Sounds great! Bah, I want Data vs. Sherlock's nutty Jim Moriarty! (and someone to point out Holmes' strange resemblance to Khan)
The TV series left a lot of interesting storylines dangling. I'm excited to see Moriarty come back! I liked him as a villain because he wasn't evil. It was easy to sympathise with him. Presumably, he's still stored in that box. In the STO timeline, this status was compared to imprisonment without trial. I wonder whether he could legally carry the title "Professor", because it stems from a holoprogramme and was not awarded by a university.
That short novel synopsis of Data&Lal versus Moriarty sounds really intriguing story idea for a novel.
Boy the blurb from this novel has had me daydreaming all day! So many intriguing questions and possibilities! A holographic program downloaded onto a positronic brain? If I was the Doctor, whos mobile emitter had been stolen or messed with a 100 times, and found out this was possible I would be very interested in this procedure!
I doubt the Doctor would be interested - being a hologram is so much a part of his identity, and he's somewhat of an advocate for holographic rights.
Moriarty? Okay, I'm definitely in. My first SCE pitch was a Moriarty story. I know of at least one other Moriarty SCE pitch.
So... why does Moriarty need a nefarious plan to get an android body? I thought Trek society had finally gotten past the LGBT... err, I mean artificial lifeform issue.
Well, I can only speculate... but if you figured out that you'd been tricked and that the universe you'd believed to be living in freely was really a prison that you'd been deliberately trapped in many years before, that might make you rather bitter and inclined to revenge. Particularly if you were created in the image of the Napoleon of crime.
^Macavity was directly based on Professor Moriarty, which was why T.S. Eliot described him with the same "Napoleon of crime" epithet that Sherlock Holmes had used to describe Moriarty in "The Final Problem" decades earlier.
And how did he ever find out he was in a VR world anyway? It's not like that little box had any connection to the outside.
Or maybe Lang never read the Voyager Homecoming novels, establishing briefcase-sized portable holo-emitters in the novelverse