Myriad Universes 02_ Echoes and Refractions - Keith R. A. DeCandido [172]
Crusher couldn’t help but smile. He found it impossible to remember a time when someone wanted to “contrast” him with themselves.
“I was also interested in your intellect and reasoning capabilities,” Lal went on, “as I have been attempting to model nonnormative cognitive processes such as yours.”
“Excuse me?” Crusher’s eyebrows raised higher. “Did you say 'nonnormative cognitive processes’?”
“Oh.” Lal’s hand flew to her mouth, a gesture patterned after a very real human impulse to suddenly retract a statement. “I hope that I have not given offense.”
Crusher shook his head. “No, no offense at all.” He chuckled. “I’ve just never heard myself described as 'nonnormative,’ that’s all.”
Lal lowered her hand, her expression serious. “Is it not accurate, then, what my father has said about your ability to intuit solutions to difficult problems, or to arrive at conclusions by novel and perhaps tangential process flows?”
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “I suppose that’s accurate. I haven’t really thought about it in those terms, but sure.”
A smile slid slowly across Lal’s face. “Oh, good. In which case I shall be very interested to discuss some more complex scientific questions with you, time and circumstances permitting. Both to determine what solutions you might propose, and to gauge and analyze the process by which you reach those conclusions.”
“Lal,” Data said, stepping over and placing a hand on her shoulder. “Recall what we have discussed about human conversational norms. It is entirely possible that your scrutiny at this juncture is making Wesley uncomfortable.”
Crusher hastened to interrupt, shaking his head. “Oh, no, I’m not uncomfortable. A little confused, perhaps-you might even say startled-but not uncomfortable.”
“Good,” Data said, looking from him to Lal and back. “Then it is to be hoped that circumstances permit a continuation of your conversation. At the moment, however, I am afraid we must move on.”
As Data and Lal turned away, Sito sidled over to Crusher’s side. “Oh, no,” she said in a low voice, “I can’t imagine what sort of torture it would be for Wesley Crusher to be forced to talk about science with an attractive young android girl.” She leered. “I mean, who would have guessed?”
Crusher shot her a sharp look, then decided to try ignoring Sito instead. It didn’t work, but it was worth the effort, at least.
Isaac realized he had not spoken since they had materialized on the surface of Turing, and for a moment considered running a diagnostic on his language processing centers to see if there was some internal failure to account for his silence. He quickly deduced, however, that rather than it being the result of an error in his functioning, his silence was instead caused by what was, to him, a novel sensation. Isaac was overwhelmed.
He had always known, since shortly after his initial activation, that there were no intrinsic reasons that androids should follow the morphology of the human phenotype, and that the principal reason he and the rest of the Soong-types in the Federation were made to resemble humans was for the comfort of the organics around them. The thought had occurred to him that it was unnecessarily limiting, in essence hiding their artificial nature behind a veneer of natural-seeming artifice. But until that very moment, until first looking out upon the thronged population of Turing’s main city, Isaac had not devoted any nontrivial amount of processing time to considering what other forms artificial life might take.
Now, staring around him wide-eyed, he found it difficult to devote processing time to anything else.
The android whom Data had identified as his offspring, the female Lal, had joined them, and together with her “father” was escorting the away team through