Myriad Universes_ Echoes And Refractions Part 33

Epilogue.

An Undisclosed Location Carda.s.sian Union/The Dominion The Founder stared in the mirror, the reflection of Skrain Dukat staring back.

Also reflected there was the other Founder still living in this quadrant, who had been disguised as General Talak.

"This is intolerable!" the other Founder said with Talak's voice. "Changelings have been killed! Access to the Dominion has been cut off, and-"

The Founder held up Dukat's hand. "Nothing has been 'cut off.' We are still in the Dominion."

"Bah." The Talak Founder began to pace the small room. "Our forces have been halved thanks to what happened at Qo'noS. Our true nature has been exposed, we have no way to reach the Great Link-and worse, three of our number are dead!"

"You have," the Dukat Founder said gently, feeling that the outburst was far more Talak than it was a member of the Great Link, "perhaps been in this form too long. Come, let us link."

Talak's face started to shimmer. "Yes! Yes, it has been far too long since I was able to share in the link." Immediately, the other Founder approached, and their arms glowed and transformed and blended.

What shall we do now? We cannot yet create more Jem'Hadar, and our forces are weak.

So are the solids. True, our own losses are greater than expected, but they're hardly crippling. The plan is as it ever was.

True. We can instruct the Vorta to have new ships built, ones that can traverse the galaxy at greater speeds. We can reach the Great Link eventually.

And this quadrant is ready to be taken. The Federation and Romulans are weak, the Carda.s.sians are ours, and the Klingons are no longer a factor. Even with reduced forces, we will have this entire quadrant under our domain within a decade.

Yes, the Dominion will prevail. My apologies, I spent so much time in the form of that Klingon, I started to become a bl.u.s.tering fool, much as he is.

There is nothing to apologize for. It is why we take on new forms, to learn and to grow.

Still-I cannot recall the last time a Founder was killed.

Yes. The Jem'Hadar first who killed the renegade has been executed. But nothing will bring our other two fellows back.

It is a dark day.

True. But dark days eventually become the next day. The Dominion has lasted a thousand years because, while we suffer defeats, we are never defeated.

Yes. Solids are finite. We are infinite. We will triumph.

Indeed. Victory is life.

The link broke, and the Founder returned to the form of Dukat. The other Founder, however, took on a human visage. "I believe," the Founder said in a voice that was still deep, but less raspy than that of the general, "that Talak should be considered a casualty of Qo'noS's sun going nova. Our cause would be far better served if I were to replace this human."

The Dukat Founder looked upon the face of Admiral William Ross and said, "I believe you are correct."

Brave New World Chris Roberson On one of our first dates, I sat my future wife down and showed her an episode of Deep s.p.a.ce Nine, a series she'd not watched before. (It was "The Visitor," for what it's worth.) When it ended, I got up to eject the tape, thinking she'd been very indulgent to sit patiently through the whole thing, and would doubtless now want to watch something else. Instead, she turned to me and said, "Do you have any more?"

We spent the rest of the weekend watching Trek, hour upon hour, and I knew then that I would marry her.

This story is dedicated to Allison Baker, my wife and Star Trek viewing companion.

Prologue.

2336 (Old Calendar) It was early morning, the sun just beginning to spill across the lowland plains. The colonists were starting their days, heading out to check atmospheric sensors or to collect astronomical data retrieved overnight by automated telescopes or to feed the live specimens in pens at the community's edge. It was a bright spring morning, greeted by the high, trilling songs of brightly colored birds, the only native life-forms larger than insects on Omicron Theta before the arrival of the research colony. Most of the colonists found it difficult not to smile when hearing the high, sweet song of the birds, who seemed a sign of new life and boundless optimism.

Most of the colonists found it difficult. Not all.

"Will those d.a.m.ned things ever shut up?!" The man threw a spanner clattering to the floor. "Maybe we should just shoot them all down and serve them for supper, eh?"

"Eat them?" The woman pursed her lips in distaste. "When the replicators can whip up anything we like?" She bent to pick up the spanner and set it back on the bench, beside the still body splayed out before them.

"Why not?" The man gave a sly, humorless smile. "We'd kill two proverbial birds with a single stone, as it were. Or a single phaser, I suppose. We'd be saved their incessant chattering, and we'd get a home-cooked meal in the bargain."

"And who'll be doing this cooking, Noonien?" She raised an eyebrow. "You?"

"Me?" He chuckled, and bent low over the body. "Juliana, my dear, if you married me for my culinary skills, I'm afraid you're getting the short end of the stick." He paused, attempting to twist off a limb from its socket. "Come on, blast you," he growled, gritting his teeth. When the limb came loose with an audible pop, the man fell off balance, sprawling back onto the cold, smooth floor.

"Are you all right?" the woman asked, coming around the side of the table. She reached out a hand, with evident concern; the man didn't take it, but gave her the detached limb instead.

"No," the man said simply, remaining on the ground, his arms resting on his knees. He shook his head, scowling. "No, Juliana, I'm most definitely not all right."

"Noonien, dear, you know we've made the right decision." With care, she put the detached limb in the case. "You know we have."

"Oh, really?" He pushed himself up onto his feet, wincing somewhat as his joints complained. "I'll tell you what I do know, my dear, and it's that this marks the fourth occasion on which we've had to deactivate and disa.s.semble one of my creations, and I'm getting more than a little tired of it."

She gave a slight, sad little smile, and came over to stand beside him. "I know this can't be easy for you." She laid a hand on his shoulder. "It isn't easy for me, either. But you and I agreed that Lore had been acting strangely recently, exhibiting emotional instability and increasing degrees of aggression."

He sighed, and placed a hand over hers. "I know, I know, it's just..."

"Just that you thought we had it this time?"

He nodded. "Yes, d.a.m.n it, I was sure we had."

"We were certainly close," she agreed.

The man laid a hand on the body's chest, the golden-hued skin cold under his fingers. "But you know, the others are going to be happy about this, I'm sure."

She smiled. "Oh, at least one person won't be quite so happy about it, I can a.s.sure you." He gave her a questioning look. "Tom Handy bet me the cost of a trip to Risa that it would take me at least another month to convince you to deactivate Lore."

He looked up from the body to meet her eyes, and grinned. "He didn't."

She nodded. "Fancy a trip to Risa?"

He walked around the bench, and began detaching another limb from its socket. "We could use the break," he answered with a sigh. "Still, I'll be eager to get back to work."

She arched an eyebrow. "A new project?"

"The same project," he corrected, "only better." He put the limb in the case, and then went back to remove the head, whose face still wore a slightly startled expression. "Next time, we'll hold off introducing emotions to the programming until we're sure the positronic matrix is solid and the behavioral programming is completely in place."

She nodded, thoughtfully. Coming to stand beside him, she took the detached head from him, cradling it in her arms like an infant. "What do you think we'll call the next one? Lore, Mark 2?"

He shook his head. "Data," he corrected. "We'll call him Data. And this one I'm sure will work."

She looked at the head in her arms, its features so much like those of her husband, but here twisted into a mask of cold cruelty. "I want to believe you're right, Noonien. I have to believe. But let's suppose you are, and that this next android...this Data...functions within normal parameters." She looked up and met his gaze. "What then?"

"Then?" The man smiled, draping an arm around her shoulders. "We'll unveil my creation to the worlds, and the sky itself will be the limit."

1.

2378 (Old Calendar) Jean-Luc Picard hissed in pain as Doctor Dalen Quaice prodded his shoulder with the tip of a finger. As the doctor hummed thoughtfully to himself, Picard managed a weary smile.

"This is all your fault, Doctor," Picard said. "You were the one who insisted I exercise, after all. If it were up to me I'd have been reading a good book with a cup of Earl Grey."

Quaice grunted like a disapproving old man, a sound at odds with his youthful appearance. "I prescribed exercise, Jean-Luc, not torture." He shook his head, reaching for his medical tricorder. "I have never understood the appeal of anbo-jytsu. After a lifetime spent treating the resulting injuries, I'm half-convinced the Federation should ban it altogether as cruel and unusual."

