ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

by Michael A. Martin

  You mean unless Data completely removed his program from B-4’s body.

  Yes. This stunned the entire team. As for me, all the grief I’d been stuffing down for nearly six years just came erupting straight to the surface. It’s pretty hard to describe the disappointment we all felt. We were crushed. After all that work, all those dead ends and blind alleys, we’d finally succeeded. And Data’s first act after rising from the cybernetic grave was to try to throw away the new lease on life we’d given him.

  Was he really throwing his life away, Captain? Or was he just making another noble sacrifice?

  Noble sacrifice. That concept must have run in Data’s family—putting his “brother” Lore to one side, of course, along with his “grandpa,” Ira Graves. Anyway, I knew I had some time to prevent what Data was trying to do. He needed at least a few minutes to write the subroutine that would remove his matrix from B-4’s head. Maybe even an hour or more, so he could craft a deletion program that would be failsafe, erasing every trace of Data while leaving all of B-4’s unique files and memory engrams undisturbed.

  I know there had to be more to this than Data proverbially slashing his wrists, but did he really need that much time to write this sort of program? I thought he was capable of performing, I don’t know, trillions of operations per second. Shouldn’t he have been able to deactivate himself almost instantly?

  Normally, that would be true. But Data was trying to perform an extremely delicate positronic brain-surgery procedure. He was looking out for B-4’s well-being. And the fact that his matrix was still confined to a relatively small portion of B-4’s positronic brain was working in our favor. Remember, B-4’s cerebral hardware was less sophisticated than that of the original Data’s brain, so the Soong team had to compensate for that on the firmware and software level. And there’s also the fact that the matrix of Data’s consciousness hadn’t yet had time to fully spread out and establish permanent control over B-4’s brain and body. All of that meant that Data only had access to a fraction of the resources he normally had available to him. Think of him as running in “slow mode.”

  So I asked B-4 to speak to Data, to try to convince him to continue our conversation. At the very least, I hoped that if I could just keep Data talking, I’d have a shot at convincing him that Starfleet and the Federation really did need him. That the human race that he had always tried to emulate needed him, maybe for its very survival.

  Because of the gathering threat posed by the Undine.

  It was a valid enough reason, even if it wasn’t generally known at the time for reasons of Federation security. Back then, those of us with a high enough clearance to have been briefed about the Undine already knew how dangerous they were. Of course, I would have said anything to convince Data not to… decompile himself. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that, but I’m not.

  So my next step was to gather every classified report about the Undine threat I could access and upload them into B-4 for integration with his existing memory engrams. I asked him to share those files with Data, who I hoped would finally understand the urgency of the situation in the outside world, and look at the bigger picture beyond the limitations created by his hardwired ethical constraints.

  That was an extremely weird afternoon, even for veteran members of the Soong team. Whenever B-4 would have what you’ve described as an “internal conversation” with Data—bringing him the team’s arguments in favor of his taking over B-4’s body—B-4 would apparently vanish from the android body the same way Data had disappeared. B-4 would go rigid in the chair, and his eyes would go completely glassy. Vacant, like a mannequin, with nobody behind the wheel. Whatever was going on inside that android body was confined entirely to the deep recesses of its positronic brain.

  Several of us stood around or sat nearby, anxiously watching B-4’s motionless, lifeless-looking body. Doctor Kasdan compared it to sitting shiva with a corpse. I felt like a Klingon performing the ak’voh ritual for a slain warrior, keeping B-4’s body safe from predators while his soul made the journey to the afterlife. When we all sat in a circle around the apparently dead android body, I thought of it almost as a kind of cybernetic séance, as though we were trying to conjure one or the other of the two personalities back by sheer force of will.

  Your later attempts to persuade Data must have worked better than the first.

  Not right away, they didn’t. Maybe if Data were already up and running on all cylinders, I could have gotten through to him—made him see the absolute necessity of his being flexible.

  Flexible with regard to his ethical subroutine, you mean. And B-4’s life.

  To most people, the stars may look white and space might look black. But I learned a long time ago that the dominant color in the universe is gray, no matter what other wavelengths my optical implants might contribute to the discussion.

  Ironically, the limited computational resources Data had at his disposal then were also making his ethical subroutine less flexible than I’d seen it since the time Lore took over his mind. There was simply no way anybody was going to convince him to accept that B-4’s death was a necessary evil, no matter how many classified reports about imminent danger I had B-4 lob at him. The Federation could sustain casualties in the millions or higher if Data were not around to help us prevent them. But he was caught in an ethical trap that no amount of logic or persuasion could break. I had no way of knowing if Data had even read the material I’d sent him, since he was still refusing to talk to us. B-4 told us that Data didn’t want to discuss it anymore, and that he wasn’t even talking to him all that much. All Data seemed to be interested in was completing and running the new subroutine he was working on.

  The subroutine that would erase himself from B-4’s brain forever.

