by David Mack
Our waiter arrives and sets our entrees in front of us. Prak is feasting this evening on soft-shelled Kytherian crabs and a side of pickled seaweed. I’ve ordered the filet mignon, medium rare, with roasted root vegetables. The momentary interruption is a godsend, in that it gives me a chance to steer our discussion back to the reason I arranged this meeting. As soon as the waiter steps away, I smile and look Prak in his beady, red-ringed eyes. “So. The casino.”
“Must we talk business right this second? Our dinners will get cold.”
I slice into the tip of my filet to check the color. As one would expect from the chefs of the most opulent and acclaimed luxury hotel on Risa, it’s perfect. “Talk between bites,” I tell Prak, just before taking my first bite of steak. Its salty, savory decadence is just as satisfying to my artificial palate as it once was to my human taste buds.
“Well, as I said, it’s a franchise.” He swallows and washes down his latest mouthful with a swig of Slug-O Cola while I do my best not to wince. “The biggest casino chain on Ferenginar. Our patented probability algorithms make ours the most profitable gaming houses in the galaxy.”
It sounds promising, but I’m not sold yet. “How profitable?”
He bites a ragged crescent through another struggling crustacean, ending its suffering. Between wet chomps, he splutters out, “Quarterly? Eleven percent, guaranteed!”
That’s not bad, but it’s not enough for my purposes. Fortunately, I’m sure I can improve on the Ferengi’s overhyped algorithms, and I have my own plans for increasing revenues. “Sounds good. How soon can we set up the deal?”
He sleeves wet flecks of shell and crab from his chin, leaving a greasy smear down the arm of his jacket. “Depends on the details. How many locations? And where will they be?”
“Just one location. The Orion homeworld, in the capital.”
I recognize the look in Prak’s eyes. It’s one I used to see from my colleagues throughout my years at the Daystrom Institute. He thinks I’m out of my mind.
Prak shakes his head—slowly at first, then with increasingly vigorous denial. “No. No, that’s absurd. We’ve wanted to open there for decades. The numbers never work out.”
“They will for me. I own the property it’ll sit on.”
He waves off my argument. “Doesn’t matter. The taxes on Orion gaming houses—”
“Don’t apply inside foreign embassies.”
I admit to deriving a perverse degree of satisfaction from watching Prak process that revelation. “That’s pretty clever for a hew-mon with such small lobes. I’ll have to remember that trick.” He leans across the table, bares a sawtooth grin of avarice, and lowers his voice. “Just out of curiosity: Whose embassy do you plan to work from?”
“The Nalori Republic’s.”
My poor Ferengi guest looks baffled. “But the Nalori and Orions hate each other.”
“All the more reason they need good diplomatic channels.” Which is exactly what I told high-ranking officials from both powers—shortly after I’d used a shell corporation to purchase sixteen square blocks inside the Orions’ capital, demolished the lot’s existing structures, and erected a walled compound of high-rise towers. Once the Orions invited the Nalori to send an ambassador to their capital for the first time in nearly a century (thanks in no small part to some financial incentives I offered), I persuaded the Nalori Republic to sign a dirt-cheap hundred-year lease for a spacious, high-security residence on my property, in exchange for putting the entire compound under its diplomatic protection and authority, while leaving its administration to me. In exchange for a cut of the casino’s profits, naturally.
Prak’s eyes narrow to slits. He must sense profit is in the offing. “What percentage of the compound’s floor space will be devoted to casino operations?”
“Sixty-eight percent of fifteen high-rise towers, with the other thirty-two percent for the hotel, dining, and entertainment spaces. At an average height of a hundred floors per tower, we’d be talking about 707.2 million square meters of casino floor space, operating around the clock, every day of the year. Most of our games would be designed for winners’ payouts at ratios of five-to-one—but the players would already be laying eleven-to-one.”
Prak takes a minute to cogitate. He grinds another crab into paste with his teeth while the figurative gears inside his head crunch the numbers implicit in my proposal. “Tempting. Very tempting. But risky. The Orion Syndicate will try to shut you down.”
