Hello all! Ric here with the final Star Trek bestiary of October,
covering one of the more unnerving creatures of Trek. Although I’ve already done a video on Alice,
the ghostly shuttle that took over Tom Paris, it does set a precedent for certain machines to end
up here too… So… this is on the Automated Ware Repair station form Enterprise’s “Dead Stop”.
So the location of this space station is known pretty well to Starfleet who received exacting
coordinates from the Tellarites, but the Unroth system must be nearby the Alpha-Beta border
as the Enterprise encountered it after running into a Romulan minefield that left the Enterprise
damaged and unable to exceed warp 2.1. Limping to the location, they found an unmanned station with
a central habitation hub and two docking arms that could expand to accommodate a wide array of ship
sizes. The station immediately took a biomolecular scan of the approaching vessel and was so
through that it read the entire database of the Enterprise and a complete record of its damage.
The station then demanded payment for repairs in the form of resources that it knew the Enterprise
could provide, derived from its own inventory. A lot of these files, especially complete schematics
of the vessel would be protected by security measures, but the station was able to bypass
all this. The crew seemed wary, but the station seemed benign, so they paid for the repairs
with 200 litres of warp plasma. The computer system that ran the station seemed rather basic,
unable to understand several requests that fell outside its programmed repair jobs,
but here the lies had already begun. The station was far more aware and intelligent
than it seemed, and warp plasma was not the only price it would extract. Within the next 34 hours,
it would lure away a member of the crew, abduct them and replace them with a replicated clone that
seemed to have suffered an accidental death. It would select an appropriate target, then engineer
a situation to get it alone through using the internal comms of the vessel it was repairing,
by mimicking a higher ranking officer to send them to an isolated location.
From there, presumably it beamed them away, replacing them with the wounded facsimile
and staging an accident. The adaptability and ingenuity on display here
is far beyond the level of sentience it presented itself as.
It did all this to utilise the crewman’s brain and tied it into its central processing system,
using organic minds from dozens of kidnapped crews to keep itself operational. The longer a mind was
attached to the system, the more integrated it became as the A.I. restructured the mind and as
the body wasted, removal was no longer an option. This station had several alien species inside it,
including species that the fledgling Starfleet had not encountered yet, like Cardassians, Axanar,
and even a Vaadwaur, which haven’t been exploring the galaxy for over 600 years and are native to
the Delta Quadrant. This means that the station may indeed be as old as they are. There are also
several unidentified aliens showing just how many visits this station had, and how many victims
it had snared. This goes hand in hand with its understanding of biology and medicine, as it was
able to synthesise dermal regenerators and repair biological tissue alongside artificial components.
This station had transporter systems that could be very subtle and hard to detect as
well as replicator systems. Internally it had a variable atmosphere, which switched from a
liquid helium atmosphere at near absolute zero to a standard M-class environment in seconds.
Its internal habitable areas were arranged for humanoids, but with its extensive industrial
level replication abilities, perhaps the entire interior was completely fabricated
for the comfort of its “guests”. I would speculate that its M-class atmosphere is probably closest to
its natural state, as its computer core room contained humanoid captives that did not have
breathing apparatus. However, it clearly has some form of life support for its mind-slaves,
judging by the decay on the uniforms here. Once within a berth, the victim vessel was
pretty much at the whims of the station, and would usually be released to leave and spread word of
this miracle station. However, if payment was in dispute, or damage done to the station then those
same repair arms and system interfaces that the repairs station had used to restore and placate
the crew, could be used to lockdown the vessel. The extensive repairs that it could conduct were
not limited to visiting vessels, but to itself as well. This is probably why it demanded payment
from its subject as these would be materials to keep it running, including the crewmembers it
stole away. Finally, this function in repairing itself shows us that even without its linked-up
minds, it has some level of programming and ability, which correlates with the statement
that it expands it processing ability with these kidnapped brains, not that it requires them.
As the organic minds died off, it would require more to replace them with, so it’s a stockpile
of stolen victims that would only increase, and perhaps its intelligence would with it.
In apocrypha, it was revealed that this station was constructed by a
species known as the Ware, well, species isn’t the right word. “The Ware” was simply the name
of the technology that constructed it, a power that began in the Beta Quadrant centuries past
and covered in the Enterprise Pocket Novels, sufficed to say,
the sort of tech at play on this station existed in other location in the Alpha and Beta quadrants
and was just as nefarious. In fact, several other such stations were discovered by other Starfleet
crews in subsequent years and even one that had been destroyed by Romulans already. In this case,
it’s clear that the Romulans mistrustful nature probably saved them a great deal of trouble and
blew up and Ware stations they found. Apparently, by the dawn of the 23rd century, all traces of
the Ware had been destroyed, primarily by the Klingon Empire who also learned of the machines.
However, the creepy factor of seeing this station quietly begin to repair itself after
Enterprise apparently destroyed it stayed with me, so who knows how thorough the extermination
really was. Thanks for watching this bestiary on the Ware Repair Station. That’ll about do it for
the scary theme I think, I’m not one to drag it out over all of October, but for 1 week, I don’t
mind. Thanks again for watching and I’ll see you later for another lore video, until then, goodbye!