Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [109]
Data knew all too well what the Presence meant. His positronic matrix would be wiped clean. His experiences and memories, his dreams and hopes, his friendships and loves would be reduced to a blank slate. He would be erased as though he had never been. The Presence had obviously adapted to the output of his emotion chip. The only weapon he possessed had been neutralized. Despair threatened to overwhelm him. How easy it would be to simply let it happen, and accept the surcease of deactivation and nothingness. No! Data shouted silently. He recalled his brief glimpse of the scoutship’s interior. He remembered that a Romulan warbird was about to vaporize Captain Picard and Lieutenant Hawk. Then, even as awareness began to flee him, hope arose within Data once again: He recalled that he had set the emotion chip’s output at nowhere near its maximum gain. That told him that he still had a weapon. Gathering up his will, he let the chip’s energies build, as though it were a phaser set on overload. A cybernetic eternity later, he released the chip’s greatly increased emotional output, letting it flood into the Romulan machine-entity’s consciousness. With all of his remaining will, he directed the totality of his anger, his fear, his frustration straight into the algorithm-creature’s core. It was as though the Presence had been forced to drink from a fire hose. Teraquads of intense emotion rushed through the chip, sweeping the entity away before it had an opportunity to sever Data’s subspace connection to the Romulan array. The death-scream of the Presence reverberated in Data’s consciousness as the entity’s code decompiled, corrupting itself in a spontaneous cascade effect. Even as Data felt his adversary’s passing, he wondered whether his triumph had cost him the use of his emotion chip. At that thought, hope fled from him, as did every other human emotion he had worked so hard to acquire for so many years. But with no emotions to distract him, Data had no trouble accepting that the loss was infinitely preferable to nonexistence. And he had no trouble giving the plight of Picard and Hawk his full attention. Noticing that his cybernetic connection to the Romulan array remained intact, he sent a portion of his consciousness deeper inside it, ready to resend the abort command- -only to find the data channels still aswarm with “antibody” programs, the final nonsentient remnants of the Presence. Or perhaps they had arisen as a consequence of that entity’s contact with him, like a cybernetic immune response. Regardless, Data knew that he could never get the abort command past them, even if he were to perish in the attempt. He quietly backed away, all but disengaging entirely from the Romulan array. Despair stung him then- -and struck a spark that glimmered into joy. Only a functioning emotion chip could have made either experience possible. As his maintenance subroutines reawakened and began purging his matrix of whatever remained of the Presence within him, Data rejoiced at having succeeded in hanging onto his hard-won humanity. And, even as he struggled to regain control over his body’s many subsystems, Data clung just as steadfastly to the hope of finding some other way to neutralize the Romulans’ subspace singularity. His hands a blur on the instrument panel, Hawk entered the final command sequence, then tried to get a fix on the subspace singularity with the sensors. This has to work, he thought. No change. Ten long seconds ticked by as Picard continued dodging the Gal Gath’thong’s relentless disruptor fusillades, while staying less than quarter of a kilometer