Ex Machina Read online

  Kirk’s eyes swept across Enterprise’s skin once more. He knew that what he saw was twenty thousand crystaltritanium plates phase-transition bonded into a single, nearly seamless whole, each plate with its grain aligned differently so no crack in the hull could propagate too far. But to his eyes it was a mosaic of pearlescent, luminous grays, making the ship shimmer like a many-faceted jewel. “I prefer her this way,” he said, but stopped himself from adding “naked,” realizing how that would sound—especially if it got back to McCoy, who was still watching him for signs of obsession with the Enterprise.

  But if I’m not obsessed, Kirk thought, then why am I standing here gawking out the window at every chance, instead of mingling with my crew, getting to know them? Particularly the new ones just coming on board here at the starbase. Enterprise had left port with a minimum standard crew of 431, many of them temporary personnel who had other assignments waiting now that the emergency was past. They had disembarked and just over a hundred new people had boarded here at the starbase, bringing the crew to its full five-hundred-person capacity. Kirk had formally welcomed them all aboard and gone through the proper motions, but he hadn’t yet made any serious effort to get to know them, to connect with his crew and begin forging them into a team, a family, like the old crew had been. Why was that?

  Kirk mentally shook himself from his reverie. “You’re right, David,” he said. “Enough rubbernecking. It’s time I got back aboard.” With Fein following, he left the officers’ lounge with a deliberate stride.

  The corridor leading to the docking gangway had its own windows, and Kirk was not surprised to see that he was far from the only person looking at the Enterprise. Certainly he could understand the base personnel’s curiosity—for most, this was their first look at the cutting edge of Starfleet technology. But soon he realized that many of them were staring at him, with expressions ranging from curiosity to awe. He fidgeted. “What’s wrong?” Fein asked.

  Kirk hid behind a wry smirk. “Contrary to popular belief… I’m not that comfortable in the limelight.”

  “You can’t blame them, Jim. That was a pretty spectacular mission you were on. A giant cloud cutting a warp-nine swath through Klingon and Federation space, spitting out a ship the size of Maui that almost wipes out the Earth, but somehow ends up putting on the mother of all fireworks displays instead, apparently in the course of evolving to a higher plane of existence. On top of which it turns out to be the long-lost Voyager 6, all grown up and looking for its mommy. Not only epic stuff, but with great visuals to boot.”

  “Visuals?”

  “Of course. V’Ger’s… eruption… has been all over the news feeds for a week and a half now, shot from every conceivable angle. Not to mention the sensor records from your flyby of the thing, which the feeds have been replaying ad nauseam. Pundits are coming out of the woodwork to explain what V’Ger was, what it became, and how it proves their pet theories about cosmology, cybernetics, evolution, God, whatever. I hear some people are making pilgrimages to Earth, declaring it a holy site.” Fein frowned. “Haven’t you heard any of this?”

  “I’ve been busy! Besides, you know me, I’m more of a reader.”

  “Anyway, the point is, it’s only natural that people would be interested in the ship that was in the middle of it all, and its captain.”

  “But Starfleet people? We encounter… strange cosmic phenomena all the time.”

  “But this is a special case. Face it, Jim, you literally saved the Earth. That’s going to get a guy a fair amount of publicity, especially if that guy happens to be James T. Kirk.”

  Kirk sighed. “I’m not James T. Kirk,” he said, echoing Fein’s dramatic delivery. “I’m just Jim Kirk. I’m no more special than any other captain. It’s just… publicity.”

  “Yeah, I know. The Pelos thing. Hard enough trying to live that down, and now this gets dumped on you. Face it, Jim, from now on you’re a cosmic hero, larger than life, like it or not.” Fein chuckled. “If it were me, I’d capitalize a little. A promotion, a book deal… But then, that’s not the way of the cosmic hero, is it?”

  “Keep it up, David, and I’ll stop coming here for repairs,” Kirk said with more good humor than he felt.

  “And miss out on the food? That’ll be the day.” The commodore slapped Kirk on the back and made his farewells, leaving the captain alone with his thoughts as he strode along the gangway.