“Let them try. With your support, fifty percent of my start-up capital and all my gaming equipment would be provided by Prak-Tikal Games Incorporated, and my security would be provided for free by the Nalori Commandos. As for food and other commodities, let’s just say I have my own supply network and leave it at that. It’s a sound business model.”
He still seems resistant. “You’d face a lot of competition on the Orion homeworld.”
“Imagine you’re a traveling businessman from the Federation,” I tell him, in my best fairy-tale storyteller’s voice. “You’ve come a long way to Orion. Maybe you love it there, maybe you hate it, but either way you’re tired after a hard day of haggling with the merchant princes. You could go back to your ship, but if you’re like most tourists on Orion, you want to catch a show. See some dancing girls, play a few games of chance, have a rich meal. But you’ve heard the Orions’ gaming houses and red-light districts are dangerous. Is it really worth the risk? But, wait! There’s another option! A professionally run gambling mecca in the heart of the Orion capital! An endless variety of games and entertainments and restaurants to suit every taste. Best of all, this cornucopia of entertainment is safe and clean. . . . Where are you going to take your crew—who might also be your family—for a night on the town?”
I can’t say whether my spiel has swayed Prak, or if he’s just tired of hearing someone talk as much as he usually does. “All right, we’ll back you, but we’ll need time to pull it all together. You’ve just described the largest single gaming house in the quadrant. It might take up to a year to get that much equipment together, not to mention the security systems.”
“That’s fine. I need another eight months to finish building and furnishing the towers. But don’t worry about the security system for the casino. I’ll be using one of my own design.”
“Suit yourself. But there’s one more thing: for a risky venture like this, I won’t guarantee an eleven-percent profit margin. At best, I’ll guarantee nine percent.”
“In that case, I need my franchise fee reduced to six percent per annum.”
“Seven.”
“Six-point-five, or I’ll take this offer to your old friend Venk.”
Hearing me invoke the name of his rival puts a bitter scowl on Prak’s already prune-like face. “Fine, six-point-five. I’d swear you were part Ferengi if your lobes weren’t so small.”
I raise my glass in a mock toast. “I’ll assume you meant that as a compliment.” I savor another taste of my wine and put down the glass. “How soon can I expect the contracts?”
He takes a small portable comm from his coat pocket and starts tapping its touchscreen. “I’ll have my assistant make the amendments now. You’ll have the revised deal before dessert.”
“Splendid.” I pick up my fork and knife to carve off another bite of my filet, only to be interrupted by the soft electronic chirping of my own comm device. “Excuse me.” I tap the screen and accept the incoming signal from Shakti, who I know I can trust to remain in character as my assistant and adhere to our current noms de voyage. “Yes, Bree, what is it?”
“Sorry to interrupt your dinner, Mister Miller, but there’s breaking news you need to see.” The screen of my comm switches to a live report from the Federation News Service. For the sake of discretion, Shakti has taken the precaution of muting the vid’s audio, and with good reason. I’m looking at a stunning vista of scorched earth and wreckage, a smoldering scar cut across the surface of some barren world, a geological wound leading to the battered
remains of a Galaxy-class starship’s saucer half-buried in a hillside. The banner headline across the lower third of the image: USS ENTERPRISE CRASHES ON VERIDIAN III.
Suddenly my brilliant business deal means nothing. All I can think about is Data.
“Thank you, Bree.” I switch off the comm, push back my chair, and stand, then shoot Prak my most apologetic look. “Forgive me, but I need to attend to an urgent matter of business. I’m sure you understand.”
“Profit waits for no one.” He waves me away. “Go, already. Time is money.”
“Thank you. Don’t forget to send the contract.”
