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r_scribblesSome violence and gore in this one, I'm afraid. I wouldn't describe it as 18 Certificate as such, but it's much stronger than the usual tone of Rollercoaster.
ROLLERCOASTER
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Mr Data And Miss Yar Send Their Regrets
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Chapter Four – I, Monster
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A.N. – This chapter contains some violent and bloody imagery.
-x-
He was not certain how long he had been captive now. The Inhibitor appeared to be affecting his internal chronometer as well as many other systems. Poklar would come, she would cause him pain, he would resist the urge to show it, and then she would leave again, for how long he did not know. She would usually come with verbal abuse to complement the physical pain, but she had not attempted to sexually harass him since that first occasion. Poklar still insisted upon calling him Lore. He had to admit to himself that that bothered him, although he would never let her know that. He never made that sound – that “scream” - again either. In a way, it was good to have something to defy his captive with. He would not give in again.
The door opened, and he watched Poklar enter from his prone position on the floor, just as he always did. The damaged Romulan seemed more excited than usual this time, and carried a portable computer monitor with her.
‘I’ve got it,’ she mumbled as she set the monitor up next to him. ‘I’ve finally got it. Took me a long time to find…’
‘What do you have?’ he asked, a distinct slur to his voice.
‘The truth.’ Poklar had a strange look in her eyes. ‘I thought that the truth you needed was to feel the pain I felt, but now I know. Now I know. You’re a machine – you’re not supposed to feel, you’re supposed to see, to process. I understand now that sympathetic pain won’t affect you. Facts… facts will affect you.’
Data managed a small, defiant smile. ‘You intend to attempt to torture me with a Scientific Presentation? Will there be a test afterwards?’
Poklar continued to set up the monitor. ‘This is footage. Security footage. It took some doing to hack into Romulus’ archives system and procure a copy, but here it is.’
Data gazed at the back of her head as she worked. What footage could she possibly be so excited about? How did she believe that it could hurt him?
Tasha…
Perhaps she had known that Tasha had also been taken by Fajo. Perhaps Poklar knew about their history. Another version of Tasha Yar, from another reality, had spent many years on Romulus, being raped, enslaved and finally murdered. Perhaps it was footage of this that Poklar planned to show him. Or worse – perhaps she had tracked “his” Tasha – the same Tasha Yar who had been captured alongside him. Throughout his endurance at Poklar’s hands, he had worried about Tasha’s safety. He knew that, in spite of her bravado, she viewed the outcome that Fajo had suggested for her as a fate worse than death. Perhaps he was to be shown his own Tasha Yar’s torment. If that were the case, then Poklar would be correct in her assumption that witnessing a specific event could hurt him more than manufactured pain stimuli.
Poklar pulled the monitor up close to him, so that the image of the screen filled his field of vision.
‘Watch,’ she ordered.
Suddenly, there was a recorded image in front of him. His first instinct was to scan the image for any figure that might be Tasha. He experienced a sensation of relief to find none. The footage was of a windowless room filled with computer banks and electronic equipment… a laboratory, perhaps. Three Romulan males were clustered in a group, deep in a conversation that Data could not decipher, since the footage had no sound. The image panned across the room, slowly, showing more computer banks and… and a table, laden with heavy restraints. And, restrained upon the table was… was him.
In his mind’s eye, he was taken back to that day in Engineering once more. She played her finger over the tip of his ear and whispered; ‘remind you of anything?’
‘Is that…’ he murmured, ‘…me?’
‘Of course it’s you,’ Poklar replied. ‘Who else could it possibly be?’
Data watched as the figure on the table gazed about himself with a bored expression. He saw two of the Romulans leave the room as another – a visibly pregnant female, this time – entered. This Romulan was younger and plumper than his captive, and with a flawless complexion, but it was clearly Dr Poklar from years gone by who had just walked into the shot. The figure on the table curled a grin at her. Data knew that grin – one that superficially charmed but masked a deep underlying contempt. That was not his smile - not his face.
‘No. That is Lore.’
‘You are Lore.’
Data shook his head weakly, still helplessly watching the monitor. In the footage, Lore began to giggle. Poklar and the other Romulan turned to look at him. The male Romulan took a couple of steps towards the table. Lore thrust out a hand, breaking out of restraints that had clearly been no match for his strength from the start, then pulled his other hand free. His legs and torso swiftly followed, and within less than a second, he had swung himself down from the table. Still giggling, he grabbed the Romulan male and, just as Poklar had described, snapped his spine, grabbed the disruptor from his twitching hand and fired at a computer bank less than a metre away from where the young Poklar was standing, mutely screaming her partner’s name. The computer bank exploded, flinging the pregnant Romulan to the floor.
‘You told me what happened here,’ Data reminded her. ‘I do not need to see it.’
‘Oh,’ breathed Poklar at his ear, ‘but you do. You need to understand.’
