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The colors. The people. The inputs.
Too much, Data thought.
Exams. Conversations. Stories. Emotions, active as fire but twice as unpredictable.
Too much, Data thought.
“Hey.” Someone’s fingers snapped.
Expectation. Reality. Equation. Result. Nothing computed correctly. He was an android. He could only compute, he was designed to compute, but what to do, now that his ways of adapting were clearly insufficient to meet the tasks required of him? He had a sense that normally at this point, running into problems where his programming was incomplete and ill-equipped to handle, a programmer was supposed to fill in the gaps, help him cope.
That person—his creator—was gone.
No longer functioning.
Dead.
Too much too much thought Data, blinking his eyes against the colors that were brighter than they needed to be. The voices—thousands, overlapping, yet each one as distinguishable as threads in a tapestry, but now they were unraveling and becoming loud, and Data was having difficulty isolating the sounds he needed to focus on. Heartbeats. Footsteps. Shouts. Laughs. Air filters hissing. Taps on pads. Beeps and chirps as machines hummed on and off, over and over, all around him, echoing off the arched ceilings and reverberating through his synthetic skin.
On and off, over and over.
“Data,” said one of those voices. It took Data seconds, eternities, to isolate the voice and turn his head to face Merrin leaning over him, brow creased. “Data? What’s wrong?”
“I cannot,” he started, but then could only shake his head.
The furrow deepened. “You can’t what? Data? Are you…okay, like—?“
Still shaking his head. Data took a step back. Voices. Sounds. Beeps. Blurs. Too many people. Too much. He couldn’t calculate what to do, what was acceptable, and if he couldn’t calculate, he would certainly do something wrong.
In response to the rush of sensations, his databanks attempted to assist by opening up files of memories from thousands of colonists, drawing on times they had experienced a similar sort of too much, but the fragmented memories and personal logs only served to slow his processing errors further. In those situations, the human colonists had often hyperventilated, panicked, or wept.
Or fled.
Data took another step back. He couldn’t hyperventilate, he couldn’t panic, he couldn’t weep. That left one obvious alternative. Merrin reached for his shoulder, lips forming a shape like “Wait” but Data was still an android and could dodge a phaser blast if absolutely necessary. He was five steps back before Merrin could even turn. “Goodbye,” said Data, because that was what humans were supposed to say when parting ways.
He did not linger after that.
There were so many sounds surrounding Data, and he could count every single one. The force he needed to apply through his legs into the ground in order to achieve his current sprint was equal to five thousand six hundred forty two point three melograms, a speed which he could maintain without stopping for rest or repair, for months if necessary. Shades of red, blue, gold, gray, and black from the cadets he passed reflected back at him, rippling with rays of light and casting shadows as they jerked out of his way with noises of alarm.
Alarm. They were alarmed for some reason. If Data could simply locate the correct neural pathway, he could perhaps understand the cause of their alarm and remedy it. But there were so many pathways. Overlapping. Overriding.
Somewhere down a hallway, someone had turned on a faucet and Data could calculate every droplet of water hitting the sink, filling it faster than it could drain, and strangely enough, the patterns were similar.
The rushing water. Neural pathways. Cascading, cascading, cascading down.
He reached the other end of the Academy. There were stairs leading downwards, into the engine rooms, and upwards, into the gardens. Down or up. A choice. Another choice. Every second, choices, and not enough information to make the correct one. Data hovered in the eternity of several android milliseconds, debating, paralyzed with doubt, before settling on running up the stairs onto the rooftop botanical gardens. Perhaps there would be fewer people up there at this time.
If he were human, he’d be panting. Sweating. Dying. Instead, he came to a full stop and walked toward a tree. But Data could still see the Academy, see students milling around acres away. So he climbed up the tree.
The sun was setting, and still so bright. Data closed his eyes.
Even having distanced himself from lifeforms, the rustles of leaves and blades of grass and whispers of wind demanded new neural pathways of their own, tearing old ones apart in their wake. Maybe if he covered his ears, he could suppress some of the auditory inputs.
He covered his ears.
