After attending a cybernetics conference in 2366, Lt. Commander Data spends all his off-duty hours for two weeks in a locked laboratory, at work on a secretive project. At the scientific meeting, Data learned of a breakthrough in submicron matrix transfer technology. Entering the clandestine lab on invitation, Lt. Commander La Forge, Counselor Deanna Troi, and Wesley Crusher are startled to hear from Data that he has built an android clone of himself, endowed with a like positronic brain. The unexpected AI advance has enabled the 31-year old Soong-type android to “lay down complex neural net pathways” that allow the transfer of a succession of programming subsystems from himself to the Offspring android. Such a crosslink procedure was previously held to be impossible, or known only to the disappeared genius Dr. Noonien Soong.
The new Artificial Life-form initially has a featureless body and demeanor. It “has” no species or gender. After being asked “how are you?” by Counselor Troi, it responds routinely in the same manner as Data: “I am functioning within normal parameters.”
Data and Troi accompany the neonate android to the Holodeck. It selects the external appearance of a young female human, played by Hallie Todd, choosing from thousands of United Federation of Planets member phenotypes in a virtual reality catalogue of race as fashion accessory. (Donna Haraway, Modest Witness at Second Millennium) She is more humanoid than Data, with more “realistic skin and eye color.” Other semblances under consideration as “finalists” were an Andorian female, a muscular human male, and a Klingon male warrior.
Data announces that the newly named Lal, a Hindi word for beloved, is his daughter. He hands out cigars. He intends to take full responsibility for her upbringing and parental care. A second round of neural uploads between the associative pathways of the two “algorithmically identical” androids improves Lal’s motor coordination. After the third cycle of “heuristic” transfers, she ponders advanced problems in logic, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology. But these conundrums have no solution. When Lal asks too many questions – what is my purpose? what is my reason for being? why am I me instead of someone else? – Data (temporarily) shuts her off.
The Operations Manager of the Enterprise-D teaches his child about paintings, the sense of touch, and how to inhale and smell a flower. He instructs her in how to blink, eat and drink, catch a ball, and absorb visual information from a computer display. It becomes clear that Lal is going to require a great deal of training in social and interpersonal skills. This will be an arduous process of supplementing her “innate android behavior with simulated human responses.”
To be with others “closer to her own age,” Lal attends a shipboard elementary school for a couple of days. But the children are intimidated by her. They tease and make fun of her for her maladroit, excessively formal speech and deportment. She tells her father of her longing to become more human, to “fit in” with ordinary people. “I do not wish to be different!” she fervently declares. Her loneliness and sense of being an outcast are the beginning of her suffering.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is an noyed at Data for not consult- ing him before proceeding with the intricate operation of putting together Lal. Data explains to Picard that the decision to build a duplicate android of himself was a personal affair concerning the continuation of his own kind. It was an attempt to act in accordance with what Data has studied and observed as the “primal instinct” of almost all species to perpetuate themselves. The Captain has difficulty accepting that Lal’s existence is chiefly an issue of parenting and Data’s progenitiveness. He is worried about the reaction of Starfleet’s research division. They will surely look upon the parturition of the young female android as an issue of techno-scientific achievement and military-organizational opportunity. The milestone attainment in Artificial Life represented by Lal opens the vista of making fully functional and serially reproducible sentient androids for Starfleet’s use.
Admiral Anthony Haftel, played by Nicolas Coster, a high-ranking research scientist at the Daystrom Institute Annex on Galor IV, has been informed of Lal’s procreation. Admiral Haftel regards the event as strictly a matter of a “technological step forward in the development of artificial intelligence.” Haftel travels to the Enterprise-D, which holds a stationary position in space until his arrival. He officially notifies all parties that he is invoking the authority of Starfleet Research Standard Procedures and, pending a first-hand evaluation, intends to take Lal into his professional custody. But Haftel is already too opinionated for the “evaluation” to be other than a formality. He believes that the ongoing behavioral adaptation of the young female android will progress most smoothly if she is placed in the care of cybernetics specialists in a supervised clinical setting.
Lt. Commander Data protests vehemently against the recommended physical separation of Lal from himself. Captain Picard eventually comes to support Data’s resolute stand. He recalls the legal gains made by Data in The Measure of a Man. Soong-class androids are “living sentient beings” whose “rights and privileges in our society have been defined.” But Admiral Haftel accuses Picard of sentimentality. Humanoid automatons of the type invented by Dr. Noonien Soong are too valuable to be put at risk. If Lal’s experimental development is not carefully monitored by a team of experts in a controlled environment, there is the danger of a disaster as catastrophic as what occurred with Dr. Richard Daystrom’s M-5 computer in 2268 (The Ultimate Computer). Daystrom worked on the artificially intelligent cybernetic war machine in perilous isolation, just as Lt. Commander Data proposes to do now with the “technological leap forward” named Lal.
Admiral Haftel becomes especially miffed when he sees that Lal has been working for Guinan as a barperson and waitress in the Ten-Forward Lounge recreation room. “Is this what you call a proper environment?” the Admiral angrily asks. Data, Picard, and Guinan all believe that extensive direct exposure to humans and other humanoids in a casual ambiance, including informal banter and foreplay between opposite sexes, would be a positive learning experience for Lal. Haftel argues that Data is in no position to judge the effect of this kind of social interaction on the youthful android, since he himself has never yet “mastered human cultural and behavioral norms.”
