Synthesis - James Swallow [59]
The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Why have you chosen to look like that?”
The avatar appeared confused. “My database shows this image is the last holocharacter you spoke with. Does this aspect trouble you?”
Riker shot the others a look. “The woman… her name is Minuet.”
“From the Jazz Club simulation?” said Troi. “That’s an interesting choice.”
Vale got the sense that she was missing something, and she filed the thought away for later consideration. “If you’re part of this ship, if you know who we are, then you have to know that your… creation presents a concern for us.”
The hologram nodded. “I am not a danger, Commander. I can maintain all normal shipboard functions without interruption. Currently, four thousand eight hundred and ninety-one processes are operating under my governance. These include monitoring all local spatial wavebands, regulating power management through the warp core, tracking several Sentry vessels in sensor range of the spacedock—”
Riker stepped forward, silencing the avatar with a nod of his head. “You recognize my authority as the commanding officer of this vessel, yes?”
The avatar nodded. “I do, sir.”
“So if I give you an order, you’re going to follow it.”
“To the best of my ability,” came the reply.
“Without question?” he pressed.
Riker’s words seemed to confuse the avatar. “You are the captain,” she said, as if that were answer enough.
He nodded and turned away. “You’re dismissed.”
“I—” The hologram broke off and then nodded. “Aye, sir.” With a whisper of virtual light, the avatar faded into nothing.
“This complicates things,” said Troi. “Will, perhaps—”
But Riker made a quiet motion with his fingers before his lips. He looked toward Vale. “Get Doctor RaHavreii. I want him to tell me what just happened to my starship.”
He heard them speaking as he approached the operations office in main engineering. Lieutenant Sethe’s voice had a habit of carrying, if he wanted it to or not.
“I can’t understand why we aren’t dead in the water,” the Cygnian was saying. “A systems meltdown like that should have crippled us.”
“You’re reading it wrongly,” clacked Chaka, her vocoder translating the motions of her mouth parts. “That wasn’t a failure. It was…” She groped for the right words and failed to find them.
“It was incredible,” breathed Dakal. “The spontaneous onset of sentience. I’ve read about such things, but to see it actually occur…”
Ra-Havreii grimaced at the awed pitch in the young Cardassian’s words, and he paced into the room, shooting the ensign an unforgiving glare. “It seems we have a situation,” he said without preamble. “As if our current circumstances were not serious enough to occupy our every waking moment, we now have the added complication of a dangerous program artifact inhibiting normal function of the Titan’s subsystems.”
“You make it sound like a data glitch,” said Sethe.
“It is,” Ra-Havreii retorted. “Even if you don’t see it that way. The captain has asked me in no uncertain terms to evaluate the situation and provide him with a full report. To that end, you three are now tasked to assist me.”
Someone knocked delicately on the wall of the office, and Ra-Havreii found a deerlike face staring up at him. “Doctor? It’s me, uh, Torvig.”
“I know who you are, Ensign,” he replied briskly. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to assist in the evaluation of the, ah, incident. I think I can provide a useful viewpoint.”
“Really?” Ra-Havreii’s first instinct was to dismiss the Choblik, but then he realized that an extra set of eyes—in Torvig’s case, augmented ones—might