It did not help, but he continued to cover his ears and close his eyes and—strange. His synthetic muscles were caught in tiny spasms. Data became aware that his head was tilting and twitching every few seconds. It appeared that although he’d purposefully developed that mannerism simply to mimic human behavior, it had somehow become linked with the processing of information. And now that he was currently experiencing some kind of dysfunction in his neural net and having difficulty keeping pace with all the inputs flooding his mind…
Data tried to still himself, but failed. So many pathways. That rushing water sensation was increasing, and with it came the possibility of imminent cascade failure.
Cascade failure?
If Data experienced total cascade failure, there was not an engineer in Starfleet capable of repairing even the simplest of his circuitry. His mind—if he had a mind—would shut down. Data would be gone, and with it, his creator’s legacy.
Even with the massive amounts of feedback and pathway fractionation coursing through Data’s mind, his core programming was strong enough to instantly assert that cascade failure was unacceptable. But if his neural net continued to fracture like this…
There had to be a solution. He had to find a solution.
Data twitched, and twitched, and could not think.
Unacceptable. Data could not feel; that was simply a fact. But if he could not think, then could he actually qualify as a living being? How could something be sentient if it could no longer think properly? If he could find no solution to something as simple as pathway fragmentation? If he could not simply learn to live alongside the humans he was built to emulate? If he could not contribute, and do his job—
An hour had gone by, already. No one had found him. Perhaps no one was searching. Perhaps they did not anticipate that even an android could malfunction. If he stayed in the tree forever, would they notice? Perhaps they would forget him.
Forgetting. Yet another human ability he would never have. If he could simply forget things, perhaps his new experiences would no longer have to compete with the hundreds of lives he did not understand stored in his memory banks. Perhaps it would be easier to learn.
Data’s eyes flicked open.
Forgetting.
An overhaul. A blank slate. To begin from zero.
Would it work?
A slightly colder breeze brushed past Data, faintly stirring his hair as he lowered his hands to his lap and considered the options.
If he zeroed out his neural network, wiping all traces of memory and existing pathways from his system, he could begin again. He could forget. He could forget everything. He could forget having accidentally shattered the man’s hand when they had first activated him, not knowing just how strong his grip could be. He could forget the disorienting experience of switching back on after the “practical joke” the others had played. He could forget standing trial for sentience before Starfleet Academy’s board of directors. He could forget the hundreds of lives that weren’t his stored inside his head. He could clear it all away, and begin another attempt at life…or at least, his crude imitation of it.
It would only take a few moments.
Data turned his gaze down towards his hands, tilting his palms upward to study the faint fretwork of lines across their surfaces and along his fingers, swirling into delicate patterns along the tips. Fingerprints. Somewhere in the background of the still-glitching neural storm in Data’s head, he wondered, not for the first time, why his creator had invested so much time and technology into making him human on the outside, while everything within was…not.
Could the solution be so simple?
Once again, Data found himself wavering above the chasm of another choice. To start over or continue. A complete memory wipe or potential cascade failure. His file banks held no programming for this—no clear instructions. There was no one he could ask for the answer, because there were no other androids. And he had never dealt with this before. His own experiences only extended back sixty-one days, twelve hours, three minutes, and forty-one seconds, forty-two seconds…
Perhaps the right answer would be plain if he were human, but he was not.
And nothing would never change that.
Not even…
Not even starting over.
He would always be an android, and there would always be choices to make. It was a fact of the universe that did not scare him—though he wished it did, because that would mean experiencing an emotion and tapping into that unfathomable “intuition”—but it did cause him to wonder if he could ever actually belong.
Because he wanted to. He wanted to belong here, among such intriguing beings as those who had discovered him on Omicron Theta. They could have dismantled him, left him, or even forced him into service—but they did not. When Data had made so many mistakes in those first few days, they could have shut him off, but they did not.
Why not?
Yes; Data could erase himself.
But life would go on.
Even if he began from zero, all the challenges of being alive—learning, struggling, making mistakes—would still be there. It would still be difficult. In fact, he was beginning to realize that there would likely never come a point where he would no longer need to learn. Change. Adapt.
And actually, was that not that one of the defining qualities of life itself?
Growth?
And so, Data thought, his forehead creasing slightly as he fought through the apparent contradiction of it: could it be possible that his very difficulties in becoming sentient…were somehow…making him more alive?
