The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [80]
Data remembered the reason for his disorientation, but that was of little help in dealing with the knowledge that the transporter room was just the same as it always had been—it was he who had suddenly, completely changed. He was no longer himself.
He heard sounds as he was moved, and he understood intellectually that they were voices, speaking English in undertones. His memory even assigned meanings to the words, but that meant little—the words and sentences would not correlate within his mind. He could no longer comprehend the context in which the words and sentences had meaning.
It was like being two people, like that ancient (and erroneous) term for schizophrenia—split personality. One small portion of his mind that he thought of as old Data remembered who and what he was, and why he was doing this. While all the while the other, larger, new Data portion of his mind was totally disoriented and confused.
He had to fight the urge to get up and bolt away from them. Their very presence created in him a vast discomfort. It was all he could do to remain still and silent.
New Data wanted to produce noises, this body’s best approximation of the sounds it was now programmed to find familiar, but the old Data portion of his brain insisted that he must be quiet, that to make noises would only distress the beings who surrounded him. New Data could not see the beings properly, his eyes could not follow their alien contours, but, even though their forms were strange, they were still familiar to the old Data portion of his mind.
He worried briefly about whether new Data would overwhelm old Data before the transporter could be activated, but then a sensation surrounded his body, and the old Data portion of his mind recognized it for a transporter beam. New Data wanted to struggle against it, not comprehending, but old Data managed to hold the body still until the sensation halted.
He was lying on the floor aboard the artifact. Slowly he rose to his feet. New Data was in control now, had to be in control, for this was the reason he had been created. New Data was Data, for the moment, at least. In the back of his consciousness, old Data was worried that new Data would be Data forever, but this was a small, far-off concern that he squelched effortlessly.
The android gazed around him with his altered vision, heard with his altered hearing, felt with his altered senses.
Geordi had been right. It was beautiful.
Data looked at the murals surrounding him, his eyes catching and appreciating every nuance of color, shade, texture, and shading. Some of the pictures were stills, but others were more like holographic recordings—they moved, going through a sequence of motions that were never quite the same.
And the sounds! Data played the violin and considered himself knowledgeable about music from many different worlds of the Federation, but he’d never heard anything to equal this. The scale was extraordinary, soaring both below and above the range of human hearing, with tonals and atonals threading and weaving their way through the notes, creating a tapestry of sound.
The sound accompanied the pictures, as La Forge had guessed. Each figure had its own theme, its individual leitmotiv, and its story was partly expressed in music, in song. The nearest comparison to any human art form that Data could arrive at was grand opera, except that the emotions the participants had felt were also a component to each story, changing from image to image and moment to moment.
Data could discern, but not feel, the emotional content. Here, too, he was handicapped by having been created a machine. He could sense and follow the emotional component of each story, but he could not experience the emotion itself. And that was, as always, a profound disappointment to the android.
All the figures had their own individual stories, and yet those stories interwove and touched to form one huge theme. A theme of hope and benevolence and courage in the face of death’s inevitability. Art had