Metamorphosis - Jean Lorrah [101]
Honest to a fault, he admitted that comprehension of the human condition, not the flesh with all its dangerous pleasures, was what had always beckoned, just beyond his reach.
Why? Why would anyone desire such pain? How did humans live with it? “Tasha, Thralen,” he whispered, “you are well out of it.”
But Data was still here, with a life to live, with duties to fulfill, and without the companionship of those friends lost along the way. Another memory surfaced with the clarity of a computer log, this time from the mission he and Tasha had been assigned to on the planet Treva. There Tasha and Dare had been reunited. Then, Data had controlled his response without much difficulty. Now, he wondered if he would have been able to or if, as Dare had said, they would be rivals if Tasha were still alive.
But she was not. He would never see her again, except in the hologram, frozen there forever young and strong and beautiful. As artificial as he had once been.
For the first time, Data wondered what his own fate would be. Was he a survivor? Would he grow old, outliving all his friends and colleagues, the fate he had accepted would be his as an android? Or would he die young, like Tasha and Thralen?
Which was worse, dying before one had fulfilled one’s potential, or living not only to lose friends but to experience the kind of frustration that lay like a shroud over the Enterprise tonight as they waited, impotent, for orders to abandon their assignment on Dacket?
“I remember how frustrated you used to get when you could take no action, Tasha,” Data said. “The Samdian situation is worse than anything we encountered while you were alive.”
But those memories were dimming. Only the ones that decided to intrude on him surfaced from his human mind of their own accord. Tasha looked at him out of the hologram, but when he tried to remember her on board ship, or on a planet, the images were blurred.
Wanting her to seem more real, he touched the switch that put the hologram into motion. Unintentionally, he hit the sound setting as well, and Tasha’s last words to him sounded in the small room: “You see things with the wonder of a child, and that makes you more human than any of us.” Horrified, Data hit the switch to turn off the hologram. “Oh, Tasha,” he said wretchedly, “you have no idea how wrong you were.
I’m glad you never knew.”
Data put his head down on his arms, and wept.
Worn out emotionally, he fell into uneasy sleep.
His door signal woke him.
Data felt feverish and headachy, and regretted the automatic “Come in” almost before it had passed his lips.
His visitors were Darryl Adin and Pris Shenkley. “We’ve come to say goodbye,” Dare said. “Or-was “Come with us, Data,” Pris said.
“We may die trying,” Dare continued, “but we are going to do something for the Samdians. We would welcome you along for the fight.”
“What good would I do you now?” Data asked.
“As an android I had unique strengths and skills. Now I’m just another human.”
“Like the rest of us,” Dare replied.
“For one thing, you shoot as well as I do. You’ve got Starfleet training, which I admit is the best basis there is for a life like ours, once you strip away some of the naivetd that goes with it. There’s probably not a computer in the galaxy that you and Sdan couldn’t finagle between you.” He attempted a smile. “I don’t ask very many people to 282 join up with us. We have to depend on one another in too many life-or-death situations.”
“Thank you for your confidence, but I think not,” Data said. “At least not now.”
“If you change your mind,” Dare said, “it’s never difficult to locate me. Pris, I’ll see you at the ships.”
Pris watched the door close behind her, then turned to Data. “I’ll miss you,” she said.
“I-was