by David Mack
And yet . . . my memory of Juliana is so clear, like spring waters. The shocking blue of her eyes, the sweetness of her Irish lilt, the burnished copper hue of her hair, the rosy flush of her cheeks are all so vivid. Her essence was a firebrand, making its mark in my psyche from the first moment I met her. She was indubitably unique in the universe, brilliant and special and difficult and so much more. How could I have helped but be smitten?
It pains me now to think how many of those moments must already have been lost to the imperfections of my former human brain. I try to dredge up those long-past days and give them new life, but it’s as if the pages have been ripped from my book of memory, leaving only dead-end listings in an index of regrets. Only the palest snippets of those days stay with me. I remember flashes of the afternoon we spent in a park, in the capital of Marvala IV, right after we got married in a secret ceremony. It was cool and sunny, early spring, and children were racing model sailboats on the rectangular pond. The trees had just recovered their leaves after a hard winter. We sat on a blanket, sharing a bottle of white wine, and I snapped a photo of us by holding my pencam at arm’s length. It was an awkward photo that overemphasized my nostrils, but it was one of the few pictures ever taken of us together, and I treasured it right up till the day the Crystalline Entity laid Omicron Theta waste, along with my lab and that precious photo, which occupied a place of honor on my desk, beside my workstation.
There were other moments, of course. Outside her window there was a nest of rock doves, and when our romance was in its early days, I lay awake many times beside her, enthralled by the soft cooing of the birds in the blue-gray dim of the predawn hours. That recollection unleashes a flood: a night we cooked Polish sausages and sauerkraut with beer on her stovetop because the replicator was broken; the time she asked me to sing to her when she felt ill, and the only song I knew well enough to attempt solo and a cappella was the centuries-old comic ballad “Rocky Raccoon”; we made a habit of sleeping late on Saturdays and then treating ourselves to a brunch that always included raisin bread and mimosas.
And then I wince at the memory of her falling, stricken by the devouring energies of the Crystalline Entity, and her sightless stare as I carried her inside my escape ship and fled that world for my secret redoubt on Terlina III. I used every trick I knew to keep her alive, to cheat death, but I felt her slipping away from me a bit more with each passing day. And so I turned my great secret project, the synaptic scanner and the blank android prototype, to the task of saving the only woman who has ever mattered more to me than myself.
The scanner and her new positronic brain were ready before her new body was. I hadn’t realized before I started how mind-bogglingly difficult, verging on impossible, it would be to capture the totality of her, to remake her in all her perfection, all her imperfection, all her fathomless humanity, all her peerless beauty and infinite subtlety. Fortunately for us both, I was just deluded and desperate enough to try. But it was so slow to come to fruition, and while I was tinkering and refining petty details, her life ebbed. Out of time, I put her in the synaptic scanner and ported her mind into its new form, but then I left her inactive so I could finish my work.
Even though I’d known she was not really gone, that the quintessence of her had been preserved and was only sleeping, I couldn’t help but feel I was lying to myself, that my beloved had died on that table, never to return. It didn’t matter how many times I told myself her mind, memories, and soul were safe inside a positronic matrix waiting to awaken; I still wept as I dug a grave in the jungle and interred her native form. My tears mixed with my sweat as I hacked through roots and manually excavated that pit until it was two meters deep, and when I dropped that first shovelful of loam atop her shrouded corpse, it felt so real, so final.
It took me nearly two months to finish refining her new body so that it would fool even her. I hoped that any details I might have missed could be explained away as products of imperfect tissue regeneration, stemming from the injuries the Crystalline Entity had inflicted. For the eight weeks I spent reincarnating my beloved Juliana, I left my lab each night in tears. When I went to bed I’d lie awake, staring at the emptiness on her side of the bed until I shuffled over and slept there myself so I wouldn’t have to look at it and know she was gone.
The day I roused her, like a prince breaking the spell of slumber on a hexed princess, was one of the happiest of my life. Juliana awoke with no suspicion that she was anything other than what she’d remembered being. I’d told her she had languished in a coma since the Omicron Theta tragedy, and she believed me without hesitation. It felt to me like a miracle.
Not long afterward she left me, for all the reasons I’m sure the original Juliana eventually would have, and I wondered if perhaps I’d made her too well.
Now I’m in motion, and the endless night of stars drifts past me, a steady stream of space and time, an unbroken continuity hypnotic in its homogeneity. At high warp, the stars seem claustrophobically close together. It’s an illusion, a trick of perception, but then so is reality, when you think about it. Reality is what we perceive, what we experience.
I’m leaving a bank on Argelius, aglow with success after securing a very generous line of credit for a new interstellar shipping company. It’s a more pedestrian enterprise than many I’ve inaugurated under my myriad corporate umbrellas, but one I suspect will be eminently useful when it comes time to move resources and equipment without having to answer awkward questions or fabricate convoluted explanations. As I cross the lobby, I spy through an open door a conference room and a long table on which rests a large sheet cake—or, rather, what remains of it now that the partygoers have descended upon it like locusts. At the center of the festivity is an older man, a white-haired and dignified Trill gentleman who looks abashed at the attention. A paper banner on the back wall of the room is emblazoned with metallic-red letters: FAREWELL.
