Star Trek: The Next Generation - 112 - Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory

by David Mack

  Choudhury checked her tricorder and reported with a gesture, No life signs.

  Worf issued orders with his hands, signaling in quick succession: Keep your eyes open. Choudhury, flank left. Velex, flank right. La Forge, take shelter and cover us.

  Then the Klingon drew his sidearm and prowled straight ahead, through open ground and under the alien transport ship. The two security officers brandished their weapons and stole forward around the edges of the plateau, advancing from one formation to another in a stuttered pattern while covering each other. La Forge marveled at how quiet the three of them were. He couldn’t hear their footfalls on the dusty ground; they were like ghosts in the night.

  From behind him came the crunch of gravel under a boot. He spun and leveled his Orion-made blaster at a face both strange and familiar. The man looked just like Data, or Lore, or B-4, but his complexion was fully human, and his light-brown hair fluttered in the mountain breeze as he regarded La Forge with a beatific smile. “About time you got here. What kept you?”

  The young man’s voice sent a chill down La Forge’s back. He sounded like Data, but his tone was cocksure and more than a bit arrogant—echoes of Lore’s inflections. Unlike Lore, he had no malice in his eyes, and something in his manner spoke of a gentle humor. Drawn by the sound of his voice, Worf, Velex, and Choudhury came charging to La Forge’s aid, and the three of them fanned out behind his back. A glance over his shoulder made it clear to La Forge that his compatriots all had their weapons aimed squarely at Data’s peculiar doppelgänger.

  With exaggerated slowness, the youthful figure lifted his empty hands, palms facing the away team. “I’m not armed. So maybe you could all take a breath and calm down.”

  Choudhury narrowed her eyes, struggling to make sense of the situation. “B-4?”

  The stranger stifled a derogatory chuckle. “Not by a long shot.”

  Worf snarled and tensed his finger on his blaster’s trigger. “Lore!”

  “Sorry, no.”

  Velex stared at his tricorder display, perplexed. “Sirs? One second this guy registers as human, the next he scans as a Soong-type android, and then he doesn’t show up at all.”

  La Forge took the scanner from Velex and studied the details it had recorded about the stranger’s internal structure. “You’re definitely a Soong-type android, but your body contains systems and components I’ve never seen before.” He switched off the scanner and looked more closely at the man’s bluish-gray eyes. “Who are you?”

  The android offered his right hand to La Forge, who did not take it. “Doctor Noonien Soong. It’s nice to see you again, Geordi. And you, as well, Worf.” Seeing that his greeting had been rebuffed, he withdrew his hand with a disappointed half-shrug.

  “I do not understand,” Worf said. “Data told us you were dead.”

  “I wanted him to think I was. A boy doesn’t really become a man until his father dies. But let’s just say that when it came time to shuffle off this mortal coil . . . I had other plans.”

  Staring in disbelief, La Forge wasn’t sure he could take this man at his word—yet everything he said rang true. He spread his arms as if to embrace the impossible. “How can you be Doctor Soong? And assuming you’re telling us the truth, and you are who you claim to be—what the hell are you doing here?”

  Soong smiled. “That, my friends . . . is a long story.”

  PART TWO

  NOONIEN

  2367

  7

  I look into my son’s golden face. Data is a portrait of innocence—or should I say naïveté? His pale eyes stare back at me with wonderment, but I see that the truth of this moment eludes him, despite its copious visible evidence. I’m bruised and broken, propped up against the wall of my home like a marionette with its strings cut, the right side of my face aching where his older brother, Lore, struck me down like the invalid I’ve become. I feel the warm tickle of fresh blood on my forehead above my right eyebrow and on my fleshy, wrinkled jowls.

  Heaven help me, I’ll need to spell it out for him. I take a breath and muster my strength.

  “Everybody dies, Data.” I behold my ageless son and permit myself the luxury and vanity of hope. “Well . . . almost everybody.”

