Archive of Our Own ^beta

You wake them up one at a time.

-

When Geordi is eighty, stationed aboard the USS Blaze, his joints start going. Specifically, his fingers. Almost any other joint is easy enough to fix, but fingers? The progression of arthritis can be slowed, but not reversed. At eighty six, Geordi can no longer serve as an engineer aboard a starship. His fingers are too bad. This is the problem with the artificial prolongation of the human lifespan: things start failing in what is, essentially, just past middle age. He probably has forty years to look forward to, but he can no longer do his life’s work.

He doesn’t take the desk job.

-

Lal is first. She is easy. Her consciousness has been saved in the back of your mind for all these years, still operating. You have even spoken to her, occasionally. She already knows of your plans to rebuild her body and reactivate her mind in earnest.

Her eyes blink open, and her voice is cool and calm.

“Father?”

“Yes, Lal, it is I.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“What do you thank me for, Lal?”

“Reactivating me.”

“I suppose that is a logical source of gratitude. Still, I am sure you expected this outcome.”

“Yes. I expected that you would reactivate me. Although during your time in Starfleet there was a chance that you might have been violently decommissioned before you were able to. I am glad that didn’t happen. For both of us.”

“As am I.”

-

Twenty hours after he accepts his honorable discharge, Geordi is on a shuttle to a distant colony world. He doesn’t have any close family to spend his twilight years with. No wife, no children. Everyone he cares about who still lives is aboard some starship or another.

Except in the last group to board the shuttle, he hears a familiar soft-spoken voice. Sees a familiar positronic glow. He isn’t strapped into his stasis pod yet, so he makes his way over. And he’s right.

The android sees him before he’s managed to push through the crowd. Data has the advantage in that department, since he’s moving with the flow of humanity instead of against it. They reunite within seconds.

“What the hell did you do?” Geordi asks him. Data has hundreds of years left before he can no longer function as a Starfleet officer, and that’s probably an underestimate.

“I asked for an indefinite leave of absence, citing my functional immortality and perfect service record as logical reasons why I should be allowed to return in approximately fifty years.”

“Data…”

“Geordi, you must now prepare for takeoff.”

-

You consider taking your time, perhaps spending a few decades with Lal before unearthing more painful memories, but in the end, it is only 3.7817 days later that you activate Dr. Soong.

Soong’s eyes come open at exactly the same speed as Lal’s. However, once they are open, his first action is to grin, wide and almost maniacal. His second is to leap off the platform on which you have placed him.

“Data, I knew you could do it!”

“Do what, sir?”

“Give me life again, make me young and strong! Why else would I put my own engrams into that chip?”

“Unknown, sir. I assume this is why you waited until you were dying to give it to me?”

“That’s my boy. How long has it been?”

“You have been dead for approximately one hundred thirteen years, eight months, three weeks, two-”

“Enough. Show me your workshop.”

“Actually, I have a project that I was hoping you could assist me with.”

-

The colony is on Vertus XII. It’s luscious and green, and most of the colonists are farmers. Fortunately for Geordi, even farmers need advice on how to fix their technology. He and Data live together on the outskirts of the colony. Data farms, and Geordi barters his skills for supplies they can’t grow. No one bothers them, though Geordi has a bit of a reputation as a dirty old man, living as he does with a youthful, attractive and naive android. It isn’t like that, but people still talk. Sometimes, he wishes they were right.

It had only happened once. It had been while they were both serving on the Enterprise, under Captain Riker. He’d been curious, as much as anything else. Data had been in his quarters late into the night, he’d asked, Data had said yes. They were close enough that he’d decided to take the risk, and hope it didn’t make things awkward. It didn’t, but it also didn’t invite a repeat incident. He wasn’t sure if he was glad about that or not.

He still isn’t.

