Ferris was a human male. He was a security officer who served the Cephalic Security thought-police organization on the planet Rampart in the 24th century.
History[]
By 2366, he was in his mid-thirties, held the rank of major and was second in command, reporting to the Director of Cephalic Security. He was authorized to speak for the Cephalic Security organization. His military conditioning had made him stern, aggressive, and territorial.
In 2366, Ferris was the first Rampartian to communicate with the USS Enterprise, hailing them when the starship entered orbit to search for the missing USS Huxley. Ferris and his superior, Crichton, Director of Cephalic Security, beamed aboard the Enterprise with 11 one-eye robots to search for evidence of an epidemic. When Ferris and Crichton realized the ship was full of entertainment, including literature and a holodeck that replicated fiction, Crichton ordered the one-eyes to purge the vessel and destroy it, as they had with the Huxley. While the robots attacked members of the crew, Ferris knocked out Jean-Luc Picard and took him to CephCom. An away team was unable to retrieve Picard, whose mind was filtered to remove literary and cultural aspects that were considered illegal on Rampart.
Later, Rampart news media recorded Ferris as he and his forces defended a raid on CephCom by Dissenters. Ferris recognized Powell among the attackers, someone he’d worked with ten years before, and shot Powell in the chest from close range. As Powell lay dying and delirious, Ferris applied a truth serum to force Powell to name his co-conspirators. Slyly, Powell named Odysseus’ maternal grandfather, a pig farmer and his wet-nurse, characters from the Odyssey. When Ferris repeated the names aloud, the one-eyes recognized the names as fictional and concluded that Ferris was co-opted. The robots reflexively fired their weapons, killing both men instantly. Edited combat video was broadcast by the news media. An anchorman described Ferris as a hero who died in the line of duty. (TNG novel: Gulliver's Fugitives)