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.

Star Trek '12: 2812 AD - Braxton

Braxton already knew what would happen to him before he began anything.  It was there in the history books.

By this point in history you will be encouraged to censor.  The first thing you will want to censor is, of course, history, as it will be entirely possible that even an idle survey will reveal things you yourself have done, in your own future but clearly in the past, because the ability to time travel is a matter of course.  Before you have the ability to make these decisions for yourself, your parents will make them for you, and it is common for parents to lack discretion, so there are warrants taken out all the time for parents against their own children, lest they pollute their potential.

…Well, presumably all of this is easier to understand in 2812, when all these rules are common, all these realities a part of everyday living.  Just as you will learn to ride a bike today, tomorrow you will learn these things.

When you break these rules, there is counseling available to help you cope.  If you want to forget what you’ve learned about yourself, what becomes of you, there are hypnotherapies available, quite effective, except there are always lingering elements.  There will always be a part of this unfortunate knowledge in your subconscious.

Presumably, Braxton entered the time service because of what he’d learned.  Perhaps he somehow believed that he could prevent his awful fate from happening.  And possibly he had many instructors who tried explaining why it was unlikely.  For everyone who has made a paradox, and perhaps an alternate reality, in such efforts, there are many others who have proven the rule that time is time no matter how it is experienced.  It is a strictly causal affair.  You have a better chance of winning the lottery, coming face-to-face with Big Foot, than altering your fate, no matter how convoluted you’ve made it.

This does not preclude the concept of free will.  You will always make your own decisions.  It’s just that, from an objective standpoint, everything that will ever happen has already happened, and it’s only from first-person perspective where it still has yet to play out.

Braxton’s fate, of course, was to eventually travel back in time to 1967, where he would lose his timeship to the ambitious Henry Starling and his mind to various temporal integrations necessitated by his obsession with a lost Starfleet crew in the Delta Quadrant.

To those who don’t understand it, time can be a terrible thing.  Braxton was supposed to not only understand, but police it.  It was his life that proved time travel had not yet been perfected.

He of course, did not know this.  As with any other contemporary to an established idea, he believed that everyone already knew everything they needed to.  The fact is, he never even knew of his own participation in the Temporal Cold War.

Braxton never recovered from temporal psychoses.  He did, however, manage to enjoy himself in odd moments during his time, mostly when he stopped taking everything so seriously.

There's a Twit Here Somewhere...

The Scouring Monk wasn't aware that he was an outlaw until he was told.  He trusted the source.  Now he had determine what he'd done...
     
The place to start, as it always was, had to be the Owl's Eye, where Monk would find the source himself, who went by the name Waterloo.  The Owl's Eye wasn't a casual sort of destination, however, and Monk was fairly deliberate about all his movements. But a problem? Hardly.  He had a pair of shoes for that.  For women, owning many pairs of shoes was a matter of fashion.  For Monk, it was about getting around.
     
There was only one place to find his Destiny Shoes: in his Foot Locker.  It wasn't the source of all Monk's power, but it was handy.  The shoes he needed for the Owl's Eye were brown with blue highlighting, and there was only one pair like that. It was that easy...
     
Putting them on had the effect of instantaneously transporting Monk to the Owl's Eye, where he found Waterloo drunk off his ass.
    
"Loo, you jerk," he said in greeting, before knocking the old fool off his stool.  "What've you been spreading around this time?"
     
"It wasn't me. But it appears that someone has been spreading the word around that you're El Bandido. Bad luck, friend..."
     
At that moment, Monk wondered if he still had a twin.
     
"I was worried for a moment," he said. "I thought someone was being serious."
     
The Owl's Eye was a new place that had been made to look lived-in, a 21st century false-front; it was hip, and ready for the jaded.  You shouldn't let the apparent character of Monk or Waterloo color your opinion of its patrons. They're not really so bad to hang out with.  They do, however, think they're birds, but it's weird, because even birds have a good reason when they tweet, whereas these people...don't?
     
"You misunderstand," El Bandido will say. "I do not mean to disparage. To tweet is surely divine."  He smiles just then, looks around.
     
