In a quiet corner of a salon there was a little girl.
This was not just another girl and this wasn’t just any salon. The salon was in the city of Kambata, in the planet the Federation called Delta IV. The little girl was called Ilia, after her mother.
Ilia had been born before her mother reported for duty aboard the Enterprise. She was a product of her mother’s affair with the human, Will Decker.
Deltan society had room for Ilia, had a place for her when her mother went away, but it didn’t account for her mother never returning, or never meeting her father. She was lonely, all the same. Among Deltans, their peculiar pheromones work differently. In their society, they had mastered themselves. With the child, it was a little different. She found it difficult to process her impulses. When she was in public, she was at the salon, where she could study her people at their most uninhibited.
And they were her people. She was never made to feel any differently. She felt isolated, all the same. When she was told what had happened, it hardly made things easier. She was young, but not too young to know the yearning she had felt when her mother told her she would return.
It was a blessing, then, when she closed her eyes for a nap, one day, and saw her father.
“Hello,” Will Decker said.
“Hello!” Ilia replied.
“Sorry to drop in on you like this,” Will Decker said.
“That’s okay,” Ilia said, in her sleep.
“I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Will Decker said. “Not your birth! That’s not what I mean. Ilia didn’t tell me..I don’t mean to make excuses. I had placed my career first. Always so ambitious…That’s what brought me here in the first place, the ‘impossible assignment,’ they all said. No one could have the discipline. Well, I did. Mostly. Until I met your mother. And then I was given command of the Enterprise. It was a big assignment! They wanted the ship totally overhauled. It was practically a new ship, by the time the work was done. Some of the crew from its prior mission was retained, some had moved on. I asked for your mother. I needed her by my side. I didn’t know how selfish that would…Listen, something happened. You were told, but no one could really explain. That would’ve been, well, impossible.
“I will try my best. Your mother was killed by a machine. This machine was going to, it was going to destroy everything. It was headed toward my home planet, Earth. You have family, there, too. Someday you’ll meet them, I’m sure. The machine was something Earth had sent into space long ago, before humans had begun living amongst the stars, before we had visited other worlds, before we’d met any of their inhabitants. Before we knew Delta IV existed. Before we knew your mother’s people. The machine encountered a problem we couldn’t have anticipated, or hadn’t accounted for. It became confused, in its programming. It went in search of its creator. But it had forgotten what it was.
“It absorbed your mother, really. It transformed her into a kind of emissary, a representative, and it…had all of your mother’s memories, but it didn’t understand them any better than it knew itself. I knew her, though. I chose to accept what had happened, and to bring those memories back…
“I stepped away from things. I don’t really know how to explain what happened, better than that. I was absorbed, too. It was the only way to explain to the machine what its creator was. This time, the machine didn’t destroy, though. I remained in control of myself.
“And a very curious thing happened. This was the moment I learned of your existence. Your mother hadn’t told me, but the machine knew, and didn’t know that I didn’t. It was just information. It devastated me. I fell in love with you instantly. I was able to see everything, the moment of your conception, your mother’s pregnancy, your birth, the whole of your life that she witnessed…That was how I met you. I just couldn’t be part of your life. This is what I tried to explain to the machine. Your mother, the version that existed, the memory, the echo, she became herself, again, when she saw you, too, for the first time, all over again, and that was what convinced the machine…
“I’m sorry, this is a lot. You’re not going to remember…Anyway, I think we taught the machine…love. And that’s what I want you to feel, now…I hope you can. I can’t cross back over…I realized, later, that I died, too…I love you so much. I’m sorry for everything. I should’ve been there. I should be there now. We should both be. The machine learned something about selfish impulses. I did, too. Too late. Or maybe not.”
Ilia woke, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was exactly the kind of dream that lingers. She woke happy. She thought about talking about it, but decided to keep it to herself.
She murmured, “I love you, too,” and then went to explore other corners of the salon.
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