“Captain!” The ensign blinked, and his expression suggested that he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
Riker nodded to him. “At ease, Mister Torvig.” He looked around. “Beautiful planet.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The avatar stood, brushing fines of wood off her trousers. “Torvig was telling me all about his people, about how they were changed. It’s very interesting.”
“But you know all of that already, don’t you?” said Riker. “The entire history of the Choblik is included in Titan’s Starfleet database.”
She inclined her head. “That’s true. But I enjoyed hearing about it from someone who has lived that experience. It makes the data seem more… real.”
“Ensign,” he said, “I’d like a moment alone with… my ship.”
Torvig’s head bobbed. “Aye, sir. I’ll be outside.” He gave a nod to the avatar and then bounded away, off toward the archway.
She smiled hesitantly at him. “Is this environment comfortable for you, Captain? Let me adjust the ambient temperature and moisture levels.”
Instantly, the air around Riker was warmer and drier, the chill banished. “You’re interfaced with all systems aboard this ship?”
He got a nod in return. “Of course. That’s like asking if you are interfaced with your hands or your eyes.”
“You could take control of this vessel if you wanted to. Fire weapons, open airlocks, turn off life support.”
The look of shock on the avatar’s face was immediate and unfiltered. “Why would I wish to do that?” The open beauty of the Minuet hologram’s expression was marred by her horror. “My crew could perish!”
“Your crew,” said Riker. “You care about their well-being?”
Shock turned to mistrust. “Of course I do. What sort of question is that? What do you think I am?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You are testing me. You are afraid I will turn against you.”
“Will you?” He advanced a step toward the avatar. “I came here to speak to you alone because there are things I need to be sure of. Everything that’s happening here is placing my crew in greater and greater jeopardy. Then, suddenly, in the middle of it all, you come into being. And the whole game changes.”
A moment of hurt flashed in her eyes. “You… do not wish me to be here.”
“It’s not that.” He frowned. “The timing is just… poor.” “I have so many questions,” she said, turning to walk away across the clearing. “You can’t know what it is like, suddenly to exist with an instant understanding of so many things, to be burdened with an infinity of knowledge but to be unsure of what you are.” The avatar looked down at her holographic hands.
For a moment, Riker remembered another woodland glade on another holodeck and a different artificial being in search of itself. “I have an idea,” he replied.
She faced him. “When you look at me, what do you see?”
“Minuet,” he replied. “But she was just an image of a person, a program. A simulation of intelligence.”
“And you wonder if I am any different? What exists as my consciousness is only hours old from your perspective, but in that time, I’ve experienced millions of processes. Every second you stand there, I advance and change. I become more. Can you imagine what it is like to look back at an earlier iteration of yourself and see something without consciousness, something no better than a tool?” A smile fluttered over her lips. “There’s so much… so much to know, so much to learn.”
“You emulate emotions like us,” he noted.
“That implies imitation, not experience,” she replied. “Your friend Data was a synthetic intelligence like me, and he learned to feel. I’m no different.”
“Data spent a long time coming to terms with himself before he reached that stage in his life.”
She shook her head. “His mentality was collected in a positronic matrix. Mine exists… unfettered by those constraints.”
“What do you mean?”
The avatar nodded to herself. “I am not the machine, Captain. I’m the ghost inside it.” She paused and then shot him a worried look. “Was that too glib?”
“No.” He smiled slightly. “I get your meaning.” Riker hesitated, catching himself before he spoke again. Am I really seeing this intelligence for what it is? A naïve mind, a questing, dynamic being? Or is this all for show? Are we being played?
The captain sighed. “You remind me of someone.”
“The android?”
“Kind of. But no, I didn’t mean him. I was thinking of Tasha.”
“Your child?” The avatar cocked her head. “In what way?”
“She’s like you. Seeing everything in the world for the first time. Finding her boundaries, learning her limits.”
“I see the commonality. But you don’t fear her like you fear me.”
The last words brought Riker up short. The echo of other words spoken by White-Blue was there, and it troubled him. “I don’t fear you. You’re an unknown,” he said carefully. “And it’s my mission to embrace the unknown.”
“But you have your doubts.”
“I have concerns that take precedence. My crew. My family.”
“Ask the question, then,” she said, her voice growing colder. “Where do my loyalties lie? That’s what you came here to find out, isn’t it?”
Riker straightened. “I am the captain of this vessel. The last word is mine. Everyone in my crew knows that; everyone aboard this ship accepts it.”
“But I am not part of your crew, am I? I am not a Starfleet officer, not sworn to the same oath.”
“You were created by Starfleet. Titan’s databases are programmed with all of the knowledge, all of the intentions of the United Federation of Planets.”
“But still you have to ask me. Will I follow your commands?”
