Expert: Justin Case - 6/15/2009

Question
In "The Most Toys," Data is abducted. He clearly wants to be returned to his ship. Why? If he has no feelings than should it not matter what happens to him?

During the episode, Geordi and Wesley try to figure out what happened to Data in Engineering. They listen to communiques that Data sent from his shuttle to the ship, before being abducted.

Question: How long are these communications "saved" to the computer? For example, are the away team messages to the ship from EAF saved in the computer, so that these messages can be accessed at any time? Are all of the  communications to the ship saved indefinitely, or only certain ones?

If Data picked up a Horta and threw it against a cave wall as hard as he could, would it die?

Would a Varon-T disruptor kill Odo? Can Odo be contained in the Enterprise brig?

400 Calamarain vs. 7 Prophets (no time manipulation)

Answer
Hi John -

Data seems to believe that he functions best on the Enterprise and among its crew.  Though (according to his own admissions) he doesn't have any feelings about that, he probably wished to be where he felt he was doing the most good and served a useful purpose.

As a part of Kivas Fajo's collection Data would really be serving no useful purpose other than Fajo's own gratification, which I think he would compute as a waste of his skills and training.

It's never been explicitly stated how long the communications log is saved, but we have seen Picard access the logs of Captain Donald Varley and Kirk and crew access communication's from ships lost for months.  Given the massive storage capacity of the Enterprise computer my guess is the logs are stored for quite a while, but I can't believe that they keep them in the main computer indefinitely.

Its' possible that past logs might be stored on a portable storage device such as an isolinear chip rather than in the main computer banks.

We are led to believe in the final episode of Enterprise that Commander Riker was able to access a holosimulation of the final days of the crew of the NX-01.  Why the holodeck would have detailed information about a crew from more than 200 years before is something of a mystery to me, but it was there!

My guess is the logs can be accessed via a storage medium of some kind but, no, not every communique from every starship could be stored in the Enterprise computer and allow much room for anything else.

I doubt any creature than can burrow through rocks and withstand the heat and pressure of crushing rock would be harmed by being slammed against the wall by Data.  Sure they'd certainly be jarred, but I doubt they would die.

I think a Varon-T disruptor could kill Odo.  We saw a standard Bajoran phaser do the job on a Mirror Odo just fine!

I doubt he could be contained for long.  Somehow air and light must get into the brig and, if he were clever enough I'd bet Odo could transform into a mist or something like that and escape.

The Prophets were able to construct the only known stable Wormhole across space/time, which I think would give them an edge over the Calamarain!

Thanks!

Deran