Disruptor in hand, Lore went to the door, still laughing, then stopped and turned, grinning again at the stricken pregnant scientist. On the floor, clutching her burned face, the young Poklar began to plead Lore to leave her be – that she posed no threat to him; that he could just walk away. This only seemed to feed into Lore’s Sadistic mirth. He walked smoothly up to her, and kicked her with a sickening force. Once… twice… three times in her swollen belly. At that, Lore seemed satisfied that the little life within the female was now dead, and left her screaming and sobbing on the floor.
‘That was not me,’ Data whispered, starting to wonder for whose benefit he felt the need to repeatedly reiterate that point. ‘That was Lore. That was not me.’
The footage changed – the image was now of a long corridor. The two Romulan scientists who had left
the lab previously had obviously heard Poklar’s screams and come rushing back to her aid. But between them and her, calmly walking towards them, and laughing all the way, ha-ha-ha – was Lore.
‘No more,’ pleaded Data. ‘Do not show me any more.’
‘Does it bother you?’ Poklar asked. ‘Are you starting to understand? Are you beginning to see the monster that you truly are?’
In the footage, Lore reached the scientists, still grinning. He caught the head of one, and with an effortless flick of his wrists, twisted and pulled, decapitating the Romulan alive. Sprayed with his colleague’s blood, the second scientist went into hysterics, tripping over his feet as he scrambled to flee. He ran out of shot as Lore calmly, cheerfully followed at a swift walking pace.
Data’s emotions dealt him sickening double-blows of panic and horror, and for a moment, his mind returned him to Engineering, and back into the clutches of the Borg, where She straddled his torso, gazing down at him, relishing his distress.
‘It is not me,’ he repeated, softly. ‘It is not me.’
‘Are you certain?’ She asked. ‘You snapped the spines of Borg Drones – felt their necks pop under your naked fingers.’
‘That was different,’ argued Data. ‘Borg Drones cannot be reasoned with… we were being attacked… breaking the spine is one of the few reliable methods of eliminating them…’
‘What does the Borg have to do with any of this?’ Poklar asked, dispersing the image of the assimilated Engineering in Data’s imagination.
‘Nothing,’ Data replied, watching helplessly as the footage changed again to show the fleeing scientist running towards a security team.
‘The Borg wanted you,’ Poklar reminded him. ‘That faceless, monstrous, electronic scourge of natural life wanted you. They saw you for what you really are. You’re so very like them.’
On the footage, Lore walked into shot, firing his stolen disruptor upon three of the five security guards before they could so much as draw their weapons.
‘I am not,’ railed Data, weakly.
Lore lunged forward with the same unnatural speed that Data possessed, and caught the hand of another security guard just as he took aim. The android looked into the Romulan’s eyes and grinned a terrible, open-mouthed, sharp-toothed crescent of a grin. He slammed his free hand against the forearm of the guard. The Romulan’s arm snapped in two, splintering bone and spurting blood. The screaming Romulan’s forearm had been folded in, so that his weapon now pointed back at him. This seemed to amuse Lore greatly. He held the Romulan’s dead hand and squeezed, forcing him victim to, effectively, shoot himself.
‘I am not like that,’ continued Data. ‘I am not like the Borg. I am not like Lore.’
The last guard had abandoned any attempt to stop Lore and was just trying to escape now, like the scientist. Lore grabbed the final guard and pulled him to the floor, put his heel to the Romulan’s skull and ground down, down, down until the cranium crushed like an eggshell, sending blood, eyes and brain matter bursting from it.
‘But you are,’ Poklar told him. ‘You’re made by the same designer, from the same material, for the same purpose. To say you’re not the same is like saying a disruptor isn’t a disruptor, as long as it hasn’t been used to kill anybody yet. Soong’s monsters are all the same, so what does it matter what you claim to call yourself, or what you claim to stand for?’
In the footage, Lore looked up. There was nobody left now but the scientist from earlier. The scientist was backing away, pleading, sobbing. It was obvious that he had soiled himself. Lore slowly approached the Romulan, clearly enjoying eking his terror out.
Data was vaguely aware of tears running down his face. ‘Run away,’ he whispered to the scientist on the screen. ‘Please, please, run away.’
The scientist did not run away. Lore walked forward, and put his hands on the Romulan’s shaking shoulders…
…and pulled.
‘No!’
Data watched helplessly as Lore ripped the nameless, silent scientist apart, scattering limbs and body parts like a bored child with a paper cut-out doll.
‘It is not me,’ he reminded himself aloud. ‘That was Lore, and Lore is gone…’
‘How sure can anybody be of that?’ Poklar asked. ‘As far as I’d heard, two androids disappeared together, amidst the chaos of a battle, and one walked out unscathed while the other was terminated. So very alike… who’s to say which was which?’
‘I know that I am Data!’
‘Lore could have reprogrammed himself to think he was Data,’ argued Poklar. ‘To effectively fool his friends in the long term, to get past the scrutiny of the Betazoid…’
On the screen, Lore turned briefly and looked straight at the camera recording him with a wide smile.
‘No,’ replied Data. ‘I was there. I remember. It was Lore who died. It was Lore who I…’
He trailed off. The footage had been paused. Lore was still smiling up at the camera - a monster. Data’s own face, twisted in bloodthirsty delight; his own hands slick with dark green blood.
