To Talia, Jacob,
and Wendy
CONTENTS
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A NOTE ON SOURCES
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PROLOGUE - COCHRANE’S FLIGHT: 2063-2120
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CHAPTER I - FIRST STEPS: 2120-2155
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CHAPTER II - THE ROMULAN WAR: 2155-2160
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CHAPTER III - THE FEDERATION: 2160-2245
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CHAPTER IV - THE EDGE OF NIGHT: 2245-2290
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CHAPTER V - THE NEW ERA: 2290-2311
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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A NOTE ON SOURCES
The following history was commissioned by the Council of the United Federation of Planets to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding. The true story that follows is based on first-person interviews, official documents, letters, personal and official logs, journalistic accounts, and memoirs. Many sources were already in the care of the researchers at the Federation Library on Memory Alpha. Other material was gathered through visits to the archives of the Federation member worlds, including the Vulcan Science Academy, the War College of the Andorian High Command, and the Klingon High Council, as well as many of the Federation’s starships and starbases, colonies, and outposts.
David A. Goodman
Memory Alpha Historian
ABOVE: Zefram Cochrane’s warp-drive prototype, the Phoenix.
PROLOGUE
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COCHRANE’S FLIGHT
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2063-2120
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“Don’t try to be a great man, just be a man. Let history make its own judgments.”
—Zefram Cochrane, 2073
The two figures met on a chilly April evening near a missile silo in northern Montana. They were from different worlds, Earth and Vulcan, and this was the first open contact between the two species (Vulcans, it was later discovered, had been visiting Earth in secret for centuries). They introduced themselves to each other in the greetings common on their worlds; the Vulcan offered his salute, the Human, a handshake.
“I didn’t know what I was supposed to do,” the Human would say in an interview years later. “The truth was I was pretty drunk.”
It was an introduction without fanfare, but it would prove significant in the annals of diplomacy; aliens from across the quadrant would honor the date, April 5, “First Contact Day,” as one of the only intergalactic holidays. Though the other founding member races of the Federation—the Andorians, the Tellarites, and the Vulcans—had already had their own “first contacts” with one another previous to this, they would honor this day specifically because they understood that without this meeting there would have been no Federation.
ABOVE: An artist’s rendition of the meeting of Cochrane and Solkar on April 5, 2063, known colloquially throughout the Federation as “First Contact.” The original currently hangs in the Hall of the Federation Council.
But it was still a prologue; the formation of an intergalactic union was a very long way off. When these two beings met, they did not talk about trade or alliances. Neither one felt he had the authority, the legitimacy, or the necessity to speak for anyone but himself. The Human, Zefram Cochrane, and the Vulcan, Solkar, did not, nor could not, foresee the effect their actions would have on the Galaxy. They were products of their worlds, closed societies whose intermingling would change both their home planets’ populations, as well as those of dozens of other worlds.
Zefram Cochrane was born on January 27, 2031, into a society that for decades had not known a moment’s peace. The wars began in 1992, when genetically enhanced men and women came to power in countries around the world during what would be known as the “Eugenics Wars,” the first stage of World War III. Historian John Gill, whose multivolume history of World War III is the definitive work on the subject, wrote: “In four catastrophic years, these genetic supermen seized control with the use of nuclear weapons. They devastated populations and permanently redrew the map of the World.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Indeed, the legacy of the Eugenics Wars is so severe and horrific, shortly after it became public that time travel was possible, many people thought it would be worth going back in time and changing this chapter in Human history. In 2293, one terrorist group of Humans took action: calling itself “1992,” they stole the U.S.S. Yorktown from the Starfleet museum and attempted to return to the past and erase these events from Earth’s history. They disappeared without a trace along with their ship. Because we believe we are all living in an unchanged history, if they were successful it was only in creating an alternate timeline.
North, Central, and South America became the American Empire under the dictator Asahf Ferris; Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands fell under the rule of Bernard Maltuvis; Europe was ruled by John Ericssen; and Asia through the Middle East, dubbed the Eastern Coalition, was under the control of Khan Noonien Singh.
“Their control did not last long,” Gill wrote, “because their oversized ambitions led them to war with one another.” This weakened their holds on their populations and allowed resistance movements the opportunity to overthrow them.
“But their devastating effect on the world was permanent,” Gill wrote, “and peace would elude the new nations that were left in their wake.”
At the time of Cochrane’s birth, civilization continued to deteriorate, and, with a few blips of hope, careened head-long into barbarism. In 2037, NASA was re-established and had launched the Charybdis, a manned extra-solar probe. But only a few years later the forces of anti-intellectualism took root in the former United States (now part of a failing democracy that included Central and South America) and in 2044, responding to the public unrest, the government ordered a purge of academia. Cochrane’s parents, two academics at the University of Chicago, were killed, and, as a teenage orphan, he was forced to learn how to survive on his own in a world ravaged by war, famine, and climate change.
