Identity Crisis Read online

  “But,” Gomez was losing patience, “why did the program pick me?”

  “Tell me,” he said, “did you get a call on a communications link just after you deleted the tribblecom?”

  Gomez thought back. Yes, there had been a call, with no one there. It had asked who she was, then disconnected—oh, no. “Yes. It asked me my name.”

  “Well, there you go,” Sprachnee said. “Once the program realized its surroundings were apropos to the mission, it found a target subject, asked for your name, ran your records, found your image on file, located your personal logs, rewrote your journals on the basis of what your mission records said you’d been through, et cetera, et cetera.” He sighed. “It could have been anyone, anyone at all, almost anywhere in the Federation. It was my bad luck, Commander, that it was someone like you. If you hadn’t figured it out…or,” he said wistfully, “if even one of the billions of sentients who have read the tribblecom by now had taken me up on the prima facie offer, I’d be a rich man instead of rotting in a cell, for good this time, I fancy.”

  “So my involvement in this was just—bad luck?” Gomez said.

  “That’s correct.”

  That wasn’t possible. He’d known enough about her daily schedule to track her to Hidalgo Station. Enough to rewrite her journals. Enough to create a simulacrum of her that fooled her closest friends and associates for quite a while. The only way that would have been possible without detailed knowledge of her background and security codes….

  “You wrote a multivariant, adaptive, artificially intelligent superworm that can propagate via subspace, penetrate Starfleet security, and invade personal logs? That can, on its own, extrapolate from personal writing style and records exactly how to convince someone’s closest friends and associates that they are talking to them instead of a program? That can run on equipment with as little processing power and memory as Hidalgo Station has? And that works at nanosecond speeds?”

  “Well, yes,” Sprachnee said modestly. “I was pretty proud of it.”

  Gomez was stunned. He should be proud, she thought. Sprachee had written one hell of a sophisticated program, so sophisticated it had taken her quite a long time trapped in a freezing-cold control center to figure out even part of what he’d done. What she’d realized was that Sprachnee had hidden coding in the text of the tribblecom that was set to activate when someone used a glommer to delete the message. When Gomez deleted the tribblecom, she had triggered the hidden code, resulting in the station shutdown and implementing the entire incident that followed.

  If Gomez hadn’t been listening to the conversation between Corsi and the simulation, she would never have known that the planet mentioned in the tribblecom and the planet where the prisoners were being released was the same planet, and that Sprachnee’s name, which was on the bottom of the tribblecom, was also on the list of prisoners. She had almost missed it anyway.

  Armed with that knowledge, when Soloman figured out it wasn’t really her on the screen and established communication, she had had Soloman locate Sprachnee’s tribblecom, the one that had started all the trouble. As the tribblecom reentered the Hidalgo computer system through the combadge link Gomez had set up, it clogged up the memory unit again—and crashed the complex program controlling the station, allowing the established station programming to reassert at least intermittent control. Gomez had figured that Sprachnee’s program wouldn’t be set to defend against itself, and fortunately, she had been right.

  Back on the da Vinci, with full information in hand, Gomez had suggested, and Corsi and Abramowitz had then confirmed, that the list of prisoners to be released had been set up to manipulate Starfleet and the Federation. The only prisoners on the list who didn’t seem a real threat were the batch of prisoners on Sigma V. It was therefore predictable that Starfleet would offer to release them first—especially predictable to someone who had read the Starfleet negotiation manual, as Sprachnee, Gomez thought, most likely found a way to do.

  The records on Sigma showed that Sprachnee had made certain he was among those prisoners by acting out so badly in the council chambers that he would not only be fired, but would be thrown into jail. The tribblecom had also made clear what Sprachnee was trying to get away with—the biggest latinum heist in history. From there, the specification of a hauler-class ship, the only ship class in the area with both a passenger complement and transporter buffers large enough to contain that much latinum, was a dead giveaway.

  Gomez looked quizzically at the little man who had caused her so much trouble. “Why’d you bother with all this?” she asked. “Don’t you know how much you could have sold your program for? It would make five billion bars of gold-pressed latinum seem like lunch money.”

  Sprachnee waved the notion away. “Where would the fun have been in that?” he asked her. Then he stopped and looked thoughtful. “I don’t suppose we could cut a deal now? I show you everything I know about the program, you get me out of here?”

  “We’ll see,” Gomez said. She was angry at what he’d done, to her, to her reputation, the risk to the lives of those on Hidalgo Station. Gomez wrestled with conflicting emotions, but in the end she was an engineer, and the program he’d written would impress the best engineers in the galaxy. “I’ll talk to someone. But don’t hold your breath.” To her own surprise, instead of punching Sprachnee in the eye as she’d thought of doing, Gomez stuck her hand through the bars in a gesture of respect. Sprachnee hesitated for a moment, then took her hand and shook it firmly.

  As Gomez and Corsi left the holding area, Gomez wondered what would be next for the strange little genius. “What adjudication facility is he being sent to?” Gomez asked the security chief.

  “I’m not sure,” Corsi said. “Why?”

  “Because it had better have damn good security tech, or we’ll be hearing from him again really soon.”

  Shortly thereafter Gomez found herself back where she had been a week ago, about to beam down to Hidalgo Station. This time she wasn’t going alone—most of the crew of the da Vinci would be visiting the station, some to help put all their systems right, others simply for much-needed shore leave. Gomez was doing a little of both—she would help the day shift with repairs on a part-time basis as well as having some time for herself.

  She’d already sent word to Tobias Shelt to clear his schedule for dinner, dancing, and who knew what would happen afterward? Seeing “herself” doing things so far from her character had brought things home to her. She could accept that she wasn’t entirely who she had been. What she had gone through with Duffy had forced her to leave some of herself behind, and that empty space in her would have to be filled with something new. Maybe Tobias Shelt would be part of what filled it. Maybe someday Wayne Omthon would be. Or maybe it would be somebody else entirely. She’d take it one day at a time. Smiling, she vanished from the da Vinci in a cone of light.

  About the Author

  JOHN J. ORDOVER, former executive editor of the Star Trek fiction line for Pocket Books and codeveloper of the Star Trek: S.C.E. series (with Keith R.A. DeCandido) and the best-selling Star Trek: New Frontier series (with Peter David), is the happy husband of Carol Greenburg and the proud father of Arren Isaac Ordover. Ordover is currently the editor-in-chief of Phobos Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the author of the upcoming “An Easy Fast” in the Star Trek anthology Tales from the Captain’s Table.

  Coming Next Month:

  Star Trek™: S.C.E. #53

  Fables of the Prime Directive

  by Cory Rushton

  Until the Dominion War, the pre-warp civilization on Coroticus III was under observation by the Federation—and then the Dominion moved in. Forced to abandon the planet—and leave a person behind—Starfleet does not return until after the war is over and the Dominion has pulled out.

  Carole Abramowitz and a team from the da Vinci must now determine how much the Dominion contaminated Corotician culture—but that’s the least of the S.C.E.’s problems, as they uncover a mass-murderer,
who may be the Starfleet officer left behind….

  COMING IN JUNE 2005 FROM POCKET BOOKS!