while on the way to starbase armus ix for computer maintenance, the "enterprise" arrives at the planet omicron theta, the site of a vanished colony where the starship "tripoli" originally found the android data (brent spiner). an away team travels to the surface and finds that what had been farmland is now barren with no trace of life in the soil. the team also finds a lab which they discover is where dr. noonien soong, a formerly prominent but now discredited robotics designer, built data. the team also find a disassembled android nearly identical to data and return with it to the ship. as the course to the starbase is resumed, the crew reassemble and reactivate data's "brother" (also played by brent spiner) in sickbay. he refers to himself as lore, and explains that data was built first and he himself is the more perfect model. he feigns naiveté to the crew, but shows signs of being more intelligent than he is letting on. later, in private, he tells data that they were actually created in the opposite order, as the colonists became envious of his own perfection. he also explains that a crystalline space entity capable of stripping away all life force from a world was responsible for the colony's demise.