Perfection, 21 of 28
"PERFECTION"
by Jim Smith
Fine print: I don't own Star Trek and I'm not claiming to. I just own the story. Ask me before you do anything with it.
Chapter Twenty-one.
Special relativity dictates that matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light--to even challenge that limit requires prohibitive amounts of energy, and subjects the traveler to increasingly acute time dilation. So explorers developed ways to encase their vessels within subspace fields--the ship doesn't have to move because the field warps through space at superluminous speeds. However, this did not eliminate the physical stresses upon a body in motion. A structural integrity field was necessary to resist shearing effects. A deflector grid prevented subatomic particles from plowing through the hull. Inertial dampeners made it possible for the passengers to experience intense acceleration as though it were a pleasant cruise.
The Stormwind was possessed of all of these systems. But at warp factor 9.978 and climbing, it had already exceeded design limits for all of them.
Conditions were difficult for the crew, who were trained for the experience. Utana Ijhel was not. So she fell about her guest quarters, in search of some part of the room where she could ride out the difficult journey.
"I'm certain there's nothing to panic about!" Ajax assured her. Since his body was a collection of force fields, hs balance was impeccable.
"I'm not panicking!" she huffed. She had only just braced herself against a chair when a particularly bad jolt almost tossed it on top of her. Undaunted, she inched her way toward the nearest bulkhead, taking each step as if the next might trigger a landmine. "And may I say, I am very tired of having you deduce how I feel like some sort of...mood tricorder!"
"I was only trying to help," he said, insulted. "What would you have me do?"
"Find me a place to sit!" Ijhel shouted.
Without another word, Ajax marched up behind her, and lifted her into his arms. Ijhel made a noise that might best be described as a squeak. Before she could object, the hologram had carried her into the bedroom, and was laying her on the mattress.
For a moment, he hovered over her, and the dim lighting reflected in his eyes just so. And in that instant, he wasn't the obstinate hologram she'd refactored for Starfleet, but an image she found in a database all those months ago, when she was selecting Ajax's physical appearance. The image of a human man, tall and striking, with eyes from a Cardassian portrait. Choosing that image was a momentary indulgence...one that had just made her interaction with the program more difficult than it needed to be.
Ijhel put some distance between them. "This isn't working."
"What isn't?"
"This. I..." She sat up and looked at him again, with the light hitting him from another angle. And it was Ajax again...the spit-and-polish soldier, who saw her as a civilian first and his programmer second. The hologram that never, ever, stopped arguing with her, and took everything she said personally...as if he was a person at all. "I might as well be talking to myself," she realized.
"Then talk to yourself," he suggested. "I won't mind. And it's not as if it'll matter to me."
She found she had no argument with that...at least, none she could articulate. Maybe saying it would get it off her mind. "I'm...well, it's...I find you...your holo-image. It's attractive."
"What?"
"I find it attractive!" she groaned. "It...you...your holo-image. You originally looked like a miserable holoprogrammer from Jupiter Station. I couldn't picture a million of him charging into battle."
"I fail to see why this matters now..."
"Because...!" She'd forgotten that she was trying to pretend she was talking to herself. "I made you look like something I...appreciated...and I thought nothing of it, because I didn't expect to be stuck on the Hrunting with you all this time." She could tell he didn't understand. "You see, people can become infatuated with...fantasies just as easily as with other people. As a holodeveloper, I've made a good living designing characters that drive end users to obsession."
"Why should anyone be obsessed with a hologram?" Ajax asked. "I'm not real, Doctor. My emotional responses are just..." He remembered what she had said earlier. "...a collection of booleans returned by first order functions you wrote."
"Exactly!" Ijhel looked relieved that someone could see this point. Kreighen, Tirava, and Jimenez wouldn't have. "You're an impressive piece of software, Sergeant--if I do say so myself--but that's all. I find I have to remind myself of that with alarming frequency."
"But I would think you, of all people, would have no difficulty with that." He sat down beside her, and debated sharing his own private concerns. "I must admit that I've...had thoughts about you that can't be accounted for by my code coverage. I think you're...ah..."
