Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Stardate 57136
“This is all your fault, Will,” complained Beverly as she contemplated the meager remains of the pile of poker chips in front of her. Deanna had already been cleaned out, and Geordi was little better off than Beverly. Data was holding his own, as was Riker. But the person with the largest pile of chips by far was Kitty Pryde.
“My fault,” Riker asked indignantly. “Why’s this my fault?”
“You invited her,” answered Deanna with mock snippiness, indicating Kitty.
“Yeah,” Geordi confirmed. “If you hadn’t invited little-miss-card-shark over here, we’d still have a few credits to our names to leave our children. Now, we’ll just have to put our kids on healthfare.”
“That’s ‘welfare’, Geordi,” corrected Kitty, “and thankfully, it no longer exists. Stupid system. Pay people for not working, and then go and wonder why unemployment is so high. Besides, you don’t have any children.”
“That’s not the point. And you shouldn’t be defending him. You’re as guilty as he is.”
Kitty smiled. “How do you figure that?”
Riker cleared his throat. “Ahem. I seem to recall you saying that you don’t play poker anymore.”
Kitty nodded her head in confirmation. “And it was true; I haven’t played a single hand of poker in over a decade. But you never bothered to ask why I had stopped playing.” She began shuffling the deck for the next deal.
The group had known they were in trouble the first time Kitty picked up the deck and did a three-way one-handed cut of the deck. It had been confirmed when Kitty proved to be as avid a bluffer as Riker. Worse, she bluffed when there seemed to be no advantage to bluffing, throwing all their attempts to figure a pattern to her play out of whack. And slowly, over the course of the past three hours, she had relieved them of their hard-earned money.
But the truth is that none of them were really angry with her. Despite their losses, it had been a pleasant evening of poker and conversation. There had been a few tense moments as they tried to press Kitty for details of shadowy past, but Kitty had avoided their attempts through vague answers and misdirection, and they had finally gotten the message… at least for now.
Now Riker took the bait. “And why, Miss Pryde, did you stop playing poker?”
“I kept winning, so no one wanted to play with me anymore,” she said with a mock pout as he cut he deck for the next deal. “It’s quite sad, really.”
“Our hearts bleed for you,” Riker responded wryly. They all chuckled.
Kitty dealt the next hand. Chips clinked as each of them anted up. Riker examined his cards. “Five,” he said, throwing a five-credit chip into pot. Then he turned to Data. “How’s your research going, Data?”
Data examined his cards and added a chip to the pot. “I am again finding myself at an impasse, Commander,” he replied.
Curious, Kitty asked “What kind of research are you doing, Mr. Data, if you don’t mind my asking? See your five and raise five.” Two more chips clinked into the pot. The others followed suit.
“Not at all, Commander,” replied Data. “I am endeavoring to understand the human condition.”
“Ohhh. I see,” said Kitty with a sly smile. “You do realize, Mr. Data, that the human condition isn’t something that has a definitive answer.”
“I understand that, Commander. Nevertheless, I believe the effort to be worthwhile.”
“Data wants to be human,” Deanna offered, upping the ante to fifteen credits.
“Pinocchio wants to live,” murmured Kitty.
“A somewhat inaccurate statement,” Data said. “By the definition of life that is understood by Starfleet, I am already alive and sentient. What I wish to be is human.”
“I understood that you recently acquired and installed an emotion chip,” commented Kitty. “Didn’t that make you human in the emotional sense?”
Data shook his head. “Contrary to what most theorists believe, emotional responses are not the sum of the human experience. I had hoped that the installation of the emotion chip would bring me closer to understanding humanity. However, I have now found that there is much more involved in humanity than emotions. For instance, there are many lower life forms that operate based on emotional responses. Yet nobody would categorize animals as ‘human’ in the sense in which we are speaking.”
Kitty nodded in understanding. “I see. So what direction is your research taking?” She threw in another chip to match the most recent ante without looking at her cards.
“I have hypothesized that the key to understanding humanity is in its racial history. The experiences of humanity as a race have shaped human emotions and the human spirit immeasurably. I am attempting to experience the sum of human history in an attempt to recreate within myself the experiences of the human race. It is my hope that this will lead to the same level of ‘awakening’ as humans. I will take two cards.”
