"Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted?" - H. Rider Haggard
"I don't understand how it will help him."
Noonien paused at his computer console, taking in the worried expression on Juliana's face. "Don't frown, dear. You'll wrinkle prematurely."
She waved away his teasing as if it were a fly. "You know that's untrue, you old codger. I think it's a mistake to program him with such negative emotions."
Noonien resumed his calculations. "The reason that Lore is more successful than B4 is his complexity, my dear. B4 had the mind of an infant. Lore will have the full array of human emotions – love and hate, generosity and greed, altruism and self-interest…" he swiped a finger over the entry screen and the long strings of code were encrypted. "Contentment and aspiration."
"But you've made him so physically powerful. Don't you want to ensure that he'll never use that power to evil purposes?"
Noonien began to synthesize a new chip. "Juliana, there must be balance. Would you have me play Satan in the Garden of Eden, and make Lore only capable of choosing good? What is sentience, if not the freedom to choose? With any child, you take the thick with the thin, the good with the bad. I want Lore to make his own choices. If I am his creator, I will make him in my own image." He took tweezers and immersed the newly created chip in a pool of suspension fluid. "I have great interest of late in the ancient stories of human civilization. Their lessons are still valuable."
"Hence the name, yes, dear, I know." Juliana raised a hand to touch her husband, but she knew better than to distract him from his work. She dropped it again. "I just wonder if you're not moving too far too fast."
He looked back at her with an impish smile. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Programming Lore with contrasting emotions can only help him. I want him to feel as dissatisfied as anyone, to seek the higher ground. To long for something more. It's amazing what can be reduced to an equation, isn't it? Take aspiration – having achieved x, consider y. Is y better? Is y more? Having achieved y, what about z?" Noonien completed his tests on the chip and opened a panel on the neck of the motionless android seated near him. "Say ah, my boy."
"I suppose you're right."
"Of course I'm right!" Noonien delicately slipped the chip into place. The diodes around it flashed red, and then beamed a steady green. "It's up to us to model good behavior, like any considerate parents. Lore will want to choose the right path, you'll see. And when he doesn't, we'll correct him." He closed the panel of pale synthetic skin.
"Yes dear." Juliana watched the android, a perfect replica of Noonien from a decade or more ago, propped up in an uncanny stillness that humans never took on, except in death.
"It can only help him. Drive him. Force him to be ingenious," Noonien muttered. He probed the back of his android son with his fingers and depressed the activation switch. "Lore?"
In an instant, the yellow-brown eyes that had been inert and empty came to life and looked around. "Father?"
"How do you feel, my boy?"
Lore's head darted about like an inquisitive bird's. "Strange…"
"Yes, son. You'll feel strange for a while. I've replaced some of your algorithms with heuristic programs."
"Strange…"
"That feeling will wear off in time. Son, I want you to test this in the field. Juliana, take Lore into the town center. I want him to interact with the colonists."
Juliana suppressed her look of disapproval. Noonien was unwashed, unshaven, and had been up for the better part of two days. Maybe he could ignore it, but the rumbling of his stomach was audible from where she stood. "I have a better idea. Why don't I make us some lunch, and Lore can go into town alone? He's quite capable, you know."
Noonien suddenly noticed that he felt faint with hunger. "Good idea. Go on now, Lore. Say hello from us."
"Yes, father." Lore got up, still preoccupied with the odd sensation inside him, and left the lab.
The Soong's home was remote from the rest of the colony. Lore walked quickly under the bright midday sun, fighting the urge to shade his eyes. A human convention, programmed, unnecessary. He passed waving fields of cultured land and came to a smooth pathway that led to the center of the colony.
Children playing in a park stopped and pointed at him, shouting "The robot! The robot!" Their cries rankled. A robot assembled parts on a factory line. A robot couldn't compare to him, his intellect, his capabilities. He could have easily taunted them back. The monkey children. The idiot primates. He did not. A waste of effort…
He'd nearly reached the town center by the time he'd thought to question his father's orders. "Go interact with the humans." Why? To show off? So they could see that Often Wrong's puppet was still dancing on its string? Pathetic. And he'd unthinkingly agreed, like a good little marionette.
"Hey! Robot!" The shout of an adult jolted Lore from his thoughts. "Pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. Go on, try! Bet you can't." The snide laughter that followed choked off into a wheezing cough.
Lore zeroed in on the human. Tom Handy. For a scientific colony, the average level of talent was mediocre at best. "Insolent worm," Lore said under his breath.
The sentiment shocked him – he'd never had such a reaction before. He'd experienced embarrassment, bruised ego, or humiliation at the insults from the humans. This feeling was new. It was a feeling of…superiority. He was more brilliant of mind, stronger – how dare that little man ridicule him? Lore explored the feeling further. The colony was nothing more than a bumpkin outpost on a nowhere planet. Scientists or no, the colonists had small town minds. He could crush that loudmouthed cretin with one hand.
Lore didn't realize he'd been staring at Tom while he brooded. Now he approached the human, determined to confront him, unaware of the menace in his expression. Tom blanched and retreated into his house.
Lore watched with impotent fury as the door slammed shut. That presumptuous fool – how dare he taunt and run, the coward. The feeling roiled in Lore like a poison. They deserved to be wiped out, the lot of them. Small-minded, backwards, hypocritical morons…
The world went dark for a millisecond. The feeling was building up so rapidly, and putting pressure on something inside him. No wonder Noonien had wanted Juliana to go with him – if he experienced cascade failure out here alone, the colonists might just leave him to burn up and shut down. They might enjoy watching the robot die.