I leave the restaurant in haste, fighting the urge to sprint across the lobby to the lifts, even though that would make a spectacle of me—an error I can ill afford right now, or ever. The lift takes forever to arrive, leaving me to stare at the reflection of my latest disguise on the lift doors’ mirror-perfect exteriors. My close-cropped gray-white beard looks like a natural extension of my snowy tonsure and sideburns. I’m wearing the visage of a man in late middle age, pale and wrinkled with dark gray eyebrows in need of a trim. Even my eyes are a steely gray. If not for my midnight-blue suit and smartly patterned gold-and-crimson tie, I’d be all but colorless.
The lift doors open, and I hurry inside. Its AI intones, “Floor, please.”
“Sixty-three.” The doors close, and I shut my eyes for the ride upstairs.
• • •
Four hours later, I’ve used every trick I know and exploited every back-door code I have into Starfleet’s communications, yet I don’t know much more than I did while I was sitting in the restaurant, looking at silent video of the Enterprise’s devastated saucer. It’s as if someone on the Enterprise, or at Starfleet Command, is going out of their way to bury the details of whatever happened at Veridian III. All I’ve found so far are vague reports of a madman named Soran, who Starfleet calls a terrorist who unleashed “antistellar munitions” inside Federation space, though I’ll be damned if I can find any explanation of who he was or what he hoped to accomplish.
I try searching for any new log entries by Data, but there are none. In fact, there are no new logs on file from any of the Enterprise’s crew. Apparently, whatever logs are stored inside the ship’s main computer will be retrieved manually after the computer core is transported home to Utopia Planitia for forensic analysis. This strikes me as odd, too. If the core is intact, why not recover the logs on-site? I have to conclude that whatever really happened out there, it’s something so top-secret that Starfleet doesn’t want to risk transmitting its details via subspace.
I’d call them paranoid if I weren’t tapped into their network.
The only information I’ve found so far—other than the pabulum Starfleet Command is feeding to the press, which laps up the spin-doctored official statements like a hungry dog begging scraps—is an after-action report filed by Captain Jean-Luc Picard. He notes that a crew of rogue Klingons abducted his chief engineer and hacked the man’s VISOR, enabling them to acquire intelligence that they used to compromise his ship’s defenses.
If I were still organic, this would make me sick. An obsolete bird-of-prey shot down one of the Federation’s most advanced starships. It would be funny if it weren’t such a disgrace.
I forget about that. All I want to know right now is whether my boy is alive. His name’s not on Picard’s roster of verified fatalities, and he’s not one of the crew’s four MIA personnel. Reassured, I skim the rest of Picard’s report and stop when I find mention of Data. To my relief, he is apparently unhurt, but this sentence troubles me: “However, Lieutenant Commander Data’s behavior since installing his repaired emotion chip has been unpredictable.”
It catches me by surprise, so I reread it three more times until it sinks in. Data repaired his emotion chip on his own. I breeze through the rest of the report and discover he had help from his friend La Forge, but that doesn’t diminish the greater aspect of Data’s accomplishment: he repaired his emotion chip without my help. I had no idea he’d come so far. Sure, he unlocked his dreaming subroutine on his own, but that was pretty much an accident, a real-life bolt from the blue. But this is different. If he can do work of this caliber and complexity, he’s already decades ahead of where I was at his age.
After I get done basking in my pride over my son, I dredge up another enlightening tidbit: a salvage and cargo manifest prepared by the Starfleet Corps of Engineers team sent to recover the Enterprise’s wreckage. It’s a full inventory of matériel and personal effects retrieved from the saucer, packed up, and sent back to Utopia Planitia. It’s cross-indexed by property type and owner, so I skim all the cargo attributed to Data. Salvaged intact from his quarters are a handful of paintings; a Lorcan wisdom mask; my first three failed prototype androids, which Data recovered from Omicron Theta after Juliana told him where to find them; the body of Data’s own failed experiment, the daughter he named Lal; and all of Lore’s components . . . except one. The vault in which Lore’s brain had been stored self-destructed automatically when it was compromised by bulkhead damage. Lore’s positronic matrix was reduced to vapor.
