Star Trek '12: 2912 AD - "Living Witness"

Aberdeen was hesitant to report his findings.  He’d just discovered physical proof of the existence of a starship said to have caused immeasurable devastation seven hundred years ago.  The reason why he was hesitant was that he did not believe the stories that surrounded the starship.  He believed that they had been manipulated to justify a continuing social injustice he sincerely wanted to be overcome.

Yet he could not ignore his findings either.  There would be outrage if it was found out that he suppressed them.  One way or another, someone would find out, and they would accuse him of the very crime he had hoped to avert, the support of an agenda.

Progress had been glorious, but it had also been stagnant since the time of the starship’s appearance.  It must be said that there was peace now that hadn’t existed before.  But it was peace built on a foundation of lies.  Aberdeen did not want to be a part of it.  How then had he stumbled into this position?  He was an itinerant dreamer, and so was forced into more practical concerns in order to make a living.  He supposed that mining would be a harmless way to make a living, locked underground and basically lost to the world.  There was no reasonable expectation that something like this would happen.

So it was that the very man who could usher more than one revolution had found himself in such an unwanted position.  Aberdeen was also a self-professed coward.  He loathed and feared others, his faith in his own kind trampled by years of bad breaks that betrayed a selfish nature he abhorred.  Was he no better than anyone else?

In the end, the decision was made for him.  A supervisor came by and caught a glimpse of his discovery, and roughly shoved Aberdeen out of the way, didn’t wait for an explanation, and certainly not for his thoughts on the matter.  Aberdeen was quickly forgotten in the rush to capitalize on this stroke of fortune, this vindication of the popular belief that a starship full of strangers had brought destruction and unexpected peace to his world.

He secretly hoped that there was still a chance that all would be well in the end.