‘…who you killed,’ interjected Poklar, finishing Data’s sentence.
‘Yes,’ breathed Data. ‘But he had to be stopped. What you have shown me only reinforces that fact. He was monstrous.’
‘You murdered your own brother. And yet, you still think he was the monstrous one?’
Data’s emotions were spiralling out of control. He could feel systems throughout his body beginning to go into overload. ‘What?’
‘You can’t possibly tell me that you could have killed your brother and not be the same creature as the one you just watched going on the rampage,’ Poklar replied.
Data looked down, away from the screen, and caught sight of his hands, slumped weakly on the floor. He squinted at them. He was certain that his palms had a green tinge to them that they had not had before.
‘No.’
‘What about the Borg,’ continued Poklar, in an increasingly excitable manner. ‘You killed them…’
‘No! That was different!’
‘They wanted you, but you went on the rampage and you killed them.’
His hands were definitely tainted with green. The colour was growing clearer and clearer. ‘Leave me alone…’
‘You were her lover, weren’t you – this “Queen”? You licked and kissed and thrust and sighed and then you pulled her into acid and made her burn.’
He could not stand it any longer. He pooled what little might he had, and lunged his green-stained hands at Poklar’s throat.
‘I am not Lore!’
Poklar raised her eyebrows in mock impress. ‘You actually got up off the floor. I didn’t know I’d left you with enough strength to do that. You’re putting every iota of what energy you have into trying to break my neck, aren’t you? What sort of mess do you think you’d have made of me by now if it weren’t for the Inhibitor?’
‘I am not harming you…’
‘Only because I won’t let you…’
‘I have never harmed you! I just want you to stop!’
‘Then admit it! Admit that you’re Lore, and face up to what you did to me.’
‘No!’
‘You want to kill me,’ sneered Poklar, ‘don’t you? You want to squeeze all the life out of my frail, biological body. Don’t you? Don’t you!’
Data didn’t answer – couldn’t answer.
Poklar pushed his hands away and threw him back to the floor. ‘Admit it!’
‘Dr Poklar,’ interrupted a deep voice from behind.
Poklar looked around, startled. Data followed her gaze. In the doorway stood a middle-aged Romulan male, dressed in the uniform of a General, a disruptor in his hand, pointed squarely at Poklar. Data recognized him as the Romulan that he and Tasha had encountered on the mission to locate Ambassador Spock – it was Sela’s father.
‘What…?’ Poklar was still clearly taken aback. ‘What are you doing here? How did you find me?’
‘You really thought that you could pay for the abduction and delivery of a Starfleet Officer on the Black Market and leave no trace?’ asked the General. ‘Once we’d discovered the co-ordinates of the pick-up from your contact, your location was a simple matter of deduction.’
‘Deduction,’ sighed Data to himself, feeling his emotions begin to relax to far more manageable levels. ‘Yes. I do like deduction. And Gilbert & Sullivan. And Beatrice & Benedick. And Tavener and Turner and Tasha. I am Data. I am Data. I am…’
He was aware of being beamed away. When he looked up again, he was on the flight deck of a very small ship – not much bigger than a moderately sized shuttle. The Romulan General was still there, as was Poklar – incensed at her treatment. A fourth figure – evidently the one who had beamed them all aboard - was obscured by the back of a large chair on which he or she sat.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Poklar railed.
‘You are under arrest, Doctor,’ the General told her.
‘I am trying to do the Empire a great service,’ Poklar seethed, ‘by ridding it of an unnatural monster that threatens every Romulan life – every biological life in the Universe!’
‘You embezzled vast amounts in order to play out your fantasies of revenge upon a blameless individual…’
‘You’re just worried about how Starfleet will react to the loss of “their” android. Pathetic, Human-sympathising old coward – I won’t take orders from you.’
The fourth figure turned around. Commander Sela glowered at Poklar. ‘Don’t talk to my father that way.’
Poklar blinked, taken aback. ‘Commander…? What are you doing here? The last I heard, you were at odds with the General…’
An odd look crossed Sela’s expression. Even in his haze of bewilderment, Data could tell at that moment that she was not who she claimed to be. It was Tasha. She was alive and, it appeared, safe. His emotions, still fluctuating wildly, swelled with joy and relief at seeing her, only to plummet again when he realized that it must have been Sela’s father who had arranged to purchase her from Fajo. Still incapable of pulling himself to so much as a sitting position, he curled up and fought with his overloading systems as the conversation continued around him.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand anything about family, Doctor,’ snapped Tasha, still playing the part of the Romulan Commander. ‘Now, you will do what my father tells you – I assume that you are still prepared to take orders from me…’
‘You have always been so supportive of my work,’ retorted Poklar. ‘I don’t understand – how could a simple fiscal misunderstanding lead you to try to stop me using the very devices that you encouraged me to create?’
‘I don’t need to explain myself to you. You’re under arrest.’
Poklar tilted her head slightly at Tasha, as though ruminating something. Data heard her whisper the word ‘prosthetics’, under her breath – far too softly for the other two to hear.
