Diagnostics engineer Lt. Reginald Barclay, played by Dwight Schultz, is investigating a matrix diode spatial orientation systems bug in Sherlock Holmes Holo-program 3A when he accidentally initializes the executable data file object where Professor James Moriarty, Detective Holmes’ archenemy and a self-aware piece of software code, is saved. Professor Moriarty is a “sentient holographic life-form,” like Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram (or Holodoc), played by Robert Picardo, or the omicron particle reactor Holo-generated villagers of the Deep Space Nine episode Shadowplay. Through technological accident, emergency, or irony, these “subroutines” or software modules have exceeded their programming and become eligible for the coveted status of real or alive.
Professor Moriarty, played by Daniel Davis, appears, in a sudden special effects swoosh, against the backdrop of the offline Holodeck’s yellow-and-black wireframe grid of squares. He wears a sly expression on his face. Moriarty has suffered enormously during four years of captivity on disk, intermittently living through terrifying moments of “disembodied consciousness.” The Professor is irate at the injustice done to him. At the very least, he should have been put into a dormant state as a stream of terrabytes written to permanent media. “I have been stored in memory for God knows how long and no one has given me a second thought,” he angrily exclaims. Moriarty is furious at Captain Picard for leaving him languishing indefinitely in such a horrifically abstract “serialized” state in “protected memory.” He is not willing to accept any offer of an upgrade to the condition of permanently activated Holodeck character. Given his self-awareness, Moriarty regards continued existence as a holographic avatar or image as the undesirable fate of being “trapped in a world I know to be nothing but illusion.”
Captain Picard, Lt. Barclay, and Lt. Commander Data hold an emergency meeting in the elegantly furnished interior of a Victorian-era London home with the disgruntled lines of computer code. Picard throws a book at the “real” opening in a wall of the sitting room to demonstrate the non-substantiality of Holo-matter in the “real world.” He says to Professor Moriarty: “you are a computer simulation.” But Moriarty astounds the Starfleet officers by nonchalantly walking off the Holodeck into a real Enterprise-D corridor without disappearing or “disintegrating.” He claims to be able to accomplish this unprecedented feat through the force of his will. “If my will is strong enough, perhaps I can exist outside this room. I can walk into your world right now,” he declares. “Mind over matter. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.”
Professor Moriarty is a life-form deserving the standing of “personhood” by virtue of his intelligence, behavioral complexity, and consciousness of his own existence. The highly sophisticated Artificial Life computer program made his original appearance in The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data. In that Holodeck story, flirtation with an official literary theme (the Sherlock Holmes detective Holonovel) swiftly gives way to the more fascinating trope of the technological accident. But the circumstances of the intrinsic accident involve a deconstruction of the taken-for-granted status of reality, and an aesthetic irony, that is also literary, albeit in a new and unrecognized way.
Lt. Commanders Data and Geordi La Forge are fond of partaking in Holo-programs enacting the Sherlock Holmes detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Data plays the role of the Great Detective with deerstalker cap. La Forge is Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson. In Elementary, Dear Data, La Forge is frustrated by the excessive ease with which Data solves the Conan Doyle-penned “whodunits.” The Chief Engineer complains out loud that the android super-genius from the Omicron Theta science colony has fully grasped the logic, and successfully mimed the deductive reasoning, of the Holmes stories, but has not gained any sense of their “mystery.” Acting Chief Medical Officer Dr. Katherine Pulaski, played by Diana Muldaur, joins the conversation between La Forge and Data in the Ten-Forward Lounge. Dr. Pulaski, who looks upon the android condescendingly as less than human, challenges Data to solve a Holmes-style murder mystery “freshly” generated by the Holodeck computer, as distinguished from the existing stock of Holo-programs, which are based on the original Conan Doyle tales that Data has simply memorized. Pulaski expresses her view that the essence of human problem-solving is lost unless there exists a real chance of defeat. “Are you suggesting that there is some value in losing?” Data asks Pulaski. “Yes, that’s the Great Teacher.” the Doctor replies. “We humans often learn more from a mistake or a failure than from an easy success. But not you… To you it’s all memorization and recitation.” It was the Great Detective’s “life experience” and intuition that enabled him to understand the secrets of the human soul.
After the three Starfleet officers enter the Holodeck and step onto the streets of late nineteenth-century London – complete with horse-drawn carts, open-air vendors, and Holo-characters of all social classes and underclasses – Lt. Commander Data rapidly works out the solution to the machine-authored narrative crime puzzle. The new thriller was little more than a rearranged composite or recombination of dramatic elements taken from a couple of already existing Holmes Holo-modules. Dr. Pulaski taunts Data by pointing out that the only thing he accomplished was to recognize details from two different stories that he knew by rote. As an artificially intelligent humanoid, Pulaski states, Data is totally deficient in the “true strengths of Holmes” such as inspiration and creative thinking. Data’s “circuits would short out,” the Doctor opines, if he were ever confronted with a truly original mystery.
In exasperation at Dr. Pulaski’s verbal assaults on his friend, Lt. Commander La Forge calls up the “Arch” interface and tells the Holodeck computer to “create an adversary capable of defeating Data.”
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Read part two of a 3750-word version of this text at redroom.com.
