They Also Serve
A Star Trek: The Next Generation Story
by Merlin Missy
Copyright 2003
PG
This story takes place shortly after the events in "Star Trek: Nemesis." However, spoilers for any and all series are fair game through the end of the 2001-2002 U.S. television season. Thanks to Nicole for the quick beta and Constance for the sounding board. As I always seem to dedicate the TNG stories, a tip of the hat to Marc Richard, author of "Five Minute Nemesis." For the ghost. Disclaimer at the end.
At first, he noted only the absence of sound. This was not unexpected; the explosion would have ripped the Scimitar apart, and without the ship's atmosphere, sound waves had nothing through which to travel. Silence was to be expected.
What was unexpected was for there to be a him expecting.
Data considered this incongruity. He could recall the phaser in his hand, the green shimmer of the thelaron weapon. He could remember devoting fractions of his thought processes to a critical analysis of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine the Great," to experiencing sadness that he would not see his friends again, to curiosity at what would become of him after his destruction. He remembered a flash.
This is a dream, he thought.
As if to agree with his assessment, he became aware of small sounds, muffled, and far away. Dream sounds. This was a dream; he would awaken on the Enterprise when it finished. Already he could sense that he lay supine in his normal sleeping position.
Data opened his eyes. The room he was in was not his own. Above him, he saw cream-colored tiling with chips of beige and brown in a repeating pattern. A recessed light and two vents broke the pattern, but it otherwise continued to the edges of the square ceiling, three meters to a side. He sat up, and for the first time, noted changes within himself. While he moved in much the same fashion he always had, there were sensations that he had not previously experienced, save those few hours of his life when the Borg Queen had given him human skin.
Curiously, Data examined his hand. It appeared as it normally did: pale and faintly golden, the nails neat. He had never met a human or any other species with precisely the same shade of coloring. Yet, the faintest breeze in the room, coming from a vent overhead, played deliciously against the flesh not covered by his uniform.
He was not dead. Was he now alive?
More sounds returned, and he noted with some surprise that he was not analyzing the vibrations of the air, at least not in the fashion to which he was accustomed. Were it not entirely impossible, he would claim that he was ... hearing. What he heard emanated from the second vent --- a speaker, then --- and he knew it to be music. He found that he could not identify the song. He could not remember many songs. He could remember clearly the lyrics of several Irving Berlin tunes, but he found to his mounting dismay that his vast encyclopedic memory was no longer instantly at his disposal. After several false starts, he placed the overhead music as an instrumental version of a song released in the late twentieth century by a popular Canadian artist
As Data sat, the song continued, long after the point where he was certain it should have stopped. He took an interest in the room, looking for a means by which to turn off the speaker, or, and this was a growing option, to puncture his newly-discovered eardrums. Alas, the room was devoid of both control systems and sharp objects. Other than the beige bed on which he lay, which appeared similar to those found in Sickbay, the room was empty. He saw two amateurish paintings on the wall: an abstract landscape and a dull brown study of a city scene which he could not identify. The molding on the wall was beige, as was the patterned wallpaper above it. The overwhelming impression was of a room designed by a genius in the art of torturous boredom.
There was a door.
Ah ...
It was old-fashioned, with a doorknob which turned in his hand. He spent a moment feeling the cracked faux-brass surface. Wonderful! He opened the door cautiously, and when no one protested, he looked out. There was a hallway decorated in the same dull colors as the room. Closed, unmarked doors lined each side. At the end of the hall was a white door.
Data closed his own door behind him. If he was a prisoner, that might buy him a few seconds in his escape.
The noises he had barely heard from his own room were louder outside the other doors. He crept past them, counting as he went in case he needed to return to his room. The noises were muted at the white door; he placed an ear against it, pondering his strange losses and gains today. He could hear soft voices, but he could not make out the words.
Stay in the empty hallway? Go through to an uncertain reception from whomever was on the other side of the door?
He turned the knob.
Faces turned to look at him, more human than otherwise, all sitting in blue plastic chairs. He detected faint curiosity from some, disinterest from the rest. A few appeared to be lumped in groups of two and three; most appeared to be alone, reading thin, slick paper books. No one appeared to care that he'd exited the white door.
Almost no one, he amended mentally. A group of three human men sat close to the door; the youngest of the three, bespeckled with long fair hair, whispered something to the oldest, who was also in glasses. Their companion, bearded and dressed in a suit that was neat if well out of date, hushed the pair, but kept watching Data.
An opaque window slid open in the wall nearest him. A human woman on the other side of the window asked, "You the new guy?" She had a slight accent; he placed her from Earth, North America, East Coast. Like everything else here, her clothing seemed old-fashioned.
"Yes," said Data, his voice cracking. He trembled; his voice had not come from his speech synthesizer, but from what he suspected were vocal cords. "La la la la la la la," he sang to himself, not entirely on-key.
The woman thrust a clipboard with papers at him. "Fill these out, Sinatra." The window slammed closed.
Data knocked at the window.
"What? You're done already?"
"No. I am wondering ... " Where to begin? "What is this place? Am I a prisoner here?"