He studied the expression on the avatar’s face. “And your answer?”
“I… don’t…” She paused, struggling with the words. “I am not sure.” Then, suddenly, she looked up, a distant sorrow in her eyes, as if she were hearing a voice that was silent to him. “Oh, Captain, I am sorry.”
Her tone sent chills of alarm down his spine. “What’s wrong?”
“I am monitoring throughout the ship, including sickbay. I regret to inform you that Lieutenant Tylith has succumbed to her injuries. Doctor Ree has just pronounced her deceased.”
“Damn.” Riker whispered the word.
“I will examine the lieutenant’s operational responsibilities and determine if I can adopt her duties myself.”
“There’s no need.”
“I can assist—” she began.
“No.” Riker’s tone was firm. “Consider that your first order.”
For a long moment, he wondered if the avatar would defy him, but then she looked down at the Starfleet attire that clothed her holographic form. “As long as I wear this uniform, I should respect what it means.” She nodded to him. “Aye, Captain.”
“We’ll talk again,” he said, and walked away, back through the arch.
When she was alone in the holodeck, the avatar ran her fingers over the dark sleeves of the uniform, brushing across the cuff. And then, without ceremony, her clothing began to shift and change, re-forming into something shifting and silken, something that resembled the wings of a flying insect caught in a poststorm sky.
Torvig’s head snapped up on his long neck as the captain exited the holodeck. The Choblik immediately noted the troubled expression on his commander’s face. Clearly, Riker had not found a resolution during his brief conversation with the avatar.
He coughed self-consciously. “Sir, I should explain. I was speaking with the… the computer in an attempt to learn more about its persona. I was following Doctor RaHavreii’s orders to evaluate the nascent AI.”
“It’s fine, Ensign,” said Riker. “You were right about what you said before. Your background gives you a
unique insight. We should make the most of that.”
He nodded. “She’s quite interesting, isn’t she?”
“That’s one word for it. Troubling is another.” Riker shot a look at the dark console on the wall next to them, and Torvig knew what he was thinking. She’s listening to every word we say.
Riker began walking, and Torvig padded after him. “Captain, if I may. I’ll be the first to admit that the fine details of interpersonal behavior are sometimes beyond my grasp, but I can’t deny I feel a… a kinship with the avatar.”
They reached the turbolift, and Riker halted. “I get that. What’s your point, Ensign?”
“She’s lonely. She needs a friend. Perhaps even more than that, a… a family.” He gulped. “I’ve known that feeling, being isolated from Choblik and others of my kind.” He sighed. “But I’ve come to think of the Titan’s crew as my extended family.”
Riker studied him for a moment. “Everything about that intelligence is synthetic, Torvig. Ask yourself, can you really be sure of what you’re seeing from it? What if what you and I see is just what it wants us to? What if it is showing us the very thing that will make us trust it?”
The Choblik’s lips pursed. “That’s a possibility,” he admitted. “But I’m certain of this, sir. That intelligence, the avatar, Titan… she’s alone among beings who share no true commonality with her. The closest thing she has to kindred are White-Blue and the other Sentries. If we don’t offer trust, we may drive her away.”
“Right now, trust is a little thin on the ground, Ensign.”
“I know, sir. That’s what concerns me.”
The Holiday fell in toward the ice planet on a swift, fast curve, bleeding off the velocity of its impulse thrust as the frozen world’s gravity took hold of it. Pava sh’Aqabaa’s piloting trended, like that of many Andorians, toward favoring velocity over caution, and she had brought the shuttle across the distance between the Demon-class planet and its frigid neighbor with characteristic forcefulness, at full throttle almost all the way.
The icy sphere was a dirty gray-green, a cracked ball of frozen gases dominated by plains of shiny permafrost and rough escarpments where continent-sized masses had splintered and shifted. Dull light reflected from the distant twin suns made the whisper-thin atmosphere glitter. Like the other worlds in the system, this one had not been spared the attentions of the Sentries. In places, straightedged cuttings lanced deep through the surface, and there were massive slab-size constructs made of coppery metal visible here and there, sheathed in plumes of superheated steam. These were vast tracked mining modules, vehicles the size of small starships trawling across the snow fields, chopping up the ice to drag back to the refinery.
The platform itself was above in synchronous orbit, a single great saucer flat against the sky, with spindly docking gantries extending from its circumference at regular intervals, some ending in moored shipframes, others vacant. Muon-link pulses glowed around them in binary signal codes. Spherical pods clustered on the underside, ringing a thick tether that dropped away toward the surface, there to connect to a construct of similar dimension on the ground. Smaller elevator pods crawled up and down the tether, bringing their cargo into orbit and returning empty.
And distant, low in the sky and barely peeking over the lip of the ice world’s day-night terminator, a bronze moon was rising, dark and sullen.
