DESCENT Page 6

  “Can you tell me,” he began, “why Data wanted to play poker with you?”

  “He wanted to get insight,” Einstein said. Then he shrugged and grunted.

  “He wished to observe us interacting,” Newton added. “But I know that was not all he wished for.”

  Geordi turned to him. “Why do you say that?”

  “He was searching for interaction within himself.”

  “Absurd,” Einstein said. “He was a machine with hair. A mobile navigation system for a computer. I could see it in his eyes and the way he talked.”

  Bristling at the blunt statement, Geordi turned to the heartless projection and snapped, “And I’ve heard you couldn’t do math.”

  Einstein shook his head and threw his cards to the floor. “How did that rumor begin?”

  Hawking heaved with laughter and said, “What rumors are people spreading about me?”

  Geordi frowned. “Excuse me?”

  Hawking explained. “That rumor came about because Albert took his college entrance exam in French when all he spoke was German. It’s a mark of his genius that he could pass it at all!”

  Geordi gave himself a few extra seconds to comprehend Hawking’s assisted vocalizations, then let his shoulders drop.

  “Okay, I’m sorry, Dr. Einstein. I don’t mean to insult you. We just have a problem with Data, and he’s my friend. There’s a change in him that we can’t figure out, and I’m just digging for clues.”

  Einstein clamped his lips shut behind the sagging mustache, folded his arms, and glared unforgivingly.

  Not a patient man. And not a man who cared about ordinary things.

  Geordi peered at him through the VISOR—also unforgiving in its way—and wondered how much like the real Einstein, Hawking, and Newton these replications were. Probably a lot. The holodeck was programmed against creating historical characters just any old way anybody expected them to be. Reams of material about these men had been dumped into the computer. He was probably talking to as close to the real thing as anything but a séance could get him. They gave him the willies and he suddenly felt like a first-year student again. He was sitting at a table with some of the most profound thinkers in history, three of the twenty-five smartest people who ever lived.

  That was why they weren’t interested in the poker game, why they had not asked him to play or expected him to deal. The holodeck’s information was probably right to make them this way. Men who spent all their time thinking above and beyond the capabilities of most of civilization just weren’t interested in ordinary things. They were world-class thinkers who, out of a pot of commonness, had imagined things like mass becoming infinite mass, and getting around that by using quantum fluctuations.

  Suddenly he wished he had time to talk.

  He put the padd down on his lap.

  “Can you help me?” he asked somberly. “Can you give me any idea about what Data wanted?”

  “I know what he wanted,” Newton said. “There is no mystery. You need seek no clue. The truth is all before you.”

  He was elegant, enshrouded in a sophistication of manner and bearing that mankind had let go of as history slipped away, but he had a quirkiness about him that made him very individual. Suddenly he had Geordi mesmerized just with the tone of his voice, the steady peering into the facts as they were presented to him. He was clearly unsatisfied with the void of the future.

  “If your friend is some kind of diabolical device made in the image of a man, and if he knows what he is,” the professor went on, “then he is a compendium of knowledge placed within him by others. Correct?”

  “Or by himself,” Geordi answered. “He does collect new information as it comes to him.”

  Newton nodded once. “Then he wants more than simple information.”

  From another corner of their harshly lit table, Hawking said, “Yes.”

  The words were very simple. Geordi sensed the ideas behind them certainly weren’t. These gentlemen tended to understate what he comprehended from their glances at each other. He himself came from a time when science was babbled out casually, as though everything in it was common knowledge and anybody who didn’t understand was just silly—but these men in their times had been relentlessly reaching forward, unsatisfied with what they simply saw and knew.

  And even now, in Geordi’s time, they were still reaching.

  “Ask yourself,” Einstein said, “why Data chose the three of us. Why not Michelangelo and Mozart and”—he shrugged—“Hitler? Why did he pick three scientists?”

  “Yes!” Geordi exclaimed. “If he was looking for emotion, why didn’t he pick the greatest artists of all time or the greatest orators or someone like that. Is that what you mean?”

  Einstein tightened his folded arms and just nodded—one very short, terse, very German nod.

  “Your friend can learn,” Newton said, “but he has no ability to conceive completely new thoughts. These carry me forward, above information provided. It is new thoughts that I would seek, were I Data.”

  “We went beyond our learning,” Hawking said, excitement gleaming in his eyes, right through the veil of his debilitation, and made a second light in the room.

  “All three of you took what you knew,” Geordi reminded them, “and you went beyond your programming. How did you do that?”

  “We had more than knowledge,” Hawking said. “We had intuition. We took our flashes of intuition and carried them to extremes. An android can’t do that.”

  Geordi hitched forward on his chair. “And that’s what all of you did. You put facts together with inference, combined them with deductive reasoning . . . and came up with completely new information! Thoughts that had never been thought before!”

  “That’s it!” Einstein agreed.

  “If Albert were Data,” Hawking went on, getting excited, “he never would have developed the theory of relativity, because he wouldn’t have had all the information in hand.”