The owner of the Owl's Eye looks around, too, wondering if Monk and Waterloo will be causing problems.  All he sees is a girl with a camera.  Monk realized that he wasn't going to have enough time to put up with this nonsense.  He pulled Waterloo aside and asked the tough question.
     
"Are you going to contact K or not?"
     
"That's tougher said than done and you know it," Waterloo almost didn't say.  "K is harder to reach these days than you are."
     
Monk hadn't seen her for over two years, hadn't heard from her since the spring.  Sometimes it seemed like yesterday, sometimes longer...
     
He could never forget her face, though.  Never.  He saw her face everywhere, though, almost like he expected to see her just around the corner, and the universe was just getting him ready.  But all the same, K was K, and there didn't seem to be much that was going to change that.  It was just that, she left a gap.
     
"She was just here," Waterloo said.
     
"That's somewhat unlikely, but I'll play along," Monk said.  "She's the one who told you?"
    
 "I'm surprised you're so quick to believe me," Waterloo said.  "You must really be getting desperate."
     
"You'll believe just about anything at this point about her.  She's a zombie these days, swear to god.  Loves the brains."
     
"She has nothing to do with any of this," Monk realized.  "You're just trying to distract me."
     
"What did I say.  You'll believe anything," Waterloo said.
     
"She was just here, believe me.  She has nothing to do with the El Bandido business.  But she could probably help."
     
"The thing is, I don't know if I want her help," Monk said.  "I'm trying really hard to get over her.  And, well, to hold onto her."
     
"You're nuts," Waterloo remarked.  "Anyway, the best way to get around is to advertize.  You should just assume you're El Bandido."
     
"Let me guess," Monk mused, "That's what she thought."
     
"Like I've said, everyone thinks so," Waterloo said.  "I'd believe it, too, if I didn't know you better.  You're more bendy than bandit."
     
"Your confidence in me is astounding," Monk said.  "But I guess I could be in a worse position.  Now to figure out what to do with it..."
     
As you might have guessed, K was not unaware of circumstances.  She wasn't even that far away.  Not that she wanted Monk to know.  She was avoiding him not because of the El Bandido story, but because she had become convinced that he was a pirate.  She was wrong of course, not because he wasn't a pirate, but because he never told anyone; there was no reasonable expectation of exposure.
     
Monk did a search for his name and "El Bandido" and ended up finding out that the terms were synonymous.  Maybe he was Bandido after all...
     
He turned to the only person he truly trusted, the Black Squirrel.  But he would have to visit his shoe locker again, to get access.

Star Trek '12: 2712 AD - Future Guy

He really hated his father.

For lack of specifics, we will call the father “Levon Helm.”  There are very few things known in any period of the man known as “Future Guy.”  His father Levon knew even less about him, and that was why he hated him.  In fact, he held him in contempt.  The future was the same as the past to him, as it was to any civilized culture of that time.  It was he who saw its truest potential.  He did not start the Temporal Cold War, but he saw its wicked potential, as surely as if it were architectural designs for what Starfleet was calling the Hall of Time, on the old Academy grounds in San Francisco.

Let’s further humor ourselves and call our humble protagonist “Rooney.”  There has always been speculation as to which race he was, but Rooney even by this name could be anyone.  That’s Rooney’s greatest trick, other than the outright genetic manipulation of the Suliban to be his agents at his chosen arena, which he determined to be the formation of the Federation because it was least likely that Starfleet would look there, with too many conflicting interests for enough lucidity.

Simply put, in his own time, Rooney could not have avoided Starfleet temporal agents if he tried.  He lived three centuries before his greatest enemy, but already three centuries earlier investigations had begun in earnest, even if regulation had not yet been initiated.  If he attempted to operate in any of the periods where an agent existed in real-time, Rooney would have failed before he even began.  That was why he branched out to a time where civilization was advanced and spread enough to be manipulated without itself being aware of the fact, because the truth was, no agent could be a success without indigenous allies.

