CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Tammas?”
The voice startled Tammas and he spilled a dish of honey-roasted almonds. He hurriedly scooped them back up and put them back in the dish before Sparky had a chance to get to them. Sparky whined none the less. Tammas looked up and smiled at Perrin standing in the doorway.
“You seem a little bit jumpy today,” Perrin said. “Everything okay?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?” he asked.
“Because, you seem a little bit jumpy today,” Perrin said, a little slower to emphasize she had just said that.
“Oh, well, yeah,” Tammas said. “Final exams are coming up, you know.”
“May I come in?” she asked. She saw through Tam’s deflection, but didn’t comment on it. She understood when humans wanted a little privacy, all too well- being human herself, and sometimes they used a little misdirection to avoid having a conversation. She found it interesting observing Tammas cycling through phases of being more human than Vulcan, some days being logical and days of being defiantly anti-logical.
“Of course,” he said, petting Sparky as the sehlot grew more insistent on a treat. “No, Sparky. You don’t like almonds. You’re not a vegetarian.”
“I think he likes the honey salt taste,” Perrin said.
“Yeah,” Tammas said, patting him roughly until it sat down against his feet.
Tammas had been sleeping in Spock’s old room since he arrived on Vulcan in 2342, by the Earth Calendar. Sparky slept on a mat beside his bed and this was one of the rare times that his sehlot wasn’t asleep and snoring loudly. Tammas had never known an animal that slept as much as Sparky, but then, it was under six years old, and in sehlot years, that was pretty old. He wondered if Sparky was vicariously excited because of his own anticipation of his birthday party with Persis. Animals were often quite perceptive of their master’s emotional state.
Perrin was dressed in a Vulcan robe, revealing her arms, neck and hear, her hair down, a stream of black down the center of her back. The material of the robe was such that it kept her cool when outside in the garden, and warm inside the house, where the temperature had been brought down for Tam’s and her comfort. Though the words were never spoken, Tammas considered Perrin and Sarek as grandparents. They had provided him an extremely stable environment, and their age and wisdom had helped him through the difficult assimilation process in school, as well as learning to master his psychic boundaries. Not that he needed help with the school, per say. He excelled in every subject and had finished his first college degree before his tenth birthday, and had two masters before he was twelve. The only reason he already had a doctorate in musicology was due to his extraordinary talent. He might have had his Doctorate in Sociology finished before the music had he not been constantly distracted by his own interest in various academic opportunities and had stuck to one or two majors earlier on.
He had nearly pursued a careered in astronomy, but the possibility of him being stuck on a remote mountain observing the sky, or stuck on some interstellar telescope dropped off in some remote sector of the sky, or teaching, was all too real a possibility. He enjoyed archaeology, but really didn’t want to study past cultures to the depth that that subject would have taken him. That, and again he would probably have ended up being a teacher. He did get a degree in psychology, with an emphasis in crisis counseling, but he found that way too draining for any potential long term career. He was too easily caught up in the emotions of his clients, which were all humans who were currently residing on Vulcan because they were in Fleet, or because family members were in Fleet. Very few non-Vulcans lived on Vulcan to simply be immersed in the culture, as Perrin did. The fact that his older clients were reluctant to open up to someone so much younger than they had also contributed to his decision to avoid psychotherapy as a career. By the time he would be old enough to be perceived as credible, he would be old and too much time would have been wasted. So he had to stick with counseling adolescents, who at least accepted him as a peer, a potential friend trying to help them as opposed to a “real” doctor trying to fix them. And of those, they were mostly humans having trouble adapting to their parent’s constant reassignments.
No one questioned the fact that Tammas was smart beyond his years and that no matter what he finally settled on, he would master. The main goal was ensuring that he found something that would hold his attention. For most of his Vulcan peers, his indecisive and flighty character was a detriment to any potential scientific career, or true academic standing, but he consistently proved them wrong. For them, his intelligence and academic standing was comparable to a Vulcan of equal age. This created some rivalry tension, and a lot of competition between his mental peers. Even without the competition issues, it was difficult for him to socialize with people, and he had made very few friends in school. Sarek had confided in Perrin that it was very much like watching Spock grow up all over again. Tammas found it hard to believe that Spock had ever had trouble with anything. Especially making friends. It was no secret that the bond he shared with the Enterprise Crew transcended the definition of friendship. They would have given their lives for Spock.
“So, do you want to talk about it?” Perrin asked, sitting on his bed.
“Uh?” Tammas asked. “Oh, not really.”
“Are you worried about your final thesis for sociology?” she asked.