Tactical officer Ro Laren looked on, still wearing her workout fatigues. "It's the best all-around exercise I've found, Doctor. And it has broader applications as a martial art than something less strenuous."

"That's as may be, Commander," Quaice said, running the tricorder over Picard's shoulder and arm. "But exercise won't do him a lick of good if he breaks all his bones in the process."

Picard and his tactical officer had been sparring on the holodecks, employing anbo-jytsu techniques that Picard had learned from his former first officer, before Will Riker left to take command of the Excalibur. As usual, Ro had gotten the better of her captain, though Picard was proud at least to have put up a spirited defense this time.

"Remember, Jean-Luc," Quaice said, "you're not as young as you used to be."

Before Picard could answer, Ro let out a short, scoffing laugh. "My father always told me you're only as old as you feel," she said, her arms crossed.

Quaice smiled, and rapped his chest with his knuckles. "Well, I feel like a hundred kilos of tripolymer composites, molybdenum-cobalt alloys, and bioplast sheeting, so how old does that make me?"

"Old enough to know not to get into arguments with a Bajoran, one hopes," Picard said. As Quaice rummaged on the counter for a hypo, the captain asked, "So what is your diagnosis, Doctor?"

"A few pulled ligaments is all." He pressed the hypo against the captain's shoulder. As the mist spread into his shoulder, Picard could feel the pain and tension fading. "You should be more careful with the roughhousing, Jean-Luc."

Picard shook his head, bemused. The doctor appeared young enough to be his own son, and yet here he was lecturing Picard like a stern grandfather scolding an errant child. Still, the doctor wasn't as old as he used to be.

Ro opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the beep of of Picard's combadge. "Bridge to Picard."

"Picard here."

"Captain, it's Sito," said Enterprise's ops manager, Sito Jaxa. "Subs.p.a.ce transmission for you."

"From Starfleet Command?" The current mission of the U.S.S. EnterpriseD was to patrol the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone. An unexpected communique might well be bad news, considering the strained relations between the Federation and her neighbors, with the Carda.s.sians girded for war on one side and the tenuous Klingon-Romulan Alliance perched on the other.

"The message is encrypted according to Starfleet protocols," Sito answered, "but the source of the transmission has been hidden. It could be spoofed." She paused, and Picard fancied that he could almost hear her smile. "I can crack it open, if you like, sir, and see what's in it."

"That won't be necessary, Lieutenant," Picard answered, smiling. At times he wasn't quite sure what possessed him to promote two strong-willed Bajoran women to his senior staff, but he never regretted the decision. Both of them had more than proved their worth these past few years. "Pipe it down to sickbay, if you please."

"Aye, Captain."

A moment later, the viewscreen on the far wall blinked to life. The header information indicated that the transmission was a one-way broadcast, in essence a recording. As the message spooled up and decrypted, a Starfleet emblem filling the screen, Picard shouldered back into his uniform jacket, his right arm slightly numbed by the hypo, and went nearer to the wall.

Then the Starfleet emblem winked out, replaced by a very familiar face. Gold-irised eyes looked out from a face with the same yellowish hue shared by all early-generation Soong-type androids, before the techniques to make bioplast look and feel just like human skin were perfected.

The features were the same as those of nearly all those early Soong-types, modeled after their creator, the late Noonien Soong. Picard had never met the man, but couldn't help but imagine that this was an idealized self-image of the scientist at a younger age. Based on the holos he'd seen of Soong, bent with age, skin wrinkled, and hands gnarled, Picard found it difficult to accept that the scientist had ever been that young, smooth-featured, and tall.

This could have been any one of hundreds of early-generation androids, one of thousands even. But at first glance, Picard knew that it wasn't. There was only one android this could be.

"Data?" he said in a voice so low it was scarcely above a whisper.

"h.e.l.lo, Captain Picard," the image on the screen said, almost as if in response. "It has been some time. And now I need your help. Only you can avert a war."