He correctly gambled that an isolated captain on an isolated ship could not thwart his efforts to any significant degree, even when they met face-to-face, on multiple occasions.  Rooney eliminated his only real rival in the conflict by sending him to the very planet this captain originated from, in a period of so little consequence that his presence could be corrected and his threat made obsolete in one effort by the human captain.  There had once been speculation that Rooney himself had led himself into this trap, but it could hardly have been likely for a genius.

When he wasn’t busy strategizing, Rooney suffered to think of Levon Helm, the inspiration for his grand designs.  Just as the universe was undergoing a series of drastic changes at the time, Levon was beset by his own problems, an inability to remain solvent, a failure at everything he pursued, unable to support Rooney and his budding abilities.  Rooney hated him for it, resented him, believed him to be a saboteur, and in fact used him as subconscious motivation, perhaps one day to travel back just early enough in time to correct this blight on himself, and perhaps improve his own abilities, unless his was the misfortune to eliminate himself in the process, should Levon prove so great a success that he did not have the time for offspring, or even neglect.  He had never been a tyrannical parent, never had any vision, so far as Rooney had ever noticed.  Perhaps, just perhaps…Rooney ought to thank him.

Was that right?  Is so, might it cast into question all of Rooney’s dreams?  Had he plotted the course of his life and all of history on a need to undo something that would alter himself?  He had always been a conflicted man, even in the midst of his glorious, subtle triumphs, and had avoided scrutinizing his motivations for fear that such conclusions might be reached.  He had always assumed that his father’s embarrassment spoke for itself, and that he could pin all his frustrations on it without reserve, and yet, the one moment he looked too far into the abyss, as it were, the abyss did indeed look back.

That was the long and short of it.  Rooney stood back from a desk cluttered with temporal maps, and wiped away the digital ones that hung in the air before him.  He was due for another confrontation with the captain, and suddenly he braced himself, unable to enter the temporal chamber.  Perhaps in another day clarity would be restored…

Star Trek '12: 2612 AD - Founders

A long time ago in a part of the galaxy known as the Gamma Quadrant, many ambassadors were sent forth from the Founders to explore the nature of the universe.  These ambassadors were a little unusual, in that they were infants, not knowing even their own kind.  It was the wisdom of the Founders to choose them for this service so that they could discover themselves at the same time as discovering the circumstances in which they found themselves, so as to form an unbiased opinion.  Always they would feel the call home, to discover their own origins, and report what they learned, but they would be untainted by prejudice.

This would always be ironic, because the Founders themselves had allowed themselves to be corrupted by their own past.

A long time from now, one of these infants will return.  He will be the last of them, and he will be one of the very few of those who were sent away to make it.  In many ways, these ambassadors will have mirrored the original experiences of the Founders, the ones that helped form the Dominion, which terrorized the galaxy for a time, eventually to be defeated by an inversion of itself, and through another reunion with one of its own.

This particular infant, this particular ambassador, spent five hundred years on his own.  He did not know sentient life for all that time.  He observed space all the same, and came to know many wonders, saw manipulations from a thousand different forms, the secrets of nature, decay and creation unfold on an unimaginable scale, with unmatched subtlety, a ballet of atoms and elements.  There were times when he could see the unseen forces, the unknowable architects, interpret the unthinkable in the tiniest acts.

Then one day it was snagged by a passing starship, caught in the exhaust port, unable to resist a sudden curiosity, half-deliberate and part accident, spending a week exploring the mechanics before even considering interacting with the inhabitants, perhaps because he had no conception of them, too complex and terrifying to contemplate.

The poetry of the hardware fascinated the changeling to no end.  He was more experienced than almost any other being in the universe, yet in no practical way had he ever conceived of such things.  There was much recognition, the changeling slowly realized, and he spent several more weeks replicating these discoveries.  This was something he could understand.  It was the conspiracy of human life that baffled him.  It was entirely foreign to him, the infinitely more complex nature of bringing the whole engine together.  Had he known these beings believed thought to be the essential ingredient of life, he would have laughed for the first time.