It’s a retirement party. I’ve seen dozens of these. Pathetic affairs, to the last.
I’ve avoided spectacles like this my whole life. I made a point of never retiring precisely so I’d never have to sit and smile through one of these stale-cake and cheap-sparkling-wine fiascoes. I’ve hated them ever since the farewell party the faculty threw in absentia for my first cybernetics professor, Doctor Emil Vaslovik, Ph.D. He was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known; he taught me more about robotics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, biomechanics, and computer programming in one summer internship than I learned during my next eight years at the Daystrom Institute as an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student and a doctoral fellow. Some of my most ambitious ideas were the product of his teachings.
I know Vaslovik didn’t retire. He simply vanished, along with all the artifacts we found on Exo III. He had been bursting with ideas, many of which became touchstones for his graduate assistant, Ira Graves. None of the other faculty at my dissertation defense got a word in between me and Graves as we peppered each other with the latest cutting-edge ideas in AI and cybernetic design. To tell the truth, I think most of them were convinced my dissertation was hogwash. There I was, some cocky twenty-six-year-old, telling them how I planned to revolutionize AI by creating positronic brains, even though everyone else in the field had “proved” it was impossible. If it hadn’t been for Graves, they probably would have refused to grant me my doctorate.
I’ve always wondered what became of Vaslovik after he vanished. I’ve long imagined he did it so he could finally work in peace, away from all the naysayers. That made him my hero, and I promised myself one day I’d do the same, as soon as I proved my theories about the positronic brain. Of course, after Graves also left the Institute, the ridicule began.
“Soong’s folly,” my detractors said of my research. Not even Graves—who by then was well on his way to becoming a superstar in AI, with all his research projects grotesquely overfunded by the confluence of Federation grants and private investors—believed in me. He smugly suggested I ought to come work for hi
m instead of “making a damn fool” of myself.
Yes, I admit it. I despised him. He was brilliant. He did revolutionary work. I had great respect for his achievements. But the man was an egotistical, misogynistic troglodyte. Imagine, if you will, a hormonally imbalanced Neanderthal who is inexplicably graced with a brilliant gift for computer engineering and artificial intelligence programming. A being that can craft an elegant virtual sentience by day, and go on drunken howling sexual rampages by night. That monstrous hybrid of genius and savagery was Ira Graves.
Perhaps I’ve exaggerated his faults ever so slightly. But you get my point.
There were times I doubted myself. I spent years trying to unlock the secrets of several half-sketched ideas I’d once seen in Vaslovik’s notes: proposals for circuit pathways and isosynaptic structures that would give rise to human-style emotions natively in an artificial intelligence. The promise of such technologies fascinated me, but I could never figure out how to reconcile them with my own designs for a positronic matrix. It was maddening to see such a tantalizing possibility shimmering like a mirage, only to have it ripple and fade when I tried to render it in concrete terms as a prototype. I doubt even Vaslovik knew how to porter those ideas over the threshold separating the theoretical from the practical. But he was like that—always concocting ideas for grandiose technologies that no one could possibly have the resources to build, or the wisdom to use properly if they did.
Vaslovik was probably the only person I ever knew who believed I would succeed in my dream of creating a stable positronic matrix. At least, he made me believe that he believed in me.
Months seem to pass like hours as I work my way from Benecia to Evora, alighting on multiple worlds just long enough to establish new shell corporations, complete with encrypted subspace comms that shuffle incoming messages from one to another in endless loops, masking both the origins and destinations of their signal traffic. Cloaked in a different alter ego on each planet, I build a network of shadows, a web of phantoms that will surround me like a fortress in the years to come. From the lush Summer Islands of Deneva to the blustery boulevards of Nokolu, Fellebia’s metropolis of commerce, I roam the Federation’s core and periphery with a singular purpose. I pass my time between stops reading all the science journals, political news, and heartbreaking works of literary genius that I never had time for during the past sixty years. Ultimately, I’m forced to conclude I didn’t miss much.
I’m on Hanolan, my business concluded, admiring the perfume of wildflowers on a summer wind as I am ferried back to the open-air starport outside the sprawling colony’s city limits. The hovercraft makes a scheduled stop and picks up a few new passengers bound for the landing fields. Among them are a pair of twin brothers, young Efrosians with golden manes and their culture’s traditional drooping mustaches and upswept eyebrows. As the two men converse in a discreet hush, I note how well they mirror each other in every glance, laugh, and gesture.
Seeing them together reminds me of my boys, though they never got the chance to interact like this at the Omicron Theta colony. After the debacle of Lore threatening the other scientists, I had been forced to shut him down and disassemble him. I knew it had to be done, that it was the right thing to do, but still it broke my heart. He was my son, a part of me, yet we took him apart as if he were nothing but a broken appliance. Juliana said it was my fault for trying to realize Vaslovik’s designs for emotional emulation circuits in an incompatible technology, and I knew she was right. I even admitted it—a rare concession on my part.
