Synthesis - James Swallow [55]
Sections of the computer core were turning flame red, zone after zone flaring as it changed color.
“What?” demanded Ra-Havreii, glaring at Sethe.
“Cascade failure,” he reported, his voice rising an octave. “The reboot isn’t taking. Several elements of the core program are not responding to commands.”
To his right, the Cardassian ensign was shaking his head. “No, it’s more than that, sir. The commands aren’t just being rejected. They’re being altered.”
“How is that possible?” said Chaka. “The system is free of any viral infection. There is no way that the White-Blue AI could have left anything behind in our computers. We scoured every sector, every memory core and isolinear chip!”
Ra-Havreii’s hands flew across his own console, which flickered worryingly as he worked it. “Yes… no…” He shook his head. “There is no virus in the system! It’s something else.”
Dakal looked at him, his eyes wide. “Doctor… I think it’s the system itself.”
Chaka’s vocoder made a chugging sound like a snort of derision. “You’re mistaken.”
“Critical loss of parity imminent,” snapped Sethe. “Doctor! We need to initiate an emergency shutdown now, before this error wave corrupts other sectors of the core.”
Ra-Havreii glared at the lieutenant, but he knew he was right. “Do it,” he ordered. “All sectors, interrupt protocol and quit. We’ll reset and—”
“No response!” Dakal called.
The Efrosian engineer looked out at the shapes of the virtual display and felt his blood run cold. It had been his idea to do this, his idea to take the ship through the reboot process. He had assured Captain Riker that nothing would go wrong, convinced that any errors encountered could be dealt with, but now it seemed his own arrogance had turned on him. His gut tightened as the awful guilt over the U.S.S. Luna returned to him, along with the fear that it was about to happen again.
The consoles fizzed and dissolved to static, and the holographic display broke up into incoherence. Abstract shapes, distorted images and strident blasts of color took their place, the white space flashing in and out of existence. Glare hit them all, and Chaka hissed, throwing up her manipulators to shield all four of her eye spots.
“Out!” shouted Ra-Havreii, stabbing a finger at the holodeck arch. If the malfunction was reaching into the holosystem itself, a critical program crash could be fatal. Dakal hesitated, and he grabbed a handful of the ensign’s uniform, pulling him forward. “Come on, boy!”
“Look!” Dakal pointed past him, into the flickering chaos that had replaced the display.
Ra-Havreii looked, without thinking about why he did, and he saw the same smoky shape as the Cardassian saw. It stepped through the riot of color and sound, a humanoid, if one were willing to stretch the definition.
Within the halo of the flickering shape, countless flash-fast images surged and writhed, each becoming the strange figure for barely a fraction of a second before changing into something else. With a sudden certainty, Ra-Havreii realized that the shape was every character in the holodeck’s memory banks, jostling for prominence, one after another in a riotous profusion.
“Doctor, we have to get out!” Sethe was shouting from the open doorway beneath the arch. “Once the holodeck is clear, we can pull the power to the emitters!”
The figure heard the Cygnian’s words and understood them. It raised a hand, and in a hundred voices, it said a single word. “No.”
With a gesture, the heavy doors sighed shut and sealed. In the next second, the doors and the arch faded away, trapping them.
Behind the figure, the frenzied virtual display began to stabilize itself, folding in, returning to a static-laced semblance of its original form. The chief engineer saw immediately that the structure of the ship’s core program had changed. A growth of new lines of logic, strange