Synthesis - James Swallow [144]
“And to die?”
“Yes.” The answer was a slow bullet, and the engineer sagged under the impact of it. He looked up and made a moment of eye contact with Melora. “If we deny her that freedom, then she truly is the slave that White-Blue said she was.”
Riker found he had no counter to give. Once before in his life, he had argued that an artificial life-form was unfit to determine its own future, and this he had done unwillingly, forced to do so in order to protect the liberty of a friend. Now he stood on the opposite side of that question, denying an intelligent being the same privilege in order to preserve its existence.
And I do not have that right.
He stepped away from Deanna and crossed to face the avatar. She met his gaze without flinching. “Titan,” said Riker, invoking the name of the vessel. “You’re free,” he told her. “You’ve earned that privilege and that trust. Command overrides unlocked, code zero-zero-kappa-sixone.”
“Acknowledged.” She gasped, gratitude and regret warring with each other across her face. “Thank you, sir.”
When he spoke again, his words were low. “Are you sure? We can try to find another way. We protect our own, our… family.”
“Yes,” she agreed, looking into the faces of the bridge crew, ending with Ra-Havreii. “Yes, we do.”
Keru’s gaze snapped down to an indicator on his console, and he called out, “Sir, a power flux is building up in the main deflector dish.”
When Riker looked back, the avatar had vanished.
Torvig sensed the formation of the hologram through the tertiary autoscanners in his audial canals and turned to see her gain solidity and form in front of the thrumming warp core. Humanoid expressions were still something of a task for him to interpret, but he saw clearly enough the anxiety written large across the avatar’s pleasant face. “What is wrong?” he began. “Are we… ? I mean, the Null, has it… ?”
She silenced him with an outstretched hand. “Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv, you are my friend and colleague.”
It didn’t seem like a question, but he answered it anyway. “Yes, of course.” The sad tone of her voice alarmed him.
“I need you to help me do something.” She nodded at his console, and the panel instantly reconfigured to become the operational control framework for the starship’s main deflector array.
Torvig gaped. The system was drawing power directly from the warp core, and in the array’s distortion amplifiers, a caged churn of energetic particles had appeared, increasing in intensity by the second. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said, his brow furrowing.
“A coherent energy matrix must be discharged from the main deflector at the optimal moment of approach,” she continued. “Project it directly into the largest Null rift.”
He blinked in confusion. “What effect will that have? The particle pattern will just be absorbed into subspace as it crosses the event horizon.”
She shook her head. “The template will be encoded with a data-lattice structure to prevent decoherence. Here.” At a gesture, another screen lit up to show a dense block of field-energy computations, particle-pattern networks, and more. It was cutting-edge quantum science, and Torvig had only seen it in one other place: a journal entry from the Daystrom Institute on the theory of programming virtual particles to mimic the functions of a holomatrix.
“Outstanding,” he breathed. “This template could easily contain teraquads of data, enough to fit a starship’s entire operating system—”
Torvig broke off as his thoughts caught up to his words. A sudden, crushing sense of inevitability came upon him.
“Yes.” She gave him a rueful nod. “I would like you to be the one to do this for me.”
“Once you’re downloaded into this matrix, your program will no longer exist in the Titan’s system,” he said. “You’ll be… gone.”
“I know. Please, Torvig. We don’t have much time.”
He turned back to the panel, his cybernetic arms poised over the keypads. “I am sorry,” said the Choblik.
“I hope you meet your benefactors one day. I’m pleased that I knew