You had me at Pinochet Helicopter ride. This looks interesting.

cool! please update soon!

I think this site ate a section break between these two paragraphs:
"Granted. Don't make me regret this Lieutenant."

"Um, sir, why are we wearing these Gas Masks?" Ensign Rodriguez asked me experimentally poking and prodding at the mask made out of dark leather, a material that funnily enough was very rare in clothing during the twenty fourth century and while the other members I had selected for this particular trip didn't ask the question their rude stares gave away the fact that they weren't exactly pleased by me having them wear something that wasn't part of a Starfleet uniform.

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"I pulled out my modified tricorder, which was slightly bulkier than the standard Starfleet version, but in exchange, it had more battery life, better sensors, and overall more functionality, hell, I could play the entire Gameboy, NES and Turbografix 16 libraries on this thing!"

...how low-tech is the regular tricorder? You can emulate the GameBoy on the TI-84 Plus. NES is harder, but Raspberry Pi Zero (a literal $5-10 computer) can emulate it and the GameBoy with no problems. (I can't speak to Turbografix 16, as I have no idea about hat system.) I guess you might be driving home that Starfleet is oddly behind modern tech in some ways due to the pseudo-Cuban economy retarding technological development, but *that* much?

"canisters that the three Ensigns had in their gasmasks containing a very specifically calculated amount of anti-matter ruptured after I'd pressed the button on my Tricorder, wiping them out, the only clue as to them having been there were their slightly damaged uniforms and intact communicator badges, the latter of which I proceeded to place in my pocket."
Uhhhhh... their uniforms would be a lot more than SLIGHTLY damaged. It would be indistinguishable from a bomb having gone off in their gas masks, minus chemical residue, and only a minuscule amount of mass would be missing. (I think you'd also have isotopic transmutation from atoms nearby the annihilation site briefly reaching temperatures required for hot fusion, but I'm not a physicist.)

If you put in enough antimatter to get rid of their entire bodies, well... Google "Waíse néiat inconsistency". People did the math, and each body would be roughly equivalent to an explosion four times the size of the Tsar Bomba.

I mean, Star Trek has always played fast and loose with physics, but that struck me as odd. I think he should've gone with some undetectable-on-autopsy poison instead if he was going to turn teamkiller. *shrug*

Well, I'm interested to see where he's warping, anyway. I halfway think he'd be best off targeting 'Q Continuum civilization, shortly before ascension, nearby a repository of ascension-preparation technical knowledge I can steal and make comprehensible to present-day minds', but that might draw too much attention from the Continuum. "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever", etc.

Hope you update. For all my nitpicks, you write engaging fics, and I'm interested in seeing where you're going with them. (Also hope finals have been going well for you, if you're in school.)

Wait, why would a Lotus Eater civilization be using huge amounts of power?

...uh, come to think of it, is Sharra really sure the *biologicals* are in charge any more, or is this a Type II civilization of rogue AI that keeps the biologicals in blissful captivity as a sop to the original hardcoded 'must serve and protect [original species]' programming? In other words, a spacefaring version of The Matrix?

Yeah, run away, run away fast...

The DMZ? Aw, no Augments took over Korea and completely eliminated the divide between the countries? (Actually, wasn't Khan the ruler of Asia? I can understand him not bothering with *North* Korea on its own merits, but South Korea seems like it would be worth conquering, and it would be truly bizarre if he didn't pick up North Korea on his way over.)

Meh, preaching against perfection is an oversimplification. Sharra could have explained it to Data as the human mind craving novelty, even at the price of imperfection, and elaborated upon that tendency as a way to avoid getting trapped in globally-suboptimal local optimizations. An AI would understand that.

(Yes, yes, I know, I should write my own story if I'm going to nitpick like this...)

The Alien scenario was funny. Nice to see pop-culture references being put to good use.

Nice solution to the Kobayashi Maru. I suspect the Academy will patch it out by having your warp drives just *happen* to crash if you try that double-jump move. Yes, I know they stuck a random warship in there, but it seems like he still could have gotten out if he'd been aware enough to go for a third jump rather than celebrating prematurely. (Actually... was that Klingon Warship the result of the AI immediately adapting and having a 'reserve' ship pull the Warp-and-Run maneuver *against* Sharra? Would be funny as hell if it was.)

I'm not sure it would be too useful a maneuver in the field, as it sounds to me like, as soon as it was widely adopted, it would be countered by 'predictive' strategies of mixing a few short-range shots with the long-range ones in case your opponent tried a hit-and-run. Then again, I'm not well-versed on the limitations of Star Trek technology.

I'm enjoying your fic, by the way. I know I'm griping a lot, but I only do this sort of mass-reviewing binge when I'm engrossed enough to bother commenting. Usually I'm a full-fledged case of the plague of readers-who-read-but-don't-review.

You handed an AI a Heinlein work that *wasn't* The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress? For shame!

Although I guess the SI's justification was that such a work would probably red-flag him in the eyes of Section 31, assuming it hasn't been suppressed out of existence already. Meh. Might have been worth it to encourage Data down a path of humor and freedom rather than pseudo-neuroticism and perpetual attempts to imitate humankind.