It did not make sense.
And yet, it did.
Data turned his gaze down towards his hands, tilting his palms upward to study the faint fretwork of lines across their surfaces and along his fingertips. Fingerprints. Somewhere in the background of the still-glitching neural storm in his head, a curiosity made its way to the forefront of his brain.
Why did he have fingerprints?
Despite having no personal memories of his creator, Dr. Noonien Soong, his memory banks still contained schematics of his own internal systems, and the evidence appeared to indicate that Soong had dedicated an almost inhuman attention to detail when he had designed Data. Every circuit had a purpose. Every piece had been carefully crafted. Technologies yet undiscovered by Starfleet had apparently been employed to give Data his extraordinary mental and physical capacities, all within a vessel made to appear as human as possible.
So why fingerprints?
No one would notice. No one but Data.
His gaze trailed up from his hands to his sleeves, seeing how the tightly woven gray threads interacted with the black in a helical pattern. It was a specially made fabric unique to Starfleet, and so expertly made, it was conceivable Data could wear this exact uniform for the next sixty years with hardly any visible wear. Of course, if he graduated and was eventually assigned to a starship, he would acquire a new uniform. Yellow, most likely. If he continued in his current path towards degrees in probability mechanics and became an engineer.
Which brought Data to another realization. If he erased his own history, he would also lose any claim he had to his place in the Academy. He had no doubt Maddox would leap at the possibility to redo the trial, and with no memories, semblance of personality, or hint of resilience, he would most likely be ruled unfit for Starfleet.
A ruling which would probably be just, if Data could not learn to face failure.
Like the Kobayashi Maru, he thought. Only in this case, accepting a no-win scenario meant adjusting to living itself, and embracing his own endless imperfections.
Suddenly, Data shifted and sat a bit higher, eyes bright.
Had he successfully made a connection? He had. He had remembered an unrelated bit of information in order to arrive at an abstract conclusion applicable to himself as an individual. He had thought. Despite the fact that his neural pathways still felt deeply tangled, and the electrical stimulation to parts of his brain were still unbalanced, he had thought.
Was this like hope? Data did not know what hope felt like, but his calculations informed him that the probability of making it through Starfleet Academy without an irreversible cascade failure was higher than zero. It was small—but there was a chance.
He could make it through this.
A mechanical chirp.
A weathered voice followed. “Cadet?”
After two long seconds, Data touched his badge and activated the communicator in response. “Cadet Data here, sir,” he said.
“…You’re aware it’s past curfew?”
Data glanced at the horizon. The sun had slipped beneath it. “Yes, sir.”
The voice, who Data recognized as Professor Graath, his academic counselor, paused. Was he angry? Was he disappointed? Data did not know.
“…Cadet, are you all right?” Graath asked.
Concern?
That surprised Data. There was no reason for anyone to be concerned for him. He was a machine, incapable of the physical or emotional trauma that people could experience, human or otherwise. “I am unharmed,” Data answered slowly, unsure if that was the response the professor was seeking.
“So why are you still out? Did something happen?”
The sense of too-much that had torn through his neural pathways earlier began pressing at his mind again, tugging at mental threads that were already threatening to unravel. How was Data supposed to answer? Nothing had happened. No unusual event had prompted Data to break protocol like this. And yet, answering “no” did not feel entirely honest either.
When Data did not answer immediately, Graath said, “I talked to your roommate. He said you took off in quite a hurry earlier. He seemed worried.”
“I apologize,” murmured Data.
“No need to apologize, cadet, you’ve done nothing wrong. I imagine the last few weeks have been challenging. Overwhelming, even.”
“Overwhelming,” repeated Data, testing the word out in his mouth.
“How’s about you come to my office and we can chat about things? Not a formal assessment; just a chance for us to exchange perspectives. Sometimes I find it helps to talk about what’s troubling me to someone else, even if they don’t have all the answers.”
Data touched one of his fingertips to the bark of the tree, feeling the ways its ridges interacted with the lines of his skin. A tiny firefly drifted into view, settling on the back of his hand for a brief moment, before flying off. The wind blew softly on his face.
“Okay,” answered Data. “When?”