Data’s creators, Dr. Noonien Soong and Dr. Juliana O’Donnell Soong, were presumed to have been killed on Omicron Theta in 2336, along with the other 411 inhabitants of the scientific-agricultural colony who had their life energies sucked away by the doomsday Crystalline Entity of unknown origin. In actuality, the Soongs fled the atrocity in an escape pod. They made their way to a new concealed robotics laboratory on Terlina III. Noonien ended up living alone in his hideaway, following Juliana’s death and the chosen departure of the female android clone whom he built to replace his spouse and implanted with her memories.
In the year 2367, in the episode Brothers, Dr. Soong summons his “son” Data to visit him in his hidden skunkworks by activating an “encoded homing circuit” in the sublogic controller of the Enterprise-D Second Officer’s positronic brain. Soong then operates the android via remote control. Data commandeers the starship, which is en route to Starbase 416 to secure help for a medical emergency, while in a trancelike state. He plots a navigational course to Soong’s Planet, increases speed to warp factor 9.3, locks out Picard’s command authorization by speaking in the Captain’s perfectly duplicated voice to the computer, and beams down to join his father in the elderly scientist’s secluded tropical home.
Unforeseen by Dr. Soong, the homing circuitry of Data’s evil twin brother Lore also responds to the electronic signal. The more volatile artificial sibling shows up at Soong’s secret doorstep not long after Data. Since Soong believed Lore to be long dead, he did not pay any heed to the fact that the Brothers are nearly identical in their hardware specification and transmission conduit channels. Lore participates in the extraordinary three-way conversation that ensues among the reunited immediate family members, with all parts played by the versatile Brent Spiner.
The balding, white-haired Dr. Soong confides to Data and Lore that he is soon going to die. Just before Lore’s arrival, Soong explains to Data in his raspy voice that his deepest motivation for creating a sentient android with mental and physical characteristics resembling his own was to achieve a kind of immortality. In the early days on Omicron Theta, the two Dr. Soongs “gave birth” to a precession of three stillborn androids who never achieved consciousness, and who died tragically of positronic matrix deterioration. Lore was the firstborn son. But Lore was a calamitous failure because his design was too ambitious. Soong programmed artificial intelligence modules related to all three stages of cybernetics into Lore: top-down logical ratiocination, decentralized adaptive learning, and a full complement of flowing, rhizome-like emotions. But the combination of all three superintending “subroutines” associated with differing informatic epistèmes proved to be combustible (and fatal to others). Lore was “unstable.” He blew up and became evil. He sprouted a warped psyche permeated by power obsession.
The scientist stepped back from his workstation and mulled over what to do next. Soong decided that the “next logical step” was to make an android inscribed with all of Lore’s algorithmic (first-order) and object-oriented (second-order) cybernetic code, but divested of the turbulence, unpredictability, and energy discharges incorporated into Lore in congruence with the third-order computing paradigm of chaos theory and “complexities.”
But Dr. Soong knows that the product of his next phase of development, the highly functional Data, has always “felt” incomplete and “unhappy” with his lot. Data lives among humans, but cannot genuinely experience what they experience. The remorseful father has been working for years on a compensatory emotion chip for his younger son. He has “recalled” Data in order to install it.
The Starfleet officer will have to exercise caution in his use of the corrective emotion chip. The microprocessor device can potentially trigger an overload of his general system functions. Nonlinear holist emergence will supersede routine coordinated responses, introducing greater variation and more self-evolving computation. But then the temptation of iniquity will appear. “You may even learn to understand your evil brother,” Soong elusively suggests.
After resting for a few hours, Soong sits Data down in an operating chair. He inserts the chip into an expansion slot below the android’s right ear. But the recipient of the upgrade is not Data, it’s Lore! Lore has managed to “impersonate” Data once again. The angry young man tells Soong that it is to him that the creator owes reparation, not to Data. He steals the invaluable emotion chip, and departs from Terlina III in his small spaceship. He mocks Dr. Soong in rhyme: “Often-Wrong’s got a broken heart, can’t even tell his boys apart.”
Although Data often says that he has no emotions, it is important to distinguish between emotions corresponding to the flexible knowledge-acquisition competencies of second-wave cybernetic systems, which he does have, and those corresponding to the Artificial Life fluidity and incalculable turbulent energies of third-wave cybernetics, which he is lacking. In contrast to the first-wave static regulatory procedures of rational homeostatic control exercised by Mr. Spock, Data is a figure of second-order object-oriented reasoning and methodical “learning by doing.” He has the self-emendating capacity of acquiring real emotions from his performative involvements in the world. He is able to feel in his own way, as the dying Dr. Noonien Soong tells him. In The Offspring, Data tells Dr. Beverly Crusher that he cannot love his daughter Lal, and then walks out of her office. Dr. Crusher shrewdly says aloud to herself, “now why do I find that hard to believe?”
While Dr. Soong lays on the ground dying at the conclusion of Brothers, Data comments modestly to him, “you know that I cannot grieve for you, sir.” To which Soong replies, “you will, in your own way.” “Goodbye father,” Data says with tenderness in his voice as his maker expires. Data does not know his own adaptive differential strength, nor the wealth of feelings that he has.
In Brothers, Dr. Noonien Soong tells Data that he is not less perfect than Lore. Hearing this has a neurotically obsessional impact on Data. He repeats several times aloud to himself: “I am not less perfect than Lore.” Lore mimics him: “I am not less perfect than Lore.” Lore has the power of a strange attractor for Data. Data will later pursue Lore – in The two-part Next Generation episode Descent – and the emotion chip which Lore pilfered. Lore carries within himself the energy of chaos and the liquid variation of Artificial Life. It is the challenge of the advances of third-wave cybernetics that Data must confront if he truly wishes to move ahead to the full-fledged Artificial Life that he so intensely “desires.” The brother who haunts me is the non-identity of myself to myself. I slowly learn that his doubling is the very condition for my existence.
