Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [71]
“What about science?” Riker interrupted, circling the desk to the captain’s side. “Could technology eventually put these captive entities into bodies? Like Data’s?”
Picard glared at him for a moment, then pivoted to Crusher. “Doctor, what about that?”
She shifted from one elbow to the other and dubiously said, “I’ll just wave my magic wand…. In my opinion, it might be too late for them. If they’ve been in a virtual fugue state since 1995 and most even before that, they may have lost their ability to be embodied in humanoid form.”
“You mean like a blind man suddenly getting complete sight?” Picard suggested. “Something like that?”
“I mean exactly that. There are plenty of circumstances that allow current medicine to replace or restore sight, but unless the patient is very young, there are usually grave complications. If I suddenly restored Geordi’s sight with some kind of transplant or something, he’d have to completely retrain his senses. His whole body, his whole brain. His sense of visual depth would be all askew, for one. He’d be grabbing for things that were ten feet away, because he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He probably couldn’t walk with his eyes open either. Not without extensive therapy. His equilibrium would be completely thrown off. His balance would suddenly be affected by something that had never affected it before. There’ve been too many disastrous cases of restored sight. Some patients ultimately opted to have blindness reinflicted rather than continue with sight.”
“My God … seriously?”
“Far too many for me to recommend trying to hook up these whatever-they-ares to android bodies.” She lowered her voice and let empathy slip into her professional assessment. “It’d be a worse hell than they’re already going through. And, Captain, I think the only rational, moral decision,” she added, “is the one they’ve selected for themselves.”
“We’re not that sure of what they want,” Riker insisted.
Troi twisted in her chair, her face a sculpture of pure melancholy and disappointment. Her face ached with the misery she felt inside and the insult she heard from without.
“Well, you’re not,” Riker said to her. “You’re not, are you?”
“Bill … ” she choked.
He circled the desk and confronted her. “You yourself have admitted that these people could be insane and incapable-“
“Some of them, but-“
Dr. Crusher put her slim hand on his arm and actually pushed him back from where she and Troi were sitting side by side. “This life-sucking machine is violating the rights and needs of its captives.”
Riker whirled and glared down at her. “Which rights?”
“The right to normal life as they see it and the dignity of self-decision. It’s robbing them of a quality of life to such a degree that all they see left for themselves is death.”
“So we provide it, all on Deanna’s say-so?”
Troi lowered her eyelids now, and tears broke from them. “Oh, Bill,” she whispered.
But he pressed on. “How do we know their decision is rational? It may be one of plain despair or temporary depression.”
Crusher didn’t back away from his challenge, but was ready with her own. “You call three hundred years temporary?”
“On that thing’s time scale? It might be. And you don’t know and I don’t know otherwise. That thing could be a galactic utopia, for all we know. It could provide endless time to think about things and intermingle and share memories-who knows what else? Maybe Deanna’s only picking up the wishes of a handful of new arrivals who don’t know what