  Cosmic hero. Where did they get that? But then, maybe Kirk had started to believe it himself. He’d been so sure that only his years of experience could let him save the world. But how much had he really contributed to the V’Ger mission? It had been Spock whose mind-meld with V’Ger had provided the key insights into its nature. And it had been Will Decker who had made the final sacrifice that had really saved the world, giving up his corporeal existence to fulfill V’Ger’s need to merge with its Creator and evolve to a new level of consciousness.

  True, Decker might have been more cautious than Kirk, might not have taken the necessary steps in time; but then again, as first officer it had been his duty to advise caution. Had he been in the center seat, he might have made the same choices Kirk had. So what had Kirk really contributed to the mission? What had he done to deserve anyone’s accolades—or to earn the trust of his crew?

  Kirk pushed those thoughts aside as he neared the main gangway hatch to the Enterprise. For better or worse, he was her captain again, and it was time to start acting like it. “Permission to come aboard, ma’am,” he said to Bosun’s Mate zh’Ral as he crossed the threshold.

  “Permission granted, sir,” the Andorian replied. “Welcome back, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Crewman,” Kirk said, appreciating the informal addendum. Indeed, he did feel welcomed. Something about the air, the gravity, the ambience of the ship, as standardized as it all was, just felt more right than the starbase had, more like home.

  Now all Kirk had to do was prove himself worthy of that welcome. He needed a mission. This was supposed to be a working shakedown, after all. The fleet was stretched dangerously thin these days, still recovering from the losses sustained in the past several years—Constellation, Intrepid, Excalibur, Defiant, Zheng He, the entire crews of Exeter and Sphinx and Ashoka, too many others. This had led to the preposterous situation of Earth being left defenseless save for one unready heavy cruiser and a smattering of light cruisers too weak to make a difference. (Well, that and a state-of-the-art planetary defense grid, which V’Ger had switched off like a light panel after extracting its highly encrypted specs from Enterprise’s computer in a matter of seconds.) Now, in the wake of their close call, the Federation Council was finally heeding Admiral Nogura’s calls for more resources. Enterprise was certain to be put to real use before long, testing her untried systems in action, in what would no doubt be a long and interesting (in the Chinese sense) process of discovery. Klingons attacking from without, systems blowing up from within… that was just what he needed, Kirk thought wryly, to take his mind off his self-pity.

  As he neared the turbolift, he saw his first officer emerge. “Mr. Spock!”

  Spock nodded. “Captain.”

  “Were you coming to find me?”

  An eyebrow lifted, and Kirk reflected on how much he’d missed the sight. “No, sir. I was… going for a walk.”

  Kirk stared at him. “Not another spacewalk, I trust?”

  Spock reacted with a slight but genuine smile—a sight Kirk was still trying to get used to. “No, I have had my fill of those for now.” He paused. “I… have had difficulty meditating since my meld with V’Ger. I recalled that my mother frequently enjoys taking walks around the city— generally at night, when the temperatures are more amenable to a human—in order to, as she puts it, spend some time with her thoughts. To me, the concept of walking with no specific destination or exercise goal in mind always seemed illogical. But Amanda believes it helps her to focus her mind. She told me once that she tends to associate a given thought with a given place, so that any singl
e place can grow ‘cluttered’ with thoughts, making it difficult to sort among them. Walking apparently allows her to… distribute them more effectively. Or so she has always claimed.”

  Kirk smiled. “It doesn’t sound very logical, does it?”

  Spock tilted his head thoughtfully. “In fact, humanoid brain function is largely an associative process, so there is merit to the idea. However, I will grant that I have become more open to… unorthodox ideas of late.” Kirk harrumphed. “Sir?”

  “Oh… nothing.”

  “Very well.”

  “It’s just that… Bones and I spent five years trying to get you to explore your human side… you spent decades of your life immersed in human culture… yet despite all that, what finally got you to open up was a two-minute mind-meld with the galaxy’s biggest computer!” Spock looked at him with bemusement—or was it amusement? “I just feel a bit… slighted. On behalf of the human species, that is.”

