vale.
Commander Troi shook her head slightly. “Am I the only one here who isn’t assuming that what happened to the Titan’s computer is part of some Sentry conspiracy?” She looked around the cabin. “White-Blue told us that this was a chance event.”
“A chance event that it set in motion,” Tuvok added. “If for a moment we concede the point that the AIs are incapable of direct falsehoods, even then, the Sentry White-Blue remains fully culpable for that act. It opened the door to allow Titan’s computer to become self-aware, without our permission.”
Troi’s dark eyes narrowed. “I don’t dispute that at all. But White-Blue did that. Alone, not on the orders of the Governance Kernel.”
Vale sniffed. “If it’s a renegade, we have all the more reason to kick it off our ship.”
“Despite what White-Blue has done, he was correct.” Troi shared a long look with her husband. “Does Titan’s computer system have the capability to become sentient? Yes. We knew that. We’ve always known it. The intelligent thinking machines we have aboard starships have been pushing at the borders of sentience since the twenty-third century. But as a society, we chose to make sure they didn’t cross that line. White-Blue said we prevented Titan from thinking for itself. He’s not wrong.”
“Point made and taken,” conceded Vale, “but that doesn’t forgive the intrusion. And it doesn’t address the fact that we keep a tight hand on AIs because history has shown us what happens when we don’t.” She let out a breath. “How many instances have there been where uncontrolled machines have become self-aware and then dangerous? The V’Ger construct? Daystrom’s M-5 computer? The mainframe on Bynaus?” Vale looked Troi in the eye. “Deanna, you’ve seen it yourself. The nanites from the Stubbs project, the Moriarty holoprogram—”
“I can cite counters to every one of those,” replied the other woman. “The Retellik Lattice. The Exocomps. The Pathfinders on Memory Prime.” She glanced at Riker. “Data.”
Torvig watched as Vale seized on the mention of the android. “And the flip sides of him? Lore and the B-4 prototype? However you cut it, the record is not good in the plus column.”
Troi was silent for a long moment. “None of which has any bearing on this. If we had encountered an alien race holding a being like us aboard their craft, shackled to a neural servo, without the freedom to think… tell me, Christine, what would you have done? Wouldn’t you have been compelled to rescue it?”
Vale opened her mouth to reply but instead she paused. Torvig saw the passage of complex emotions across the woman’s face. “I want to say that I would be certain of the dynamics of the situation before I did a damn thing,” she said at length, “but I’m not sure that I would.”
“What’s that Earther phrase?” said Pazlar. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The change has been made. We can’t unmake it.”
“Certainly not without the…” Riker paused, struggling to find the right term. “The avatar’s compliance.”
And then the Choblik was speaking, the words coming to him automatically. “If anyone present has commonality of experience with the Titan, it’s me.”
The captain nodded to him. “Go on, Ensign.”
“Sir, my species were once a race of arboreal animals, without true sentience. The benefactors who visited my world in our prehistory and gave us the Great Upgrade enhanced us with cybernetic implants just as White-Blue granted Titan the chance to upgrade herself.” He paused and licked his lips. “We’re alike.”
Riker studied the diminutive engineer for a moment, considering his words. What he liked about Torvig was the fact that everything the ensign was existed right there on the surface, without artifice, without pretension. And he could almost see the train of thoughts crossing through the Choblik’s mind, written there across the wide-open expressions on his face. Perhaps there had been method to Ra-Havreii sending the ensign up here for this meeting after all. What Torvig said rang completely true. He wondered what it had to be like, to know with absolute certainty that without the benevolence of an unknown higher power, one would be little more than a dumb animal, unable to think and reason and converse.
And now his starship was in the same place, and here he was plotting ways to undo that. Do I have the right? No matter how this came to pass, do I have the right to end it? For an uncomfortable second, he found himself thinking of his wife and the fraught pregnancy that had almost cost her life. A similar choice had been laid before them both then, a choice to halt a new life before it had the chance to form fully. He blinked and looked away, aware of Deanna’s passing glance on him.
“You have both been ‘uplifted,’ ” Tuvok was saying to Torvig. “An intriguing assertion.”
“It’s likely that was how the SecondGen came into existence,” said Melora. “The FirstGen built them as improved versions of themselves, gave them the ability to achieve a state of sentience.”
Vale snorted softly. “Like parents and their children.”
“And maybe, with all of the same behavior patterns. The tensions, fears, the hopes,” said Deanna.
“You think White-Blue did what it did because of Daddy issues?”
Troi glanced at Riker’s first officer. “It’s possible. You mentioned Lore. He was driven by the needs to appease and eclipse his creator. Perhaps consciousness follows the same psychological patterns, no matter if it springs from silicon or flesh.”
“Lore was a liar and a killer,” Riker stated. “He’s not a good example.”
“Even the names they use for themselves—FirstGen, SecondGen, the colors and numbers—all of these things have a meaning for the AIs.” His wife paused. “They call their kind the Sentries, which implies some kind of guardianship, a duty.”
“A sentry stands guard against a danger,” said Tuvok. “Logically, we can conclude that danger may be this unknown ‘Null.’ ”
“But what does a sentry protect?” added Deanna.
Riker pinched the bridge of his nos
e and sighed. “All of this is getting us off track. Melora is right, the damage has been done—but all the same, I want to see if there’s any way we can reverse it.”
“Any such attempt will likely cause the obliteration of the Titan’s new neural configuration,” said Tuvok. “We may be able to reinstate the original data structure, but the nascent intelligence there would be erased.”
“Find a better way,” he ordered, meaning every word. “If you can.”
“And if there isn’t one?” Vale challenged.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” he replied. “In the meantime, what about the more immediate problems?”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 16