The riddle of expression was what bothered him most.  Forced to create it for himself, the changeling did not know where to begin.  He had no inherent form.  He had only ever observed.  He knew the ingredients, but he had no idea how they tasted when put together.

He fashioned himself into the most simple thing he could think of, a communications badge, and allowed himself to be worn by one of these individuals, and spent a month like that, fulfilling a function and observing, completely mindless to its significance, and perpetually unconvinced that he would ever make sense of anything that happened.  He picked up the language, mastered it, yet remained silent, as he had been since he first became aware of himself.

One day the woman to whom he had been attached went on a mission and was shot, and it was he himself who was hit, and he uttered his first sound, a scream, and the woman didn’t even register his existence, believed until the day she died that she was the one who’d made the sound.  She never even entertained another possibility, though her colleagues continually suggested that she had been mistaken, even though they couldn’t explain it themselves.

He started making communications, conversations, mimicking her voice, and though it caused a little more confusion, it was also basically ignored, more of himself that remained hidden from the world he believed he would never truly know.

The pull began without him noticing, something that had been going on all his life, but kicked into gear when he had to give up the communications badge existence, when the woman died and the badge was stuck in a drawer.  He didn’t want to live in a drawer, so changed forms, and felt the pull.  It was irresistible.  It was undeniable.

He shot through the stars.  He went through the wormhole.  He briefly acknowledged the Prophets.  He landed on the current homeworld of the Founders.  He didn’t think he had much to tell them.  But he was finally home.

Star Trek '12: 2512 AD - Starfleet

Alexander Chase never wanted to be first officer of anything, but it was the only way to reach the captain’s chair.  At least, if he was lucky, that might be the case again.  Starfleet had seen better days.

Serving under Captain Winick was proving to be a lot more interesting than he’d thought.  After years of idling on Academy grounds, waiting for a position to open in one of the few ships still in service (which did not guarantee that they were in working order), Chase was surprised when Winick contacted him directly.  Maybe that’s how it used to be done, too, when the fleet had a mandate, a purpose, hell even a Prime Directive.  There were more officers than could find work, so most of them sat around doing civilian jobs when someone bothered to hire them, or just sat around, which was the last thing Chase wanted to do, but he couldn’t avoid doing, because the Great Bird of the Galaxy had not only died, but left no next of kin, no will, and definitely no successor, and so everything fell apart.

It had been a pretty good run, all told, several centuries of exploration and making friends out of enemies and making contact with the unknown, surviving every challenge, upholding an ideal and a dream, and producing some of the finest individuals to ever travel the stars.  Decline comes to everything, even Starfleet, even the Federation, whose Council had not met in more than half a century.  The only reason the fleet was still active at all was because the remaining ships had not completely fallen apart.  The problem was a deficiency of great men.

At some point observers had stopped looking for them, and when they started overlooking great men, great men stopped appearing.  There was no longer any incentive.  Chase had been surprised by everything about Winick, whose career he had never seen reported in any of the news services, which squawked incessantly about inane events of the day and tracked things that could be made to sound like crises, but ignored anyone who might actually make a difference.  He’d stopped believing such individuals were possible.  Winick was bold enough to make her interests plain.  She cut through all the bullshit and asked Chase directly if he’d like a job.  She’d fired her last commander.

“Come work for me and you’ll see the future open before you like a sunrise,” she’d said.  Chase believed her.

The ship was predictably unimpressive, of a famous lineage but hardly capable of living up to it, even under Captain Winick.  There was only so much she could do, operating with a crew of fifty, the best Starfleet could afford any vessel these days, just enough to keep it running, keep it in space, as long as the fuel held out.  Winick had him take a tour of the whole ship, and asked him how many of the positions he could fill in a pinch, and Chase had to admit that his knowledge was shallow.  She seemed to understand, but said she valued his honesty most of all.  Still, he’d have to learn, and pull double-shifts until he did.  There wasn’t much sleep on a ship like that anyway.