  “I see,” Spock said dubiously. “Well… if it’s any consolation, Jim, the original Voyager 6 probe was built by humans.”

  Kirk threw him a long-suffering look, but it soon turned into a smile. There in Spock’s eyes was that puckish humor Kirk had always believed he’d seen there in the past, but now it was no longer as veiled, as regulated, as once it had been. All joking aside, that meld had changed him, and so far Kirk liked the results. “Go on with your walk, Mr. Spock. But try not to leave too many stray thoughts lying around in the corridors. They aren’t as wide as they used to be,” he added, rapping on the angled, metallic bulkhead.

  Spock definitely smiled this time. “Yes, sir,” he said, and turned away. As the Vulcan strolled—yes, strolled—around the bend, Kirk was certain he heard a chuckle. He shook his head. This will take some getting used to, he thought as he called the lift. Although he was intrigued to see where Spock’s journey would take him, he found he somewhat missed the old, deadpan Spock who always pretended not to get the joke.

  * * *

  Spock paused to gather himself before the chuckles got out of control. Succumbing to humor was a pleasant sensation, but right now he needed to find his focus. (And it hadn’t been that funny anyway.) That was the paradox: his recent epiphany about the necessity of emotion had given him much to think about, but his emotions made it difficult for him to think. And that tended to bring annoyance, which made matters worse and threatened to set off an escalating cycle. That was the real reason he had “gone for a walk”—sitting in his quarters, fruitlessly attempting to meditate, had been an exercise in frustration, and he had simply felt an overwhelming urge to exert himself physically, presumably a manifestation of the instinctive fight-or-flight reaction. Since there was nothing in his utilitarian quarters to fight against, and since he hadn’t wished to explain a roomful of smashed furniture to the quartermaster, he had chosen flight, or at least movement. Only once he was out in the corridors, his legs carrying him aimlessly forward, had he remembered his mother’s long meandering walks, and the benefits they seemed to bring her.

  Spock’s continued difficulty with impulse control was a matter of concern to him. At first, he had been able to attribute it to the neurological trauma he had sustained when the contents of V’Ger’s cosmos-spanning memory banks had flooded his brain. Indeed, many times over the past ten days, he had been tempted to conclude that his new emotionalism was solely the result of impairment to his mesiofrontal cortex, and that once he was fully healed he could return to his old, strictly logical ways. But he knew that would be an act of self-deception. He had seen the barrenness of a life ruled solely by logic. V’Ger had journeyed across gigaparsecs of space and millennia of time (for the singularity which had hurled it across space had also sent it well into the past), amassing unprecedented amounts of knowledge about the workings of this universe while searching through thousands of galaxies for its point of origin. Yet even with all that knowledge, it remained completely empty and unfulfilled. With no emotion at all, there was no motivation, no sense of purpose or meaning to existence.

  In retrospect, this should not have come as such a surprise. Vulcan neurologists had learned millennia ago that even the most logical, abstract decisions engaged the emotional centers of the humanoid brain, with the more sensible or correct option being selected because it felt more right. Yet Vulcan philosophers shied away from confronting the ramifications of this fact. Spock saw now that to do so was itself illogical. And it would be just as illogical for him to deny the knowledge he had gained simply because it failed to conform to his prejudices. Besides, by now his brain function should have returned to normal, so he could no longer use it as an excuse. That recognition alone, however, did not solve his control problem, nor did it explain his inability to meditate.

  At least the change of scenery had helped to ease the clutter in Spock’s mind. But it couldn’t take the place of meditation. There was too much sensory input, as passing crew members greeted him, as conversational echoes from side corridors reached his sensitive ears, as the scents of over a dozen different species asserted themselves to his olfactory receptors. All it did was to take his mind off the questions he sought to meditate on; it brought him no closer to finding answers.