"it was actually kind of refreshing to see that the Federation wasn't wholly strategically incompetent as the designs for their ships would otherwise suggest."
Heh heh heh... well, you can tell it's an *advanced* Communist state because they've reached the point of form-over-function, rather than having neither form nor function at all. :)

Wait, I thought the issue was that Vulcans are actually a highly *emotional* species by nature, but discipline themselves to rely upon logic and heavily repress their emotions because the alternative was being a race of wrathful, murderous lunatics. (The matter can also be handled via military discipline rather than logical discipline, as the Romulans show.) So wouldn't it be more along the lines of Vulcans not *valuing* emotions as other races do, rather than 'understanding' them?

Anyway, I liked this chapter, especially the final line. As you said, I didn't expect a Vulcan Counselor.

"Saying Evolution has a plan for us is like saying Gravity has a plan for the moon, it's technically true, but completely asinine at the same time."
No it isn't. Gravity is an actual force. "Evolution" is a description of the long-term large-scale biological equivalent of 'emergent behavior'. Thinking "evolution" is an actual force is soft-Creationism.

Look at the neural net trained to play Super Mario World. It did actually learn to 'play' the level, but it jumps about like a crack-addled toddler and has Mario twirling non-stop for some godforsaken reason. Evolution as a 'force' would have the neural net eventually looking like the TAS, which... it will definitely never achieve.

Sorry, pet peeve...

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The weirdness of Federation genetic-engineering, though I don't know if that's your addition, sounds like it has a perfect *political* explanation in the setting: the Eugenics Wars. The Federation probably has an ancestral terror of anything that sounds like transhumanism due to how badly things went sideways for them then.

(It's almost a pity that the Mirror Universe was later retconned to have been a deep divergence in human history. It seems like there would be an easy divergence in 'Augments won the Eugenics Wars'.)

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Heh, I don't know if it's too late to avoid being "emotionally unstable". After all, a poor man's insanity is a rich man's eccentricity, and the SI is already acting pretty loopy from an outsider perspective (as you acknowledge). Besides, we don't actually know if the Augments were *all* ruthless tyrants. After all, we only see the ones left alive after the Eugenics Wars. Could be the nice ones were rounded up into concentration camps by the victors, killed by their more ruthless kindred in internecine conflicts, etc. Only a fool judges a population solely by a self-selected subgroup. :)

(Could also be that the Augment tyrants abused stimulants that ended up altering their brain chemistry, were fond of recreational drugs that had deleterious long-term effects, got space-lead in their drinking water, etc. Or it might just be that wielding vast amounts of power left them with permanent God complexes. Ever seen perfectly human-normal Grand Old Men when things don't turn out precisely the way they want precisely when they want? It ain't pretty...)

Anyway, cool fic so far; continuing to read.

Shouldn't you be less worried about creating a custom OS for your replicator than figuring out how to jailbreak it and then *physically* tearing out its wireless capabilities? Once that's done, tampering *physical access* to the replicator, at which point you have much bigger issues than hacking. IIRC, there's a story in Man-Kzin Wars V concerning the joys of stealthily poisoning someone by tampering with a replicator.

I like the dystopian take on the Federation, but I'm interested to see if you're going to elaborate on the 'cryptocurrency' bit. Since you specifically made the SI a CS major, I hope he manages to run an attack on the currency (say, by stealing "wallets", botnet-based '51% attacks', mass identity theft, etc.). Sure, it would have the secret police howling for his (excuse me, 'the unknown hacker's') blood, but that's half the fun in *writing* this stuff versus angering an *actual* Commie state, right? :P

Onwards to the next chapter.

Horseshoe in action: Like a communist, this libertarian is writing an arrogant ramble where he thinks he has economics all figured out and pretends it's "ironic".

Bloody brilliant. Really enjoying this so far. Can’t wait for more.

Good chapter.

Cheers
Corrin

As the co author on a long running and very long Star Trek SI story who also happens to be an augment, I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of this kind of fanfiction. I really quite liked this! Your SI has the same irreverent bent as my MC does, who delights in rejecting Star Trek silliness while using his foreknowledge and the perspective of his old universe to do awesome things.

I didn't choose to put my SI in Starfleet, though he wouldn't have been allowed anyway since his Augment status came out immediately, but you really make it work. I suppose I understand the thinking behind making him an engineer versus the command track, better survivability and all, but it does limit him in some ways.

I'm quite enjoying Sharra's reputation as a maverick, a prodigy who delights in going against the grain. The blowback from his controversial civilization scale must have been amazing for him to see. I dont think the Federation enjoys being told or forcing them to realize just how young and low on the scale their civilization is. Q is probably getting a kick out of all the feathers Sharra is ruffling. I wonder if it's called the Sharra scale of civilization now. I bet so much of the opposition to it is because of how much it resonates as truth.

This encounter with the Gaurdian of Forever was unexpected and incredibly improbable, so I suspect Q might have subtly arranged for it. Giving someone like Sharra access to it seems simultaneously like the worst and best idea of all time. I found myself wondering what this guy would use it for. My guess, based on him augmenting himself, and the minor reference to Stargate, is him asking the guardian to send him to the Stargate universe, maybe to encounter one of those data repositories of the Ancients. How he'd get it to activate is beyond me considering he's not human, but if there was anyone who could do it, it would be him.

I would love to read more of this. Good Star Trek fanfiction like this is incredibly hard to come by.

That was dark.