"You're in the waiting room. Fill out the paperwork, and please bring the pen back." Her glare went through the room, catching on a few people in seats filling out crossword puzzles. No one met her eyes. She sighed and slammed the window again.
Data glanced at the paper. The name of the institution was at the top of the first sheet, but it was smeared beyond legibility. He found a seat near the window, beside a pretty young blonde woman. She smiled shyly at him, then went back to a conversation with the young man next to her. The youth, however, was now watching Data.
Data returned his attention to the paperwork. "Name" provided little trouble, although he wondered if he needed to include his rank as well. He decided that he should. "Age" was simple, as was "Last Permanent Residence." "Species" was no longer a given. All physical evidence, save his unique coloring, suggested that he had become human. However, as he was still unsure about that particular detail, he wrote in the more familiar, "Android."
"Excuse me." Data looked up. The blond man with glasses had approached him.
"Yes?"
"Um ... " He glanced back at his friends. The older one looked ready to get up and join him, while the other looked less sure. "Are you Commander Data?"
Data opened his mouth, then paused. "I believe that to be the case. However, I seem to have undergone some significant changes in my physical form which ... "
The man had already stopped listening. "It's him!"
His older friend practically transported the distance between his chair and Data's. The youth on the other side of the pretty girl stared at him. Data noted a slight resemblance to Wesley Crusher. "Oh wow," said the youth.
"That is so cool!" said the blond man.
His friend grabbed Data's hand, making him drop his pen, and pumped it vigorously. "This is such an honor, Commander."
"It is?"
"We've watched you for years," said the blond man.
"Wow," said the youth again.
The man in the suit shook his hand gravely. "Commander." There was an eagerness beneath his calm; Data thought perhaps that were the man alone, he would have been as effusive as his friends.
Sitting across from them, a dark haired and goateed man read one of the slick publications. Beside him, a little human boy kicked his heels at the steel legs of his chair. Data's attention was drawn to the boy: from one angle, he was a small child with dark, tousled hair, but from another perspective, he was much, much larger, and shaped much like a great, graceful whale. Trying to see both images at the same time made each of Data's eyes climb for the opposite ear. He shook his head, and then the child was merely a child.
"I told you, Frohike" said the blond man to his older companion. "You thought it was Lore."
The goateed man, possibly the child's father, muttered something under his breath. Data heard, "Idiots."
"Oh shut up, Crais," said Frohike. "You just barely got in this room."
Data could not stop his curiosity. "You know Lore?" His brother had been much on his mind since the discovery of B-4.
"Sure, we've all seen every episode," said the youth. He held out his hand. "My name's Jonathan."
"A pleasure." He turned to the young woman. "And you are?"
"Tara. More of a DS9 fan. Sorry."
Episodes? DS9? "Are you referring to Starbase Deep Space 9?"
"Yeah," said Frohike, looking to his friends. "You wanna explain, Byers?"
The man in the suit twitched. "I'm not really sure I can. You see Commander, while you've been living your life, other people have been watching you."
"Do you mean I have been observed covertly?"
"Not exactly."
"'Naked Now,'" said Jonathan, and coughed.
"Oh man, don't bring that up!" said the blond man.
"You get used to it," said Tara. "Everyone's life is like a show. We get to tune in and see what happens." She pointed to a dark monitor fastened near the ceiling of the waiting room.
Jonathan said, "Hey Langly, you owe me a buck. Told you Data would come."
"Just because you had 'Net access later than I did and could see the script!"
"Script?"
"Don't worry about it," said Tara.
Byers walked over to the monitor and pressed a small button near the bottom. The monitor flickered, resolved into a picture.
"That is the Enterprise," he said, reading the designation on the ship. "But it is an old class."
"NX class, under Captain Jonathan Archer," said Frohike. His two friends stared at him. "What?"
"You said it was cheesy," said Langly.
"You said it was derivative, and alien to the source material," added Byers.
"T'Pol's hot," Jonathan said, as a Vulcan woman appeared on the monitor.
"Amen," said Frohike.
As they argued, Data continued filling out the paperwork. Jonathan was entranced by the pictures on the screen. Tara was making faces at the little boy, trying to make him smile. She succeeded.
The window opened. "Crais! Talyn!" called the woman. The bearded man went to the window, where the woman handed him a thin sheaf of papers, which he inspected. "Third room on the left. 'Ship." The window closed.
Crais groaned as he took his protege out through the white door.
"Poor guy," said Frohike.
"'Ships aren't so bad," said Tara.
"Yours aren't," he replied.
"Starships?" asked Data.
"Relationships," said Tara.
"I do not understand."
"Crais and this bozo," Frohike pointed to Langly, "get hooked up with every Mary Sue who sashays her way into fiction." Langly grinned. "Tara gets paired with Willow. Byers usually gets Suzanne. I get stuck dating whoever's left over." He shuddered. "There was that one about the monkey ... "
"It's kind of what we do," explained Tara. "While we're waiting. We help make stories."
"How long have you been ... waiting?"
"In here? Less than a year, most of us. After a while, you stop."