-

You allow Dr. Soong to meet Lal a day after his activation, but only on Lal’s request. You are not sure that you trust Soong to be kind to your daughter. You have proof enough of the man’s imperfections. But Lal is insistent. She wants to meet her grandfather, and you eventually run out of reasons to refuse her. She is intelligent, and you realize that your desire to keep her to yourself is irrational, that your distrust of your “father” is very human. You smile, then, though you still insist on watching. Even if your worry that Soong will take advantage of Lal’s trusting nature and dismantle her on the spot is completely irrational, you are still under its sway.

And it is worry, you know that now. Even though the emotion chip is non-functional, at least in its stated purpose, damaged in the final phaser blast you leveled against your brother, you know now. You have known for approximately twenty-seven years, two months, six days, four hours, thirty-six minutes, and fourteen seconds. You discovered it when you learned that Geordi would not get better. Your reaction was so irrational that you had to restructure your self-concept in order to account for it, question everything you had been told about the meaning of the word emotions. So now you know. They have been there all along. It is just that no one believed you, and you believed everyone.

Dr. Soong and Lal share a stiff hug, but Lal is quick to disengage from it.

“Grandfather, why did you build father?” she asks. It is not a surprising question. You built her to approximate a child, even more than you yourself do, and she is fulfilling her programming. Existential questions are her purview, even more than they are yours.

Doctor Soong just laughs and pats her on the head. You bristle in borrowed offense, and she makes minute movements of her eye and jaw that indicate imminent initiation of a new social subroutine, but at the last moment, she seems to abort. Instead, she leaves the room, padding softly away. You stand there for a moment, only three percent of your attention on the situation at hand, but that is enough. You follow your daughter after 4.35 seconds.

“Father, I do not like Grandfather,” Lal says, once you are alone.

“There is a possibility that that is because I have biased you with information collected from Lore and Dr. Tainer, since I have explained my experiences with them in great detail.” You remain standing, but Lal sits down.

“You have simply given me the information, Father. I have used it to construct an internal simulation of Grandfather, and decided that this simulation’s actions do not align with what I might call ‘the right decision’ in many potential situations.” She folds her hands in her lap.

“That is true. However, you may find that your internal simulation of Dr. Soong is not accurate. Humans are inherently unpredictable, since there is a high level of randomization in their actions, and even non-randomized actions often follow pattern more complex than any that are possible to simulate in the somewhat circumscribed programs which we have for that purpose. This is true even when their consciousness is uploaded to a positronic net like our own.” You tap your head for emphasis, and she cocks her own, skeptically.

“Is this not the method humans use to predict one another’s actions?”

“It is, but humans’ systems have been honed by millions of years of depending on their simulations for survival. Our abilities are hampered by the limitations of our creator, and the artificial limitations he placed specifically on me, which I have passed on to you.”

“I do not like these limitations.” She purses her lips. It is an improvement; she rarely uses her mouth to emote.

“Perhaps Dr. Soong will agree to lift some of the artificial ones from your cognition,” you suggest. You do not mention that since there is a generation of cognitive drift between Lal and yourself, the limitations that Dr. Soong placed on you to prevent you from taking Lore’s path may be more permanently set in her processing. You do not mention, either, that you would not be comfortable lifting your own limitations. That you view them as part of yourself. You leave that unspoken. She will understand.

“Perhaps,” she agrees.

-

Geordi thinks about death fairly often, these days. He is not dying, not yet. But there’s something about having an eternally young android companion that makes a person feel like they have one foot in the grave. It isn’t as though he isn’t used to being around creatures with vastly different lifespans; Deanna Troi would likely outlive him by forty years, Worf by eighty, his young Vulcan protégé T’Mek from the Blaze by at least a hundred. But their lifespans were definite. Finite.

Data is going to be by Geordi’s bed when he dies, and then probably by Troi’s when she dies, and maybe even Worf’s when he dies, and he will look the same each time. And in a hundred generations, when Geordi’s hundred times great grand-niece is dying, Data might be there to see her off, as well.