I thought I’d already grieved for Lore, hardened my soul to his loss, but this news still fills me with sadness. As irrational a desire as it might be, I think part of me had secretly wished that one day I might still repair Lore’s damaged mind. Maybe I could have fixed him, maybe not. Now I’ll never have the chance to find out. There’s nothing left of him to fix.
Picard seems uncertain whether Data will leave his emotion chip activated. For my son’s sake, I hope he does. He’s lived a good life so far with only the pure emotions of a machine to drive him. Yes, you read that correctly. It was always a bit of an exaggeration to say that Data had no emotions. He had to have some kind of emotions, or else he never would have done anything except what he was told—and what damn use would he be then? What he’d lacked were human emotions, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, in hindsight. Curiosity, loyalty, a need to be useful, a desire to live in harmony with other beings—those are all emotions. I mean, what is an emotion, really? It’s a motive. A reason to act. Data has plenty of those: a sense of duty; an innate desire to acquire and accurately share knowledge; a drive to improve himself.
With just those emotions, he’s made me proud (despite his insistence on remaining in Starfleet, a decision I continue to find disappointing, no matter how hard I try to accept it). But when I think of the broader vision of the universe he could possess with a wider range of emotions, I dare to hope. He’s been a good and just person with only his ethics and morality programming to guide him; how wondrous a being could he become if he had true empathy? I think he, and the rest of the universe, deserve to find out.
The official news isn’t good for much, in my opinion, but at least it tells me now that all the members of the Enterprise’s crew are on extended leave pending new assignments. Two overstyled talking heads—a male human and a female Trill—smile obsequiously at each other and trade rumors. “Anonymous sources inside Starfleet Command have hinted that one of its new Sovereign-class starships might be renamed in honor of the Enterprise,” he says.
“There’s no official confirmation on that from President Zife’s office,” she says with a twinkle that makes me want to punch her, “but one high-ranking member of the Federation Security Council assures me that the rewrite of the new Starfleet appropriations bill announced this afternoon might not be a coincidence, after all.”
Rather than vent my rage by destroying a useful piece of equipment, I turn off my hotel room’s vid panel and resolve to get some sleep. It’s been months since I let myself have an hour off to dream. I adjust the privacy setting at my door to DO NOT DISTURB and settle in for a long-overdue plunge into the arms of Oneiros. I hope to dream of my son—and I hope that wherever he is and whenever he next lays his head down to rest, he might continue to dream of me.
NOVEMBER
2372
13
“Mister Miller? Prin
ce Xifal and Chairman Molob are here for their scheduled appointment.”
I thumb open the reply channel of my intercom. “Thank you, Laryn. Send them in.”
Courtesy dictates I should stand and emerge from behind my executive desk to greet these distinguished visitors. I recline my chair and steeple my fingers as the door opens.
The two forty-something Orion men step through the doorway into my office, and they squint against the harsh glare of the morning sun, which streams in over my head, through the window at my back. While my guests’ eyes struggle to adjust, I size them up.
Prince Xifal has the lean and polished look of modern royalty, born to the spectacle of endless media scrutiny. He’s lean and toned, more by athletics than by combat from the look of him. His skin is a bright shade of emerald; his short black hair has been styled into a slick crown. I admire his taste in clothes: robes of Tholian silk in hues of cerulean and charcoal, with accents of purple, and hand-tailored soft leather boots that hug his calves. Everything about him marks him as a man of wealth and status—in particular, his hard stare of haughty contempt.
That intimidating gaze is all he has in common with the man beside him. Where Xifal seems to glide into the room, Chairman Molob lumbers, a prisoner of his own fearsome mass. Molob is a hulking, dark-green brute with a shaved head and a bespoke suit. His raiment is no less custom-made than the prince’s, but he has dressed to emulate the fashions of the Federation and, to a lesser degree, the Ferengi, eschewing his people’s traditional garb. Even though he is careful to stay half a step behind the prince as they approach my desk, I can tell he is unaccustomed to showing such deference. In fact, his secondary status here seems to rankle him.
