Myriad Universes 02_ Echoes and Refractions - Keith R. A. DeCandido [154]
“For the moment we’ll proceed from the assumption that it is Data,” Picard said. “If it is, what do we know?”
“Well,” said La Forge, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, “I can tell you what we don’t know.” The first officer had been, so far as Picard knew, the closest thing Data had had to a best friend, and the captain thought that Geordi was probably the hardest hit by Data’s disappearance. “We don’t know where he went, or what he’s been doing for the last ten years.”
“And not just him,” put in Wesley Crusher. The boy…the man had grown up on board the Enterprise, having arrived on board shortly after Picard took command; when Crusher had graduated from Starfleet Academy he’d requested service on her himself. Picard had been proud to have him on the crew, and was prouder still years later to promote him to the head of engineering when the post became available. Even so, Picard found it difficult not to see the boy he had been when looking at the man Crusher had become. “Hundreds of other androids serving in Starfleet resigned their commissions that same day and just disappeared, same as Data.”
“It was just after the androids were declared fully sentient and granted citizenship in the Federation,” Sito said. Then, after a pause, she added, “With conditions and qualifications, of course.”
Picard drew his lips into a tight line. It had been a hard fought battle, but the victory for android rights had been only somewhat marred by those same conditions and qualifications. Androids were no longer property, as they’d been, but if they were citizens, it was of a second-class variety. Still, it was a step forward, and one he was sorry not to have been able to celebrate with Data, one of the prime architects of the movement in the first place.
“Yes,” Picard said, thoughtfully, “and if not for Ira Graves’s synaptic mapping, and the introduction of uploading into positronic brains, Data and the others might be waiting for their rights still.”
He couldn’t help glancing in Doctor Quaice’s direction, but the doctor’s normally expressive face had become unreadable.
“Yeesh,” Sam Lavelle said, leaning back in his chair. “I was at the academy when uploading was first released to the public, and I swear that they should have renamed the place the Ira Graves Academy, given the amount of time my instructors spent talking about him.”
“I’m not sure I like your tone, young man,” said Quaice, his voice brittle. Sitting beside each other, the doctor and flight operator looked so near in age that they could have been classmates. “There are some of us who wish Graves had announced synaptic mapping just a short while earlier, if you don’t mind. Just a few months and then maybe my wife wouldn’t have died unnecessarily-of old age-but could have had her consciousness uploaded into a positronic brain, just as I did a few short years later.”
Lavelle’s cheeks flushed red, and he averted his eyes, mumbling apologies.
Quaice wasn’t alone in wishing that the ability to cheat death had been granted to the public a little earlier. The Enterprise was filled with people who had lost family, friends, and loved ones in the weeks and months before synaptic mapping was first made available, granting anyone the ability to extend their lives indefinitely, transferring their consciousnesses from their frail organic bodies into nearly indestructible and all but immortal android bodies. Only a few generations ago, in the days that Doctor Roger Corby had met his tragic end, the idea had been anathema. But after a few early adopters underwent the new procedure, and emerged on the other side no less human and in fact all