Metamorphosis - Jean Lorrah [123]
The shuttered face, the hard set of the mouth, bespoke a man who knew life to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but who refused to bow before that knowledge.
“Oh?” the Klingon demanded. “You would leave traps behind, then.” “Certainly,” Dare replied.
“Nuclear weapons are easy to build. The Konor want ready-built cities, cleared and cultivated agricultural land, industry and technology in place for them to take over without effort. Stop giving it to them! Destroy the cities with weapons that will leave them and the land around them contaminated for generations to come. Contaminate 342 the fields so nothing will grow. Teach the Konor that if they try again to kill their fellows and steal what they have built, their efforts will win them only scorched and blasted territory, and many of their own dead in the process.”
Data was an android. He was not supposed to have physiological reactions to emotion, yet although his hands were clasped before him on the table, he saw his fingers twitch spasmodically at Dare’s words.
“And would you have the Samdians use the same strategy on Gellesen?” he asked.
“No,” Dare replied. “The Konor must be left thinking they would, to give us time to make plans and train people. Dacket is as good as lost-if it must be let go, make the Konor pay a high price for it. But on Gellesen the Samdians must take a stand or lose everything. We will teach them guerrilla tactics. If the Konor should succeed in taking any part of Gellesen, they must never be allowed to feel secure, never know when an attack will come, a bomb go off.”
“That’s terrorism!” Geordi exclaimed.
“Against self-righteous murderers who would kill the Samdians and take their children into slavery? What would you have them do, Mr. La Forge? Surrender? You saw what that got them on Dacket: mass slaughter.” Geordi got up. “There has to be another answer. We can’t leave murder, slavery, and terrorism as the only options. Data-was “I know, Geordi. We must continue trying to duplicate the frequency on which the Konor transmit. But there is no reason to expect me to be able to do it any better than you can.”
“No,” objected Thralen. “You are the only one with 343 a chance, Data. There are too many differences between one of us and the ship’s computer for us ever to find the right one. Look for the difference between you and the computer.”
“Thralen’s right,” Geordi said as they walked to Data’s quarters. “Let’s try to reason it out.
If the computer can’t detect the transmissions, chances are you’re not doing it with inorganic components.”
“But most of my organic structure is no more than nutritive fluids,” Data said, sitting in the armchair at an angle to Geordi, who had chosen the couch. “It is not a sensing device any more than your blood is. The answer has to lie in the organicstinorganic interface in the anterior cortex of my positronic brain.”
Geordi sighed. “It figures. The mystery that died with Dr. Soong.” “Or disappeared with him,” Data corrected. “There is no actual record of his death.”
“Either way, we don’t have him here to ask. But Data, we do at least know, physically, where that interface is located.”
“It is the one thing I cannot allow even you to touch, Geordi. I am sorry. If it were damaged, I could lose … everything.”
“No, Data, I’m not suggesting that 1 do anything. You don’t have to touch that disarea to isolate its sensations.”
“I cannot isolate them,” Data replied.
“What? Why not?”
“It is my … my mind, Geordi. Not my brain, which has a number of separate memory and program storage areas. This is one way in which we are alike. I share memory storage and computation capacity with 344 computers. With humans I share the ability to think. Can you isolate which area of your brain you think with?”
“No, but you’ve just described exactly what we’re looking for. Never mind that you can’t physically locate it. You can still use it.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the Sherlock Holmes fan: after everything else