“I see,” Kitty said again with a smile, as she dealt him his two cards and collected the dead cards. “You’re using the holodeck to recreate Earth’s historical events and experiencing them first hand.”
“Precisely, Commander.”
Geordi looked up from scowling at his cards. “Data, I thought you have all of Earth’s history in your memory? One card for me.”
“I do, Geordi,” replied Data. “I also have the entirety of Vulcan history, Klingon history, Andorian history, Gorn history…”
“Data…” Riker said firmly, while signaling that he was standing pat with the cards in his hand.
“…and the histories of more than 412 other races,” Data said, getting the message. “But knowing history is not the same as experiencing it. Before we met Zefram Chochrane during our visit to the 21st century, you did not know what he was really like, did you?” Geordi shook his head. Data continued, “But you knew his history, did you not? So you see, knowledge and experience are not the same.”
“I get it, Data,” Geordi acknowledged. Then he turned his cards down and folded with another scowl. “I don’t like this game anymore. Can we play ‘go fish’?” The rest of the table chuckled.
Kitty asked, “What specific experiences are you researching?”
Data answered, “I have noticed that issues of what was once referred to as ‘racial equality’ have always elicited strong emotional responses. I am currently recreating the great speeches of the leaders of the various civil rights movements.”
“Which leaders?”
“I have recreated Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, the speeches of Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘Children of the Atom’ speech of Charles Xavier, and the Zefram Chochrane’s ‘Forward the Galaxy’ speech.”
“Wait a second,” said Beverly. “I’m no historian, but I know that all of those people lived before space travel was common, and except for Chochrane, all of them lived before humans met people of other races. What kind of racial equality were they speaking about? Call.”
“That, Doctor, is part of my dilemma,” answered Data as Beverly threw chips into the center of the table. “These speeches all were about racial equality, yet the problems those speeches were addressing were between people of the same race… humans.”
“Well, that’s nothing new,” answered Kitty. “The color of one’s skin, or hair, or the shape of their bodies has always been a justification for hatred based on race.”
“Why?” asked Data.
Kitty turned to Riker. “You explain it.”
“Me? I don’t understand it either,” he replied. “I mean, I know it used to happen, but I just never understood why.”
Kitty looked at him, surprised. Then she looked around the table, and found the same puzzled expression on the faces of everyone else.
“Well I’ll be damned…” she murmured. “I don’t believe it. You’ve actually forgotten how to hate. The dream lives. The Professor was right…”
Kitty shook herself out of this reverie and continued. “To answer your question, Data, the whole thing was basically illogical. The theory was that people who have a different appearance must be of a different race. The human race was, therefore, broken down many different ‘races’. Most often, those racial differences tended to also run along national borders. Remember, this is before Earth had united after the First Contact. National wars were practically a racial pastime, and oftentimes those wars were justified by race. My race is obviously superior to you race; therefore, if I hurt or kill you, it is a case of a superior species killing an inferior one, and is therefore not wrong or immoral. That was the general justification.”
“But the basic premise is untrue,” said Data. “There is, genetically speaking, no significant difference between a human from China and one from North America.”
“Of course there isn’t, Data,” agreed Kitty. “But remember that this sort of thing became common long before the genetic sciences were developed on Earth. Plus there was the fact that this sort of argument works best on an instinctive level, rather than a conscious one. People didn’t go around saying, ‘that guy is inferior to me’. But on an unconscious level, it affected his way of thinking. And frankly, it’s not that uncommon to see it even today. People make snap judgments based on appearance all the time. If you see a person in Starfleet uniform, you automatically make assumptions about his trustworthiness and loyalty, don’t you? And in the few cases where there was a conscious attempt to use that argument, like Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the effect was catastrophic and the backlash against it was astronomical.”
“I see,” acknowledged Data. “But if the effect was mostly an unconscious one, why was the emotional reaction from both sides of the issue so strong?”
“Well, on one hand, you had the people who were being discriminated against. For them, the bigotry was obvious and constant. So for them, it was an issue to fight for. And on the other side, you had people who thought that they were being perfectly accepting of other people in all ways, who were now being told that they were bigots. If the accusation was false, then it was a huge insult to them to be called bigots, and if it was true… well, nobody likes to have their face rubbed in an uncomfortable truth.”
