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Answering a distress call, the
away team finds a device embedded in a rock that proves to be a
form of artificial intelligence. It has bio-neural circuitry
and, with the help of the Doctor's translating, reveals it is
suffering from a technical form of amnesia. The machine thinks
it is an organic being, but once it is beamed to Voyager, the
Doctor explains what has happened. Scanning the planet's
surface, Janeway finds a crater filled with radiogenic decay and
realizes they have beamed aboard a weapon of mass destruction.
In sickbay, Torres attempts to
separate its bio-neural circuitry from the explosive, and
download its synaptic patterns into a holographic matrix.
Suddenly, the weapon arms itself, and Torres is forced to use an
EM pulse to short it out. She and Kim soon discover the machine
has commandeered the Doctor's program. It now recalls it is a
long-range tactical armor unit, which was deployed at a target
it never reached. The machine, speaking through the Doctor's
body, tells Janeway that she will help him find his target, or
her ship and crew will be destroyed.
After Janeway is given new coordinates to follow, Neelix locates
a merchant who may be familiar with the weapon. He offers to
disarm it with his transporter's dampening field in exchange for
full access to salvaging its parts for sale. Wary of handing the
weapon over to a stranger, Janeway refuses. When the merchant's
ship tries to get a transporter lock on the machine, it sends an
antimatter surge back through the beam and blows up the ship.
Meanwhile, Seven realizes her nanoprobes can be adapted to
disable the weapon's circuitry.
Paris plans to make the machine believe they are navigating a
minefield. When Seven of Nine is brought into sickbay pretending
to suffer from burns, Tuvok will disrupt the Doctor's program.
This will give Seven enough time to inject her nanoprobes into
the weapon and disable it. Meanwhile, Kim and Torres retrieve
lost data from the weapon's memory files, which reveal its
launch was a mistake. He thinks they are deceiving him and
refuses to abort. The plan fails, and Voyager is suddenly
surrounded by 32 self-guided weapons.
The machine is ordered to transport off Voyager to the target,
but Kim persuades him to look for his people's confirmation code
in the rest of his memory files. When he confirms the order to
cease his mission was valid, he tells the other weapons to stand
down. They cannot be diverted, so the weapon reconfigures his
bio-neural matrix and joins the others. Once he leads them to a
safe distance, he detonates and destroys them all. |