“No,” Tammas said. Thinking about that, as opposed to his upcoming date, had a calming effect. He knew Perrin would continue to talk to him until she was satisfied that he was well, so he chose sociology as a line of discourse. “There are a couple things I have thought about doing, like, introducing my modified game theory of sentient interaction and how it creates structure through boundary fortification. But lately I’ve been thinking about raw intelligence.”
“How so?” Perrin asked.
Tammas relocated the dish of almonds, placing them in Perrin’s reach, took a handful for himself, and leaned back, propping his feet up on the bed. He munched on one before answering.
“Consider human populations,” Tammas said, setting up conditions. “How many brilliant people would you say there are?”
“I would say there are quite a lot,” Perrin said. “Do you mean like geniuses, like yourself?”
“I’m not a genius,” Tammas waved off, as he always did. “I mean really, super smart people.”
“I don’t know,” Perrin said.
“Okay, going with that, let’s narrow it down further. How many people have degrees?” Tammas said. “Out of the people you know personally, how many with degrees versus certificates?”
“Fifty, sixty?” Perrin guessed. “But my circle of friends and associates is probably quite different from the norm, and, I feel compelled to point out, a degree is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.”
“Agreed,” Tammas said. “But why so low a number? You know quite a lot of people, right? And we all have access to the same learning technologies. And a graduate education now is the equivalent of what a high school education was worth three hundred years ago, at least on Earth. On Vulcan, getting a Doctorate is like finishing elementary. Their expectations for learning far exceed humanity’s expectations, but that may be due to the fact they live much longer than Humans. Anyway, we, Humans, don’t have an abundance of people with Doctorates running around. Why is that? I’ll tell you why. The technology which was intended to help improve us, make us all equal and smarter, has indeed made us more equal, but not smarter. Everybody knows a little bit about everything, but not enough to be an expert in any one thing. And why would you want to? Computers are experts in everything. Come upon something you don’t know, you ask your computer, and later, when you no longer need that info, you forget it. And why not? Why carry useless information in your head that you don’t use every day. We should have billions of experts, but most people are satisfied with just knowing enough to get by with their daily activities. They are rarely faced with a crisis that would require a person of such highly trained technical expertise, like someone in Star Fleet, to resolve an issue. High-risk careers, such as Star Fleet, are the key exceptions. They need warp core experts, and medical experts, and military experts. And among these people, you will find that most have been cross trained so as to be double utilized in a crisis. But for society en mass? They’ve gotten dumber!”
Perrin chewed on her lip. “I was under the impression the average person is smarter.”
“Of course, comparatively, everyone is marginally smarter than they were a hundred years ago. We’re all more computer savvy, that’s for certain,” Tammas said. “Almost any one can figure out what button to push to turn on an auto pilot, or activate a replicator in order to get food or clothes. But that’s simply emulation. Any three year old kid can operate a computer these days simply because computers are so simple, and so abundant. Ninety percent have voice recognition systems, so if you can speak, you’re well on the road to developing a general knowledge about technology. As we agreed, just because a person has a college degree doesn’t mean they’re intelligent, just as a person who is computer savvy doesn’t mean they’re brilliant. It simply means they have learned how to pass the test, regurgitate information, and emulate society. Most people in college still cram for tests. Cramming utilizes short-term memory only, and so 90 percent of the stuff they learn is forgotten right after the test. Now, if they ever need that information, they know where to go look it up, which is good to know that they know where to find information, but again, any moron with a computer is capable of getting at that same information.”
“But there are different types of intelligence,” Perrin said. “Musical intelligence is a different type of intelligence than say kinesthetic intelligence.”
“Indeed,” Tammas said. “Maybe we need a whole new way of thinking about intelligence, which means I need to do more research. There’s tons of literature debating that subject. The one thing that science has consistently demonstrated is that genetics does not determine intelligence. You can give me someone’s genome and I can yell you everything about that person, from height, to hair color, the best diet for his particular biology, but I can’t tell you how smart he is. The two most important variables determining intelligences is nutrition and stimulus. You can have the best genes and the best nutrition, but if you were to sit in front of a blank white wall from birth till you were five, you would be as dumb as a box of rocks. Or, you can have all these wonderful experiences, but if you don’t have proper nutrition, your brain can’t make the connections, and, consequently nothing sticks. The interesting part of this equation now is that everyone has access to good nutrition, and everyone has access to stimulus. In fact, many scientists say we have access to too much stimulus. They say we have too much information available to sort through. Perhaps that’s a factor. A distraction factor.”
“Well, what do you want for society?” Perrin asked. “Do you want everyone to be as brilliant as you?”
