Everyone needed a daemon.

Data knew this, of course, even though he was just an automaton. An advanced one, to be sure, the most advanced one ever made, but an automaton nonetheless. No matter how well his creator had tried to make him look human, he couldn't give him a daemon. Daemons emerged naturally out of Dust, and there was nothing natural about the way Data came to be.

Data had recently been discovered by the crew of the Enterprise, an airship that traveled the globe exploring and going on missions of peace. After finding out that Data was intelligent, they brought him on board to be a member of their crew. But they had their misgivings. Data still remembered the human who found him, Will Riker. His daemon, an Alaskan malamute named Miska, had bristled upon seeing that the automaton had seemingly been severed.

Severed. That was a word that brought terror into the hearts of the entire crew. Their captain, Jean-Luc Picard, had once been severed by the Daemonless, a horde to the north that ripped people's daemons away from them. His daemon was a peregrine falcon named Celeste. They had fought hard to stay together, but it was no use. Most of the time, when people had their daemons severed from them, the daemons died. But Celeste somehow survived, and the Enterprise crew restored the connection between them. One of the Daemonless, Hugh, had broken away from the horde and manifested a daemon of his own. He was one of the rare humans who had a daemon of the same gender.

There was a special bond between people and their daemons, and sometimes between the daemons of two different people. Like Miska and Zarathustra - Zara for short. He was a black Persian cat, the daemon of the ship's counselor Deanna Troi. Daemons didn't normally talk to each other, but Miska and Zara talked to each other almost as much as Will and Deanna did, and often nuzzled each other in tender moments. This type of bond was known as "imzadi".

The others had daemons too. Data's best friend, the engineer Geordi LaForge, had a naked mole rat daemon named Nya who liked to perch on his shoulder while he did repairs. The ship's doctor Beverly Crusher had a red fox daemon named Balgair, and her son Wesley had a weasel daemon named Mustela. She had settled just a few years earlier.

And then there was Worf, the panserbjorn - polar bear. He didn't have a daemon per se. A bear's daemon was his armor. He forged it himself, and it gave him protection. A bear without his armor was like a person without his daemon - broken and powerless.

So all of Data's friends had daemons, but Data himself did not. Did this mean he was incomplete? He asked this of several people, but none of them had a definitive answer.

And then Picard told him about the other world. There was a parallel plane of existence, he said, where people did not have daemons, where the soul was contained inside the body. If Data did not have an outer daemon, there must be something inside of him that made him tick. And it was up to him to figure out what that was.

Data ran several tests on himself using the ship's equipment, trying to discover the answer. And what he found intrigued him greatly. At his core, where a human's heart should be, there was a device called an alethiometer.

An alethiometer was an extremely rare instrument that operated using Dust. It always told the truth. It worked by pointing to three symbols at a time, and only a few people could read it. This, it seemed, was what Data had in place of a daemon - a soul. It was why he always seemed to know everything, except for himself.

Picard seemed very pleased by this discovery. An inner daemon could not be removed from you without killing you, and most people would consider losing your daemon to be a fate worse than death. Data had just as much Dust as anyone else, if not more, meaning that he was just as strongly connected to the mysteries of the universe.

Everyone needed a daemon. And Data, the mere automaton, had perhaps the best one of all.