The Computers of Star Trek (19 page)

While the holodeck characters are good for a quick boost, a pulse of sexual arousal, they would be as bland, in the long run, as today's two-dimensional fantasy and pornographic images. Sure, certain people would be hooked on the holodecks for escapism. Those filled with self doubt, for example, might turn to fantasy lives and retreat from reality; might prefer relationships with fake holodeck characters who offer predictable and nonthreatening
responses. But most people, especially those who qualify to enter the ranks of Starfleet, would use holodecks for diversion in the same way that most people today use film and magazines. Despite the availability of holosuite fantasy sex, we suspect that the best erotic uses of the holodeck are shared ones.

The ways in which Picard and crew use the holodeck are acceptable, not damaging to their careers, and simply bland amusement. The holodeck novels would be entertaining during their initial run-through, much like the interactive video and computer games available now. Fighting your way through
Beowulf
and slaying monsters definitely could be exciting, even knowing you can't be harmed (“Heroes and Demons,”
VGR
). So would be trying to stop a mutiny with the lives of your friends at stake (“Worst Case Scenario,”
VGR)
.

But, as with games today, we suspect that once the game was complete, the
Trek
user wouldn't bother playing again. For all their exotic backgrounds, holodeck novels are still only stories, not real life.

Dr. Moriarty complains about this very fact—that his life in storage is deadly sterile and boring. He wants freedom.

As we've noted,
Star Trek
in all its incarnations is much less an extrapolation of advanced science than a projection of today's culture three hundred years into the future. Thus the computers on the ship are merely faster versions of what we have today. Weapons like photon torpedoes are more destructive renditions of today's technology. Each
Star Trek
series is a product of its times.

So far, we've concentrated on the areas where
Star Trek
and reality intersect. But not all of our future is in
Star Trek.
Much is neglected or ignored. It's time to take a look at where our world and the universe of television diverge. The stuff that's missing or just plain wrong.

I
f Vaal and Landru, the giant supercomputers of the original series, symbolize the 1960s' fear of automation, then the Borg are the ultimate late twentieth-century bogeymen. They're an updated Frankenstein's monster, computer technology gone berserk, the sentient machine overwhelming its outdated master. Like Vaal, the Borg give voice to our concern about our growing
dependence on computers in our daily lives. Instead of humanity becoming a slave to the machine as in the original series, we're faced with the horrifying possibility of mankind
becoming
the machine.

The Collective isn't user friendly. The Borg consider humans “irrelevant.” We're face to face with the relentless, cold logic of the computer. The Borg are so frightening not for what they are but for what they predict about us and where society is going.

One of the best examples of Borg as Frankenstein monsters is in the movie
First Contact.
The Borg are banging on the sick bay door, trying to hammer it down. Dr. Crusher activates the Emergency Medical Holograph program. When the holographic doctor appears, Crusher tells him to create a diversion. In true
Trek
doctor form, he protests, “I'm a doctor, not a doorstop.” But then, noting that implants can cause skin irritations, he asks the twenty Borg who bang into sick bay: “Perhaps you'd like an analgesic cream?” The monsters stagger around like Halloween ghouls while the humans race for their lives. It's a marvelous scene.

The Borg are the perfect villains for our computer age. Unlike the Dominion in
Deep Space Nine
, they don't seek to rule other worlds, forge alliances for conquest, or negotiate treaties. Instead, they have only one goal: to assimilate other species into the Collective, to transform all they meet into Borg. There's no compromise with the Borg. They're quite clear when they state, “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.”
Again, the underlying fear is that people must deal with a computerized society whether they like it or not.

That the Borg are quite successful is evident by what little has been revealed about them. Located primarily in the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, they control thousands of solar systems that stretch for several thousand light years. Twice they've attacked Federation space, using just one ship, and both times were barely
defeated. An attack fleet of hundreds of Borg cubes could undoubtedly wipe out human civilization.

According to Q, the Borg are neither male nor female but enhanced humanoids sharing a collective mind with no single leader. They are the ultimate biological/machine interface (“Q Who?” TNG). Using subspace neural-link transceivers, they instantly transmit information among all minds in the Collective. Thus, all Borg form one communal mind—a mind that controls great forces and is capable of tremendous healing power (“Unity,” VGR).

One glaring inconsistency in this description is the Borg Queen (
Star Trek: First Contact
). A supreme Borg ruler (or even a group of such rulers) makes no sense. The collective hive intelligence blends the thoughts and knowledge of all minds of the individual members. No one person directs the action of all. The decisions are made by all, for all. That is one of the reasons severe casualties cannot stop the Borg. Their strength resides in the group.

Locutus served as a mouthpiece for the Borg to communicate with humans. So did Seven of Nine. Neither drone controlled the Collective. They were merely extensions of it.

The Borg Queen made good theater. It was a lot easier for viewers to focus on a villain rather than a hive-mind that made decisions based on the input of all its members. But when she claims in
First Contact
to “bring order to chaos,” she becomes nothing more than an illogical plot device. The
Star Trek
writers seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that if the Collective is conscious, that consciousness must be
located
somewhere within it. But this makes no sense. Consider your brain, which (we hope) is undoubtedly conscious. Is your consciousness located in just one part of your brain? Suppose you start removing cells from that part. The individual cells are not conscious; at some point you arrive at a structure where consciousness is a property of the whole but not of any of its parts. How big is the whole? Perhaps it's not
your brain but your
whole body
that's conscious. In the same way, the consciousness of the Collective is much more likely to reside in the whole than in any of its “cells.”

For the Borg, to think is virtually to act. When their ship is damaged by the
Enterprise-D
photon torpedoes, the Borg regenerate the damage by merely thinking about it (“Q Who?”
TNG
). As one huge mind, the Collective often ignores small details or events while focusing on performing specific, more important tasks. In many ways, the Borg resemble a network of parallel linked computers.