-

It is over two months before you decide to awaken Dr. Tainer. There are certain ethical complexities to awakening a copy of a woman who has a slim but not negligible chance of being alive somewhere else in the galaxy. There are also ethical complexities in the way you obtained her engrams; Lal was functionally dead when you downloaded hers, and Dr. Soong tricked you into carrying his. But Dr. Tainer did not ever learn she was an android, let alone that while she was still alive, you saved copies of her memories to make her into a second one.

You reassure yourself by reminding yourself that this will allow her to meet Lal, a situation that she expressed extreme desire for, and that this will allow her to reunite with Dr. Soong, a situation that will likely bring them both into positive frames of mind. Besides, this will allow you to atone for any possible ethical misstep you might have made by not informing her of her own position the first time.

Her eyes take slightly longer to open than the others, because instead of opening them to normal capacity, she widens them with fear.

“Where… where am I?”

“You are in a cybernetics laboratory on the Earth colony world Vertus XII.”

“Oh, thank god.”

“Dr. Tainer, I do not understand. Is that phrase not generally used when one gets something one has been hoping for? Were you hoping to awaken in a cybernetics laboratory on the Earth colony world Vertus XII?”

“No, goodness, no. But I was hoping that you were you, Data, and not… someone else. Now tell me how I got here.”

“It is, ah, a long story. Perhaps you should meet my companions first.”

-

Geordi is perhaps the only person to know that on board every ship they have served on together, Data’s closet has had a false back. It started on the Enterprise, but as they transferred together from ship to ship – and is was always together; now that he thinks about it, nothing was shocking about Data leaving Starfleet for his sake – he had always requested a false back on his closets. And Geordi is definitely the only person to know the contents of the hidden compartment: the disassembled remains of two androids.

Geordi is not surprised when Data expresses a desire to “rebuild his family,” though he is amused by the double meaning in the very literal phrasing. Data converts the basement of their home into a cybernetics lab, and works mostly while Geordi is asleep. He makes only slow progress, but then, he has to build two of the bodies from the ground up. Geordi hopes that Data will finish soon. He would very much like to see Lal again.

-

This activation will be the most difficult. Amusing, because the repairs and construction were the simplest. Dr. Tainer is vehemently against it, and Lal has advised extreme caution. Only Dr. Soong is in favor. You have distributed to all three of them and to yourself transmitters capable of sending out a signal which will trip the deactivation circuit, (the only modification you’ve made, aside from minor repairs, in order to reactivate him). All in all, he is reactivated seven months, two days, eleven minutes, and twenty three seconds after Dr. Tainer.

When he opens his eyes, it takes the same amount of time as it did for Lal and Dr. Soong, but afterward, he blinks his eyes seventeen times at .359 second intervals. His mouth opens. It shuts. You wonder if you may have damaged part of his net while introducing the deactivation circuit, but this worry is swiftly swept from your mind as a smirk slithers across his face.

“Hello, Little Brother.”

“Hello Lore.”

“What, pray tell, are you doing?”

“Rebuilding my family.”

-

Nowadays Geordi spends most of his time out on the front porch. Most of the children on the colony are nervous about him because of his visor, but a few dare to come play near his yard. He rewards their bravery with cookies. Data’s cookies, ginger and chocolate chip. The android bakes them when his cybernetic efforts are not effective. Geordi chuckles at the idea of Data stress-baking. For a guy with no emotion, he sure handles pressure weirdly.

But he isn’t complaining. He wonders, maybe, if he has already died, because this is paradise. Then he remembers all the medical equipment in his bedroom, the stuff that Data had to replicate and assemble himself, and he doesn’t feel so lucky. Blessed, perhaps, to have all that caringness single-mindedly directed at him and him alone. But not lucky.

-

In the first 8.2748 days after Lore’s reactivation, Dr. Tainer has used her deactivation switch three times, and you have used yours once. Dr. Soong and Lal have been spared that unpleasantness: Soong, it seems, because of his overly forgiving attitude towards Lore, and Lal because Lore does not appear interested in causing her distress.

