Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [54]
He watched Smith remove her helmet. She was at that moment the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
She pointed at the antennae and camera in the corner.
“They’ll register that I’m carrying out the sentence. They’re fooled by interference when I have the machines in this mode. They can’t hear us. We only have a moment to talk.”
“Why? Before what?”
She sat on the edge of the bed.
Her green eyes, unobscured by the helmet, showed her anguish.
“I’ve been doing this for years,” she said. “I’ve blanked thousands of people. But this time, I don’t know, something went wrong with me. What did you want to tell me?”
“That you’re different,” said Picard. “You see how this is an atrocity. You know the people here try to kill imagination because it comes from deep in the psyche, and they fear what’s deep in the psyche. They can’t even bear to look at it. And the more they try to keep from looking at it, the more fearful it becomes. They would sooner kill than look at it.”
Picard moved his eyes to indicate the machines in the rack beside him.
“All their science is wasted,” he said. “They’ve decoded brain waves but still know nothing about their minds. I can prove all this to you. I can show you things that imagination has done for the human race … things that no one on this planet would believe possible, and yet which came to be, because someone once imagined them and was free to tell others. I can show you, if you just stop this killing. You can come away with me to a place of total freedom. I can’t guarantee we’ll escape, but I will give us a fighting chance.”
Smith’s brow corrugated in a frown. She nodded slowly.
“It’s so strange … I’ve been hearing the opposite all my life, but what you say actually sounds right. Which means either I’m going insane, or everyone else is insane. It doesn’t really matter. I’m going to have to carry out your sentence anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no way to stop all this. Someone else would carry out the sentence if I didn’t. Even if I set you free, we’d never make it out of here alive. Never.”
“Then at least help my crew,” said Picard. “Two of them are imprisoned here. You could give them their communicators. And help my ship. The CS is trying to destroy it. Please tell me you’ll at least try.”
She put her hand on his chest, but kept her head turned away.
“I’d like to.”
Picard realized she was crying.
“I know there’s something special about you,” she said. “They don’t tell me anything about the people I do this to, but I just know …”
She took a deep shuddering breath, then stood up quickly.
“Sorry,” she said.
She put the piece of tape back on Picard’s mouth, and replaced her own helmet, hiding her eyes behind the rasters.
Then she went back to her cart, and with a quick, angry motion, flipped a red switch.
Later, Smith stopped at the doors to a computer room, dialed a personal code into a combination lock, and entered.
She took off her helmet and clipped her red hair in a tight whorl.
If you asked her right now if her name had always been Smith, she would say that it had. However, she would be wrong; it had been Smith only for the last two days. For many years before that, it had been Amoret.
When she had been captured along with Riker and Data at the ore factory, she had been taken to this building, put in a cell, and her mind had been wiped completely blank. On this planet, such blanking satisfied the legal demand for capital punishment, for the original person was indeed dead and gone. The body became a new citizen with a new identity.
This new citizen’s memory was filled, by computer, with real-life incidents from other people’s lives, all verified as true, and sanctioned by the CS. Only the names and faces in the incidents were changed to make them fit the new citizen’s new personal history.
Though the new memories weren’t really true for the new citizen, they had been true for someone, and the Rampartians had declared that these re-used memories were not fictional. They did not carry