Ijhel could see his difficulty. "Attractive," she offered, confident in that self-assessment.
"Attractive," he repeated. "But clearly that's an conclusion drawn on the comparative evolution of secondary sex characteristics in my medical database. Your...beauty...is an objective summary of thousands of variables, organized into a hash table and evaluated against a set of standard quantities that were rigorously constructed over thousands of years. That I'm aware of that data doesn't mean anything."
"Well...that's true," she said reflexively, "but it's not the same for organic life forms. We're driven by chemical processes beyond our control--our conscious minds only came into existence to help perpetuate those processes. I'm more aware of it than most, because I develop programs like you that separate out those irrelevant urges. But unfortunately, I'm as affected by it as anyone...it's really quite insufferable..."
"I can imagine," he offered. "The body undergoes a neurochemical imbalance..." His voice began to carry a tune. "Hormones are raging...synapses blazing...it's all so ve--" Ajax caught himself approaching a high note.
Ijhel had the most puzzled look on her face. "What was that?"
"I'm not sure," Ajax admitted. After a few seconds checking a stack trace, he decided on an answer. "A piece of music. It must be a holdover from the Emergency Medical Holographic kernel, though I can't imagine what purpose it would serve."
"I didn't even know you could sing."
"Neither did I." He turned away, and for a moment she could almost believe a hologram could be embarrassed. "I'm sorry."
"Stop apologizing," she insisted. The ship began to shudder harder than ever, and a load groan resonated throughout the deck. "Frankly, I could use the distraction. What song is it?"
"It's an aria from Rigoletto," he explained, "an opera written five hundred years ago by Guiseppe Verdi, about a duchy in 16th century Italy, where the court jester--"
"Sergeant." Ijhel rolled her eyes. "Sing the song."
"Right." Ajax rather unnecessarily cleared his throat, and accessed subroutines he had never actively considered before. "La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento..."
"Wait...I don't understand--"
Ajax was deeply bothered by this, to his own surprise. "Do not interrupt," he said sternly. "Performance is a very delicate matter, and I won't have you disrupting my tempo!"
"I couldn't understand the lyrics!" she fumed. "Something's wrong with your universal translator..."
"No, yours is not calibrated for Italian." Ajax composed himself. "The words aren't important. What matters is how the music enters one's soul, and uplifts the heart. But, to put it in the proper context, the Duke is complaining about the fickleness of women, oblivious to his own capriciousness--"
Another groan creaked through the hull. "Fine," Ijhel snapped. "Sing, before this ship collapses around us!"
Ajax sneered, but did as she asked. Once more he took his time preparing his voice, and behaved as if he was waiting for a musical cue that only existed in his subroutines. This time, though, there was a defiant passion in his voice. "La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento, muta d'accento, e di pensiero."
She'd never heard anything like this. Ijhel was transfixed by the sound of his voice, connecting musical notes in ways she hadn't imagined. He saw she was impressed, and so emboldened, gestured with his arms to convey the essence of his performance. "Sempre un amabile, leggiadro viso, in pianto o in riso, è menzognero."
As he reached the refrain, Ajax was too caught up in the song to think of anything else. "La donna è mobil'! Qual piuma al vento! Muta d'accennnnnto...e di pensier'!" A pause. "E di pensier'!"
Another pause, and as he readied himself for the crescendo he leaned in to Ijhel. "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee..."
By his nature, it was trivial to hold the note for hours. But it was the way he held it--in the tradition of tenors from Mirate, Pavarotti, and Soral of Vulcan--that captivated her. For the first time, Ijhel looked into the sergeant's eyes...and saw his soul. In that moment, neither of them remembered to be the callous programmer or the stoic program.
She interrupted him again, reaching up to draw him closer. On instinct--or whatever simulated his instinct--he kissed her. The sensation was unexpected, and could not be traced to any known event listener. But he did not pause to analyze this, any more than she stopped to debug it. If he was only an illusion of a man, then it was now an illusion they both chose to believe.