Metamorphosis - Jean Lorrah [126]
Data waited. There was no response. Damn!
Geordi started. “Data? I thought I heard something, but it was too faint to be sure. Wishful thinking?”
Data remembered the Konor “shouting.” He tried using more emphasis. Geordi?
The engineer tilted his head as if he were listening for something faint and distant. “I thought… Data, can you increase the gain?” Treating the new circuit as if it were one of his speech amplifiers, Data increased the power to it, and triedag.geor-Burning shock ran through every circuit in his body.
Geordi screamed and tore off his VISOR.
It cut off the moment shock stopped Data’s attempt to transmit. Geordi was gasping, sweat popping out on his skin as he groped blindly for his friend.
“Data, what-?”
The door bleeped, and they heard Riker’s voice. “Data! Are you all right?
What’s going on in there?”
“Come,” Data responded automatically, and the door slid open to reveal Commander Riker, very much out of uniform in a short robe and bare feet, his hair uncombed. He had obviously been wakened from a sound sleep. Wesley Crusher, in a similar state, arrived in moments from his quarters a little farther down the corridor, almost colliding with Counselor Troi, whose rooms were about the same distance in the other direction. The captain, in black pajamas, arrived just in time for explanations. By this time Data had analyzed the event. “It was not pain, Geordi,” he explained. “It was electronic feedback. I am sorry. I did not know that was going to happen.”
Realizing that what he had felt was not his VISOR overloading, Geordi put it back on.
Wesley came over to the table and studied the device they’d constructed. “Wow!” he said.
“You’ve built a thought transmitter into Data!”
It was not, unfortunately, that simple.
If they could have built a plasma electrode like Data’s own receptor, it would have taken almost no power to operate. The circuit Geordi had built, however, required at least fifty times as much power as a 351 speech amplifier-and when Data tried to send at a level people could perceive, it created a power feedback that Data experienced as agonizing pain.
He made no objection to calling it that; it went far beyond “unpleasant,” as he normally described the sensations he received as malfunction warnings.
There was actually nothing wrong with the transmission circuit; it simply required too much power to do a job associated with components of the greatest sensitivity. Unless they could duplicate or invent a device something like the plasma electrodes surrounding Data’s organicstinorganic interface, Data. could not transmit words without at the same time transmitting excruciating pain.
Which made his communicating with the Konor hopeless, and all the more frustrating because they had come so close.
“You did the best you could,” Captain Picard told Geordi and Data when they reported their failure the next day. He sat down behind his desk, tugging the front of his uniform down. The gesture, a habit from the days when Starfleet uniforms were two-piece outfits, indicated the captain’s frustration. “I’ll report to Starfleet, and you keep working. You may yet invent something to do the job.”
“Not before the Ferengi get here,” Geordi said grimly, “and the rest of the galaxy after them.”
“Darryl Adin and his gang are already here,” Data added. “They have stayed aboard at my request, Captain, while we tried to find a solution. But if Starfleet removes the Enterprise, they will try to help the Samdians.”
“And I can’t blame them,” Picard said.
“Geordi-was 352 “I’m sorry, Captain,” said the chief engineer. “Even Data doesn’t understand the construction of his plasma electrodes. Their design is completely alien.”
“They may be of a design alien to any we know,” Data added. “Considering Dr. Soong’s reputation, and the fact that there are times in his life that are unaccounted for, it is possible that he did not