‘What a small ship this is,’ she said aloud, looking about herself. ‘Why, the two of you are the only ones running it, I’d say.’
‘Two of us, one of you,’ Tasha retorted, ‘and, unlike us, you’re unarmed. That’s enough to persuade you to acquiesce.’
‘You’re alone out here,’ Poklar noted, taking a slight side-step towards Data, so that she was within arm’s reach of his slumped form. ‘You don’t have any back-up.’
‘What difference does that…’
Poklar reached down swiftly to the controls of the Halo, still buried into the back of his head, and tugged at the dial. The jolt of searing hot pain throughout his entire body took him by surprise. He gasped instinctively and was unable to control the metallic screech that had issued from him during the first occasion that the Halo had been used on him.
‘Data!’ Apparently giving up all pretence of masquerading as Sela, Tasha rushed to him, with the General in hot pursuit.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Poklar ran over to the ship’s controls and swiftly beamed herself away.
Tasha paid the escaping Doctor no heed. ‘What has she done to him? How do we help him?’
Sela’s father tried the dial. The pain did not abate.
‘She’s locked the controls,’ explained the Romulan. ‘We’ll have to take it off.’ He began carefully pulling the Halo’s needles from Data’s head. ‘I studied the design of this thing. Try to disengage it at the nape of his neck. Carefully!’
Tasha began to gently prize the device away from Data’s neck.
‘She is getting away,’ Data reminded them, thickly.
‘We’ll worry about that later.’
There was a pop, and a feeling of release in the base of his head, and the pain was suddenly gone.
Tasha looked him in the eyes, and smiled. ‘There, now. Isn’t that better?’
Data smiled back, faintly. ‘I am still all but paralysed.’
The General nodded. ‘The Inhibitor’s still in operation. I’ll try to remove that now.’
Data was aware that his emotions were still fluctuating more than usual. He felt… giddy. In both senses of the word.
‘You came back,’ he told Tasha. ‘You rescued me.’
‘Your Knight in shining armour,’ Tasha grinned, indicating to her grubby, sweat-stained uniform. She nodded to the General. ‘That’s your other valiant saviour right there. Who’da thought it?’
‘It was the least I could do,’ muttered the General.
‘The last time we encountered Sela’s father, it was all that you could do not to kill him where he stood,’ Data reminded Tasha. ‘But this time you trusted him with your life – why?’
‘Because of you, stupid.’ She brushed his temple with her thumb. ‘I’d do anything to get you back.’
With difficulty, he was able to bring his hand up to hers. ‘Thank you.’
The Romulan pulled the Inhibitor out of Data’s back. Data still felt weakened, however, and was aware of many anomalies in his systems.
‘It might take a little while for its effects to fully wear off,’ the Romulan explained. He slung Data’s arm over his shoulder and struggled to pick him up. ‘Oh, you’re heavy…’
Tasha took Data’s other arm, helping the General to lift him.
‘I’ll get you both onto the escape pod,’ the Romulan explained as they made their way through the small ship. ‘You should get back to your people as soon as possible – I imagine Poklar would have interfered with your positronic brain before bringing you into consciousness, in order to make you as vulnerable as possible, and I don’t have the expertise to right that.’
‘She overrode my emotional controls,’ Data told him.
‘Stands to reason,’ the Romulan countered. ‘That’s actually one of the saner ideas of hers I’ve heard about. In the last report of hers that I read, she seemed very excited about the prospect of modifying your optical sensors to make you start seeing a blood-green tinge to everything you looked at.’
Data had no reply to that except for a faintly sheepish ‘Oh’.
‘What about Poklar?’ asked Tasha, scraping the prosthetics from her face with her free had as she walked.
‘I’ll see to her later,’ the General replied.
‘She’ll get away at this rate,’ Tasha added. ‘If you come back having sent two Starfleet officers back into Federation space, without anything to show for it… won’t you be in trouble?’
The Romulan smiled. ‘I imagine I’m already “in trouble”.’
‘Is all this really just for the good of the Reunification movement?’ Tasha asked.
‘I think it’s perfectly obvious that it’s not.’ The Romulan stopped at the escape pod hatch. ‘I wanted to do something right for you, Tasha… I needed to do something right for you. I had to set you free, as I should have done all those years ago. Please. See this as my penance.’
‘Thank you…’ began Tasha, trailing off with a strange smile. ‘We have all this history together that I never lived – a daughter who I never gave birth to, and I don’t even know your name.’
‘You don’t need to know my name.’ The Romulan helped Data into the minute escape pod. ‘You don’t even need to thank me – not really. Just… if there’s one thing you could possibly do for me…?’
‘You’re going to ask me to forgive you,’ interrupted Tasha, dully. ‘For what you did to her… to “me”.’
‘Do you think that you could?’
Tasha sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Could you try?’
Tasha paused for a second. ‘I will.’
‘That’s all I needed to hear.’ The Romulan assisted Tasha as she crawled into the tiny escape pod along with Data. ‘Goodbye, Tasha. Have a wonderful life.’