“That’s just it,” Tammas said. “Everyone should be equally as talented as I am. We all have access to the same technology. Assuming biology is not a factor, which is the major flaw in classical sociology, the question is what motivates a person to excel and master a skill or knowledge set? If all our needs are met, what’s the incentive to push on to bigger and better things? If our intelligence evolved out of need and necessity, because our environment challenged us, then we should expect to see that children being raised on fringe worlds, colony worlds, or in highly stressed environments like aboard a Star Ship, have higher rates of success at mastering skills and knowledge.”
“And do we?” Perrin asked. “Do all successful people, or at least, people society labels as successful, come from harsh environments, or had difficult obstacles to overcome?”
“That is indeed the question I need to research,” Tammas said. “There is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to find actual data, as opposed to doing open surveys, considering how much of every day life revolves around some sort of computer, recording indirectly how we manage our lives. Perhaps if I wrote a program to sample the general population by visiting every computer in a network. Vulcan certainly wouldn’t mind, because they don’t hold the privacy concerns humans do. Humans might find such a program released on the net intrusive.”
“Maybe we should forget about sampling and statistics and simply redefine how we define success,” Perrin proposed. “Perhaps life is not about shooting off to other stars on a whim, but rather, just being comfortable and self reflective, and enjoying life, as opposed to the over production and commercialization that we came from in the past, or that we see in societies such as the Ferrengi.”
“Perhaps,” Tammas agreed, so enthusiastic about the discussion they were holding that he had lost track of time. He jumped up out of his chair and grabbed his backpack. “But I don’t see commercialization and over production as being an issue since the advent of replicator technology. All people get what they want and need, and recycle their waste, thereby eliminating excess. I would like to work from a perspective that doesn’t necessarily involve an economic framework.”
“Is that possible?” Perrin asked.
“I don’t know,” Tammas sighed, pushing his feet into his boots. “All human interaction that I can observe seems to have some sort of exchange rate, or imaginary currency, which again returns me to the perpetual game state that we seem to live in. It’s always trade offs, compromises, maintaining balance and status quo, or flat out ruthless competition. Oh, look at the time. I know you want to argue that last point, but I’m late. I’ve got to go. I actually have a date and I don’t want to use a transporter.”
“Really?” Perrin said. “You have a date? Not a holosuite novel, gaming session, or a study group meeting, but an actual, full fledge, live, person to person date, like a movie and chocolate malts at the corner store, date?”
“Okay, Perrin, we’re on Vulcan, not Earth, and we’re like way past the fifties thing. And why is it so strange that I have a date?” Tammas asked.
“Oh, no reason,” Perrin said. “It wouldn’t, by chance, be Persis, would it?”
“No,” Tammas said, heading for the door. “Not by chance.”
Persis had created an incredible dinner, completely from scratch, but she and Tammas didn’t get to that part. Tammas didn’t even get the opportunity to comment on how wonderful the food smelled, or even praise her appearance. The moment the door closed behind him, she kissed him. He dropped the package he was carrying. She laughed and dragged him into the other room. Not that he needed to be dragged or otherwise convinced. He went along like a little sehlot on a leash.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
“Uh?” he asked.
“Shhh,” she said, keeping him from saying anything by kissing him again as she pushed him into the couch. She began to unbutton his shirt.
“Wait,” Tammas said, pushing her gently away.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Um, nothing, I just want to give you something first,” Tammas said.
“You brought me something?” she asked. “Why?”
“It’s customary to give presents at birthday parties,” Tammas told her, and it appeared he had to convince her. “I looked it up.”
“I’m supposed to give you a present,” she pointed out.
“One in which I have waited for all my life, I’m sure,” Tammas agreed. “And which I will gladly accept, only after you see what I got you.”
“Alright,” she said, sitting back on his knees, her legs folded to either side of him. “What is it?”
“You have to let me up,” Tammas said.
Persis sighed and got off him. Tammas retrieved the package he had brought, and handed it to her. Before she could un-wrap it, he stopped her.
“You have a balcony, right? Facing East?”
“Yes, why?” she asked.
“Let’s go out there to open it, shall we?” Tammas encouraged, this time dragging her
“Okay,” she said, laughing.
