Synthesis - James Swallow [7]
Riker stepped in through the arch, and his face split into a wistful smile. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Excellent emulation,” remarked Sethe. “These newer Eight-Bravo-series holodecks have five times the processing power of previous units. You can really see it in the sim-persona generation,” he added, warming to the subject as the doors sighed shut behind him and melted into the illusion. “Computer?” He addressed the air. “A character for the captain, please.”
The captain turned, about to belay Sethe’s order, but in a whirl of light and color, she was suddenly there, all stunning dark eyes and absolute poise, dark tresses framing a generous mouth. The dress she wore sparkled like captured lightning in the club’s sultry gloom.
“My name is Minuet,” she breathed, “and I love all jazz except Dixieland.”
“Because you can’t dance to Dixieland,” Riker said to himself. He shot Sethe a sharp look. “You picked her?”
The lieutenant shook his head, surprised by the captain’s tone. “Um, no, sir. The holodeck did. It’s a predictive system, based on the environment, your current psychometric profile, your personal data, the kinetics of your body language, speech patterns…”
“I haven’t seen this holoprogram in years,” he said, circling the woman. “The last time was aboard the Enterprise, when we were docked at Starbase 74.”
“Did you miss me?” Minuet took a step toward him, a wry smile playing on her lips.
Sethe nodded once more. “You see how she’s reacting to you? That’s demi-intelligent subroutines at work, heuristic learning in picoseconds. The longer the program runs, the more it learns how to read you, to better tailor the experience.”
Minuet’s hand reached out and touched his arm. “Are you going to play?” She nodded toward the bandstand, where a trombone had appeared.
“Computer, freeze program.” Riker said it with more force than he meant to, enough that Sethe flinched. The woman stood there in front of him, suspended in time, as beautiful—perhaps even more so—as she had been the first time he had seen her. “The Bynars,” he heard himself saying, “they hijacked the Enterprise during a maintenance stop. They used a variant of this program to… keep me occupied.”
Sethe grunted. “Oh, I heard about that. They used the ship as a backup for their planetary database, didn’t they?” He gestured with the padd in his hand. “But that’s the Bynars for you. They’ve always been a bit twitchy.”
Riker’s attention was elsewhere. Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable; the hologram brought up old memories that he had thought long forgotten. Just for a moment, he was the man he had been all those years ago, standing in this place, with this woman, living this dream. From that perspective, it felt as if an age had passed. Then he had been a rising star, first officer aboard the fleet flagship, with countless new frontiers ranged out before him… and a universe of choices.
But he was different now. Riker was surprised by a faint stab of regret. Now he was the captain, a husband, and a father, and while the frontiers were still there, it might be that perhaps the freedoms had lessened. The thought sat uncomfortably, and with a sigh, he pushed it away. His lips thinned, and he spoke again, this time firm and definite. “Computer, end program and reboot. Load simulation Theta-Six-Nine. Lake Armstrong.”
The club and the woman became ghosts and faded into nothing. The photonic haze rippled once more, and the chamber became a lakeshore beneath a tall, curving atmosphere dome.
“Is there a problem, sir?” asked Sethe, nonplussed by the captain’s reaction.
“No problem,” said Riker.
In the middle distance, the holodeck doors reappeared and slid back. Deanna walked in, singing quietly to their daughter, the child carried high against her chest. She wore a sand-colored summer dress, and her hair was up. His wife took Tasha