The hatch closed, the airlock sealed and the pre-programmed escape pod was jettisoned into space.
ROLLERCOASTER
-x-
Mr Data And Miss Yar Send Their Regrets
-x-
Chapter Four – I, Monster
-x-
A.N. – This chapter contains some violent and bloody imagery.
-x-
He was not certain how long he had been captive now. The Inhibitor appeared to be affecting his internal chronometer as well as many other systems. Poklar would come, she would cause him pain, he would resist the urge to show it, and then she would leave again, for how long he did not know. She would usually come with verbal abuse to complement the physical pain, but she had not attempted to sexually harass him since that first occasion. Poklar still insisted upon calling him Lore. He had to admit to himself that that bothered him, although he would never let her know that. He never made that sound – that “scream” - again either. In a way, it was good to have something to defy his captive with. He would not give in again.
The door opened, and he watched Poklar enter from his prone position on the floor, just as he always did. The damaged Romulan seemed more excited than usual this time, and carried a portable computer monitor with her.
‘I’ve got it,’ she mumbled as she set the monitor up next to him. ‘I’ve finally got it. Took me a long time to find…’
‘What do you have?’ he asked, a distinct slur to his voice.
‘The truth.’ Poklar had a strange look in her eyes. ‘I thought that the truth you needed was to feel the pain I felt, but now I know. Now I know. You’re a machine – you’re not supposed to feel, you’re supposed to see, to process. I understand now that sympathetic pain won’t affect you. Facts… facts will affect you.’
Data managed a small, defiant smile. ‘You intend to attempt to torture me with a Scientific Presentation? Will there be a test afterwards?’
Poklar continued to set up the monitor. ‘This is footage. Security footage. It took some doing to hack into Romulus’ archives system and procure a copy, but here it is.’
Data gazed at the back of her head as she worked. What footage could she possibly be so excited about? How did she believe that it could hurt him?
Tasha…
Perhaps she had known that Tasha had also been taken by Fajo. Perhaps Poklar knew about their history. Another version of Tasha Yar, from another reality, had spent many years on Romulus, being raped, enslaved and finally murdered. Perhaps it was footage of this that Poklar planned to show him. Or worse – perhaps she had tracked “his” Tasha – the same Tasha Yar who had been captured alongside him. Throughout his endurance at Poklar’s hands, he had worried about Tasha’s safety. He knew that, in spite of her bravado, she viewed the outcome that Fajo had suggested for her as a fate worse than death. Perhaps he was to be shown his own Tasha Yar’s torment. If that were the case, then Poklar would be correct in her assumption that witnessing a specific event could hurt him more than manufactured pain stimuli.
Poklar pulled the monitor up close to him, so that the image of the screen filled his field of vision.
‘Watch,’ she ordered.
Suddenly, there was a recorded image in front of him. His first instinct was to scan the image for any figure that might be Tasha. He experienced a sensation of relief to find none. The footage was of a windowless room filled with computer banks and electronic equipment… a laboratory, perhaps. Three Romulan males were clustered in a group, deep in a conversation that Data could not decipher, since the footage had no sound. The image panned across the room, slowly, showing more computer banks and… and a table, laden with heavy restraints. And, restrained upon the table was… was him.
In his mind’s eye, he was taken back to that day in Engineering once more. She played her finger over the tip of his ear and whispered; ‘remind you of anything?’
‘Is that…’ he murmured, ‘…me?’
‘Of course it’s you,’ Poklar replied. ‘Who else could it possibly be?’
Data watched as the figure on the table gazed about himself with a bored expression. He saw two of the Romulans leave the room as another – a visibly pregnant female, this time – entered. This Romulan was younger and plumper than his captive, and with a flawless complexion, but it was clearly Dr Poklar from years gone by who had just walked into the shot. The figure on the table curled a grin at her. Data knew that grin – one that superficially charmed but masked a deep underlying contempt. That was not his smile - not his face.
‘No. That is Lore.’
‘You are Lore.’
Data shook his head weakly, still helplessly watching the monitor. In the footage, Lore began to giggle. Poklar and the other Romulan turned to look at him. The male Romulan took a couple of steps towards the table. Lore thrust out a hand, breaking out of restraints that had clearly been no match for his strength from the start, then pulled his other hand free. His legs and torso swiftly followed, and within less than a second, he had swung himself down from the table. Still giggling, he grabbed the Romulan male and, just as Poklar had described, snapped his spine, grabbed the disruptor from his twitching hand and fired at a computer bank less than a metre away from where the young Poklar was standing, mutely screaming her partner’s name. The computer bank exploded, flinging the pregnant Romulan to the floor.
‘You told me what happened here,’ Data reminded her. ‘I do not need to see it.’
‘Oh,’ breathed Poklar at his ear, ‘but you do. You need to understand.’
Disruptor in hand, Lore went to the door, still laughing, then stopped and turned, grinning again at the stricken pregnant scientist. On the floor, clutching her burned face, the young Poklar began to plead Lore to leave her be – that she posed no threat to him; that he could just walk away. This only seemed to feed into Lore’s Sadistic mirth. He walked smoothly up to her, and kicked her with a sickening force. Once… twice… three times in her swollen belly. At that, Lore seemed satisfied that the little life within the female was now dead, and left her screaming and sobbing on the floor.
