Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [56]
Then, like a leviathan rising up from unplumbed waters, a plan surfaced in her mind. It would be considered a high crime, of course, if she were caught.
Luckily for her, Bussard had left his door open. She took Picard’s disk in and latched the door.
On Bussard’s desk was a disk drive hooked up to a video screen and keyboard. Bussard had left it powered up.
Not like him, thought Smith, to be so scatter-brained.
The drive was used for manual searches of disks, in cases where the main computer couldn’t find something. This manual system actually imaged the deceased person’s memories on the screen. A bank of switches marked “enable” and “disable” was used to censor out all material of imagination so that the operator would not risk self-infection while searching for facts.
Neither Bussard nor any other trusted CS employees who had this job would operate the system in fully open mode. That would be like deliberately driving a car off a cliff. Rather, they would selectively disengage various of the filters, letting needed facts through, and if by error some material of imagination was viewed, immediate mind-cleanse would be used to remove it. Bussard had a small mental hygiene unit on his desk for such contingencies. It looked like an electric toothbrush with an electrode where the bristles would be.
One by one, Smith toggled all the switches to the “disable” position. A red warning light flashed: System Fully Open.
She locked the disk on the drive and typed a command. Images began to form on the screen.
Late into the night she sat there, exploring areas of Picard’s memory. On the video screen she saw incidents from Picard’s public life as a Starship captain, and images of his private thoughts as a quirky, creative man. She saw experiences she had never imagined and imagination she had never experienced; outlandish aliens Picard had met and incredible stories he had read.
As she watched she began to accept that the universe was teeming with intelligent life. It didn’t matter that Rampart science had told her the opposite.
She watched without condemning anything as impossible. She just let the images unfold. They clicked; they felt more right than anything she had experienced in her gimcrack-plastic life as Marjorie Smith.
She saw how Picard handled a double of himself. She watched Picard’s response to a supertyrant failed-god named Q. She experienced with Picard an encounter with vicious little rat-men for whom profit was everything. She saw through Picard’s eyes intelligent life that looked like a grain of sand, a lizard-man, a pool of black tar, a moving ball of light. She saw two colossal jellyfish creatures embracing in connubial bliss. She saw a Dali painting called “A chemist lifting with extreme precaution the cuticle of a grand piano.” She saw the holodeck image of Sherlock Holmes and Picard’s own mental images as he read The Tempest and The Mahabharata.
She saw images of Picard’s most private, creative musings, and unspoken jokes. She noticed that he had a great deal of affection for his crew but she could not catch him in any direct statements of those feelings. She chanced upon several love affairs, and many profound losses, such as the deaths of his crew on his former ship, the Stargazer.
She kept skipping around the disk, sifting randomly, compulsively, unable to stop. The intensity of the exhilaration, of the terror-joy of discovery, kept her going.
What finally made her stop was an excruciating realization. She, Marjorie Smith, had blanked a thousand people, a thousand personalities. For all she knew all of those personalities could have been as extraordinary as Picard’s. Since she’d never looked at them, she’d never know. Murder, over and over.
She made up her mind what she would do.
Raising her eyes from the screen and keyboard, she saw gray morning light around the edges of the window blinds. She had been here all night. Bussard and the rest of the department would soon arrive for work.
She made a duplicate of Picard’s disk, putting the original disk back in its case