Star Trek: The Next Generation - 112 - Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory by David Mack

Author:David Mack [Mack, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781451650723
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2012-10-30T07:00:00+00:00

15

I’m a day’s travel away from Orion and clear of any threat from the sprawling war zone known colloquially as the Alpha Quadrant. Shakti is compiling the latest updates from the resort so I can go to work the moment we arrive, and I’m passing my time trying to imagine how to stabilize a positronic brain inside a holographic matrix. To fill the empty spaces in my thoughts, I’m listening to a recording of Igor Stravinsky’s suite from The Firebird. Archeus’s narrow confines roar with the thunderous beauty of the classic Russian ballet, which fuses the myth of a bird of fire that’s both a blessing and a curse to those who dare to possess it, and the folk legend of Koschei the Deathless, a man who cheats death only to pay dearly in the end for his hubris.

Doing things the hard way has never been my first choice, though I’ve never let difficulty dissuade me from pursuing an idea. Naturally, my first step in attempting to duplicate Vaslovik’s holotronic technology was to try to steal it remotely from the computers of the Daystrom Institute Annex on Galor IV, using a number of custom-built, self-replicating viral programs that I uploaded to their mainframe via the Federation’s comnet. To my dismay, Vaslovik had wiped the Annex’s computers of all information related to his new android. There was literally nothing left for me to steal. So, I started from tabula rasa, with just the idea itself to guide me.

One week later, that’s still all I have. That and a festering resentment of Vaslovik.

I suppose I should be grateful. I’ve spent the past few days alternately giddy for Data and stewing with jealousy toward my old mentor. Mostly the latter, actually. I’ve hardly had time to be depressed about Juliana, though I continue to be haunted by endless hypothetical situations I can never test: What if I hadn’t programmed her biofeedback circuit so well? What if I had told her the truth of what she was twenty-six years ago, when I first activated her? What if I had thought to make two copies of her mind and keep one safe, in case of something like this?

Empty queries such as these are ridiculous, a cruel waste of my time, yet they consume ever-increasing blocks of my neural network. Why can’t I break free of this pattern? It always seemed so simple to tell other people to “let go” or “move on” or “get back to living,” but now that I’m the one with a huge hole in my life where Juliana used to be, I see it’s not so easy.

Shakti lowers the volume on the music to give me a routine update. “Noonien? Orion’s space-traffic control network has sent us an automated hail. They’re asking for our approach vector and final destination. Shall I reply with our flight plan?”

I’m about to approve her suggestion when an infinitesimal anomaly in my neural net arrests my every thought. It’s a flash of action in my quantum

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