Malfunctioning medical equipment features in some of my favorite SciFi stories. In the Dr. Who episode “The Curse of the Black Spot” a menacing specter which kidnaps all the main characters turns out to be an automated tissue sampling device. With a similar robotic commitment, the Aperture Science research AI take over the facility long after the human scientists in Portal have died. There is something about computer automation which, once the creators are gone, just continues to… automate. Commanding your emails to self sort into neat little folders was an easy implementation to crop up soon after digital mail became ubiquitous. As we tell our computers to do more and more complicated things, the individual instructions build upon one another to bring forth a more complex, and scary, ‘behavior’. Taken out of context, or left ticking along well after we have departed, these mechanized actions may just prompt the next horror story. They are an echo of our choices, and the Enterprise crew discover such shadows as these on a desolate and abandoned planet.
As Kirk and crew prepare to beam down to a strange world, a woman appears and tries to prevent them from leaving by killing the transporter technician just as the away team dematerializes. The planet disappears from view of the Enterprise, stranding the away team. Meanwhile, the crew onboard discovers that the ship has been tossed just under one thousand light years away from its original location. On the planet, the away team fans out to gather supplies, and the strange lady from the transporter room comes back again, cornering and killing a no-name extra.
Spock and crew are trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Enterprise, and Scotty senses something is off. The weird space lady shows up on the ship again and claims another victim. She has the same MO each time: talking to a crew member about something deeply technical that they are an expert in, and then stopping the conversation to say ‘I am for you’, before rushing toward them. When she confronts Sulu back on the planet’s surface, we find out that she is a native of the desolate world. Although she fails to kill Sulu, no one learns anything more about what she wants. By this point, the Enterprise is going to explode, and there is nothing anyone can do. Spock wants to save the ship using a magnetic probe, and Scotty is in the tubes trying to prevent the explosion. All the events are strange and tense, but there is no explanation for any of it.
Like most fears and terror, our emotional reaction is a resistance to the unknown, that is, what cannot be understood or controlled. Much of our primitive fear can be dispelled when we find the answer to a question. Scientific discovery removed the sparkle from old magical superstition, just like many parlor tricks become silly gags when we see the man behind the curtain. In this case, Kirk and his brave away team eventually discover the device responsible for all the terror: a defense mechanism for the planet which was left running all this time. The computer kept creating more copies of the weird lady, an artificial representation of the station commander. It was an automated system meant to defend against any intruding life form on the planet.
Once all the terror of the unexplained killer is removed, we are left with a different kind of fear, or healthy respect. The computer system is no longer a ghost, unpredictable and fraught with mystery, but more like a sharp knife. The knife is a useful tool which must be handled with care because its misuse is dangerous. We do not lay awake at night terrified of the knives in our kitchen, but we would fear the unpredictable person who wields one. Computers are tools, and our automated systems are the shadows of the choices we make, carrying the ghosts of our long forgotten influence into the future. Happy Halloween!
Hopeless Trekkie 