  His suicide capsule, so to speak. Leave it to Data to find a way to be totally right and totally wrong, all at the same time. I didn’t agree with his decision, but I suppose I had to respect it for its purity, no matter how wrongheaded I might have thought it was. It wasn’t that I wanted B-4 to die, you understand. But as the Vulcans say, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

  Right?

  Regardless, I knew I had to put aside my own selfish agenda, no matter how nicely it might dovetail with the priorities of Starfleet and the Federation Council. So I started to make my peace with losing Data. Again.

  But that’s not what happened.

  No. What happened next was completely unexpected. Nobody saw it coming. Not even Data, who’d been working so single-mindedly on making his own final exit. It never occurred to any of us that B-4 might have been reading all the documents he’d been passing along to Data, much less understanding them. Just as it never occurred to us that he knew more about Data’s “suicide subroutine” than we had given him credit for.

  Tell me.

  Well, B-4 returned while there was very little time left on the clock. We were still in the midst of our “cybernetic séance,” waiting and hoping for Data to announce that he’d had a last-picosecond change of heart.

  What we got instead was B-4 reporting that he had made sure Data had received all the documents I had sent. It hadn’t made any difference, though; Data had not only not changed his mind about leaving us, he had also just finished writing his erasure subroutine.

  Now he was getting ready to actually use it.

  We had one small ray of hope, though, despite all the gloom. B-4 might not have succeeded in changing Data’s mind about ending his life, but at least he’d managed to convince Data to speak to me one last time. As a friend.

  To say good-bye.

  Yeah. He said good-bye to each of us, one by one. He spoke to me last, and I made a final attempt to talk him out of what he was about to do.

  “I am sorry, Geordi,” he said. “But I cannot reclaim my life at the direct expense of another being’s life.”

  Then he said a last good-bye, and his yellow eyes turned glassy and vacant for a moment as he “went inside” for th
e last time.

  Then his eyes brightened. Once again, somebody was home.

  “Hello, B-4,” I said.

  He looked puzzled, an expression I’d seen on B-4’s face any number of times before. And that’s when B-4 surprised me for the second time that day—because he wasn’t B-4.

  Had something gone wrong with Data’s “suicide subroutine”?

  That was the first thing Data and I checked, but it was still in place. In fact, it had run once already, flawlessly.

  It looks as though Data must have underestimated B-4 as much as the research team had.

  It didn’t take us long to figure out what must have happened. B-4 had evidently read all the documents he’d been delivering to Data, so he knew all about the Undine threat—and how important Data was likely to be in dealing with it.

  B-4 must also have been paying a lot closer attention to Data’s “suicide program” than any of you realized.

  Like I said, everyone underestimated him. While the research teams were studying him all those years, he must have been studying them right back. And that enabled him to figure out how to edit and activate the erasure program, since Data’s internal logs clearly showed that B-4 had detached it from Data’s personality matrix and attached it to his own instead. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to cover his tracks by making the program delete itself after he’d run it. But I suppose saying that is like watching a dog play the violin and then quibbling about his intonation. Anyway, B-4 had run the entire subroutine sequence all the way through to the end before anyone realized what had just happened.

  B-4 hijacked Data’s “suicide capsule” and swallowed it himself—for “the needs of the many.”

  In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? B-4 had Data’s complete service record at his disposal, so he knew what kind of man his brother was. He knew all about Data’s sacrifice at the Bassen Rift. Then, suddenly, he was face-to-face with his brother, cybernetically speaking; he could sense Data’s anguish, along with the hope and disappointment and grief of the entire research team. Even if he didn’t completely understand the emotions involved, he knew he had to do something to help resolve them. B-4 knew that his brother didn’t want to die again. But he saw that Data was willing to do it anyway rather than take responsibility for causing another being’s death.

  So he resolved the problem by relieving his brother of that responsibility.

  B-4 came up with the one solution that only he could supply.

  I suppose that makes this story less about Data’s return from the dead and more about B-4’s sacrifice.

  Of the two brothers, Data was destined to be the one who would go on to deal directly with the Undine in ways that no one else could. But that wouldn’t have been possible without B-4’s sacrifice. That’s why I want his story to be told. I know that a lot of good people died driving the Undine back into fluidic space. And those people deserve to be remembered.

  But I don’t want B-4 to be forgotten either. I don’t want him to be just another nameless nonentity lost to the chaos of the war.

  How did Data take B-4’s death?

  Better than I did, frankly, but that shouldn’t really be a surprise. Remember, Data didn’t have his emotion chip installed at that time. If he had, I might have been seriously worried about the fact that his “suicide subroutine” was still in place.

  You think he might have… followed in B-4’s footsteps if he’d allowed himself to be overcome by grief? Thrown himself onto B-4’s funeral pyre, as it were?