“I understand, Commander. But there are at least two examples of groups that did not fit the pattern you suggest.”
“Which groups?” asked Kitty, already knowing the answer.
“The first is the group known as ‘Jews’,” Data answered. “The Jews were people of many different ‘racial’ backgrounds, with skin colors that varied greatly. There was no single racial makeup of Jews that one predisposed to such prejudices could point to as an example of inferior racial makeup. The other group was ‘mutants’, who, in the technical sense, were indeed a different species.
“Quite right, Mr. Data,” Kitty confirmed. “These two groups didn’t exactly follow the pattern. Jews are arguably the most persecuted people in history. In many ways the bigotry against Jews stemmed not from racial causes, but rather from religious ones. Jews were the people who introduced monotheism to the world. This, of course, caused all the polytheistic peoples around them to hate them. At the same time, they refused to follow the other monotheistic religions, such as Christianity or Islam, and so they were hated by these other religions as well. The funny thing is that, while other religious groups believed that you could only go to heaven if you were one of them, and followed only their laws, Judaism was unique in its belief that you didn’t have to be Jewish to go to heaven. They accepted other religions as legitimate forms of worship. Yet few others were as tolerant of them. But the point is that the main root cause of hatred against Jews wasn’t genetic, but rather religious.”
“But the statements of Hitler…”
“I know. According to Mein Kampf, Jews were hated because they were genetically inferior. But Hitler also wrote ‘Even had there never existed a synagogue or a Jewish school or the Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and would exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning, and there is no Jew – not a single one – who does not personify it.’ Clearly, Hitler didn’t see genetics as the issue. He saw them as his spiritual superiors. And clearly the Holocaust was his reaction to that belief. The genetic superiority of the Aryan race was clearly an excuse, a sham used to mobilize the German nation.”
“In the case of mutants, you are quite correct. There were actual genetic differences… which, of course, only made the situation even worse. Those who were anti-mutant were able to claim that the destruction of mutants was a matter of racial survival. They claimed that mutants, who obviously had powers that ‘normal’ people didn’t, would be able to use those powers to destroy Homo sapiens. And the fact that there were mutant activists out there who were advocating exactly that didn’t help matters. The Mutant Registration Act was only the beginning. The Nuremberg Laws were almost inconsequential compared to some of the laws that were contemplated, and even passed, against mutants. By the time the ‘mutant hysteria’ was at its greatest, normal humans were ready to start locking up all mutants in ghettos and experimenting on them. The only thing that saved the situation was that an even greater threat came along that forced humans and mutants to work together.”
“The Eugenics War,” supplied Riker.
“Exactly,” confirmed Kitty. “If Khan hadn’t come along and tried to take over the world, it’s likely that mutants would have suffered a terrible fate… as bad as what the Jews of Europe had gone through only decades earlier.”
Riker nodded in thought. “You seem pretty knowledgeable about this stuff.”
Kitty smiled. “I’ve had a lot of time to study. One of my Doctorates is in history.”
“One of them?” Beverly asked. “You have more than one?”
“Six, actually.”
“You have six Doctorates!?!”
“Yep. Computer engineering, electrical engineering, history, law, mechanical engineering, and physics. I’m working on a doctorate in warp-dimensional physics, but that’s still a few years off.” She smiled. “Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.”
Riker looked at her. “So, you’re a security expert, a defense-systems specialist, a hand-to-hand combat specialist, a computer engineer, an expert historian and a spy.”
“We call ourselves ‘spooks’,” Kitty said with a grin.
“What don’t you do?” asked Beverly.
Kitty thought for a moment. “I don’t sing very well. And I don’t play violin…yet.”
“Well,” Riker said, grinning. “At least there’s something you can’t do. And here I thought for a moment that the rest of us were becoming superfluous.”
“Some of us are, Will,” Deanna said with a devilish look in her eye. She was clearly setting Riker up.
“How so,” he asked, deliberately allowing himself to be set up.
“You can’t sing either.” Everyone chuckled.
“Ah, but I do something much better than singing. I play the trombone.”
Beverly joined in the game. “‘Playing.’ Is that what you call it?”