“My parents raised me to be an intellectual,” Cochrane wrote in his autobiography. “They wanted me to be naturally curious and analytical. But when they were gone, the violent anti-intellectualism of society forced me to hide these tendencies.” He became a pragmatist. His desire to study science was only accepted in one arena: the conduct of war. So he found work at one of the last outposts of scientific research, working for a military contractor.
The planet, meanwhile, was moving inexorably close to the second stage of World War III. The conflicts of the past had reduced the amount of livable land; food and energy were at a premium. In 2051, Le Kuan, a general in the armed forces of the Eastern Coalition, overthrew a tottering democracy. Though he wasn’t genetically engineered, Kuan was still brutal and ambitious. Faced with a starving population and dwindling resources, he launched an attack on the Americas in an attempt to increase his holdings. Europe, under the governance of the European Hegemony, sided with the Americas; the Pacific nations joined with Kuan; and the final stage of World War III began in earnest.
Throughout the conflict, Cochrane found himself designing and developing anti-matter weapons. “I was fascinated by matter/anti-matter reactions, and this was the only way I could get access to the latest research.” Cochrane was especially intrigued by the reports of an element called dilithium, excavated near the South Pole, where astrogeologists had been discovering extraterrestrial material in meteorites since the twentieth century.
ABOVE: Unrefined dilithium crystals.
ABOVE: A UAP news article reported the theft of the ship that would eventually be named the S.S. Botany Bay. It would be two centuries before the f
ate of the ship was discovered; it carried almost one hundred genetically engineered superman and -women into the twenty-third century, where they would create more havoc, and more deaths.
“The more I learned about this crystal that wasn’t native to Earth,” Cochrane wrote, “the more it seemed to hold the answer to regulating the very unstable reaction of a theoretical matter/anti-matter reactor.” This was his secret breakthrough, leading to his design of what would become the first warp engine.
Revisionist historians have postulated that Cochrane purposely kept it out of the hands of the dictators who ruled his world, but a more honest examination of the man can’t ignore the one quote Cochrane gave on the topic. “I was an opportunist,” he said in an interview. “I kept my discovery to myself until I could figure out a way to make money off of it.”
While bombs dropped and troops from the differing factions attempted to take what little valuable land was left, Cochrane bided his time, assembling a trusted circle of technicians, engineers, and scientists. An engineer named Lily Sloane was one of Cochrane’s first recruits. “He was frustrating; on the one hand he was so irresponsible, he drank so much,” Sloane said, in a biography of Cochrane, “but he had this vision, and it gave you hope, so I found myself doing what he wanted.”
In 2053, a strike by American forces destroyed the governing palace of the Eastern Coalition, killing Le Kuan. His replacement, his son Le Yu, immediately sued for peace. The leaders of the world sent delegates to San Francisco, one of the few major cities untouched by the war, to hammer out their cease-fire agreement (the United Nations Headquarters having been destroyed along with the rest of Manhattan). They met in a building on the Presidio, which had once been a United States military installation before it was shut down and leased to private businesses, including a producer of science fiction movies. The peace treaty written there that ended WWIII was far from perfect (Gill pointed out that it greatly overreacted on the subject of Human genetic engineering, limiting untold benefits from future medical advancements) but it established a diplomatic infrastructure that remained in place for many years following its signing.
The war finally over, Cochrane quietly made his move. He had a computer expert erase the location of an already secret missile silo in Montana from all military records, then moved his ragtag group there, with the promise that this venture would make them all wealthy. “We were like a rogue ‘Manhattan Project,’” Sloane said. “Not only were we forced to scrounge what Zee [her nickname for Cochrane] needed for his project, we also needed food and water.”
ABOVE: This excerpt from the Treaty of San Francisco signed in 2055 details the banning of all genetic engineering of the Human genome. Though the Eugenics Wars were already decades in the past, it speaks to the long-lasting; effect they had on Earth and, by extension, the Federation. A slightly altered version of this clause would eventually become part of both the Constitution of Earth’s world government and, much later, the Federation Charter.
Cochrane and his team turned the missile in the silo into Earth’s first warp-drive vessel. “It took a decade, which doesn’t seem so long,” Sloane said, “but if we’d been building a weapon with funding from a government, it would have only been a couple of years.”
Cochrane had chosen his location well. Throughout the end of the war and Earth’s tentative peace, the team was able to live undisturbed, allowing them to finish the project. On April 5, 2063, Cochrane piloted his refurbished missile, christened the Phoenix, past the speed of light. He and his team had little time to plan how they would cash in, because Cochrane’s return to Earth brought a piece of the Galaxy with him: the Vulcan Solkar.
If, as John Gill said, Cochrane’s flight “was the work of an extraordinary man fighting upstream against the flow of his own planet’s history,” then the work of Cochrane’s counterpart from Vulcan was the exact opposite: Solkar was a common Vulcan living a common Vulcan life.