That wasn’t enough to earn Juliana’s forgiveness, though. She resented me for making a new android after our first three prototypes had all failed so dramatically. “Miscarriages” she’d called those first three, and the grief in her eyes told me she wasn’t being facetious. She begged me to abandon my research into androids and focus on pure AI instead. I couldn’t tell her that even then I was planning the greatest escape of all time—a swindle of the Grim Reaper, an indefinite extension of my lease on life through the miracle of synaptic scanning and cybernetics.
What I never told Juliana, or anyone else, is that Lore—and later, Data—would not have been possible without B-4. I had to design him in secret, outsource the fabrication of his components to private laboratories across the Federation, and then assemble him in a rented lab on a small rock called Draken IV, on the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone. It’s not how I wanted that breakthrough to happen, but Juliana’s intransigence made it necessary. The deaths of the first three prototypes had been simply too much for her to take. And it wasn’t that I didn’t grieve for those early cybernetic stillbirths; on the contrary, I wept for them just as bitterly as she did, if not more so. I was simply more driven to find the solution than she was. I couldn’t let my sorrows stand in the way of my dream. And so I took a short leave from Omicron Theta, under the pretense of auditing a seminar at the Vulcan Science Academy, and continued my work alone. I knew I was on the verge of success, and I refused to stop short.
On a windy, gray, and finger-numbingly cold winter morning, B-4 awoke full of questions and innocence. His positronic matrix was primitive but stable, and he hungered for knowledge, for input. I did my best to accommodate his need for education, but before long I understood that his ability to grasp complex concepts and interpersonal relationships was far too limited for him to ever become more than a good-hearted simpleton. He was my son and I loved him, but I didn’t let my affections blind me to his shortcomings.
Tears stung my eyes as I lied to him. “You’re going to sleep for a while.”
He cocked his head and stared at me with wide eyes devoid of guile. “Why?”
“Because I need to do some work on your systems, and you need to be off line while I work. When I’m done, I’ll wake you up again. I promise.” Then I reached around his torso and found his on-off switch. I pressed it, and his chin dipped against his chest. His childlike gaze went flat, and his face—my face, rendered in metallic hues—went slack. I packed him away in a carton deliberately mislabeled as “laboratory equipment,” and I turned off the lights and computers on my way out the door. I left a deposit covering the rental of the lab for the next few decades, and I convinced myself that one day I would go back for him.
I went home to Omicron Theta, enriched with the knowledge of how to stabilize a positronic matrix. Having done the impossible once, I resolved to apply the lessons from B-4’s inception to more advanced prototypes. Juliana still resisted my pleas to build more androids, as I’d expected. It took me several days to explain my new method of stabilizing the matrix, and to convince her it was worth trying. Of course, I dared not tell her about B-4. She would have been furious had she learned I went behind her back and risked another failure without telling her.
Reassured by my new confidence, she helped me construct a new prototype. When she saw its matrix stabilize, all her old misgivings faded away; I’d never seen her so happy. Our new son opened his eyes, looked at the two of us . . . and smiled.
He was a triumph beyond my wildest hopes. I named him Lore.
Reveling in my success, I wasted no time starting design and fabrication for yet another prototype, one whose systems would incorporate a few minor improvements over Lore’s. I had just started designing its brain when the other scientists at Omicron Theta started complaining that Lore had intimidated them, or threatened them. Like any father, I refused to believe them.
One of them, a quantum chemist named Kim Volonakis, became so incensed at Lore’s behavior that she cornered me in my lab one night and seized me by the collar of my lab coat. “He’s a menace, Noonien! Do something about him, now, or I will!”
I wanted to believe my scion was simply misunderstood, but eventually even I had to admit something was wrong with him. He was rich in intellect but poor in empathy; he had great ambition but no compassion with which to temper it. The more he learned, the more arrogant he became. In the end, his contempt for all of us was naked and unsettling. As much as I wante
d to keep his mind active so I could study it and try to discern what had gone wrong, Juliana demanded I shut him down and disassemble him.
For the second time in my life, I willingly betrayed the trust of one of my children, and I used a remote control padd to turn Lore off. I disassembled him with Juliana’s help, and we locked his components in a secure storage vault. As I nudged his eyelids shut, I vowed that if I ever had the opportunity and the means, I would fix him. I owed him at least that much.
Meanwhile, over Juliana’s objections I had activated Data, but only after acquiescing to the other colonists’ demand that he not be invested with human emotions as Lore was, and that his programming be modified with certain safeguards, to prevent him from turning against us. I hated neutering his psyche in this manner, but after the havoc Lore had wrought, I was in no position to argue against it. In some ways, Data reminded me of B-4. I don’t mean that as an insult; Data was obviously far more intelligent, though he suffered at first from motor-control issues and intermittent episodes of sensory-input overload. No, the similarities lay in their shared innocence. Like B-4, Data lacked a sense of shame about his body, he had no grasp of social niceties, and he didn’t consider any topic of inquiry taboo—traits that led Juliana to insist we create a “modesty subroutine” to augment his ethics and morality programming.
It was ridiculous, really. I’d envisioned Data as a fully realized synthetic sentient being, and my peers wanted him to be a passionless drone.