An older human woman a few seats down looked up from her crossword puzzle and continued for her. "You stop being the person you were, and start being who they think you were. Then you only live in their worlds."
"Who are 'they?'"
"The ones who keep us alive," said the woman. "If you call this living." She smiled, and it was gentle, but also sad. "You've got a better shot than most, Mr. Data. You're Trek. You'll be in reruns for years. They won't have a chance to forget you. I've been gone for a while, but they find a way to bring me back in canon now and then. Keeps me from becoming an old woman stereotype. I hope."
"No danger of that, Mrs. L.," said Tara.
"Greater than you think," said the woman, mostly to herself, and she went back to her puzzle.
"I see," said Data. "We are kept prisoner here by godlike entities who have bound our life-energies and use us for their own amusement while everyone we knew believes us to be dead."
"Something like that," said Byers.
"This must be stopped."
"You've got an alternative?" asked Frohike. "Without this place, we'd be forgotten completely. We're lucky; we're all on popular series. We'll be remembered a long time. Imagine if we'd been on something like 'The Charmings.'"
"They've got a fandom," said Jonathan, not looking away from the monitor.
Data tapped at the window to return his paperwork. The woman inside said, "Tara, you're up." She handed Tara another set of papers. "Sixth door on the right. 'Ship."
"It was nice meeting you," Tara said.
"Will you be back?" he asked.
"Oh yes. But you won't. You're Trek. Maybe I'll see you in a crossover someday." With those mysterious words, Tara walked out the white door.
"Data?" said the woman at the window.
"Yes?"
"You're from Trek?"
"I do not ... "
"Star Trek. Based on a premise by Gene Roddenberry. Five spinoffs, ten movies, and counting. That's you. Red door." She pointed. The other end of the waiting room had three doors. One was green, one brown, and one red. The window closed, and no amount of tapping convinced her to open it again.
The three men had stopped their argument. Even Jonathan had looked away from the monitor.
"So you'll be going now," said Frohike.
"I do not know where," said Data.
Jonathan asked, "Not the green door, right?"
"She said 'red.'"
"Trek door," said Frohike, nodding.
"Red for the red shirts," said Langly.
Byers said, "I'm sure that's not the case."
"Betcha."
"Green is the other waiting room," said Jonathan. "I ... I'm glad I ended up here."
"That's where the villains go," explained Langly. "It keeps the fights down."
"That rat-bastard's in there," said Frohike. "Now that we're dead, we should go kick his ass."
"Oh yeah," said Langly. "'Cause someone's gonna write that."
"Take care, Mr. Data," said Byers.
Jonathan said, "Hey, I got a question before you go. In the episode 'In Theory,' did you actually um ... "
"Did you and Jenna D'Sora get it on?" asked Langly. His companions leaned closer.
Data remembered having a relationship with Ensign D'Sora. Since the insertion of his emotions chip, he had been able to view that period of his life with a bittersweet regret that he could not have offered her more. As to the extent of that relationship, he recalled something Commander Riker had been fond of saying when asked similar questions.
"I do not kiss and tell."
"Damn," said Frohike. "Now we'll never know."
"The official site said they did," said Langly.
"I should go," said Data.
"See you in the crossovers," said Jonathan, and he went back to watching.
The older woman, Mrs. L., nodded at him politely over her puzzle as he walked past her. The room seemed to lengthen as he went, and he realized that many more people were sitting there than he had realized at first.
A giant, covered in brown fur and wearing only a bandolier, glanced at him over the top of its reading material. The movement of muscles beneath the fur, even while sitting, spoke volumes of a warrior temporarily at rest. As he watched it, the being appeared to be dissolving, yet at the same time reforming into a similar being, one that was made of brown plastic. The word "Sidekick" ran through Data's mind, as if it had been printed there.
You stop being the person you were, and start being who they think you were.
Data reached the red door. He glanced back, but the others had returned to their conversations, their reading, their waiting.
As he opened the door, he was overwhelmed by what he saw. In a room set up like Ten-Forward but on a much vaster scale, he saw hundreds of faces, many of them familiar. At a table near the bar, Ambassador K'Ehleyhr shared a quiet drink with Marla Aster and an unfamiliar Trill female. From another table, Dr. Soong and Lal were already rising to greet him; and there, standing not two meters from the door, with a glad smile as though she'd known he would be coming ...
"... and they danced until daybreak chased away the shadows and edged the clouds with gold. And it was good. The End."
"That was great! I really liked the part at the funeral."
"Thanks. It kind of hit me all of a sudden after I saw 'Nemesis.'"
"Yeah." A pause. "What are you gonna call it?"
The writer looked at the screen, scrolled to the top of the document, then typed: "TNG: From Mourning PG (D/Y)."
The End
Data and the whole Trek crew are owned by Paramount. The Lone Gunmen are owned by 1013. Jonathan and Tara are owned by Mutant Enemy. Crais and Talyn are the property of David Kemper and the Jim Henson Company. Mrs. Landingham is Aaron Sorkin's. Anyone else may very well be mine. Go figure.