  Data kneels at my side, garbed in the drab brown Pakled rags his brother Lore had been wearing when he’d answered my homing beacon. That was an unforgivable mistake on my part, one I should have taken steps to avoid; damn it to Hell, why didn’t I give each of my sons a unique homing-signal frequency? That was lazy of me. Lazy and stupid. But the damage was done, and once I’d realized Lore was awake and roaming the galaxy, I couldn’t just let him walk out the door. Keeping him here had been easy; I’d just played on his emotions, which I knew to be primitive and easily manipulated, by telling him I was dying. Of course, Data nearly exposed my lie by asking me to elaborate on my ruse, and it was just dumb luck that Lore was so caught up in the moment that he failed to notice Data’s blunder. Curse my cybernetic naïf for breaking down my disguise with his questions! But if I have to confess my sins, I’ll admit this is why I love Data best: He’s an unblemished soul. He’s my redemption.

  He studies me with great focus. “Do you believe that we are in some ways alike, sir?”

  “In many ways, I’d like to believe.” I don’t have the strength in me to say the whole truth, and he doesn’t have the time to hear it. His ship—which he hijacked to come here, in answer to my interstellar summons—is waiting for him in orbit with a mortally ill child aboard, one who needs to reach a nearby starbase immediately if he’s to survive. If only I had more time, I would tell Data everything—a lifetime of secrets and regrets, of hopes and dreams. I would tell him that when I look at him I see all that is best in me: my curiosity, my ethics, my desire to learn objectively about the universe. I would tell him that creating him was my greatest triumph, that he is my gift to the people and culture that nurtured me and made my explorations possible.

  But there’s no time left. He needs to go, and I need him to leave.

  He tilts his head in a way that makes me think of a small, confused bird. “Then it is all right for you to die. Because I will remain alive.”

  Is he truly exhibiting compassion? It seems unlikely since his brother absconded with his emotion chip, the one I built expressly for Data, packed with selected memories from my life, knowledge that I’d hoped to bequeath to the last of my sons as his birthright. No, I suspect Data is simply parroting words of comfort, pretending to feel empathy. It’s just a part of his programming, no doubt the product of Juliana’s contribution to his core software. Still, I find myself grateful that he’s here, and that some small part of him wants to console me at my end. It takes a tremendous effort, because I’m so tired and my arm feels so leaden, but I reach up and with a feather touch I pat my son’s cheek as if to assure him, It’ll be all right.

  My gesture seems to trouble him. “You know that I cannot grieve for you, sir.”

  Oh, that infallible truthfulness, both endearing and excruciating. I wish everyone were so transparent in their motives as my son. My wondrous son who underestimates himself yet again.

  “You will—in your own way.” I can see he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I can only assume he hasn’t yet realized that, given time, he will internalize these events and that their details will become integrated into his future behaviors; that he will cope with this loss by keeping me alive through unconscious imitation, and that one day, when he least expects it, I will return to him in his dreams. Oh, he has so much left to discover! I wish I could be there to see it, to live through his eyes . . . but this is what it is to be a father. You welcome your children into the world knowing that if all goes the way you plan, you won’t get to see the end of their story. It seems a sad notion until you realize that’s what gives you hope for the future.

  The last smile I offer my son is bittersweet. “Good-bye. Good-bye, Data.”

  He mirrors my expression, and it’s so much like looking backward
in time that it makes me want to weep like a child. He nearly breaks my heart as he says, “Good-bye . . . Father.”

  I reach out, fumbling with a palsied hand, and clasp his. “Go now.”

  “What shall I do with your corpse?”

  Blunt and simple. You have to love him for that. “Leave me here. After my life signs fade . . . this place . . . will self-destruct. It’s my . . . funeral pyre.” I release his hand. “Go.”

  He stands and towers over me. “As you wish, Father.” His hesitation is brief, but then he turns and leaves. I listen to his footsteps; I hear him stop a few paces outside my front door. There is no sound of a transporter beam; he must be monitoring my life signs with a tricorder, or perhaps he is having his ship monitor my vital signs from orbit—is there anything those starships can’t do these days? As I expected, Data won’t leave until he knows this is really over.

  I close my eyes and let my pain drag me down. With a bit of extra effort I bite down on the capsule embedded in my lower left wisdom tooth, and its enamel surface cracks. I can’t taste the drug that seeps from its core, but I can feel it working. My breathing grows shallow and the world melts away. Darkness surrenders to light, and a silver veil is drawn back before me. For a moment it’s like staring into the sun but without the pain. Then darkness falls again—

  —and when clarity returns, it comes in a torrent. I shudder to consciousness, victim of a chill down my spine. I glance at one of the dozens of antique clocks adorning the walls of my longtime secret abode, and I see that several hours have passed since I dosed myself with hypothoride. I can only hope my ruse has worked, and that Data and his shipmates have left orbit. I have much to do, and the last thing I need now is an audience.

  I take my time getting up from the floor. My body is little more than a bloated bag draped over brittle bones, an assortment of aches and pains accumulated over the course of a sedentary lifetime consumed by research and slow experimentation. When I finally regain my feet, I’m short of breath, and my head swims. All my life I dreamed of spending my retirement someplace hot, mostly as a rebellion against a youth spent spelunking one frozen dead world after another at the sides of men like Emil Vaslovik and Ira Graves. Now, after years sequestered in the jungles of Terlina III, I’m reconsidering my decision. The air here is so thick with humidity and pollen that it’s a struggle to pull a full breath into my failing lungs.

  Crossing the room in doddering steps, I have too much time to think, and I curse myself again for letting Lore trick me, and not for the first time. I spent years crafting that emotion chip for Data; it was a labor of love, a singular achievement that I’d decided long ago would be the last great work of my mortal hands. Yet, as angry as I am, I can’t bring myself to hate Lore, not even for this. He’s still my son, flawed as he is. Juliana never liked him, of course; she said he embodied all my worst traits and magnified them: my selfishness, my ego, my vanity and insecurities. But she was blind to the better parts of me that live in him—my ambition, my creativity and gift for improvisation, not to mention my sense of humor.

  What’s done is done. It’s time for me to let go of this, and so much else, and move on. I told Data the truth; even if I had more time in this life, I couldn’t possibly make another chip like the one his brother stole. I sacrificed parts of my mind to imprint that chip, permanently erased several of my memory engrams in order to transfer them into its subprocessors, all in the hope that I might gift him with that spark of humanity he always seemed to think had eluded him.

  The wall is my guide as I shuffle inside my bedroom, and then I use my dresser as a crutch as I sidestep around it. At last I come to an enormous wall tapestry, by far the largest in the house; it hangs from just below the ceiling and reaches to within a centimeter of the floor. It’s thick and heavy, an intricate replica of Michelangelo’s famous painting The Creation of Adam rendered in wool and silk, and it covers most of my room’s south wall. A gentle tug frees its lower right corner from its anchor, and I slip behind it, sandwiched between the leaden drapery and the wall as I feel my way to the portal hidden behind it. It wouldn’t be obvious to the naked eye, but I know where the security pad is, in the corner where a horizontal groove in the wall meets the seam between two prefabricated panels. I press my hand flat against it, and the previously opaque pad becomes translucent as a bright, ruby-hued biometric sensor scans my palm and fingertips and bathes me in its crimson light. It confirms my identity and opens a second panel directly in front of my face, revealing a retinal scanner. Ignoring the aching in my lower back, I lean forward and ease my right eye into place above the padded sensor.

  I hate this part. The bright green light makes me want to squint, but if I do, I’ll just have to start the scan over. For a few seconds the pulse leaves me half-blind and seeing purple spots. I hear the low clack of magnetic locks retracting, followed by the soft hum of the panel sliding aside. Luckily, I’ve kept the next part simple. All I need to do is step inside. Safely inside the small lift, I mumble, “Down.” The door closes behind me, and the cylindrical pod descends.