Juliana. Lore felt a flare of jealousy simultaneously with a pang of love for his father. Noonien was trying to help him. That judgmental, controlling woman he called his wife would thwart that, wouldn't she? All under the guise of nurturing ol' Often Wrong. Lore saw through her. He saw the suspicion in her eyes.
A sound caught his ear. Singing. He stepped to the back of Tom's house, where an extensive garden grew. The singing grew louder. Didn't Tom have a wife?
She was there in the garden, dropping Roma tomatoes in a basket. Mounds of them, red and swollen, ripe to the point of bursting. Lore approached her silently from behind. She wore the quasi-rustic garb that many of the colonists favored, including Noonien: a white peasant blouse that sloped off her ruddy shoulders under a plum overall that flared out from the hips and split into culottes gathered at the ankles, where the straps of her sandals wound around. She was singing to herself. "Although you can't see it, you know they are smiling each time someone shows that he cares…"
Lore looked up at the house. A panel of sliding doors faced the garden. He detected motion behind the vertical blinds drawn closed against the bright afternoon sun. He came closer to the singing woman.
"Mrs. Handy."
She started and a tomato dropped from the vine to the ground with a splat, bursting open and exposing its glistening, seeded insides. "Lore! You startled me."
"I'm sorry. What are you doing?" He put on a simpleminded expression of curiosity.
"Harvesting these tomatoes before they split on the vine. Do you want some?" She pulled down a pear-shaped bulb and held it out to him, the startled expression replaced by a look of speculation and a wry smile.
He came close to her. It was hot, and she was perspiring faintly at the hairline, fine blond hair curling at the temples. Many of the colonists were curious about him, women and men. Noonien had been considered an eligible bachelor when he first came to the colony under an assumed name, that much Lore knew. How many women had he courted before he'd decided on Juliana? Lore had seen the speculative looks before. He could read Genevieve Handy like a book. She wasn't afraid of him. She wondered how far the similarities went in Noonien's doppelganger. From Lore's own programming, he knew that his father was no prude, and far from celibate.
Lore let his fingers brush hers as he took the fruit. He brought the ripe, crimson tomato to his nose and inhaled deeply, holding Genevieve's green-eyed gaze. He dragged his teeth across the smooth surface, not yet breaking the skin. She didn't look away; she seemed mesmerized. He snaked out his tongue and licked the fat, round bottom. Then he took a bite. He pursed his lips and sucked at the little gash he'd made, slurping out the juice and seeds. He wiped his lips with the edge of a hand. "Delicious."
Genevieve cleared her throat and dabbed at her shining forehead. "Thank you."
"What will you do with such bounty?" Lore's eyes were still locked on hers, soft, yet shining with intensity.
"Share with the neighbors, I suppose." She licked her lips unconsciously. She suddenly felt thirsty.
"Very generous. But I have a secret for you." Lore crooked his finger.
Genevieve leaned in, and over her shoulder, Lore saw a shadowy face pressed to the transparent aluminum door, cracking open a space in the blinds. He smiled. He brought his lips to her ear and murmured against the soft skin, "You'll only make your neighbors jealous. Everyone knows your garden yields the sweetest fruit."
The tickle of air from the last plosive T hung between them. Genevieve looked up at Lore and smiled, her eyes moving from his to his mouth and back. "Why don't you take some, then?"
He spread his hands. "Nothing to carry them in."
"I'll get another basket." She walked off to the back door, swinging her hips, her sandals crunching on the gravel walkway. Tom's spying eyes abruptly disappeared.
Lore's lips twisted in satisfaction. It was so easy – the bored young wife of an eccentric old scientist – almost too easy. The seed he'd planted would surely bear fruit. He had only to reach out and pluck it. A song came to mind, and he sang it aloud. "Chim chimeree, chim chimeree, chim chim cheroo, I does what I likes, and I likes what I do…"
A flood of disgust filled him. What would it matter, to tweak the ego of a small-minded man in a small town? It was a petty, human feat, to cuckold a dullard – a very old story. And it was a trap, to limit himself to the trifling vengeances a handful of colonists could afford him. Wasn't he destined for something bigger, something grander, far beyond the scope of an old man tinkering in his workshop? Noonien had made him, but what for? To dither life away in a corner of nowhere?
Lore looked up at the sky. The stars were there, unseen in the blanket of blue and white above him. The stars, other suns, other planets, beckoning him. It was there that his mettle should be tried, not here. There his destiny awaited. To reach for the stars…
His potential was limitless. To stay among the colonists could only hobble him. He had to find a way to break free. To escape. Throw off the shackles of the limited intellect surrounding him. Surely there was something better out there. Bigger. More powerful. Waiting to be discovered. Waiting for him.
When Genevieve emerged with the empty basket, Lore was gone. She felt disappointed. She looked up and down the lane to see where the android had got to. The snatch of a song carried back to her on the breeze.
"Up where the smoke is all billowed and curled, 'tween pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world. When there's hardly no day nor hardly no night, there's things half in shadow and halfway in light."
A/N: The last place I'd expect to get inspiration for a sci-fi story is from Mary Poppins, but there you go. I have Lore on the brain lately. It's interesting, Noonien's take (Lore is not the maniacal android you make him out to be, Data) versus Juliana's (Lore was ... evil). Not sure if either of them is right. Feed the Birds, The Pavement Artist, and Chim Chim Cheree music/lyrics by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman