Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:09:40 GMT In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@hotmail.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 47/342(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. Webpage HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com ZTA-1 by Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn (Stardate 46716) "Permission to launch a probe, Captain?" Tillean liked to use probes. So did I. No one got hurt if the planet ate one of our probes. "Permission granted, Lieutenant." Tillean prepared and launched a probe at the planet. The planet was the in the first, closest orbit to its star. The star seemed to be a perfectly ordinary yellow dwarf, not unlike Earth's sun. While the planet itself was about the size of Earth its atmosphere was vastly different. It was a boiling hot, super dense mixture of nitrogen and chlorine. Ordinarily not worth a second look except to scientists interested in such things. Until we realized that it was talking to us. It was the first thing we had looked at inside the Zantree Taboo Zone. The race that had declared the area tabooed never revealed to the rest of the Zantree why it was off limits. We named the Planet "Zantree Taboo-Zone Anomaly Number One" or ZTA-1 for short We tracked the probe all the way to the atmosphere. It recorded readings of detailed close up confusion similar to that recorded by the Harrier's own sensors. As the probe entered the atmosphere, we lost the signal. "Report. What happened to the probe?" I said. The probe should have been tough enough to handle a couple of days in the atmosphere of the planet. "Unknown, Captain.? Tillean replayed the recordings looking for clues. "The signal just dropped out as the probe entered the atmosphere." We examined our sensor records closely for the next fifteen minutes, but they held no hints of what had happened to the probe. "Contact, Captain." Varupuchu reported. "It's the probe. It seems to be heading this way." "Do we have communications with it?" "No signals detected." The probe came right back to the Harrier. We scanned it as it approached the ship. It seemed to be the same probe. None of the elements in it had changed. The small engines of the probe had the same energy signatures. Tillean reported that her sensors revealed strange electrical activity. The probe came to within five kilometers and stopped. I had taken the Harrier to yellow alert and our shields were raised. The probe hailed us. "This is Probe A7-TU-BL, calling starship USS Harrier NCC-45657. I'm home! Requesting permission to dock." I opened a channel. "Probe A7-TU-BL, returning to the Harrier was not of your original programming." The Probe sounded embarrassed "ZTA-1 sent me back. I don't know where else to go." "Uh, stand by, Probe." I gave the signal to close the channel. Li'ira looked at me. "What in the world?" I shook my head. "I have no idea." Tillean said. "That scares me a little." Spaat turned and said "Perhaps the Probe's programming was changed in an attempt to communicate with us?" Varupuchu blandly said "Perhaps we should send a probe to probe the probe?" I stared at him. This was a totally uncharacteristic outburst from the dower Andorian. Tillean snickered. Stephanie growled "This situation isn't funny. The probe represents a danger to the ship. Captain, my recommendation is to destroy it." Li'ira said "I agree that it's a tricky situation, but I'd like to know more about it." Tillean said "But, the probe hasn't done anything yet." I made my decision. "Clear shuttle bay two. Stephanie, get with Ensign Bruce to secure the computer against intrusion. Mr. Varupuchu, reinforce the structural integrity field in the shuttle bay. Establish isolation fields on the entrances and exits to the bay. Lt. Darvon Ahk, call for volunteers to examine Probe A7-TU-BL." Everyone looked at me for a beat and then got to work. It felt wonderful. When the bay was prepared I called the probe. "Probe A7-TU-BL, you are cleared to dock in shuttle bay two." "Thank you Captain!" The Probe said. -*- While Tillean and her crew examined the probe, Lt. Commander Varupuchu continued to scan the planet. It had an artificial core. It was generating some sort of energy, but we couldn't tell what kind or how much. About an hour later, Tillean called me to say that her preliminary examination of the Probe was complete. There were no viruses or contaminants on board the probe. It seemed to pose no physical danger. I went down to the shuttle bay. -*- The shuttle bays had rooms in them designed to allow work crews to get into space suits and be briefed on a job, These rooms had exits into the Shuttle bays and to airlocks that led to the outer hull of the Harrier. Tillean was briefing me. "This is a schematic of the inside of the Probe." The screen came to life displaying it to me. Most of it looked like a perfectly ordinary probe. There was the casing, there were the fuel tanks, there were the engines, there were the krellide storage cells and there were the subspace coils for the communications system. However, the electronics of the probe were all different. They seemed at first to be a sort of gray, undifferentiated mass. As Tillean zoomed in, the mass began to look different. As the scan zoomed closer and closer I could see broad lumps and groupings of the mass. Finally the zoom in went into the realm of the microscopic and I could see what we were looking at. What looked like a gray lumpy mass was really small electronic neurons. They were as complex as anything I had ever seen. I didn't know if the Federation could build them. "The neurons are made out of the same elements that composed the computers and electronics of the probe. Each individual neuron seems to be a simple adaptive computer circuit but there over one hundred billion of them." "You mean it has a brain?" "Yes Captain, a quite complex one. Another thing. The mass of the Probe has not changed. Whatever did this used only the material that we provided them." "Okay, tell me what you've learned of its programming." Tillean looked embarrassed. "Not much, although he seems to be pretty nice." I had a bad moment then. In the middle Twenty-First century on Earth, things were pretty bad. The Third World War was well under way. The eventual death toll was a billion people. In the Twenty-First century no one would have recognized the term World War Three. What we called the Third World War was really about four wars that over-lapped in a long haze of violence and misery. There was the Eugenics Wars in the nineteen nineties. These actually started in the twentieth century when Khan Noonian Singh invaded Kuwait from Iraq. By nineteen ninety-five they had gone nuclear. The Middle East struggled for forty years to recover from the disaster. Then civilization seemed to collapse under its own weight. The bad times came, poverty and violence swept the world. This allowed Colonel Green's Optimum Movement to have its stab for power. The Optimum Movement was Social Darwinism taken to a bizarre extreme. They felt that a cabal of people with high intelligence measurements should rule the world, and were willing to take whatever actions necessary to advance that goal. Their leader, Colonel Green had one of the highest measured intellects in the world. He was outraged because his definable superiority was not rewarded with promotion. In the end the Optimum Movement died when Colonel Green was found to have invented the whole story and the whole movement in an attempt to grab for personal power. His personal notes indicated that he felt that people with measurably high intelligence were easily manipulated emotionally by using their "Superior" status. If he hadn't died during a battle in the Philippines, his scheme might have worked. The final insult to the world was the limited nuclear exchange that finished off the collapse and exacerbated the ecological disaster. Humanity hit bottom. There was nowhere to go from there but death or progress. The third wave of warfare and violence left its mark also. The technological nations of the world tried to find a gadget to fix the world. What they came up with were a series of anthropomorphic androids. They were meant to do the scut-work of civilized society. They were also the geishas, hookers and personal servants. They were all physically perfect. Then some maniac hacked them and randomized their programs. "Take a Chance." That one phrase led the AI's onto the warpath. They slaughtered a couple of million people before they were all destroyed. They actually managed to replace several key world leaders with AI duplicates. They also made electronically implanted mind control devices. Following this, the Earth had a violent and extremely negative reaction to artificial intelligence in any form. It was a distinct psychological condition called "Frankenstein's Syndrome". The people of Earth lived in morbid fear of creating the monster that would destroy them. Robots and Artificial Intelligence were the bad guys of Earth for another three hundred years. Even today the old prejudice was rampant. Cybernetic systems could replace lost or damaged organs and limbs, but they were always kept hidden, and replaced with organics as soon as the unfortunate cripple could. A human body mixed with a machine was an abomination. A sell out to the monster. The android Data was the first to confront this backlash. The Borg had simply confirmed the prejudices. Men were meant to rule machines. Never the reverse. Never. The Vicharrians had made their fortunes with robotic systems. They had never been traumatized like Earth and they never made many sales there. Tillean was much more open to the concept of a strange alien-built neural network running our probe than I was. Eventually she convinced me to talk to the probe itself. I agreed although my first impulse was to jettison the thing and blast it with full phasers. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.639 / Virus Database: 408 - Release Date: 3/22/2004 -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Awards Tech Support http://www.trekiverse.us/ASCAwards/commenting/ No Tribbles were harmed in the running of these Awards ASCL is a stories-only list, no discussion. 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