  Geordi pointed at Hawking. “And you never saw a black hole, but you provided some of the best descriptions of them!”

  “And if Data had never learned about gravity from an outside source,” Hawking said, “he would never have suspected its existence. For that miracle, we needed Sir Isaac’s intuitive mind and his willingness to reach beyond what he knew.”

  Newton sighed. “Take care. I may come to appreciate myself too much.”

  They chuckled, even Einstein, who relaxed a little. But then Newton became sadly thoughtful. Suddenly he seemed to empathize with Geordi.

  “As superior as your friend is at deduction and calculation, Mr. Geordi,” he said, “the least of humanity are still better at leaps of intuition than he can ever be. The simplest of human minds can pull knowledge out of nowhere and come to a new conclusion without possessing all the facts. Not completely reliable but much more far-reaching.”

  Geordi could almost hear music behind the words. Newton spoke slowly, entrancingly. He was the farthest away on the scale of time, yet he seemed to comprehend a more distant future.

  “With a poker game,” Geordi added, “Data was trying to watch you reach far . . .”

  Sir Isaac Newton gazed into the darkness beyond the reach of the light over their heads, and Geordi noticed that somehow the revered English scientist was looking in exactly the right direction for the corridor entrance, even though it was shielded by holodeck protections.

  How could he look in the right direction?

  Newton’s eyes took on a warmth that couldn’t have been there either—but was.

  Thoughtfully he said, “I wonder what he learned.”

  “Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.”

  There were corpses everywhere.

  The Borg slammed against the wall and shuddered like a garden hose. Its muscle-enhancement system twitched through a spasm, but the tireless being got back up and plunged forward again.

  Data took the brunt of the attack full on his chest, but managed to get a grip on the cyborg’s arm module. He yanked the
Borg forward off balance, and drove his fist into its shield generator.

  The Borg slumped forward, and Data let him fall.

  Then he paused and waited.

  Nothing.

  In the middle of the science station’s wall, a portal appeared and slid open.

  Geordi strode in with a question on his lips, then swallowed the question when he saw what had been fabricated here. He almost dropped his portable readout as he stared at Data, who just stared back.

  It took Geordi a moment to figure out what was going on. Five seconds later he still wasn’t sure.

  “Data,” he began tentatively, “am I interrupting something?”

  “Yes,” Data said, “but it is all right. Do you need me?”

  Geordi handed him the padd. “Well . . . I wanted to see if you were ready to return to duty. I need some help on an analysis of the ship the Borg were using.”

  “I believe I am able to return to my duties.” Data took the portable readout, adjusted his balance with a foot on either side of the mechanical rag doll on the floor, and studied the information on the display screen.

  Meanwhile Geordi looked at the thing on the floor.

  Holodeck re-creations of Borg weren’t exactly right. There was something not quite “living” about them. The holodeck thought the Borg were robots. It didn’t understand the part that pulsed and grew hot and cold.

  Geordi could see the difference through his VISOR, but he still shivered to be so close to something like that.

  Maybe that wasn’t the only reason he was shivering.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked carefully.

  “I am attempting to re-create the experience that led to my initial burst of anger.”

  Uncomfortable, Geordi plumbed for more information. “Any luck?”

  “None so far. I have nearly completed this experiment. May I finish before we return to Engineering?”

  Data sounded as though he were looking for weeds in a garden or something. Completely ignoring the Borg replication beneath him—and that was probably the trouble he was having—he scanned the display screen.

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Geordi took the padd back and started to leave, but somehow he just couldn’t go all the way out. That would have been some kind of abandonment, he knew, and he couldn’t do it. He didn’t even get close enough to the door for the panel to sense him and open up. He turned instead and watched as Data spoke to the holodeck controls.

  “Computer, reset Borg simulation to time index two point one. Increase Borg strength by twenty percent.”

  With cold efficiency the Borg on the floor vanished and another Borg—or maybe it was the same one—reappeared across the room, alive again.

  “Run program,” Data said simply.

  The Borg thrust itself toward him, all its attack modes on, and this Borg was violent, mean. This Borg was growling! What gut-level repugnance!

  Geordi winced and cringed as the Borg drove Data in the opposite direction. Enhanced strength gave the machine-monster an advantage, and it had no hesitation about using the power it had been given.

  Data crashed shoulder first into a refrigeration unit so hard that Geordi winced for him and almost threw down the padd to go help. Geordi forced himself to remember this was a holodeck re-creation, but he knew that the notion that people couldn’t get hurt in a simulation was a bigger myth than astrology. He let himself worry, because if this went too far and Data allowed himself to be damaged just to feel that twinge of anger he sought, Geordi would have to end the program.

  Obsession was a bad, dangerous thing.

  “Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop,” Data droned, slamming it against the wall, but his face reflected efficiency, not anger. The android’s expression never varied; he did not even flinch with effort.

  He wasn’t even heated up when he straightened.

  “Computer,” he said again, “restart Borg simulation at time index two point one. Increase Borg strength by thirty percent.”

  The computer’s dull female voice responded, “Unable to comply. A thirty percent increase would exceed safety limit.”

