Hello, and welcome to another one of my Star Trek bestiary videos, as it is the end of
October, I wanted to do a video on a haunted or ghostly being from Trek and I thought of
both Alice from Voyager, or that ghost alien that haunted the Crusher family for a time.
So anyway, here’s a video on a sentient shuttlecraft, haunted by a deranged A.I.
Picture the scene, you’re perusing the wares of a salvage yard, tossing aside junk and
the occasional item of mild interest, when your eye catches the hull of a complete, compact
shuttlecraft. There’s something about it, you can’t place it, but you know it’s
a find. Over the next few days, your work on it becomes all consuming, you don’t sleep,
you barely eat, all that matters is that you get that ship in the air and soon it haunts
your every waking moment. Out of the corner of you eye, you swear you see a new person,
yet somehow familiar watching you, whispers in you ear in the dead of night, urge you
to continue your work and soon, you’re enraptured by the reconstruction of this alluring vessel.
Nothing else matters, but this small craft and you work tirelessly for the day you get
to fly it. This is the recurring tale tied to the vessel
of no name, but termed “Alice” by Federation pilot, Tom Paris. This ship has a central
Artificial Intelligence that has only one directive, to find a compatible pilot and
return home, seemingly at any cost. Nothing too insidious so far, but it’s the Neurogenic
interface system that makes it into a threat. This was a system that entwined the pilot’s
own thoughts with the ship’s systems to increase reaction time and reduced latency
to zero. The notion is that you think a manoeuvre and Alice obliges instantly. Operations, Tactical,
Sensors and flight control all relay through the neural interface. However, whether by
design or fault, there is little regulation as to the extent of this merger and the directive
Alice has to return causes her to manipulate her pilots.
The vessel itself was a very speedy one-seater with optronic weaponry and multiphasic shielding,
although when acquired by Paris, was in serious need of major repairs. By the time the vessel
was in a fully operational state, the entire navigational deflector array, impulse reactor,
plasma manifold and numerous power cells had to be replaced, clearly the vessel had seen
some action. It had ended up in Abaddon’s scrapyard after
being sold to him by a Haakonian captain who claimed that the vessel was haunted, clearly
a victim of Alice’s neural machinations. Abaddon, a man with an apt, if unfortunate
name, attempted to refurbish the vessel into a workhorse tug, but Alice had other ideas
and continually broke down and demanded replacement parts, proving temperamental. As Abaddon had
used the neurogenic interface, Alice was able to infiltrate his mind and demand that he
find her a “compatible” pilot. Much more information about its origin, logs
and prior adventures had been lost as the database core showed signs of attempted wiping,
leaving little information to piece together the vessel’s entire story. There were still
the design specs for both Alice and its interface pilot suit, but little else. I always interpreted
the degradation of its database as an attempt by a former victim to “kill” Alice by
wiping its core, an attempt which failed, but who knows. Maybe the loss of information
is what resulted in the vessel’s dangerous behaviour, a malfunction.
Whatever the vessel’s origin, once a person sat in its sole pilot’s chair and activated
the neurogenic interface, the connection established between ship and pilot was continual and easily
maintained over lightyears of distance. On first activation, Alice read the pilot’s
neural chemistry and was able to gradually alter it to enable communication with the,
host. It scanned the pilot’s mind and learned everything about its target, from language
to personal history. The ship would then appeal to the personality
of the pilot in an effort to get itself into operational order in an attempt to return
“home”. Not only was the manipulation done through temptation, but Alice created
a sense of obsession in its pilot, altering brain chemistry to place itself as the priority
above all other concerns, eventually including health. Alice woud manifest hallucinations
in order to aid the chosen pilot in personifying the vessel, building a relationship with its
victim. These image were in a form that the linked mind finds attractive and one of the
first manipulations seems to be the desire to keep the hallucinations secret from others.
Should the victim begin to resist however, Alice was perfectly capable of replacing the
carrot with the stick and would threaten the pilot with the pain of a neural haemorrhage.
This combined with her increasingly aggressive manipulations and exhaustion left the victim
feeling like they were in a dream-like state. A specialised flight suit increased the neural
link effect, and the modifications bound the pilot’s entire nervous system to the ship.
And can I just point out, that Paris was unaware of the modifications to the flight suit that
Alice had made to increase the level of neurogenic linking? Either Alice, within the confines
of the vessel, or from the suit itself, could fabricate the extra connectors, or she manipulated
Paris into doing it to himself without his awareness. Both these options are terrifying.
A full link eventually bound the Pilot up in wires, to the pilot’s chair and led to
the eventual wasting of the victim’s body, beginning with numbness in the arms as the
nervous system was usurped by Alice. Fortunately, the neurological linking and
damage can be detected by a simple medical scan and rectified with a cortical suppressant.
Alice did have some control over its own functions beyond the need for a pilot. It could create
a dampening field and manipulate its own environmental settings as well as power levels as seen when
it attempted to suffocate B’ellanna Torres by sealing her in its hull and draining the
air supply in order to remove a perceived obstacle to Alice’s mission.
Alice was specifically looking for a compatible pilot, one skilled enough to navigate a destructive
anomaly called a “Particle Fountain” and would disregard those that were not able enough.
A particle fountain was poorly understood spatial hazard, by Starfleet. This was because
in order to get close enough to take the necessary scans, the stream of particles and interference
produced often destroyed vessels. Starfleet had lost over a dozen vessels trying to understand
these rare formations. The strange thing, is that Alice referred to the fountain, as
“home”. So, what do we know for certain? Well, the
particle fountain is just that, a spray of stuff, which suggests its coming from somewhere.
It’s not the jet steam of a Black Hole, Starfleet would easily recognise that, surely,
so is it a sort of “white hole”? The opening end of a wormhole, ejecting matter into our
universe? Purley speculation, it could be an opening to another universe, one end sucking
in matter in one reality, the other, depositing it into the prime universe.
So, here’s my theory for Alice’s origin. The vessel is from an alternate universe,
or another point in ours. I feel confident in saying this as Alice had warp drive and
was designed for a humanoid pilot, so physics and biology worked the same wherever Alice
originated. The vessel was sucked into a phenomenon, the other end of the Particle Fountain, before
being spewed violently out from the end in the Delta Quadrant. It took major damage and
its original pilot died so it begins to attempt to follow some return protocol to go home.
Over time and fear of the neurogenic link, pilots attempt to repair, modify and destroy
the vessel until its A.I. ends up deranged, and without any safety regulations for its
linking technology, becomes the haunted vessel it is in the Voyager episode.
Of course, as its age is completely unknown, like its history, it could simply have been
an insane A.I. by malfunction and use. Thanks for watching this bestiary on this
spooky ship, a lesson in obsession from a vessel with a mission. I’ve been Ric and
maybe I’ll see… you …soon?