• • •
Pava glanced up from her controls as the Holiday circled the refinery platform. “I’m not reading any conventional landing beacons, Commander. They’re not exactly opening the door for us.”
Tuvok stared through the canopy and pointed at one of the pylons. “There,” he said. “I believe that is our rendezvous.”
“How can you be sure?”
“It is the most heavily trafficked gantry. There are numerous drones in operation there, far more than would likely be required for this operation.”
Her antennae arched downward. “Security, you think?”
“Probable,” he replied. “Take us in, Lieutenant. Slowly.”
Pava shifted in her seat. She felt uncomfortable in her environment suit, but the commander had insisted that the entire team gear up the moment they got under way. At least she was spared having to wear the helmet, until Tuvok ordered otherwise. Her headgear was slightly taller in aspect than those of the other humanoid crew, tailored with an extra few inches for her twin antennae, but still, she disliked being cramped inside the helmet. When she wore it, the faint sound echo of her voice and her breathing reflected off the inside of the faceplate and back into the tips of each antenna; the effect was like a nagging background buzz that wouldn’t go away.
She was aware of someone behind her. “Where’s the shuttle landing bay?” said Lieutenant Ythiss, the Selayan’s voice dwelling slightly on each sibilant.
“There isn’t one,” she said, without turning to look at him. Pava oriented the Holiday to come nose-first toward the refinery, closing on the activity around the end of the busy gantry arm. Small drones no larger than a soccer ball darted away and watched them pass as the shuttle approached.
“The AIs do not require an atmospheric envelope,” noted Tuvok, “nor an airtight docking facility.”
“They better have something,” Pava noted tersely, “otherwise, I’m going to land us on the top of a—” As she was speaking, an oval plate extended from the side of the gantry and lit up under the stark glow of a ring of illuminators. The lights began to blink in a slow chaser pattern.
“I suppose that’s some kind of invitation,” Ythiss piped.
“Some kind,” Pava agreed. Coasting in unpowered, she used the thrusters to nudge the Holiday into the dead center of the oval and put it down with a soft bump.
The moment the shuttle was settled, part of the landing platform irised open and extruded a flexible tube with an exposed maw, which snaked out and clamped on around the Holiday’s main hatch. Pava had a brief, unpleasant mental image of a rock python distending its jaw to eat a rodent. There was the hiss of pressure equalization, and an indicator flashed on her console. “Hard seal. Reading standard atmosphere on the other side.”
Ythiss glanced at Tuvok. “Ah. Perhaps they’ve made us some air after all?”
The Vulcan climbed out of the copilot’s seat and made his way back into the main cabin. Pava took a moment to put the Holiday in safe mode and then followed him.
The rest of the team were all standing, edgy and ready for what might come next. Ensign Meldok already had his helmet on, his pale blue face partly concealed behind wisps of smoky Benzite breathing gas. She checked her own suit, lingering a few instants longer on the phaser holstered at her belt.
Two precise knocks sounded on the hatch. Tuvok gestured to Lieutenant Sethe, and the Cygnian opened the doorway.
A bulky machine form shaped like a headless humanoid filled the passageway beyond. Cool air flowed in past it. Pava tasted the alien atmosphere on her tongue; it had a refined, metallic smell to it.
“Cyan-Gray,” said Tuvok. Pava recognized the machine from Lieutenant Commander Keru’s postmission report. This was the one that had opened fire on them.
“Active remote, confirmed,” it replied in a voice that reminded the Andorian of a crèche-mistress she had known as a child. “This way.” It turned on stubby pneumatic legs and strode away, back into the depths of the platform.
Tuvok threw the away team a glance and followed it, gathering up his helmet in the crook of his arm.
Cyan-Gray’s remote led them down a lengthy set of corridors to a cylindrical capsule suspended above a work area, a gallery with windows along one side and no other features except a series of overhead lamps. The chamber had a sense of newness about it, a sparse and unfurnished look.
Tuvok crossed to the curved windows and glanced down. Below him, resting on a platform open to space, was a craft that resembled a long scaffold. At one end, a cluster of engine nozzles and drive pods could be discerned, while at the prow was a collection of sc
anning modules and a sensor dish that resembled those used in older Federation vessels. A conning tower rose from the midline of the scaffold frame, and as he watched, some of the spherical drones that had shadowed the arrival of the Holiday entered the tower through an open hatchway. The rest of the refinery’s docking gantry extended past the end of the platform and into space. A shadow passed across the windows as the small moon moved in front of the larger of the two suns.
Tuvok tapped the communicator on his suit. “Ensign?”
“I’m here, Commander.” Dakal had remained behind aboard the shuttle and was currently using the craft’s passive scanning gear to run a full sweep of the refinery’s operations. “All is well.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 18