Riker straightened himself in mock-dignity. “I’ll have you know that I’m a fine trombone player. I’ve played in some of the best honky-tonk jazz places in the galaxy.”
“Uh, yeah, about that, Will,” said Geordi, also getting into the game, “next time we go on shore leave, the horn stays home.”
“Hmph,” was Will’s response.
“Will,” said Deanna.
“Yes, Deanna.”
“You are a wonderful starship exec. Stick to your day job.”
Riker smiled ruefully, as the others laughed. Kitty laughed along politely, but she really didn’t feel close enough to these new acquaintances to join in the fun.
Instead she turned up her cards, showing four kings.
They all groaned, muttering under their breaths, complaining good-naturedly about their losses. They began to deal a new hand.
“RED ALERT!!! RED ALERT!!! ALL HANDS TO GENERAL QUARTERS!!!” the Captain’s voice rang out from the loudspeakers. The lights dimmed to a reddish hue, and the alert siren rang out. They dropped their cards and ran out of the room.
**********
Geordi ran toward Engineering and Beverly ran to Sickbay. The rest of them made their way to the bridge. All were at their stations in under a minute.
Kitty arrived at the tactical station and relieved the third-watch duty officer from the position. “All hands report GQ ready, Sir.”
“Excellent,” replied the Captain. “Mr. Data, set course for Reinhold Station, best speed. Execute when ready.”
“Aye, Captain. Our Estimated time of arrival is forty-two minutes.”
“What’s going on?” asked Riker.
“We’ve received a distress signal. Reinhold Station has experienced a catastrophic failure of some kind. Ms. Pryde, please pull up any information that we have on Reinhold Station.”
Kitty was already doing it. The information was available in a few seconds. “Reinhold Station is one of the new asteroid mining stations the Federation set up to mine the rare minerals found only in the Gamma Quadrant. They have a regular crew of twelve Starfleet officers to manage the station itself, and another hundred and fifty or so miners, plus civilian families. Total count, about two hundred twenty, including some children. The station has been operating for about fourteen months, and has been a major supplier of quadrillium, which apparently is being looked at as a new alternative power conductor to di- or trilithium. Supposedly much safer to transport in its natural state, and a better focus for anti-matter energies than previous foci. The Starfleet team is led by a Commander Ken Takahashi, and the dig’s team leader is a Brian Serlhoff. Both have excellent records in their fields of expertise, and both have worked together before on other Federation mining projects. The station itself is a bio-dome set up on the asteroid, which has an unbreathable atmosphere with corrosive elements. The asteroid is approximately two kilometers in diameter at its widest point, and is located in an area of space that is not claimed by any other group.”
“Thank you. Now please play back the distress call.”
She did so. “…day, Mayday. This… einhold Station. We have… accident… collapse. We have about… trapped in the mines. We have… power systems… vironmental systems fai… few hours… Mayday, mayday….”
“The message just repeats itself from there, sir.”
“Thank you, Ms. Pryde. Dr. Crusher, have you been monitoring this.”
“Yes, Captain. I’m pulling together my teams now. We’ll be ready when you beam them up.”
“Geordi, I want your repair teams down there to see if you can’t get their environmental systems back up.”
“Yes, sir,” came the reply over the comm.
“Captain,” Data said, “if the miners are trapped in the mine, we may not be able to beam them out. One of the obstacles to using quadrillium as a power focus to this point has been its effect on scanning and transportation systems.”
“I heard that,” came Crusher’s voice over the comm. “I’m setting up my teams to beam down as part of the rescue effort.”
“Understood, Doctor,” Picard’s replied.
“Captain,” said Kitty, “my teams should be down there as well, if only to do the lifting and digging. And my people are all trained in basic first-aid. I’d like to coordinate my teams with Dr. Crusher’s.”
“Make it so.”
“Doc, I’ll have two of my people with each of your teams,” she said.
“Good. We could use the extra hands,” came the reply.
“Number One, I would like you to coordinate our efforts with those of Commander Takahashi’s team, and any others who are on site…”
Kitty called back the third-watch officer to take the tactical station again, leaving the others to continue their planning. She had her orders, and it was time to set those orders in motion. She pulled out her PADD to make notes on which of her people she would assign to which medical team.
Second day on the job, and already you’re saving the galaxy. What a life.