B-4 was merely his designation. (The Voyager's EMH ended up calling himself "Joe".) Tuvix took his name from a combination of the two crewmen who were blended into one.
Say, wasn't Lore being stored in a box in Data's room on the E-D? Surprised no one has done anything with that.
Me too actually. I remember them referring to Lore, Lal, and Data's "mother", but I can't remember exactly what was said about them. Damn, I just checked Memory Beta and it doesn't have anything about IC in the Lore entry.
Yeah, I was looking a few hours ago. What a mess. It's like that one SNW story has overshadowed all other Soong android appearances. It's been ages since I read it, but IC mentions that at some point after "Descent", Data had headed back to Soong's colony world of Omicron Theta and retrieved the first three prototypes first mentioned by the Juliana android in "Inheritance". The novel reveals that those prototypes, plus Lal, the recently "deceased" Juliana, and the disassembled Lore, were all stored in Data's lab. Somewhere, but I can't recall exactly where, there was mention that Lore was destroyed beyond repair in the crash of the Enterprise-D. After the revelations of "Nemesis", I told Jeff Lang that if he ever did a sequel to "Immortal Coil", perhaps the prototypes would be B-1, B-2 and B-3.
Aha! Yep! And there were three prototypes, known to Juliana, created either before or after the B-4. After the revelations of "Nemesis", I told Jeff Lang that if he ever did a sequel to "Immortal Coil", perhaps the prototypes would be B-1, B-2 and B-3.
Yet there were some hints dropped in "Paths of Disharmony" and "Rough Beasts of Empire" that a vaguely Countdownish future may come to pass. Spoiler: Typhon Pact novels In "Paths", Picard considers beconing an Ambassador, and with a young son on board realizes his days commanding the Enterprise are drawing to a close. And, in "Rough Beasts", Spock becomes a legal resident of Romulus exactly when he said he did in "Countdown" A chapter in "The Needs of the Many" explained Data's resurrection in B4, in a direct set-up for "Countdown". Although, the circumstaces in the post-Destiny novels would require a somewhat different approach.
As I've said before, that doesn't work for me because B-4 was simply too crude to be the fourth prototype out of six. Also because Julianna evidently didn't know about him, so he may have been built before she came along, before the other three. As I've suggested, B-1 through B-3 might've been nonhumanoid prototypes of just the positronic brain, or maybe, as the script itself suggested, "B-4" was simply a pun on "Before."
AFAIK, Countdown is part of the Star Trek Online continuity, which is incompatible with extended treklit.
Rather, STO chose to incorporate the events of Countdown into its backstory and the artists of Countdown borrowed the uniform designs from STO. But STO also borrowed some things from the novel continuity while contradicting others. And the final book in Shatner's Totality trilogy borrowed some Titan crew from the other novels while completely contradicting Titan's continuity. There are no hard and fast dividing lines where tie-in continuity is concerned. Different works can borrow bits and pieces from each other however they choose. So if the editorial decision were made to make the novels consistent with Countdown, there's no reason they couldn't be. After all, that comic sold very well, so there could be good marketing/economic reasons to tie into it. It would just be something that both the novels and STO chose to be consistent with, just as they're both consistent with canon. It would just fit into their respective tapestries in different ways.
Do we know for sure that B-4 was crude? At the beginning of "The Offspring", Lal exhibits many of the same behaviours as B-4. That episode took place over weeks; Nemesis over days.
^The movie made it pretty clear that B-4 was very simple and incapable of the kind of growth and learning that Lal showed. I mean, that was the whole thematic point behind the character. Lal is completely different because she learned and grew readily. B-4 asked a lot of childlike questions but showed little sign of understanding the answers or being able to assimilate new knowledge or insight.