‘That was not me,’ Data whispered, starting to wonder for whose benefit he felt the need to repeatedly reiterate that point. ‘That was Lore. That was not me.’
The footage changed – the image was now of a long corridor. The two Romulan scientists who had left
the lab previously had obviously heard Poklar’s screams and come rushing back to her aid. But between them and her, calmly walking towards them, and laughing all the way, ha-ha-ha – was Lore.
‘No more,’ pleaded Data. ‘Do not show me any more.’
‘Does it bother you?’ Poklar asked. ‘Are you starting to understand? Are you beginning to see the monster that you truly are?’
In the footage, Lore reached the scientists, still grinning. He caught the head of one, and with an effortless flick of his wrists, twisted and pulled, decapitating the Romulan alive. Sprayed with his colleague’s blood, the second scientist went into hysterics, tripping over his feet as he scrambled to flee. He ran out of shot as Lore calmly, cheerfully followed at a swift walking pace.
Data’s emotions dealt him sickening double-blows of panic and horror, and for a moment, his mind returned him to Engineering, and back into the clutches of the Borg, where She straddled his torso, gazing down at him, relishing his distress.
‘It is not me,’ he repeated, softly. ‘It is not me.’
‘Are you certain?’ She asked. ‘You snapped the spines of Borg Drones – felt their necks pop under your naked fingers.’
‘That was different,’ argued Data. ‘Borg Drones cannot be reasoned with… we were being attacked… breaking the spine is one of the few reliable methods of eliminating them…’
‘What does the Borg have to do with any of this?’ Poklar asked, dispersing the image of the assimilated Engineering in Data’s imagination.
‘Nothing,’ Data replied, watching helplessly as the footage changed again to show the fleeing scientist running towards a security team.
‘The Borg wanted you,’ Poklar reminded him. ‘That faceless, monstrous, electronic scourge of natural life wanted you. They saw you for what you really are. You’re so very like them.’
On the footage, Lore walked into shot, firing his stolen disruptor upon three of the five security guards before they could so much as draw their weapons.
‘I am not,’ railed Data, weakly.
Lore lunged forward with the same unnatural speed that Data possessed, and caught the hand of another security guard just as he took aim. The android looked into the Romulan’s eyes and grinned a terrible, open-mouthed, sharp-toothed crescent of a grin. He slammed his free hand against the forearm of the guard. The Romulan’s arm snapped in two, splintering bone and spurting blood. The screaming Romulan’s forearm had been folded in, so that his weapon now pointed back at him. This seemed to amuse Lore greatly. He held the Romulan’s dead hand and squeezed, forcing him victim to, effectively, shoot himself.
‘I am not like that,’ continued Data. ‘I am not like the Borg. I am not like Lore.’
The last guard had abandoned any attempt to stop Lore and was just trying to escape now, like the scientist. Lore grabbed the final guard and pulled him to the floor, put his heel to the Romulan’s skull and ground down, down, down until the cranium crushed like an eggshell, sending blood, eyes and brain matter bursting from it.
‘But you are,’ Poklar told him. ‘You’re made by the same designer, from the same material, for the same purpose. To say you’re not the same is like saying a disruptor isn’t a disruptor, as long as it hasn’t been used to kill anybody yet. Soong’s monsters are all the same, so what does it matter what you claim to call yourself, or what you claim to stand for?’
In the footage, Lore looked up. There was nobody left now but the scientist from earlier. The scientist was backing away, pleading, sobbing. It was obvious that he had soiled himself. Lore slowly approached the Romulan, clearly enjoying eking his terror out.
Data was vaguely aware of tears running down his face. ‘Run away,’ he whispered to the scientist on the screen. ‘Please, please, run away.’
The scientist did not run away. Lore walked forward, and put his hands on the Romulan’s shaking shoulders…
…and pulled.
‘No!’
Data watched helplessly as Lore ripped the nameless, silent scientist apart, scattering limbs and body parts like a bored child with a paper cut-out doll.
‘It is not me,’ he reminded himself aloud. ‘That was Lore, and Lore is gone…’
‘How sure can anybody be of that?’ Poklar asked. ‘As far as I’d heard, two androids disappeared together, amidst the chaos of a battle, and one walked out unscathed while the other was terminated. So very alike… who’s to say which was which?’
‘I know that I am Data!’
‘Lore could have reprogrammed himself to think he was Data,’ argued Poklar. ‘To effectively fool his friends in the long term, to get past the scrutiny of the Betazoid…’
On the screen, Lore turned briefly and looked straight at the camera recording him with a wide smile.
‘No,’ replied Data. ‘I was there. I remember. It was Lore who died. It was Lore who I…’
He trailed off. The footage had been paused. Lore was still smiling up at the camera - a monster. Data’s own face, twisted in bloodthirsty delight; his own hands slick with dark green blood.
