Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [69]
I seem to be on a cross pattern away from humanity rather than toward it. What they see as simple seems difficult and incongruous to me. What I can compute and perceive without effort, they consider arduous. As time goes by I catalog more and more information, yet I move further and further from humanness because of it. The more time I spend among them, the more complicated they appear to me. Perhaps now these conditions will change. Perhaps this is what they mean by destiny.
He felt his body come to a halt and readjusted his pilot mode, letting himself slide instantly out of autolocate, and indeed found himself right where he wanted to be. The hangar deck. He stood before the door, staring through the dimness at the lettering.
SHUTTLECRAFT HANGAR DECK
AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY
A.C.E. CLEARANCE REQUIRED
INQUIRE DECK 14
OR CONTACT SECOND OFFICER
He lost track of those few seconds during which he studied those letters and their significance. All his internal alarms were ringing, telling him to track down the assistant chief engineer, but there was no time. And that would give him away. Of course, being the second officer got him off the hook fairly well too, even if his internal alarms couldn’t be programmed to know that. Information like that was rational, a matter of thought. The formalized ranking of human beings, of lifeforms of any kind, was difficult for machine thinking to absorb, and had to be handled by what Geordi liked to call Data’s subdominant hemisphere-the part of his brain that was organic, the part of his personality that let him be subjective. The part of him that Geordi insisted was no machine.
Data looked down at his left hand. He opened the fist and saw the glint of gold and brush-buffed platinum in the stylized A-shape that he himself had earned the privilege of wearing. Yet this was not his. His own was still riding safely on his chest, proclaiming the honor of his past and the degree to which humanity had opened its arms to him. He could never look at his Starfleet insignia and think of humanity as inferior to any other species; few species would accept such as him. He had known the shunning glances of prejudice before. Geordi would chide him for not realizing that significance until now, that prejudice was in itself a kind of privilege lifeforms kept among themselves.
The gold turned rosy-pink under the utility lights above the door. He felt a strange, unexpected pang in his chest as his synthetic heart pounded in reaction to the high-gear racing of his nervous system.
This insignia, this one in his palm-this was Geordi’s.
Forgive me. I know I have never done anything resembling this to you before. I would have warned you, had I expected to behave this way….
Illogical. Geordi wasn’t here. Geordi was locked in the antimatter reserve center.
Data clutched his left hand tightly around the insignia. Also illogical. He should put it down, leave it behind. There was no purpose to carrying it. But rather than leaving the insignia behind, he dismissed the thought and kept his fist tight. With the other hand he quickly tapped in his authorized-entry code and the thick tunnel-shaped doors parted for him.
The hangar deck stored a few regulation shuttlecraft and several smaller, faster ships of various styles, all hidden neatly away in their stalls, ready to be elevated to the hangar bay, one deck up, when they were called for.
Very human impatience gnawed at him. He knew very well what impatience was. But there was no alternative to the time he must spend here before he could embark on his mission.
His hand twitched. Fail-safe programming sent quavers through his biomechanical