  Data contemplated that about as long as it took for electricity to shock a fellow, then looked at Geordi. “The computer will require the voice authorizations of two senior officers in order to disable the safety routing. Will you help me?”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute!” Geordi stepped into the simulation of the outpost. He pointed at the Borg on the floor and tried to match Data’s calm. “That thing could kill you.”

  “During the original incident the Borg presented a genuine danger to my life. With the holodeck safety routine in place, I know my life is not in danger. Since I am trying to duplicate the conditions of the original incident, I must attempt to duplicate the jeopardy as well.”

  Geordi could feel himself boiling with the anger Data was looking for.

  “Data, we’re talking about an experiment. You can’t put your life on the line just to prove a theory!”

  “This experiment,” Data protested smoothly, “may hold the key to something I have sought all my life.”

  “This is crazy! There’s got to be another way. Why don’t you try to find some other way to make yourself angry—”

  “I have tried other stimuli,” Data interrupted in that soft manner of his, “but they have been unsuccessful. I understand your objections, but this is my life and I have the right to risk it if I choose.”

  Shock moved through Geordi, stabbing upward from his legs. Data sounded right—that simple manner of speech, as though truth were a given and not flexible at all.

  Was he going to increase the power of the holodeck until it crushed him if he didn’t feel an emotion?

  Pushing forward against that show of rightness, Geordi raised his voice and grabbed for Data’s arm.

  “Well, I’m your friend and I’m not going to stand by and let you—”

  “Red Alert! All hands to battle stations!”

  Once again—how many times was it now?—Commander Riker’s voice blasted through the ship, and the holodeck program automatically shut off.

  Data headed for the doorway, and Geordi had no choice but to follow.

  “It’s confirmed,” Riker ground out. “The MS One colony is definitely under attack.”

  He and the captain were hunched over the aft science station. Worf was at Tactical, both legs as straight as pipes, ready to do what he had to do, and Data was just now taking position at Ops.

  Riker glanced toward Ops and realized that Data had been off the bridge a lot since the Ohniaka incident.

  Apprehension crawled down his arms.

  Data’s being off the bridge right now didn’t make any more sense than the incident had. Data didn’t just stroll around the ship. He didn’t sleep, but for the sake of his living shipmates had always conformed to duty rotation schedules.

  So why was he just now arriving at his station? The turbolift gasped shut behind the android, and Data didn’t even glance at any of the others as he strode down the ramp and took his seat at Ops.

  “We are nearing the MS system,” he reported even before he was settling in his seat.

  Riker watched him for a few seconds, but there wasn’t a clue to what he was thinking, not a flicker of the anger they’d seen on Ohniaka, not even any lingering evidence of bewilderment in Data about his own behavior. Nothing.

  And he watched the captain, too, that unreadable presence whose personal history was a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces didn’t always seem to fit together.

  “Doesn’t it seem strange,” Picard said finally when he’d felt Riker’s gaze for long enough, “that there have been two Borg attacks . . . and the Enterprise was the nearest ship in both instances?”

  Before Riker could answer, Data said, “We are nearing the MS system, sir.”

  “I have located the Borg ship,” Worf boomed. “It is leaving the colony, heading out of the system.”

  Captain Picard straightened and turned sharply. “Bring us out of wa
rp near that ship,” he ordered.

  “Stand by to lock phasers on target,” Riker echoed.

  Behind and above them, Worf resembled a gathering of thunderclouds as he reported, “We are within visual range.”

  “On screen,” the captain said.

  The forward visual theater winked to a new picture, and there was the floating horror—the Borg ship they had sought, and had hoped never again to find.

  Beating down a shiver, Riker tried to look at the captain, but couldn’t pull his eyes away from the ship they were following. What if he looked away and death came?

  He wanted to be looking death in the face when it turned on him.

  “Lay in an intercept course,” Picard said from beside him. “Full impulse power. Lock phasers.”

  Good. They weren’t simply going to look death in the face. They were going to kick it in the face.

  “We are closing,” Worf responded. “We will be within phaser range in thirty sec—” “Captain,” Data said suddenly, “sensors detect a subspace distortion forming directly ahead of the Borg ship.”

  “They’re not going to get away this time,” the captain vowed. “Picard to Engineering. Transfer auxiliary and emergency power to the impulse engines!”

  “Acknowledged,” Geordi’s voice replied.

  An instant later Data was able to confirm the transfer—it felt like a month.

  “Impulse engines now at one hundred twenty-five percent of rated power output.”

  “Ten seconds to phaser range!” Worf said.

  The Borg ship filled the screen, a large unappealing creature of its own kind, like those who ran it. In front of it the flash of light appeared, and the rupture in space opened up again and swallowed the Borg ship.

  Riker squeezed his hands shut until his fingernails cut the skin of his palms. They had to intercept that ship, but in his gut he felt the ball of common sense that told him to turn and run, get help, and come back. Don’t face these demons alone and be destroyed like those other ships.

  But if they let the Borg go . . .

  We can’t let them go.