No, he didn’t want to be first officer.  He craved the captain’s seat, wanted to make a difference, wanted badly to prove great things were still possible.  Yet he learned under Winick that great things could be defined in small gestures.  They visited the new Vulcan homeworld, helped reopen Romulan mining operations, brought the Vidiians to the Gamma Quadrant, introduced Klingons and Hirogen, even helped the Ferengi market get back on its feet, taught Andorians and Breen about beaches.  They visited countless worlds, saw innumerable wonders.  Winick announced that she was retiring.  Would Chase like that seat after all?

Before he wouldn’t have hesitated.  The old him had almost passed on the assignment in the first place, said it was beneath him, would have spat in her face to finally condescend him with the one thing he’d always wanted after holding him back for years.  The truth was, he was still young.  The universe was old, and he was young.

“I will show you a glorious sunset,” he finally replied.

(Based on the aborted STAR TREK: FINAL FRONTIER animated series.)

Star Trek '12: 2412 AD - Nexus

A ribbon of brilliant light flashed through the sky, and Ellis stared up in wonder.  It was the outward manifestation of the Nexus, a gateway to the reality of your choice.  Federation scientists had been studying it for years, ever since the report of Jean-Luc Picard that said James T. Kirk, or a version of him, could still be found there.  Kirk was a Starfleet legend, who saved the galaxy a hundred times over, died twice in the line of duty, thanks to the Nexus, and the best part was, having once entered this portal, there remained a copy of him inside it, as Picard noted of an El-Aurian friend of his.  The best part was, since Picard had entered the Nexus himself, there was a copy of him there, too.

Ellis had been fascinated by the notion of meeting his hero from the moment he’d read the report, part of standard Starfleet Academy paradox training, the last course of study he’d undertaken before dropping out to further explore the possibility of experiencing the Nexus himself.  Thanks to standard spatial analysis, he knew precisely where and when the Nexus would next appear, and he intended to be present, no matter the risk.

He knew that he could not simply pilot a ship into the ribbon, that the ribbon had to be the inciting factor, otherwise he would simply be smashed into oblivion, and lose his chance and life on a reckless and meaningless collision.  He signed aboard a Niberite Alliance trade vessel at the first opportunity, and used his spare time to calculate the best possible location for him to wait when 2412 finally came.

He ended up choosing a small moon in the Rigel system, where he could wait in an old mining outpost.  The moment it passed overhead, Ellis hopped into his shuttlecraft and took off, hoping he could pull ahead of it without being affected by its gravitational force, which had wrecked many other ships in the past, including the one Kirk was helping to commission during his first encounter with the ribbon, and first death.  Since by its nature the Nexus could not be tracked by conventional methods, this was the best he could hope for, counting on blind chance.  He did not want to risk the mania others had succumbed to on similar quests.

The shuttlecraft was rocked violently, but Ellis held his composure.  He’d made enough modifications to ensure his safety on this voyage, adapting Tholian technology in what he considered to be clever and innovative ways, perhaps prize-winning, if he failed in his real goal.  Still, the vibrations were brutal, and Ellis found that he was glad that there had been little time to eat that day.  His nerves, already getting the best of him the night before, so that he’d gotten little sleep on top of missing several other meals, were attempting to match the pull of the ribbon, so that he was no longer sure what caused his own movements.  His mind was too fuzzy to be sure of anything.  That was why he’d planned it out well in advance, so he would not have to rely on himself in the moment, much less the possibility of a malfunctioning computer.

Finally, Ellis thought that he could feel the ribbon itself, even through the bulkhead, its dazzling heat a kind of comforting embrace.  Control panels all around him were starting to pop, sending electrical fires and smoke into the cabin, threatening to suffocate him, and he could not control his shaking hands long enough to suppress any of it, much less utter a verbal command.  The view outside the nearest port was too blinding, and Ellis was afraid that he was going to pass out.

It was almost like a gentle nudge, the faint sensation that radiated all around him, and suddenly Ellis was back at the Academy, sitting in class and studying that report again, and he looked up, lost in thought, and almost didn’t register the fact that his instructor was holding court with a colleague, ignoring the cadets, lost in some shared adventure, something about jumping horses over a ravine, some kind of miracle, and a smile came over his face.  He had made it.