Persis opened the sliding glass door and they stepped out onto the balcony. They looked down over the Vulcan city from the high-rise apartments where most non Vulcans lived while staying on Vulcan, her arm around his waste. There was a breeze, but the temperature was still hot. City lights seemed to waver and blur as the heat rose off the land. The sun had just set, but there was still a light shade of orange on the horizon. There was a small table, a matching chair set, and a beanbag type lounge. She sat the box on the table, and pulled the ribbon free. There was enough light spilling from the apartment that Persis could see as she opened the package, careful to catch the ribbon before the wind could take it from her. She tied the ribbon to the back of a chair on the porch, and then lifted the top to the box. There were two items in it. She lifted the first one out, which was a bottle of sand. There were tiny bits of star shaped objects that sparkled like glitter. She smiled, looking quizzically at him.
“Sand from a beach,” Tammas said. “From Betazed. There was a girl there I had a crush on. Ah, no, I was in love with her. Still am. My first true love. She had promised me that someday, somewhere, there would be someone else. Anyway, she had taken me to the beach, and I lifted some of the sand. Not suppose to do that, you know. Take pictures, leave foot prints, that sort place.”
“Oh, Tammas,” Persis cooed. “That’s so wonderful. I can’t accept this.”
“Nonsense,” Tammas said. “I figure, this way, when ever I think about this sand, I’ll know right where it is.”
“What are these stars?” Persis asked, turning the bottle, watching how they each caught the light and each refracted and reflected a different wavelength.
“They’re the shells of tiny sea animals,” Tammas explained. “There called, appropriately enough, star fish on Betazed, but you can’t confuse them with the star fish, or sea stars, of Earth, which isn’t really a fish, if I remember correctly.”
Persis opened the bottle, closed her eye, and sniffed. “It must have been beautiful. I can smell the ocean.” She closed the bottle, and set it on the table. The next item she retrieved from the box was a computer PADD. On the display screen, there were three words: “Activate Moon Program,” and a small moon shaped icon for her to touch.
“What is this?” Persis asked.
“You were talking about beaches, moons and stars, with big emphasis on the moon, so, I thought I would give you the moon,” Tammas said.
She kissed him, arranged her chair so she could lean into him, lifted the PADD so they could both see it, and then she touched the moon icon on the screen. The screen went blank.
“So, where is it?” Persis asked.
“Lower the PADD,” Tammas said.
Persis lowered the PADD and gasped. Not only was there a moon in the sky of Vulcan, there were three moons! Specifically, three holograms of Earth’s moon at three different phases were being projected above the skies using the satellite arrays in orbit as the imaging devices. She stood up, her hands raised to the largest moon and cried.
“Oh my god, Tammas!” she marveled. “You said the moon, but my god! Oh my God! How is this possible?”
“Well, I can’t take credit for the actual program,” Tammas said. “Someone else wrote it.”
“Wrote what?”
“About a hundred years ago, about the time that V’Ger showed up requiring Kirk to save Earth for the umpteenth time, if you believe all those legends, there was this human who had been stationed here on Vulcan. Specifically, the date was um, 2270, and Spock was here partaking of the Kolinahr.”
“The purging of all emotions ritual?” Perisis asked, a little disgust creeping into her voice. Emotions were a great thing, and she just couldn’t understand anyone who would want to completely rid themselves of them.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Anyway, it would seem, according to the news report, at the same time as Spock was purging his emotions, this Earth guy was growing ever more homesick. He then stayed out in the sun a bit long one day, wrote a computer virus that would cause all the satellites in orbit around Vulcan to collectively collaborate on these moon projections, and released it onto the Vulcan Net,” Tammas explained. “Suddenly they had three moons, and a lot of angry Vulcans, minus the emotions, of course.”
“Oh my god,” Persis said.
“That’s what I said,” Tammas agreed. “The Vulcans, not having a great sense of humor and all, were not pleased about the little computer virus, or the fact that their moonless sky had suddenly been marred by not one, but three, large, holographic images of the Earth’s moon. They ruthlessly hunted down all traces of the virus, over a two week period, and finally managed to eliminate it from their computer networks.”
“Oh my god,” Persis said.
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Tammas said. “Knowing how thorough Vulcans can be when it comes to eliminating innocuous programs, I thought, there’s no way I would ever find a copy of it, and even if I did, there would be no way I could modify it so that it would get past the new safety protocols that were installed and surely designed and put in place to prevent such an incident from ever occurring again.”
“Oh my god,” Persis said.
“That’s what I said,” Tammas said.
“So, how did you do it?” Persis asked.
“Well, where I am staying, there is a small collection of antique tricorders. Just so happens that there is one that could have been, and actually was, activated and linked to the Vulcan Net, during the V’Ger crisis, and had been infected by the virus. It being innocuous and all, the owner of the tricorder, whose name I must protect, must not have noticed it. So, I took the little moon virus, changed a few lines here and there, nurtured it, helped it to grow, and released it into the local Vulcan computer network. And, with your help, you brought my little Frankenstein to life.”