‘…who you killed,’ interjected Poklar, finishing Data’s sentence.
‘Yes,’ breathed Data. ‘But he had to be stopped. What you have shown me only reinforces that fact. He was monstrous.’
‘You murdered your own brother. And yet, you still think he was the monstrous one?’
Data’s emotions were spiralling out of control. He could feel systems throughout his body beginning to go into overload. ‘What?’
‘You can’t possibly tell me that you could have killed your brother and not be the same creature as the one you just watched going on the rampage,’ Poklar replied.
Data looked down, away from the screen, and caught sight of his hands, slumped weakly on the floor. He squinted at them. He was certain that his palms had a green tinge to them that they had not had before.
‘No.’
‘What about the Borg,’ continued Poklar, in an increasingly excitable manner. ‘You killed them…’
‘No! That was different!’
‘They wanted you, but you went on the rampage and you killed them.’
His hands were definitely tainted with green. The colour was growing clearer and clearer. ‘Leave me alone…’
‘You were her lover, weren’t you – this “Queen”? You licked and kissed and thrust and sighed and then you pulled her into acid and made her burn.’
He could not stand it any longer. He pooled what little might he had, and lunged his green-stained hands at Poklar’s throat.
‘I am not Lore!’
Poklar raised her eyebrows in mock impress. ‘You actually got up off the floor. I didn’t know I’d left you with enough strength to do that. You’re putting every iota of what energy you have into trying to break my neck, aren’t you? What sort of mess do you think you’d have made of me by now if it weren’t for the Inhibitor?’
‘I am not harming you…’
‘Only because I won’t let you…’
‘I have never harmed you! I just want you to stop!’
‘Then admit it! Admit that you’re Lore, and face up to what you did to me.’
‘No!’
‘You want to kill me,’ sneered Poklar, ‘don’t you? You want to squeeze all the life out of my frail, biological body. Don’t you? Don’t you!’
Data didn’t answer – couldn’t answer.
Poklar pushed his hands away and threw him back to the floor. ‘Admit it!’
‘Dr Poklar,’ interrupted a deep voice from behind.
Poklar looked around, startled. Data followed her gaze. In the doorway stood a middle-aged Romulan male, dressed in the uniform of a General, a disruptor in his hand, pointed squarely at Poklar. Data recognized him as the Romulan that he and Tasha had encountered on the mission to locate Ambassador Spock – it was Sela’s father.
‘What…?’ Poklar was still clearly taken aback. ‘What are you doing here? How did you find me?’
‘You really thought that you could pay for the abduction and delivery of a Starfleet Officer on the Black Market and leave no trace?’ asked the General. ‘Once we’d discovered the co-ordinates of the pick-up from your contact, your location was a simple matter of deduction.’
‘Deduction,’ sighed Data to himself, feeling his emotions begin to relax to far more manageable levels. ‘Yes. I do like deduction. And Gilbert & Sullivan. And Beatrice & Benedick. And Tavener and Turner and Tasha. I am Data. I am Data. I am…’
He was aware of being beamed away. When he looked up again, he was on the flight deck of a very small ship – not much bigger than a moderately sized shuttle. The Romulan General was still there, as was Poklar – incensed at her treatment. A fourth figure – evidently the one who had beamed them all aboard - was obscured by the back of a large chair on which he or she sat.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Poklar railed.
‘You are under arrest, Doctor,’ the General told her.
‘I am trying to do the Empire a great service,’ Poklar seethed, ‘by ridding it of an unnatural monster that threatens every Romulan life – every biological life in the Universe!’
‘You embezzled vast amounts in order to play out your fantasies of revenge upon a blameless individual…’
‘You’re just worried about how Starfleet will react to the loss of “their” android. Pathetic, Human-sympathising old coward – I won’t take orders from you.’
The fourth figure turned around. Commander Sela glowered at Poklar. ‘Don’t talk to my father that way.’
Poklar blinked, taken aback. ‘Commander…? What are you doing here? The last I heard, you were at odds with the General…’
An odd look crossed Sela’s expression. Even in his haze of bewilderment, Data could tell at that moment that she was not who she claimed to be. It was Tasha. She was alive and, it appeared, safe. His emotions, still fluctuating wildly, swelled with joy and relief at seeing her, only to plummet again when he realized that it must have been Sela’s father who had arranged to purchase her from Fajo. Still incapable of pulling himself to so much as a sitting position, he curled up and fought with his overloading systems as the conversation continued around him.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand anything about family, Doctor,’ snapped Tasha, still playing the part of the Romulan Commander. ‘Now, you will do what my father tells you – I assume that you are still prepared to take orders from me…’
‘You have always been so supportive of my work,’ retorted Poklar. ‘I don’t understand – how could a simple fiscal misunderstanding lead you to try to stop me using the very devices that you encouraged me to create?’
‘I don’t need to explain myself to you. You’re under arrest.’
Poklar tilted her head slightly at Tasha, as though ruminating something. Data heard her whisper the word ‘prosthetics’, under her breath – far too softly for the other two to hear.