Not just any android, no. This was Data, the first successful positronic android, champion of android rights, and onetime member of the Enterprise's crew. Data, whom no one on board, Picard included, had seen in years.

A short while later, the senior staff gathered in the conference lounge. Without much in the way of preamble, Picard had Lieutenant Sito replay the message in its entirety. The captain glanced around the room, watching the others as they took it in. Some of them, like First Officer Geordi La Forge and Chief Engineer Wesley Crusher, hadn't just served with Data in those early years on board the EnterpriseD, but had become quite close with him, one might almost say friends. Flight Controller Sam Lavelle, like Lieutenant Sito, had joined the crew after Data's departure, but still was well familiar with the android's reputation. And Chief Science Officer A. Isaac, who never knew Data in person, obviously had complex feelings about Data's reputation and status.

When the recording ended, Picard toggled the viewscreen to a still image of the golden-skinned android, captured from the transmission. Then he turned to face the others, elbows on the table, fingers steepled.

"Comments?"

"It is Data," Ro said, answering the question on everyone's mind. "At least, that's our best guess. The Enterprise's computers have positively identified the android in the transmission, using everything from voice print to retinal scan." Ro had joined the crew long after Data's departure, not long after the Klingon Civil War, when the House of Duras overthrew the High Council with the aid of the Romulan Star Empire. Those had been uncertain times, and Picard had been glad to have the capable young Bajoran in his crew. Later, when Worf had left the ship to take a posting on a deep s.p.a.ce station near Carda.s.sian s.p.a.ce, she'd been Picard's first choice for the post of tactical officer. She could still seem distant at times, difficult to reach, but Picard had come to rely on her suspicious nature, which served her well, including now. "It's still possible that the android in the transmission isn't Data, but it would have to be an incredibly detailed and accurate forgery to fool the ship's computer."

"For the moment we'll proceed from the a.s.sumption that it is Data," Picard said. "If it is, what do we know?"

"Well," said La Forge, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, "I can tell you what we don't know." The first officer had been, so far as Picard knew, the closest thing Data had had to a best friend, and the captain thought that Geordi was probably the hardest hit by Data's disappearance. "We don't know where he went, or what he's been doing for the last ten years."

"And not just him," put in Wesley Crusher. The boy...the man had grown up on board the Enterprise, having arrived on board shortly after Picard took command; when Crusher had graduated from Starfleet Academy he'd requested service on her himself. Picard had been proud to have him on the crew, and was prouder still years later to promote him to the head of engineering when the post became available. Even so, Picard found it difficult not to see the boy he had been when looking at the man Crusher had become. "Hundreds of other androids serving in Starfleet resigned their commissions that same day and just disappeared, same as Data."

"It was just after the androids were declared fully sentient and granted citizenship in the Federation," Sito said. Then, after a pause, she added, "With conditions and qualifications, of course."

Picard drew his lips into a tight line. It had been a hard fought battle, but the victory for android rights had been only somewhat marred by those same conditions and qualifications. Androids were no longer property, as they'd been, but if they were citizens, it was of a second-cla.s.s variety. Still, it was a step forward, and one he was sorry not to have been able to celebrate with Data, one of the prime architects of the movement in the first place.

"Yes," Picard said, thoughtfully, "and if not for Ira Graves's synaptic mapping, and the introduction of uploading into positronic brains, Data and the others might be waiting for their rights still."

He couldn't help glancing in Doctor Quaice's direction, but the doctor's normally expressive face had become unreadable.

"Yeesh," Sam Lavelle said, leaning back in his chair. "I was at the academy when uploading was first released to the public, and I swear that they should have renamed the place the Ira Graves Academy, given the amount of time my instructors spent talking about him."

"I'm not sure I like your tone, young man," said Quaice, his voice brittle. Sitting beside each other, the doctor and flight operator looked so near in age that they could have been cla.s.smates. "There are some of us who wish Graves had announced synaptic mapping just a short while earlier, if you don't mind. Just a few months and then maybe my wife wouldn't have died unnecessarily-of old age-but could have had her consciousness uploaded into a positronic brain, just as I did a few short years later."