1,400 years before, the Vulcans had been a violent and savage race, engaged in conflicts that could have led to their destruction. From out of this cauldron came Surak, Vulcan’s greatest philosopher. “Surak recognized that violence came from emotions,” wrote Syran, a well-known follower of Surak, “and therefore only by rejecting all emotions and embracing a philosophy of logic would Vulcan be able to survive.”
Surak was a victim of the conflicts he sought to end. He died of radiation poisoning and did not live to see his people eventually embrace his philosophy. But by the time Humanity encountered the Vulcans, they were a peaceful, advanced, extremely orderly society, and Solkar reflected that. He was the son of an astrophysicist/biologist, as he himself had become. He gained admission to the Vulcan Science Academy just as his ancestors had and his descendants would. The Vulcan High Command assigned him to the science vessel T’plana-Hath at the age of sixty (though several decades older than Cochrane, he looked a good deal younger), which was considered a logical age to assume command of an exploratory team. He took his ship on the prescribed course through the prescribed systems, formally adhering to strict codes of scientific conduct. When his ship’s sensors detected the Phoenix traveling at Warp 1.1, piloted by a species that, according to the Vulcan database, did not have warp drive, there was no decision for Solkar to make. The standard procedures laid out by the High Command gave a ship’s commanding officer only one choice for this contingency: Solkar was to investigate and report back. So he landed his ship at the coordinates where the warp ship was launched, and that night experienced his first glass of bourbon.
Although history books have often portrayed the first contact as a civilized meeting of great minds, Lily Sloane described a far less rarefied and auspicious event. “Zee took him into the bar we’d set up, and tried to get him drunk,” Sloane said, “but the Vulcans could hold their liquor, and they didn’t get drunk.
ABOVE: Though the Third World War had finally come to an end, the horrors weren’t over. After the war, Colonel Philip Green, one of the leaders of the Western Alliance, instituted his own draconian measures. In an attempt to “purify” Humanity, he ordered the deaths of those Humans deemed “nuclear mutations.” Hundreds of thousands died before he himself was overthrown.
ABOVE: The Vulcan philosopher Surak grew up in a world plagued by war and on the edge of self-destruction. As a young man, he fought in those wars in the infantry; he attributed much of his later philosophy to the changes he underwent during this ordeal. in this section from the original first draft manuscript of his teachings, Surak relays his experience in escaping from captivity into the Forge, an area of Vulcan decimated by nuclear war. This was the beginning of his pilgrimage; his experience there would shape his attitudes toward emotions.
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AN EXCERPT FROM THE TEACHINGS OF SURAK
TRANSLATED FROM THE VULCAN
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… I was sick over my humiliation; I had succumbed to their torture, given them all the information they had sought, and even some they had not thought to ask. When I escaped, they needed to expend no energy in trying to find me. I had run into the Forge, where nothing could survive.
It would be years before the radiation sickness I contracted in the Forge would kill me, but kill me it would. Even then, I knew this, but I still somehow hoped that I would survive. During my long trek in the Forge, I thought about hope, and realized hope is fear; it is the mind’s desire to deny what it knows to be true and unpleasant. Hope is fear.
I traveled at night and dreamed of the comfort of home … but yet, I knew I could not return there. The thought of my betrayal brought guilt, and I knew I could never go home; the guilt was too powerful. I thought about guilt, and realized guilt is also fear; fear that what I had done would deprive me of love. Guilt is fear.
I continued on into the Forge, two days without water, three days … one morning I was awakened by the sound of a flying warcraft losing control and crashing. I ran to the wreck. The two pilots inside were dead, but I pulled their bodies from the wreckage anyway
, before the craft finally exploded. I sat with the bodies for a long time. They had no water, but thirst was overcoming me, and I thought … I could drink their blood. It would allow me to survive.
My religious upbringing considered this a violation of sacred law. If I did this and was discovered, I would be an outcast, I would be tried and executed. I won’t tell them, I thought; no one would know. But what if they found out?
I considered. What was I afraid of? The dead bodies would be taken by the ground. Their blood would allow me to live a little longer. But why did I need to live longer? I could not go home. But then I realized I had to go home, even with the guilt. My family wants me home. I loved my family, and they loved me. I knew this was real love. But would my family still love me if they’d known I drank the blood of the dead to survive? Would they still love me knowing I had betrayed my comrades? I was trapped in indecision.
I saw for the first time that you could not have love without fear. Love, true love—not love motivated by carnal pleasure, but love motivated by a need for emotional connection—is a force for good; it leads to generosity and compassion. But fear stalks in love’s shadow, and uses love for its own ends. When love is real, fear of the loss of that love is always nearby. You cannot have good emotions without bringing the bad ones along.
I stepped back from my indecision; like a cool breath, logic took over and told me to survive. I drank the blood, buried the bodies, and continued on.
Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years Page 1