‘What a small ship this is,’ she said aloud, looking about herself. ‘Why, the two of you are the only ones running it, I’d say.’
‘Two of us, one of you,’ Tasha retorted, ‘and, unlike us, you’re unarmed. That’s enough to persuade you to acquiesce.’
‘You’re alone out here,’ Poklar noted, taking a slight side-step towards Data, so that she was within arm’s reach of his slumped form. ‘You don’t have any back-up.’
‘What difference does that…’
Poklar reached down swiftly to the controls of the Halo, still buried into the back of his head, and tugged at the dial. The jolt of searing hot pain throughout his entire body took him by surprise. He gasped instinctively and was unable to control the metallic screech that had issued from him during the first occasion that the Halo had been used on him.
‘Data!’ Apparently giving up all pretence of masquerading as Sela, Tasha rushed to him, with the General in hot pursuit.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Poklar ran over to the ship’s controls and swiftly beamed herself away.
Tasha paid the escaping Doctor no heed. ‘What has she done to him? How do we help him?’
Sela’s father tried the dial. The pain did not abate.
‘She’s locked the controls,’ explained the Romulan. ‘We’ll have to take it off.’ He began carefully pulling the Halo’s needles from Data’s head. ‘I studied the design of this thing. Try to disengage it at the nape of his neck. Carefully!’
Tasha began to gently prize the device away from Data’s neck.
‘She is getting away,’ Data reminded them, thickly.
‘We’ll worry about that later.’
There was a pop, and a feeling of release in the base of his head, and the pain was suddenly gone.
Tasha looked him in the eyes, and smiled. ‘There, now. Isn’t that better?’
Data smiled back, faintly. ‘I am still all but paralysed.’
The General nodded. ‘The Inhibitor’s still in operation. I’ll try to remove that now.’
Data was aware that his emotions were still fluctuating more than usual. He felt… giddy. In both senses of the word.
‘You came back,’ he told Tasha. ‘You rescued me.’
‘Your Knight in shining armour,’ Tasha grinned, indicating to her grubby, sweat-stained uniform. She nodded to the General. ‘That’s your other valiant saviour right there. Who’da thought it?’
‘It was the least I could do,’ muttered the General.
‘The last time we encountered Sela’s father, it was all that you could do not to kill him where he stood,’ Data reminded Tasha. ‘But this time you trusted him with your life – why?’
‘Because of you, stupid.’ She brushed his temple with her thumb. ‘I’d do anything to get you back.’
With difficulty, he was able to bring his hand up to hers. ‘Thank you.’
The Romulan pulled the Inhibitor out of Data’s back. Data still felt weakened, however, and was aware of many anomalies in his systems.
‘It might take a little while for its effects to fully wear off,’ the Romulan explained. He slung Data’s arm over his shoulder and struggled to pick him up. ‘Oh, you’re heavy…’
Tasha took Data’s other arm, helping the General to lift him.
‘I’ll get you both onto the escape pod,’ the Romulan explained as they made their way through the small ship. ‘You should get back to your people as soon as possible – I imagine Poklar would have interfered with your positronic brain before bringing you into consciousness, in order to make you as vulnerable as possible, and I don’t have the expertise to right that.’
‘She overrode my emotional controls,’ Data told him.
‘Stands to reason,’ the Romulan countered. ‘That’s actually one of the saner ideas of hers I’ve heard about. In the last report of hers that I read, she seemed very excited about the prospect of modifying your optical sensors to make you start seeing a blood-green tinge to everything you looked at.’
Data had no reply to that except for a faintly sheepish ‘Oh’.
‘What about Poklar?’ asked Tasha, scraping the prosthetics from her face with her free had as she walked.
‘I’ll see to her later,’ the General replied.
‘She’ll get away at this rate,’ Tasha added. ‘If you come back having sent two Starfleet officers back into Federation space, without anything to show for it… won’t you be in trouble?’
The Romulan smiled. ‘I imagine I’m already “in trouble”.’
‘Is all this really just for the good of the Reunification movement?’ Tasha asked.
‘I think it’s perfectly obvious that it’s not.’ The Romulan stopped at the escape pod hatch. ‘I wanted to do something right for you, Tasha… I needed to do something right for you. I had to set you free, as I should have done all those years ago. Please. See this as my penance.’
‘Thank you…’ began Tasha, trailing off with a strange smile. ‘We have all this history together that I never lived – a daughter who I never gave birth to, and I don’t even know your name.’
‘You don’t need to know my name.’ The Romulan helped Data into the minute escape pod. ‘You don’t even need to thank me – not really. Just… if there’s one thing you could possibly do for me…?’
‘You’re going to ask me to forgive you,’ interrupted Tasha, dully. ‘For what you did to her… to “me”.’
‘Do you think that you could?’
Tasha sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Could you try?’
Tasha paused for a second. ‘I will.’
‘That’s all I needed to hear.’ The Romulan assisted Tasha as she crawled into the tiny escape pod along with Data. ‘Goodbye, Tasha. Have a wonderful life.’
The hatch closed, the airlock sealed and the pre-programmed escape pod was jettisoned into space.
