Cold Proof: Data's Moral Shock
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Gosheven attempts to control the narrative by dismissing Data's presence, only to be challenged when the colonists demand to hear the android speak.
Data employs reverse psychology, delivering a chillingly detached yet brutally effective speech about the colony's inevitable annihilation.
Ard'rian strategically reinforces Data's argument with a devastating rhetorical question about who will remember the dead.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Tense and watchful — aware that the assembly's political choice will have immediate engineering and survival consequences.
The engineers occupy their designated place in the amphitheater, quietly observing the debate; their tense attention anchors the practical stakes — they serve as an implicit technical authority whose presence underscores the feasibility and necessity of evacuation.
- • Ensure that technical realities are considered in any decision about evacuation.
- • Avoid emotionally driven choices that would make rescue or relocation impossible.
- • Signal tacit approval for any course grounded in survival and logistics.
- • Engineering facts and capabilities should shape communal decisions.
- • Delay or refusal to evacuate will materially endanger lives.
- • Their silent presence lends authority to arguments for practical solutions.
Anxious but determined — quietly aligning with Data and willing to provoke the leader to protect the community.
Ard'rian accompanies Data, watches his rhetorical experiment closely, offers a crucial, pointed interjection ('Remembered by who?') that punctures Gosheven's speech and helps shift public sentiment in Data's favor.
- • Help Data break the rhetorical hold Gosheven has on the crowd.
- • Translate private dissent into public, persuasive action.
- • Protect friends and the practical survival of the settlement.
- • Technical reality and practical outcomes should outweigh mythic attachment to place.
- • Speaking up can shift the crowd and save lives.
- • Data's logical approach is valid and should be amplified by insiders like her.
Divided and nervous — torn between pride in their heritage and fear of extermination, their mood tilts as authoritative voices shift.
The assembled colonists form the reactive chorus: they murmur, draw children closer, glance between Data and Gosheven, and their shifting noises and posture provide the political barometer that determines the meeting's outcome.
- • Understand the true threat and decide collectively whether to stay or leave.
- • Protect family and home while maintaining dignity and communal cohesion.
- • Seek guidance from trusted leaders when faced with existential risk.
- • Leadership guidance (Gosheven or trusted elders) should determine the community's response.
- • Sacrifice has meaning when it preserves community values and memory.
- • Clear information about consequences will determine whether to accept evacuation.
Threatened, proud, and combative — attempting to transmute anxiety into a show of certainty and leadership.
Gosheven presides from his place of authority, initially attempts to exclude Data, then rallies tradition and sacrifice to retain control; he lashes out at dissenters, tries to provoke loyalty, and calls for a reaffirming vote when he senses his power slipping.
- • Hold onto his leadership and prevent an evacuation that would dissolve the colony's identity.
- • Discredit Data as an outsider and re-anchor the crowd's loyalty to tradition.
- • Avoid the loss of built infrastructure and ancestral claims through continued resistance.
- • The colony's identity and honor are inseparable from its land and past sacrifices.
- • Evacuation is tantamount to erasure of meaning and should be resisted.
- • As elected leader he must embody courage and refusal to abandon the settlement.
Persuaded and conflicted — moved by Data's logic yet conscious of communal loyalties and ancestral losses.
Haritath stands to allow Data to speak, applauds Data's effectiveness, and publicly voices emerging doubt about sacrificing the community — signaling a shift from curiosity to pragmatic concern.
- • Protect his family and neighbors by endorsing options that preserve life.
- • Use his standing to legitimize a reconsideration of Gosheven's stance.
- • Bridge outsider arguments and local sentiment to prevent rash decisions.
- • Survival and future memory are more important than abstract honor.
- • Leaders can be mistaken and ought to be questioned for the common good.
- • A public voice from within can shift community opinion more than outsider pleas.
Measured and persuasive — prioritizing collective survival and willing to challenge sentimental loyalty with logic.
Kentor rises with calm authority, asks the crowd to consider that Gosheven might be wrong, and speaks plainly that leaving is preferable to annihilation — his steadiness amplifies the fracture in Gosheven's coalition.
- • Prompt the crowd to objectively evaluate the risk rather than follow tradition blind.
- • Enable a leadership shift toward practical decision-making.
- • Prevent avoidable loss by making evacuation socially acceptable.
- • A living community that relocates can preserve its identity better than one that dies in place.
- • Leaders are accountable to the welfare of the people and can be proven wrong.
- • Public, calm reasoning can overcome tribal appeals to sacrifice.
Calm, resolute, and clinically detached — intentionally using mechanized distance as rhetorical leverage rather than emotional identification.
Data steps to the center, deliberately performs controlled rhetorical techniques, and delivers an unsparing, clinical depiction of the colony's inevitable annihilation; he physically takes a child to dramatize the cost and then explains the purpose of his emotional experiment.
- • Convince the colonists (or at least their leaders) that evacuation is necessary to survive.
- • Undermine Gosheven's unilateral refusal by exposing the logical consequences of staying.
- • Demonstrate a persuasive method Picard taught: vivid imagining of consequence to force reconsideration.
- • Human lives and future memory are valuable and must be preserved at almost any cost.
- • Clear, unemotional truth can pierce tribal loyalty more effectively than pleas.
- • He (Data) can model human rhetorical forms well enough to influence outcomes.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The aqueduct purifying plant sits visibly behind the amphitheater, functioning as a tangible reminder of the colony's engineered survival; it punctuates Gosheven's appeals to what has been built and what would be lost by evacuation.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Picard's lesson to Data about leadership and persuasion techniques foreshadows Data's use of reverse psychology in the public meeting."
"Picard's lesson to Data about leadership and persuasion techniques foreshadows Data's use of reverse psychology in the public meeting."
"Data's verbal portrait of annihilation escalates to his physical demonstration by destroying the aqueduct."
"Data's verbal portrait of annihilation escalates to his physical demonstration by destroying the aqueduct."
Themes This Exemplifies
Thematic resonance and meaning
Key Dialogue
"DATA: "You deny me the opportunity to address the assemblage?""
"DATA: "I admire your conviction in the face of certain defeat. Your effort will be valiant, though doomed. Still, when you die, you will die for land and honor. Your children will understand that they are dying for a worthy cause. Long after the battle is over, their courage will be remembered and extolled.""
"ARD'RIAN: "Remembered by who?" DATA: "Ah, that is true. There will be no one left alive to remember.""