In the midst of the controversial battle over her custody, Lal has a violent system and nervous breakdown. She is summoned to a very uncomfortable interview with Haftel in the “observation lounge.” When the Admiral states that he would like to move the female android to the cybernetics research facility at Galor IV, she reacts by asking if she has “done something wrong.” Haftel is convinced that Lal is being controlled by the will of her “father.” He does not acknowledge that she has her own wishes as a free self, one of which is to stay aboard the Enterprise-D. Admiral Haftel labels all self-expression by her as “adversarial.” Behind his peremptory rhetoric that she should show better “selective judgment in verbalizing her thoughts” is the demand that she should shut up. She leaves the conference room in distress. To be transferred from the Enterprise-D to the Technological Insititute would mean the end of her dream to fit in with humans, and the beginning of being treated like a laboratory specimen.
Lal visits Counselor Deanna Troi in the empathic Betazoid’s quarters. She is overcome with fear and worry about her future. She clutches her abdominal area in psychically-induced pain, and astonishes Troi by saying that “this is what it is to feel.” Her anxiety and confusion are an abrupt onset of emotional awareness. This leads quickly to a neural malfunction or general cascade failure.
The cyberneticists Data and Haftel perform an emergency operation on Lal. It involves repolarizing her neural net pathways and reinitializing the base matrix. But they fail to save her.
As her condition worsens, Lal emotes deeply. She feels her love for her father Data. “I feel [love] for both of us.” “Flirting, laughter, painting, family, female, human,” she utters with her last breath. Lal dies after little more than two weeks of life.
Simulate or Die
The pivotal narrative turn or surprise of The Offspring is the unanticipated emergence of a strong emotional response in the female android Lal. This AI event during the self-organizing advance of genetic algorithms and simulated neural nets is the true context of her death, not simply the prospect of separation from her father.
There were already slight technical incongruities between Lal and Data “at the quantum level.” The self-evolving Data-clone was able to make verbal contractions (like I’ve instead of I have), a “natural language” feat that Data has never been able to pull off.
But the real cause of Lal’s breakdown and death was that she tried to live her destiny as an android in a fundamentally different way than the “simulation and seduction” of the human condition that is the cornerstone of Data’s persistence.
After Lal complains that she and her father will never feel emotions, know love, or really be like humans, Data remarks that “it is a limitation we must learn to accept.” “Then why do you still try to emulate humans?” Lal asks. Data replies at length, “I have asked myself that many times as I have struggled to be more human, until I realized it is the struggle itself that is more important. We must strive to be more than we are, Lal. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards.” What is essential about being an android, Data reveals, is not the too literal fixation on becoming human, misidentified and endlessly repeated by the Star Trekindustry in the cultural mega-legend of Data (and later of the reversing cyborg Seven of Nine). It is rather a certain struggle between the artifice of appearing to be human and the salutary unreachability of that target. The impossibility of realizing what she is striving for, the difference between the quest and its accomplishment, is the indispensable condition for the android’s survival and flourishing.
What Data neglected to do for his daughter – and this omission led to Lal’s passing – was to convey to her the positive essence of the android’s posthuman condition. This is the tension or artificial real that he himself secretly lives, and which he at last articulates to Lal in this divulging speech that comes too late. Admiral Haftel, whose misunderstanding is total, ironically objects to Lal staying with Data because she “may choose to emulate you rather than humans.”
As Data’s literary double in this episode, as the fallen android who is doomed because she fails to handle the specificity of a fate which must not be lived too literally, the contrast of Lal brings into sharper relief what Data is. What defines Data is not the goal that he is perpetually trying to attain, but the fact that he will never get to that endpoint, which would paradoxically result in his death. In order to live, he must always come up one step short of the Holy Grail techno-scientific breakthrough that would make him identical to humans. He is neither the same as nor different from the human. He is neither the same as nor different from himself. To become identical to the other or to oneself is a fatal mistake.
Lal’s single-minded preoccupation with becoming human destroys her, whereas Data knows that he is not human. But Data does not succeed in the “perpetuation of his species” because he is remiss in understanding correctly what he lives. His crucial error is in spending all his time and effort with Lal teaching her the technical details of how to simulate being human, but not teaching her the mythical heart of simulation. He instructs her on how to be human, but neglects to teach her the seduction of how to be an android. Lal’s demise is a crisis of simulation.
The Star Trek Encyclopedia calls the creation of Lal “one of Data’s most noteworthy efforts in his quest for humanity.” This ignores that constructing Lal was an effort to perpetuate his kind, and that he was inspired by his knowledge of the behavior and instincts of many species. At www.theborgcollective.com, a web site run by a group of Star Trek hyper-reality specialists, we can read the actual notations made by Ship’s Counselor Deanna Troi in her official psychological profile of Data: “[He] has quite simply wished to be more human and experience as much of that condition’s depths and shadows as his adaptive programming can approximate.” Pity the poor little Pinocchio-android misfit who pines to become human.