  I wasn’t worried about that at the time B-4 died. Data regretted B-4’s death, but he wasn’t overwrought with emotion because his chip wasn’t in place. He was dispassionate, but not uncaring. He could see that his circumstances had changed, and that there was no reason now not to see his new lease on life as anything other than what it really was—a gift from his late brother.

  But Doctor Kasdan, the Soong Foundation’s counselor, worried that Data might enter a “delayed grieving phase” later on, when the team was finishing the upgrades we were doing on Data’s emotion chip and getting ready to install it.

  And did anything like that happen?

  Probably the hardest part of having emotions is learning how to cope with them. Ask any Vulcan—or any android who’s had years of practice integrating cybernetically generated feelings into his daily existence.

  Now, I’m not going to presume to speak for Data about his personal, subjective emotional experiences. All I can say is this: I think grief must be just as rough on him as it is on any of the rest of us. That might have been true even long before he had the emotion chip, back when Tasha Yar* died on Vagra II.

  Did Data ever discuss his feelings about B-4’s death with you after his emotion chip was reinstalled?

  He did, but I’d prefer to keep most of that to myself. But Data did say something to me that kept me from worrying too much about his grieving process.

  Please, go on.

  Data told me what B-4’s last words had been. Actually, it was more like a note he’d left attached to Data’s “suicide subroutine” than a last utterance from his deathbed. Apparently, B-4 had been paying attention to more than just our official files, service records, and programming techniques. He’d evidently begun making a serious study of the human sense of humor. And he must have been concerned about the possibility that Data still might use the “suicide subroutine” to erase himself.

  What were B-4’s last words?

  According to Data, B-4 said, “I love you, brother.”

  Wow. According to Data’s mission records, “I love you, brother,” was exactly what Lore said at the moment Data deactivated him.

  It was. Of course, B-4 wasn’t anything like Lore. Because right after he said that—right before he disappeared into whatever afterlife androids have to look forward to—he gave Data a quote from an ancient Earth actor*: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

  We both pause for a good laugh, which seems to exorcise whatever old ghosts La Forge’s sometimes difficult reminiscences may have disturbed.

  That must have been B-4’s way of encouraging Data to take full advantage of his second chance at life.

  As well as his way of encouraging Data to keep trying to become more fully human.

  Since this has become B-4’s story more than it is yours or even Data’s, do you mind if I ask you to talk a little bit more about B-4?

  Go right ahead.

  You said a while ago that you had copied out the entire contents of B-4’s head into one of the Soong Foundation’s holographic imaging computers.

  That’s right. Once the team was satisfied that Data was restored—albeit in B-4’s body—Data and I took a look at B-4’s backups. At Data’s insistence, the research team started investigating the possibility of unlocking a “B-4 matrix.” We started looking for a way to resurrect B-4’s consciousness and personality using duplicate information—just as we had done to recover Data.

  But there was no body for B-4 to inhabit, other than the one that Data was using. If you had succeeded, wouldn’t Data have had to surrender that body to its original owner?

  We had scanned that body down to the Planck level. I was pretty confident we’d be able to create a holographic replica of both B-4’s body and his positronic neural nets. And I was equally confident that B-4 wouldn’t mind being confined to the holodeck for the duration of the Undine War. After all, he’d stepped aside to give Data the use of his body for the very purpose of fighting that war.

  But that’s all moot now, of course. The Soong people stopped devoting any serious effort to the problem of bringing back B-4 pretty soon after that.

  Please forgive me for saying this, Captain, but you sound bitter about it.

  That’s because I am goddamned bitter about it. And not just because of the way the Soong people decided to ignore B-4’s dilemma. The Daystrom Institute, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and all of Starfleet’s other technical branches reacted the same way the Soong pe
ople did.

  The consensus, evidently, is that it’s a waste of time and resources to try to rescue B-4. Maybe it would be different if Starfleet could see some utility in B-4. If they thought they’d be getting another Data in exchange for restoring him. But all they ever saw when they looked at B-4 was a simpleton. A low-level intellect barely fit to push a broom.

  A profound sadness sweeps over me. Even though I’ve never met B-4, after this interview I know I will never again be able to think of him as “simple.” Following our conversation, B-4 will be forever linked in my mind to some of the bravest souls ever to appear in my homeworld’s literary canon: He was Lennie from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men—if Lennie had had the perspicacity and the courage to shoot himself before the angry mob could reach him. He was Sydney Carton, bound for the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay, determined to shield his beloved Lucie Manette from heartbreak in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

  This story begs the obvious question, Captain, even if it’s one you can’t answer right now: Whither B-4?

  Well, these days I obviously can’t devote as much time as I’d like to B-4’s… problem. But I’m not going to let him languish forever as nothing more than patterns of archived information—no matter how busy my new job as the Challenger’s captain might keep me. I know that Data and Captain Maddox feel the same way. So we’ll keep at it, however long it may take, until we find a way to bring him back.

  I think it’s the least we can do for one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Undine War.