The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [131]
“Time we don’t have,” Borges told him. “We have to fix this before the Tamarians start shooting.”
He is lost.
That thought comes to him in those moments when he is able to formulate it, before it drifts away again to be replaced by…He does not know what. But sometimes he does. Flashes of familiarity. A jumble of shapes and colors is briefly recognizable as a face, then is meaningless again. It does not change; he does. He loses face but remembers sound, hears: “Data, can you understand me? Do you know who I am?” For a moment, he knows. Troi. Troy. Destroy. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? He is lost in the city, fires burning, a great quadrupedal animal looming overhead, but he cannot remember its name. He is Shaka, his mighty walls falling around him, his great ambition to protect his city forevermore proving his greatest failure, for the army is too weakened from building the wall to defend the city within. He hears the sound of the trumpet, and shouts with a great shout, that the wall of Jericho falls down flat. A trombone blows, rising as a bearded figure in red and black moves its slide. Red light flashes, a sliding, rising tone sounding danger, danger, as consoles explode around him and a vast blue-green orb looms larger before him…Oh, sh—p>
It is gone. He does not even remember it was there. For a time, he is not even aware there is a he to be aware. Ten thousand years of history on ten thousand planets unfold within him. He is it, is of it, without knowing himself, and yet it is there…until it is gone and never was. He remembers there is a universe, senses it, but is not aware of himself as distinct from it. His awareness focuses on a room. He is the room. A body—goldwhite in goldblack—lies in the center. Worried shapes/figures/friends (blueblack, goldblack, glint of metal) hover above him. He is the worriers. “His cognitive destabilization is accelerating,” he says. “Isn’t there anything we can do?” his other self responds. He shakes his head, metal glinting. He has no eyes. What are eyes? Black eyes, wide and deep, gazing down at himself. “Data,” he calls to himself. “I need you to focus. Focus on the sound of my voice. Follow it.”
He focuses on the sound but loses the words. It is only sound now. He is not inside it any longer, sees the face it comes from. Black eyes, wide and deep. Deep black void. Black, slick, roiling, it strikes out and Tasha dies. Agony! Pain, as he never knew it before, did not know it then. Then? It is now. There is only now. Or there was. Now, she lies broken on the sand, a cruel black stain on her face. Now, she lies beside him in the bed, laughing, eyes wide in discovery. Now, Ard’rian kisses him and he does not know/finally knows why. He fires the phaser at the aqueduct. He fires the disruptor at Fajo. He knows hate for the first time. Crosis shows him. The Borg…assimilation…He dissolves into the mass, only this time he is not becoming, he is losing himself, and he fears. Help me, some part of him pleads, though the rest of him does not understand it. Talk to me. Somebody. Give me a voice to follow.
The voice comes again, but from another place. “Maybe the key is to stop looking so hard for external causes and solutions…learn to manage your own emotional state.
“If the problem is with your own self-image, then the crucial thing is to make peace with it. If you do that, then nothing from outside can threaten your sense of self.
“Just try to be the best Data you can be.”
Data. I am Data. He caught that concept, held on to it. “Dwelling on external causes for our emotional states can keep us from exercising our own ability to manage them.” Outside was chaos—erratic, unstable. Nothing stayed the same. All he had was himself. I am Data! Remember that! It started to drift, but he clung to it. He stopped casting about for input and turned his attention inward. He shut out all the noise, looking deeper, until he found something