The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [130]
“The rose on the vine. The rose in the hand? The rose withered. The rose’s scent—Justice, her sword broken?” He shook his head. “Tears fallen from heaven.
“Desdemona awake. Desdemona pleading! The handkerchief. Cassio. His beard! Desdemona on her deathbed!” He was growing more agitated by the second. Before Deanna could call out, he cried, “Down, strumpet!” and lunged at Ambassador Denin, reaching for her throat.
Deanna was the only one who’d sensed trouble before the sudden attack, and given Data’s speed and strength, she knew she had to act fast. Luckily, Tamarian ceremony demanded she carry a phaser at all times, as their officers carried ceremonial daggers. She wasn’t sure its stun setting would affect Data, but she drew and fired anyway, hoping for the best. But his hands were already on Denin’s throat, and her beam had little effect.
But it was enough. Distracted, he let the ambassador drop and came at her. “Not dead?” She upped the level and fired again, knocking him off his stride but only briefly. Don’t make me do this, she thought.
Just then, Geordi moved in behind Data’s back, jabbing his manual shutdown control. Data fell limp and hit the floor, and Deanna clutched her heaving chest.
But her relief was short-lived. A wave of fury poured over her from the Tamarians. “Zinda!” cried an aide who knelt over the gasping ambassador. “His face black! His eyes red!”
Borges rushed forward to try to smooth things over. “Callimas at Bahar. Callimas on bended knee.”
“Chenza at court!” the aide cried, silencing her. “Shaka! When the walls fell! Shaka of Utomi! Makova. His army at Utomi! Utomi aflame! Utomi in ruins!”
The Tamarian diplomats stormed out and the guards moved in. Borges called the Krishna and requested an immediate beam-out. Once they rematerialized on its transporter pad, Geordi said, “Please tell me that wasn’t a declaration of war.”
“Not exactly,” Borges said. “But it will become one if we don’t fix this right away.” She looked down at Data’s motionless form. “And the only one who can fix it has just gone crazy.”
“It’s bad,” Geordi reported later as he, Deanna, and Borges stood together in the Krishna’s engineering lab, where Data lay motionless on a diagnostic slab. “I tried tuning him back to normal again, but it’s not taking. All this going back and forth between different mental states has…well, it’s unmoored him. His neural pathways can no longer remember which state they’re supposed to be in.” He shook his head. “We should’ve known this would happen. Forcing him to shift around the way he perceives people, time, his own sense of self…he can’t figure out how to interpret reality anymore.”
“So you’re saying he’s schizophrenic,” Deanna interpreted.
“Something like that. But more basic. His brain doesn’t seem to be processing anything normally at the moment. Even simple things like his spatial awareness have gotten erratic. We had to disconnect his motor functions below the neck to keep him from slamming into the walls—or into us.” But Data’s face was still capable of expression. He looked lost, confused, verging on panic. Geordi studied him sadly. “I can’t imagine what he must be going through in there. Maybe it’s something like when I first got my VISOR, before I learned to interpret the input—but that was just one of my senses, and at least the way I thought was the same. I knew who I was, what I was. From what I can tell, Data’s sense of even such a basic thing could be changing from moment to moment.”
“Is there anything you can do to fix it?” Deanna asked. “Can you shut him down and purge the program, like when the Iconian virus infected him?”
Geordi shook his head. “It wouldn’t work here. The modifications to his emotion chip aren’t just a program—they change the way his neural circuits interact on a basic level. We still don’t have a very good understanding of how Doctor Soong’s chip even works.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “I promise you, Deanna, I won’t rest