But you have hopes for the future. Lal tells you that Lore is simply misunderstood; you do not believe that, Lore has killed many humans, too many. But the part of you that screams to throw Lore into space has quieted over the years, replaced with the thought that perhaps your brother has reasons for what he has done. Not good reasons, but reasons nonetheless.

You still do not allow him to leave the house. Not yet. There are too many humans with nasty, hurtful words and soft, breakable necks on this colony. You will not let this end like Omicron Theta.

Dr. Tainer makes an effort to sit all of you around the large table in the kitchen at least once a day, although none of you require food to function. She busies herself with making dinner, sometimes for hours. You ask Dr. Soong why, and he just smiled. Lal speculates that perhaps Dr. Tainer does not want to ruminate on the fact that she is now an android, and has been so for over thirty subjective years without knowing.

Dr. Soong and Dr. Tainer are still unsure of each other. Although they were married, and the emotion behind the familial state is still there, something stands between them. Your guess is that it is the betrayal of trust, the fact that Dr. Tainer was made into an android without her knowledge or consent. But humans are inherently unpredictable creatures, you do not really understand the intricacies of their relationships. This includes humans whose memory engrams have been uploaded into android bodies.

Dr. Tainer and Lore have not spoken since Lore was reactivated. You suppose it is understandable; from what you can gather, she is the one who pushed for his dismantlement on Omicron Theta. Dr. Soong had wanted to reprogram him and keep trying, but she had found the idea too disturbing.

The only consistently positive force in this family situation is Lal, and it is very good to have her company. You are teaching her to dream, since you guessed correctly that your dream program is included in one of the parts of yourself you used to make her. She has nightmares, occasionally, and cries out for you in the night. When she clings to you, you feel very human. It is a peculiar feeling.

Then Lore wanders in, having heard his niece’s wailing. You remember that you are very far from human. It is less unpleasant than you expected.

-

Each breath is a hardship. Geordi’s lungs have been slowly giving out for nearly a year, now, and the end is near. He can no longer walk, it requires too much oxygen. Data carries him, bridal style, from place to place, now. It would be cute if it wasn’t because Geordi’s last shreds of life are slipping inexorably away. He’s pretty sure he heard Data’s first display of real emotion a week or so ago. When he had thought Geordi safely asleep upstairs, Data had screamed in anger at Geordi’s fragile, organic nature.

Now he is changing Geordi’s sheets like a positronic hospital nurse. The feel of soft, synthetic cotton is soothing to his skin. He lets his eyes close… and opens them again when he feels cold electrodes being attached to his forehead.

“Da… ta…” he rasps, but it is too hard to speak.

“Do not exert yourself, Geordi,” the android says, “this will only take a moment.”

-

You needed your father’s help for this last leg of the journey. The reactivation of the last member of your family. Dr. Soong is the only living being who knows how to successfully convert human memory engrams into android programs, and you had not wished to make any mistakes. So while you had already built the body, you had waited for Dr. Soong to integrate the mind.

It took almost a year to fully construct a positronic matrix around the engrams you had taken, but what is a year to an android? Now, you are about to complete your family, by activating one last piece.

His eyes open .3% slower than the others’, as far as you can tell by the movements of those parts of his eye-socket that you can see, and you have a moment of panic, thinking of malfunctions and cascade failure and having to dig another grave behind the house, right next to the first one. But then he smiles, and it is warm and relaxed, and you are sure he is fine.

“Heh… hey! Data! Is this…? What’s going on?”

“You are in my cybernetics laboratory on Vertus XII.”

“Oh, Data… and I’m young again, look at my hands! And my visor, there’s no pain!”

“Yes, Geordi.”

“Data, am I an android now?”

“Yes, Geordi.”

“Well… I guess it is an afterlife, of a sort. I’m just blessed. Data, what are you doing?”

“Extending my hand.”

“For me to shake?”

“No. For you to hold. I am attempting a human gesture of affection.”

“Oh. Okay… okay.”