“Oh my god!” Persis said, clapping her hands, and giving a little jump.
“That’s what I said,” Tammas agreed, looking up at the moons. Though they appeared solid, they were merely illusions of laser lights. “I wasn’t sure that it was going to work. The virus has to coordinate with about twenty different satellites capable of projecting holographs, for each moon, and I was pretty certain that the firewalls would be impenetrable, but, I guess I got lucky.”
“You sure will,” Persis said. She spun around, grabbed Tammas and kissed him with such force that they fell to the beanbag chair, where her joy and excitement became a mutual sharing of passion and affection. During the heat of the moment, Tammas let his guard down and bonded telepathically with her. Part of him wanted to do it on purpose, but another part of him warned him not to do it. That voice warning him not to was easily squashed in favor of the voice that wanted to be with Persis so badly that it felt like dying to deny it won out. They shared each other’s rapture, and joy, but because she was a Deltan, and partly because of his Vulcan telepathy genes, the equivalent of a feedback loop was created which began to cycle between them. Each time it passed through them, the joy intensified until it finally reached Tam’s threshold for experiencing pleasure. The pleasure became pain and then he began to have seizures.
A seizure was not fun in any circumstance, but feeling the on set, Tammas realized he was about to be incapacitated in the most compromising position a human would ever manage to be caught in. It didn’t occur to him that their lives were in danger as well. His last thought before loosing consciousness, was “do I have time to dress?” He never even managed to stand up.
Fortunately, Persis was still of sound mind and recognized that Tammas was in some sort of mental distress. Her problem was she couldn’t find the strength to get up, much less break the telepathic bond. She had never experienced telepathy and this joining of minds exceeded her coping skills. She wanted to stay in the warmth of his mind, the sharing of pleasure, but that was over and it was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. She tried to focus on why she couldn’t stand. At first she had thought it was Tam’s weight, but then she noticed a tremor in her hands and she knew they were both in serious trouble. Her next thought was that she had killed him and she could actually hear her parents’ admonition, “We told you to avoid human males. They can’t handle being around Deltans.”
“Computer,” she yelled. “Medical emergency. I need medics, possible heart attack, and seizure.”
The first intern on call to respond was a young, female Vulcan, named Selar, and her aid Melzac. They transported in and began to assess the situation. Melzac began sending telemetry from his scans back to the central computer at the medical center, requesting analysis and more information. He found their identity through DNA verification and their personal histories started scrolling across his PADD.
“We were just… and then he…” Persis tried to explain, gasping for air. Her words faltered as she too began to have seizures. She decided not to fight it, wanting to be with Tammas wherever he went, even into death, which, for her, was a very clear indication of just how bad she was suddenly feeling.
By the time Persis’ eyes closed, Selar had managed to assess the situation, and decided on a course of action. The quickest way to administer aid from a mind meld gone awry, she decided in the heat of the crisis, was for her to administer another mind meld. And if she didn’t do it soon, both her patients would die. She fell to her knees, put a hand to Tam’s face, a hand to Persis’ face, and mind melded with both of them simultaneously.
Tammas stopped shaking immediately and Persis became quiet, her breathing returning to a normal pattern. It was now up to Selar to break the telepathic link without killing either of them. The problem was, she discovered, that she couldn’t do it, at least not without one of them dying. She had known before initiating the mind meld that she was not following procedures, but now her own overconfidence had presented her with a moral dilemma. Which one should she save? Their telepathic bond still existed, only now it ran through her, she was the conduit, and if she let go of either, the other would die.
After a moment of silent contemplation, she came to the realization that she could save them both, but it would cost her dearly. There was really no other way, and since she had already committed to saving them in the manner she had, she was now morally bound to follow through. It wasn’t the greatest solution, but it would work, and would give them time to think about alternatives later. She put all of her energy into that one option, and separated her mind from the girl’s mind. She didn’t need to see Persis to know that she was now sound asleep, because the bond she created with Persis would never be completely severed. It might grow thin with time and lack of use, but never completely gone. The bond with Tammas, on the other hand, would require more maintenance over the next couple of months. She could sense that part of her mind was currently regulating parts of his autonomic nervous system and probably would continue to until his brain damage healed.
Selar stood up for a moment, gave into the vertigo that took her back to her knees, and then she passed out, sprawling across her patients.
About the time Selar fell unconscious, Star Fleet Security transported in, weapons raised and set for stun. One of them circled with his tricorder and picked up Garcia’s PADD. “This is the activation source for the computer virus. Everyone here is under arrest.”