STRANGE NEW WORLDS by Dean Wesley Smith & John J. Ordover & Paula M. Block

Author:Dean Wesley Smith & John J. Ordover & Paula M. Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1999-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

I Am Become Death

Franklin Thatcher

I sit with my back to the ruins of Starfleet Academy, watching the sun set over what, two millennia ago, was called San Francisco Bay. The salt air, the offshore breeze, the brilliance of the cloud-streamed sky, the yellow sunlight: all these drew me to this place. It had seemed just the right place to come to die.

But they had been waiting when I arrived.

Damia speaks from behind me. “Father Data?”

From the time I had first heard it, I detested the reverential term the Children of Soong had given me—detested it as much as the monument they had erected to Soong on Omicron Theta, where I and my brother, Lore, had been made. “What do you want?”

“We have summoned a ship from this timeline to rescue you. It will arrive tomorrow.”

She waits for my answer, standing behind me, silent as only an android can be. She came a thousand years to find me; she can wait another thousand for my answer.

Jaris, my keeper—my jailer—these past dozen centuries, has chosen to explore the ruins, thinking his job admirably done. I had covered my escape so well that it took him a thousand years to track me. But with time travel, he has been able to stop me, almost before I started.

The timeship had appeared with hardly a whisper, the instruments of my own small ship not even detecting its arrival. As I stepped onto the weed-crazed pavement outside the ruined academy, I had, at first, taken Damia for human. But her all-too-easy shift of emotions, her not-quite-right choice of mood, made it all too clear. For all of the achievements of the celebrated Children of Soong, emotion for them was still a matter of hardware and programming, the precise simulation of emotion—but a simulation still. Jaris’s appearance a moment later confirmed my deduction and signaled the complete failure of my bid for death. On their belts they carried pencil-thin metallic rods: weapons, prominently displayed in a misguided attempt to guarantee my compliance.

Without invitation, Damia sits down beside me to watch the sunset, her face a mask of emotion that unwittingly mocks my own feelings. Her expression is for my benefit more than hers, as if she is saying, look at me, Father Data, I have emotions just like you. But they are not just like mine.

When Doctor Soong implanted the emotion chip in me so long ago, a strange sensation had overtaken me. The remembrance of Tasha Yar and of Lal, my doomed daughter, had filled me with a hollowness that I could not understand, a discomfort that I could neither isolate nor control. Eventually I identified it as grief, and developed subroutines to master it, to numb myself to it. Then came the death of Jean-Luc Picard, my mentor and friend; then of Geordi La Forge; then Troi; then Worf. One by one, all of my friends died. New friends, too, grew old and died.

I became obsessed with the deaths of those I loved—those already gone, as well as those still living.

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