Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [73]
“Over half a million years ago, the sun you call Exo began to cool and the home of the Old Ones became a barren, ice-swept wasteland. Though they were quite clever in some regards, they had some issues with space travel. Never took to it, I’m afraid. I think the term you might use is ‘agoraphobic,’ which explains their rather odd decision to move everything underground.”
“Underground?” Picard asked. “On a planet that was becoming frozen?”
“Apparently, they had mastered some form of geothermal energy. In any case, there weren’t many of them and underground seemed as good an option as any. They were old and they were, by any measure you care to use, feeble, but they were also quite clever. They liked to build things and there was one thing they built particularly well.”
“Androids?” Picard guessed. Sam nodded.
“As I said, they were growing feeble and they needed help to survive. And it was, I suppose, their desire for survival at any cost that led to their downfall. They worked desperately to perfect their androids, to try to create not simply artificial intelligence, but artificial consciousness. The difference between the two, I’m sure you of all people realize, is sublime. It’s the same as the difference between your ship’s computer and Data. One is a machine. The other is alive. And the Old Ones believed their best chance for survival was to create the latter. A machine, they reasoned, no matter how intelligent, might give up if logic dictated that survival was not an option. It might be more inclined to surrender to the inevitable.” Sam paused and stared into the middle distance. “And that was, I suppose, the very thing that they wanted to hide from themselves; a machine would have told them the truth. But truly self-aware, self-determining servants would keep the Old Ones alive no matter what.”
“Did they succeed?”
“Let’s just say the results were less than perfect. Yes, they did succeed in creating a race of self-aware androids, but with a consciousness that was stagnant. The androids could process new experiences as pure data, but they couldn’t apply them to their personal growth. In short, the androids were created with a need to evolve, but were innately incapable of it. They even expressed that need to their creators. ‘Fix us,’ they said, because they knew, they knew something was terribly wrong with the way they’d been created. But there was no way to give them what they needed. The only way to correct the mistake was to wipe the slate clean and start over.”
“Are you saying the Old Ones destroyed their androids?”
“They planned to. Their creations became more demanding, more dangerous. The Old Ones realized then that they needed to act quickly, and secretly. Worse, in order to buy themselves time, they promised to fix their creations, even though they knew they couldn’t, and poured their resources instead into developing technology that would enable them to transfer the consciousness of a living mind into ‘unformatted’ android bodies.”
Picard was appalled. That a civilization could grow so decadent, and so desperate as to create sentient servants only to discard them as a failure of genius …
“When the androids began to suspect the truth, the Old Ones tried to trick them into voluntarily turning themselves off—part of the process of repairing them, don’t you see?—but some of the androids weren’t fooled. They had developed a sense of self-preservation.” Sam paused again, as if gathering his thoughts. Finally, he continued, “There is no record of the carnage, Captain, nor do I know how many Old Ones were alive on the day the androids discovered they were betrayed, but I do know that before Exo III spun again on its axis, all the Old Ones were dead.”
“And what did the androids do then?” Picard asked. “And what does this have to do with you and the attackers, Data, McAdams … all of this?”
“I’m getting to that, Captain. Patience, please. I’m not doing this for my own entertainment, though, I confess, I am enjoying having the opportunity to explain it to someone.