V'ger
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In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, V'ger (Vejur in the novelization by Gene Roddenberry) is a fictional sentient life form.
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[edit] V'ger's journey
Admiral James T. Kirk is assigned to his old ship, the USS Enterprise, in order to intercept a mysterious cloud approaching the Solar System. The Enterprise finally reaches the core of this cloud, and, through the assimilation of crew member Lt. Ilia by the cloud, Kirk and his crew discover it refers to itself as V'ger and wants to "bond with its Creator". Commander Spock, the Enterprise's Science Officer, then dons a spacesuit, exits the Enterprise and moves into V'ger's holographic memory chambers, where he sees a history of V'ger's journey. Kirk, Spock and the other senior crew do not learn that V'ger is in fact the human space probe Voyager 6 until they walk up to it at the film's climax.
They then deduce that, having disappeared during its original mission, Voyager 6 was discovered by sentient mechanical life forms, who, assuming it was an artificial intelligence like themselves, "repaired" it and constructed an enormous ship (the cloud) so that it could complete the mission embedded in its memory banks: Learn all that is learnable. Transmit that information back to the Creator. While on the way back to the Creator's planet (Earth), the knowledge V'ger records leads it to develop consciousness.
As its journey nears its end, V'ger has a crisis of faith, wanting to see the Creator and learn if there is nothing more to its existence than seeking information and bringing it back to the Creator. In this respect, it is an allegory of the search for God by humankind. However, when it first comes into contact with the Enterprise, V'ger refuses to accept humans as "true life forms", to which First Officer Willard Decker replies: "We all make God in our own image."
Spock recognizes that despite its age and experience, V'ger is immature, like a child. He recommends to Kirk that it be treated as such, despite its awesome power. After V'ger states it will "remove the infestation on the Creator's planet" — in other words, humankind — by destroying its surface, Kirk plays on its instinctive want and need for its Creator and calls its bluff: he tells it he knows why the Creator does not respond to V'ger's repeated calls. He tells the assimilated Lt. Ilia, however, that he will only disclose this information to V'ger directly.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, the Ilia probe, and Decker are permitted to enter V'ger's central core, where they find the ancient Voyager 6 satellite and realize they can trigger its radio transmitter, thereby proving that humankind is V'ger's 'Creator'. V'ger, however, wants to join with its Creator in order to experience levels of understanding and being beyond its cold, logical mind. Decker volunteers, and the two fuse into one as the entire spaceship dissipates in a flash of light around the Enterprise, leaving it unharmed.
[edit] Speculation
V'ger mentions in a visual presentation of its origin that it was once a smaller machine, referring to its origin as one of NASA's Voyager space probes. (In reality, only two Voyager probes were ever launched.) The name and nature of the machine planet it encounters is never elaborated upon and has never again been referenced in the official Star Trek canon. Some fans have speculated that the machine race Voyager 6 encountered was the Borg, a race introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation a decade after TMP was released, although the Borg are not artificial intelligences nor fully mechanical by nature, but rather cyborgs, and their established technological level in the 24th century is not enough to create a spaceship large enough to be contained in a cloud measuring over two AUs in diameter. Likewise, the Borg are of this galaxy, whereas V'ger is repeatedly said to have left it during its journeys. It has also been noted that the technology-hungry Borg, even in their earlier incarnations, would probably not have spent the vast amount of resources needed to build such a vessel, certainly not if the technology contained within V'ger would have been useful to the Borg themselves. Since little, if any, Borg technology is a direct engineering of human technology, it seems highly unlikely that the Borg would have spent the majority of their available vessel-construction power to help a potential enemy construct. Three novels authored by William Shatner and set after the events of Star Trek: Generations, however, feature this theory as stated fact, at least as it regards that particular story. These novels, however, have not been acknowledged by Paramount as canon.
[edit] Trivia
- Vger is the hostname of the machine which provides electronic mailing list services to the Linux kernel developers.
- A reference to V'ger and the Plymouth Voyager appears in the animated television series Futurama episode, "Put Your Head On My Shoulder". A "Plymouth V'ger" is featured in a commercial for Malfunctioning Eddies' Rocket Car Emporium.
[edit] External links
- V'Ger article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki.
- vger.kernel.org
