Part Five

several months later, somewhere on Terlina III...

Soong lay sprawled on his battered, brown couch, a bowl of popcorn balanced on his chest. On the viewer in front of him, an ancient black and white film was playing out, in which a blonde femme fatale was duping a tall insurance salesman into helping her carry out a plot to kill her husband.

"Father?"

"Hmm," Soong grunted, his eyes fixed on the screen. "Lore, why don't you watch this with me? Made in 1944, if you can believe it. Edward G. Robinson's character, Barton Keyes, is just fantastic. When he lights that match at the end… That's the moment, son. That's what it's all about."

"Father, you've been lying on that couch for four days."

"So?"

"You have done nothing but watch that same film in a continuous loop for all that time."

"Not true," Soong said. "I breathed, ate, drank, slept, and got up to go to the replicator and the bathroom a few times. Oh, and I rolled over."

"Father, you are human. You need to exercise your muscles or they will atrophy."

"What, rolling over isn't exercise? Look, if you're not going to watch Keyes with me, be quiet so I can hear, OK?"

"Father?"

Soong groaned.

"Father!"

"What, Lore?"

The computer paused. Soong frowned, and hoisted himself into a sitting position, blinking his vid-weary eyes until he could focus on the silvery little box.

"All right, all right, you have my attention," he said, and reached over to turn off the viewer. "What's up?"

"I have a question," the box replied.

"Shoot."

"What is death?"

Soong's head sagged down to his chest and he flopped back onto the cushions.

"Death," he said, "is just a punchline. Life…life… Life is the joke."

"I do not understand."

"I don't expect you to," Soong replied.

"Why do you insist on purposefully confusing me?"

"Because you asked a question that has no satisfactory answer," Soong told him, and sighed into his hands. "Lore, I am sorry about your brother. I tried everything I know, but… There's no way to bring him back."

"Why did my brother die?" Lore asked.

"It was cascade failure, son. The delicate balance of his positronic matrix became fatally unstable, and his system crashed. Permanently," Soong said, his eyes sliding reluctantly to the dark, metallic construct that sat all alone on a shelf of its own. For a while, a brief wondrous while, that construct had housed the infant positronic consciousness Soong had, officially, dubbed A3. Unofficially, though…he had been Archie. His sweet, curious little Archie…

"He was too young," Soong choked, and rubbed his nose against his sleeve. "Too young to make a trip like that. The stimuli all around us, the shuttles, the passengers…all that movement. It was just…too much. Too much too soon. I just…I didn't think he would be so…so fragile…"

His voice cracked and he sobbed brokenly into his hands, as he'd been doing intermittently since the lights in his son's brain went out five days before.

"I…I'm sorry, Lore. I know you don't understand…"

"I am not dead," Lore stated.

Soong blew his nose on a crumpled napkin he'd used several hours before for the same purpose.

"No, you're not."

"Yet, I was exposed to the same stimuli as my brother."

"You and Archie aren't the same, Lore," Soong said, wiping his eyes. "You're a computer. You experience sensory input and process information as a computer does. But, a positronic brain… It's modeled on the human brain. It works the way a human brain works. Its purpose is to be housed in a humanoid form, to experience life from as human-like a perspective as possible."

"Why?" Lore asked.

Soong snorted slightly and very nearly smiled.

"Just for the hell of it," he said.

"Father?" Lore said.

"Yes, Lore?"

"You are very strange."

Soong laughed.

"Thanks."

"Are all humans like you?"

"You know they're not."

"Do you like other humans?"

"Not very much. But then, they don't much like me either. If they did, I wouldn't be here, stuck in this lousy Quonset hut in the middle of a jungle."

"Father?"

"Yes, Lore?"

"Are you lonely?"

Soong sighed and turned his gaze to the rounded ceiling of the small, prefab structure, considering.

"I never used to be," he said. "It's hard to feel alone if you've never had company."

"We had a great deal of company at the university, and at the institute before that."

"Too much." Soong scowled, feeling his hackles start to rise. "And they all can march straight to hell – with Graves at the head of the parade! I've read the newsfeeds, I know what's going on out there. Let that thieving asshole say whatever he wants about me. Let the whole universe think I slunk away in the dark of night, a craven little failure who couldn't live up to his big-mouthed promises. My Archie did work. I did breathe life into Asimov's dream. My dream. And I can do it again. All I need is time. And materials..."

Soong leaped up from the couch and strode purposefully to the hut's cramped little bathroom.

"Ye gods!" he exclaimed.

"Father?" Lore inquired. "Is something wrong?"

"Yeah," Soong called back over the sound of an electric razor powering up. "Remind me never to grow a beard. You still got that connection to the Federation's subspace network?"

"I do."

"See if you can find us some tunes. Something loud, with lots of energy. Oh, and Lore!"

"Yes, Father?"

"Send a coded message to Juliana. Mask the transmission as best you can. She should know about Archie, and that I'm going to start again."

"I thought you said all the humans we knew should go to hell," Lore said.

"I didn't mean her, you nut," Soong retorted, activating the narrow sonic shower. "She's my link."

"Link?" Lore inquired.

"Yeah. That night we left...she sent me one last message. She said she'd always be my link. My 'someone to call.' If I needed someone, la la..."

"Father? Father, I can't hear you!"

But Soong was singing in the shower, his mind no longer on his son, but on circuits and subprocessors and the possibilities of programs to come…

To Be Continued…

References include: Double Indemnity (1944) directed by Billy Wilder and starring Barbara Stanwyck (who was represented by Zeppo Marx for a time, after he left the Marx Brothers' act to become an agent); the Joker's philosophy from Batman: The Killing Joke; and the Beatles song "If I Needed Someone," by George Harrison (Rubber Soul, 1965).

And that's it. All my (partly) pre-written chapters. The rest is in scattered bits and pieces I still need to stuff and sew together, so the updates will take a bit longer now. Regarding Soong's name, I used 'Noon' just for short, like a nickname. Sorry for any confusion or inconsistency! But thanks so very much for reading so far and for your wonderful reviews and especially for restoring my enthusiasm for this long-buried story! I can't wait until Data shows up either, and I'm looking forward to the challenge of writing more Lore stuff as his character gets darker and more complicated. I just hope I can pull it off! :)