The Borg begin as biological life forms (as shown in the ship's nursery in “Q Who?”), but soon after birth, are connected to the Collective through artificially intelligent implants. Humans and other intelligent life forms are assimilated through injections of Borg nanoprobes that convert them into members of the group mind. This process occurs very quickly, as shown by Captain Picard's conversion into Locutus in
The Next Generation
episode “The Best of Both Worlds” and the assimilation of various members of the
Enterprise-E
crew in
First Contact
. Again, the parallels between our growing dependence on computers, from early childhood onward, is obvious.

In his study of the Borg nanoprobes, the holographic doctor on
Voyager
comments on the amazing speed at which the nanotech devices attack human blood cells. And he marvels at how the mechanisms used to inject those nanoprobes can pierce any armor (“Scorpion,”
VGR
). The Borg, like modern technological advances, are seemingly unstoppable.

It's pretty unbelievable that nanotechnology's been developed by the Borg and not by the Federation. Nanoprobes are sophisticated scientific devices, not something that a holographic computer program can cook up in a few weeks. There needs to be a huge library of information and background available for Dr. Crusher to propose using nanotechnology against the Borg—or
even to estimate that it would take three weeks to develop nanites to fight the invaders. Twenty-one days isn't enough time to develop an entirely new branch of science.

Still, nanotechnology seems to lurk in the shadows of Federation research. Wesley accidentally creates a nanotech civilization in “Evolution” (
TNG)
. In “Ethics” (
TNG
), Worf receives neuro-transducers, nano-implants that pick up his brain's electrical signals and stimulate the appropriate muscles. He also receives an entirely new spinal column, cooked up for him in a vat within a day. If Federation doctors can remove a spinal column and boil up a new one in a kettle, and toss in a few hundred or thousand nano-implants to make it work, then Federation science already knows a heck of a lot about nanotechnology.

Yet it's never used in any intelligent way.

In
The Next Generation's
“I, Borg,” an analysis of Three of Five's biochip implants provides a great deal of information about the Borg command structure. An invasive code is developed on the
Enterprise
that is deemed capable of destroying the entire Borg Collective, but it's never implemented. Why this code isn't used when the Borg attack Earth in
First Contact
isn't clear.

In
First Contact,
Picard kills two Borg using a holodeck machine gun from the 1930s. We wonder of course how a holographic gun can kill anyone.
^*
But this objection aside, it's unlikely that a bullet could kill a Borg. Surely their nanotech devices repair the creatures and regenerate lost tissues. A bullet wound shouldn't be a big deal to nanotechnology this sophisticated. But most implausible is Picard's statement that each Borg has a neuroprocessor:
“It's like a memory chip. It'll contain the record of all the instructions this Borg has been receiving from the Collective.” If it's so easy to decode the neuroprocessor device, why hasn't the Federation disabled all Borg neuroprocessors using destruction commands sent over wireless transmissions?

It's because the Borg are just too much fun to remove them from the show. And so, as fans, we ignore their illogical aspects. Just as we ignore the medical improbabilities that abound in all the
Trek
adventures.

D
octors play an important part in the
Star Trek
universe. Dr. McCoy, in the original series, Drs. Crusher and Pulaski in
The Next Generation
, Dr. Bashir in
Deep Space Nine,
and the holographic doctor in
Voyager
are all dedicated, hard-working individuals (if sometimes lacking in bedside manner) and superb physicians who perform medical miracles undreamed of in our time.

Or do they? Is the medical technology of
Star Trek
that advanced? Most pertinent for this book, are computers as integrated into the healing arts as fully as they should be in the world of the future?

Again, we find recycled, outdated concepts pushed ahead three hundred years. Like Landru and its smoking vacuum tubes, what's true in medicine today won't necessarily be true centuries from now, just as much of the basic healing lore of three centuries ago is seen as superstitious nonsense today. Too much of
Star Trek's
medical technology is merely unimaginative projections of today's doctoring tossed bodily into the future.

Consider tricorders. They've been featured in
Star Trek
from the very first series. As demonstrated throughout hundreds of episodes, a tricorder is used as a computer, a sensor, and a
portable communicator for immediate contact with the starship or other crewmembers. It's operated by touch but also responds to voice commands. In many ways, they're like the PADDs discussed in Chapter 2. At the time of the first series, tricorders were quite futuristic, a remarkably accurate guess of what was to come.

The medical tricorder, used by Dr. McCoy and all who followed him, is just a standard tricorder with a number of additional functions. Medical tricorders are primarily used to scan crewmembers for organ system functions, diseases, and other health problems. Tricorders have huge memories (isolinear chips, of course) and so hold huge amounts of information in their medical databases.

Impossible today? At this moment, yes, but medical tricorders aren't very far in the future. Hospitals are relying more and more on handheld computer devices to measure everything from body temperature (a sensor placed in the patient's ear for an instant) to blood pressure (done on one finger). Twenty or thirty years from now, we can expect hospital personnel to be carrying medical tricorders, capable of performing numerous medical tasks, as part of their standard equipment.

Biobeds are used routinely in all the
Star Trek
series. Victims of accidents, disease, and attacks are placed there for recovery. The beds monitor all major life systems and include a variety of surgical support frames. Science fiction? Only in the slightest sense of the word. Check out the Intensive Care Unit of any major hospital. Computers are used to monitor patients' vital signs. Emergency equipment for dealing with everything from choking to heart attacks is on hand. The only difference between the beds on
Star Trek
and those today is the absence of the wires used for sensors. While perhaps not as tightly linked with computers, critical-care units are quickly approaching that standard.