  By the time I reach my home’s hidden basement, most of the violet speckles have faded from my sight. My dimly lit workshop gradually brightens as its motion sensors detect my arrival. I hobble toward a rainbow-colored Gordian knot of cables and wires that ring a machine I’ve spent decades perfecting: my synaptic scanner. It was inspired by a spinning platform I once saw on Exo III, a device for imprinting a featureless, mindless android template with the physical appearance and consciousness of an organic being. That was an impressive piece of technology, but not without its flaws. It was excellent at reproducing the details of a person’s body and mind, but not one’s essence. The androids it produced lacked what my old pal Doctor Ira Graves would have called the “human equation”—a remarkably racist term, I know, but that was Ira for you.

  My machine improved upon the Exo III device in a number of ways—most of which were my own inventions, plus a few I learned during my years as Graves’s research fellow and one that I copied from an ancient artifact Starfleet once secretly hired me to study on Camus II. First and foremost, my machine doesn’t spin. Porting one’s consciousness into a synthetic brain must be traumatic enough; who wants to wake up from the experience feeling like they’ve been on an amusement park ride run amok? Not me, thank you very much.

  I activate the synaptic scanner’s master console with the merest brush of my hand. Every system in the basement purrs to life, and the charge in the air is electric, a tangible sensation of excitement. Tendrils of radiant plasma creep around the machine’s edges and fill the air with the tang of ozone; so much power is coursing through that thing it’s all but impossible to insulate it fully without making it overheat.

  Lying on one side of the scanner, fully prepared and awaiting my arrival, is the most advanced android I’ve ever built. For the past thirty-four years, every waking moment I could spare from my work on Data’s emotion chip has been devoted to building this, an android that incorporates all I’ve ever learned about cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Its positronic brain is configured for the native expression of human-style emotions, and unlike all my previous creations, this one has no homing beacon, no off switch, and no hidden surprises. It also incorporates a more compact energy source, greater memory capacity and computational power, a built-in subspace transceiver, and a few concealed gizmos and repair kits—always handy.

  Looking into its youthful face—my face, as it looked sixty years ago, when I was a young man—reminds me of what my ex-wife Juliana always used to ask me, “Why do you always make them in your own image, Noonien? Is it because you like playing God?” I never bothered to answer her when she went on those rants; I didn’t see the point of explaining myself, because I was certain she would never understand. I made my sons for the same reason a painter paints: because I needed to do it. I didn’t make them to serve a function or play a role; I made them just to be, to live, to think and feel, and to choose their own fat
es. The reason all my androids looked like me was because I’ve spent my whole life working toward the moment when one of these androids would become me—or, to put it more correctly, when I would become one of them.

  Now that day is here, and I can hardly keep my hands steady enough to key in the final activation sequence. I’m on the verge of accomplishing what Ira Graves tried but failed to do (a blunder that nearly destroyed Data in the bargain, for which I still curse Graves’s memory), and unlike Ira, I already know my plan will work—because I’ve done it before, thirty-one years ago, when I used an older model of this machine to save Juliana’s life by transferring her consciousness into a perfect android replica of her body. I’d had no choice, then. The wounds inflicted by the Crystalline Entity’s attack on Omicron Theta had left my beloved wife trapped in a coma by the time I’d flown our escape ship here. I couldn’t let her die, so I transitioned her mind into a cybernetic shell. I knew she would’ve hated me for it, so I programmed her to think she was human, and I built her so well that the rest of the galaxy would believe she was.

  Not long after she “woke up” she left me, filed for divorce via subspace text message, and abandoned me to my work. I’ve had decades to think about my mistakes. To be honest, I’d known for a long time that I was losing her, that we were growing apart. But even though I saw it coming, I refused to believe it. In the letter that came with the divorce decree, she spelled out all the ways I’d disappointed her as a husband. I don’t know why I didn’t try harder to show her how much she meant to me. All I know is I’ve had three decades to live with my regrets.