  And even without the sensory interference, it was growing harder and harder to sense the Voyager, as he had come to think of the entity which had emerged from the fusion of V’Ger, Decker, and the Deltan navigator Ilia. From the moment of its emergence, Spock had no longer felt the same telepathic rapport he’d somehow achieved with V’Ger—an awareness that many other telepaths across known space had reported experiencing as well, though only Spock had been in a position to use it constructively. According to the news feeds, those telepaths had felt an overwhelming surge at the moment of the transformation, and then nothing more, as though the entity had either moved beyond their sensory range or transformed beyond their ability to detect. But Spock had retained some lingering awareness, an aftereffect of his direct contact with V’Ger’s mind.

  He knew that the Voyager had gained the sense of purpose V’Ger sought, that it felt a newfound freedom and was suffused with passionate curiosity. More: the Voyager was no longer alone. Even greater than the freedom to intuit new levels of existence, it had learned, was the joy of having someone to share its knowledge with, to share itself with. Although the Voyager was a unified being, Spock could still recognize the facets that made it up. V’Ger was still the core, the power and purpose of the whole, still driven by an overriding urge to learn all that was learnable, yet now finally able to understand the human curiosity that had inspired that programming, and able to gain fulfillment from its fruits. Decker was there, suffusing the Voyager with awe and wonder, giving it the imagination it needed to find new realms, yet tempering it with a sense of caution and discipline, keeping the newborn entity from becoming too reckless on its ventures into the unknown. And Ilia was there too, a quieter voice, less of a driving force, yet in some ways serving the most crucial role of all. Her experience with Deltan mating practices gave her insight into the sharing of minds and made her the linchpin of this far more intimate joining. While Decker gave it the impulse to quest outward and seek out new realms of existence, Ilia gave it the instinct to know itself, and to love the selves that made it up.

  Spock sensed that the Voyager was exploring realms that made four-dimensional spacetime seem flat and claustrophobic, sensing and seeking contact with other minds that resided within those realms, but the experiences were too far outside Spock’s referential frame for him to comprehend. And he sensed that the Voyager was growing, searching through its memory for the countless sentient beings which V’Ger had absorbed—all of their minds digitally preserved as perfectly as Ilia’s had been, but not recognized as consciousnesses until now—and methodically incorporating them all into the composite mind, allowing them to live again, perhaps forever, as parts of its growing gestalt. Many might consider this a reasonable approximation of an afterlife. Spock didn’t know, however, never having given much tho
ught to the question.

  Spock’s own rapport with the Voyager was swiftly fading as it evolved further and further away from the mind he’d melded with. He regretted this; on some elementary levels, the Voyager’s journey of discovery paralleled Spock’s own—they were both logical beings who had recognized that logic was not enough and had achieved a new unity with an emotional half. Spock had hoped that an ongoing rapport with the Voyager would bring him guidance on his own journey. But it seemed he would soon be entirely on his own.

  Spock registered that his meanderings had somehow brought him down to Deck 7, right outside sickbay. He lifted a brow, wondering if his walk had been as directionless as he’d thought. Fascinating, to be guided by motives he hadn’t consciously reasoned out. No, correction: he had always had those motives; he just hadn’t admitted it to himself before. Vulcan thought, he was coming to understand, was not wholly rational so much as wholly rationalized. But Spock judged his subconscious impulse, if such it had been, to have merit. Perhaps a medical consultation would be beneficial. Perhaps there was some physical factor he was overlooking.

  On entering the medical lab, he found it empty, but he could see Doctors McCoy and Chapel through the window of the CMO’s office, and their voices carried plainly through the open door.

  “Are you sure the damn thing is calibrated now?”

  “I supervised the installation myself, Leonard. I think I know what I’m talking about!”

  “Well, then according to this thing, the whole crew is currently dying of hypothermia!”

  “Let me see that…. Oh, Leonard, you’re reading it wrong! Are you still thinking in Fabrini units?”

  “Damn… I knew I spent too much time on that blasted backwater. Okay, how do I select between channels again?”

  “Just read the menus, all right? I have rounds to do.”

  “Don’t leave me here alone with this monstrosity, Christine! I didn’t sign up for this kind of torture.”