Data's Aqueduct Ultimatum
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Data issues a directive to Ard'rian to inform Gosheven of his intent to destroy the aqueduct, anticipating resistance.
Ard'rian reacts with stunned hesitation at Data's bold strategy, expressing concern about Gosheven's reaction, which Data welcomes.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Stunned and horrified with an admixture of admiration and anxiety; she is aghast at the sacrifice yet understands the tactical necessity.
Ard'rian watches Data's self‑surgery with fascination and horror, witnessing the technical work and then absorbing Data's command; she is left speechless, then attempts to protest as she is pressed into the role of messenger to Gosheven.
- • Assist and observe Data's technical improvisation to ensure it works and to learn.
- • Prevent unnecessary harm to the community if possible by tempering or relaying Data's ultimatum responsibly.
- • Carry the message to Gosheven in a way that might avert violence or force a constructive decision.
- • Gosheven will likely attempt to physically stop Data (explicitly stated).
- • Data's action is extreme and dangerous, and must be handled carefully to avoid needless escalation.
- • Technical solutions can be sacrificial and morally fraught; human judgment is still crucial.
Inferred defiant and outraged; likely to respond with protective aggression to prevent destruction of communal resources and to defend his authority.
Gosheven is not present in the shuttle but is the explicitly named target of Data's threat; the event is structured to compel him into a reactive role — to either attempt to stop Data or to double down on defiance and keep the colony in place.
- • Prevent the destruction of the aqueduct and the pumping station.
- • Maintain control and communal autonomy, resisting outside coercion or evacuation.
- • Preserve the colony's resources and the legacy that anchors his leadership.
- • Leaving or destroying the aqueduct is abandonment and betrayal of communal sacrifice.
- • External threats or orders must be resisted to maintain sovereignty and honor.
- • Demonstrations of force are to be countered, not capitulated to.
Calm, resolute and quietly expectant — outwardly clinical but willing to self-sacrifice; there is a measured hope that provocation will force needed resistance.
Data has opened his forearm, removed internal servocircuits, and physically integrates the component into a phaser, explaining the technical rationale and issuing a cold, strategic order to Ard'rian to deliver an inflammatory ultimatum to Gosheven.
- • Repair and adapt a phaser to function in hyperonic radiation by using his own servocircuit.
- • Force a confrontation that will compel Gosheven (or others) to act and thereby create the conditions for evacuation.
- • Protect the colony by any means necessary, even if it requires personal physical loss.
- • Technical improvisation (using his servocircuit) will produce a phaser capable of operating under hyperonic conditions.
- • A deliberate, tangible threat will provoke the leadership to choose resistance over inaction, catalyzing evacuation.
- • His duty to save lives supersedes the preservation of his own physical components.
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The colony aqueduct serves as the explicit threatened object — Data names it as the thing he will destroy to force a confrontation, making it the leverage point of his moral gambit and the symbolic heart of the community's survival.
Data physically extracts a palm-sized servocircuit from his own forearm and repurposes it as the key adaptive component for a phaser, turning his internal hardware into the operative element that compensates for hyperonic interference.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The cramped shuttlecock is the intimate, pressure‑filled theater where Data's self‑surgery and the moral ultimatum occur; its confined space forces direct witness, makes technical improvisation tactile, and turns private mechanics into public threat.
The aqueduct purifying plant and broader waterworks are invoked by implication as the infrastructure at stake — the technical system whose destruction would endanger the colony, giving Data's threat its moral and practical weight.
The Main Street pumping station is named as Data's rendezvous and is the public site he threatens to visit and where he intends to destroy the aqueduct; it functions narratively as the anticipated battleground and stage for confrontation.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
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Part of Larger Arcs
Key Dialogue
"DATA: "Hyperonic radiation randomizes phaser beams. But I believe I can improvise a servocircuit which will compensate by continuously recollimating the output.""
"DATA: "Get word to Gosheven. Tell him I am coming to the pumping station. Tell him I am going to destroy the aqueduct.""
"ARD'RIAN: "He'll try to stop you --" / DATA: "I sincerely hope so.""