ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

by Michael A. Martin

  And yet something was missing. While it was true that I needed to protect this project from being polluted by what I will charitably describe as “misinformation”—this translates roughly as “lies” to any reader less inclined than I am to afford the bearers of misinformation every reasonable benefit of the doubt—my emerging skein of narratives was largely bereft of some of the Federation’s more conservative political perspectives. So I contacted a number of individuals and interest groups across the Federation that I thought might best represent the ideological perspectives most contrary—or is that complementary?—to my own.

  I heard back from only three of these respondents. Of these three, two steadfastly refused to let the conversation advance past the not-entirely-unexpected demand to vet my questions in advance. While I’m happy to discuss the broad outlines of the conversation in advance, I will not submit detailed lists of questions for advance approval. Nor will I rule out, a priori, any area of discussion that may appear relevant as the interview unfolds. Nonfiction interviews, like the fictional characters I develop for my stories and novels, have lives of their own.

  The third response, which came from the offices of a culturally conservative political action group known as the New Essentialists, likewise insisted on trying to control the proceedings. This is why the meeting I had hoped to set up with the New Essentialists’ founder, leader, spokesman, and ideological soul, Pascal Fullerton—a man who achieved notoriety (if not much of a following) in 2373 by sabotaging Risa’s weather-control grid as a cautionary object lesson about the perils of Federation complacency and decadence—never happened.

  But Fullerton’s office was kind enough to supply a press release (in both text and holo formats) about his organization and its beliefs. I have chosen to reproduce the text of that press release, perhaps bending my own rules in the process, for two reasons: because of its relevance to my assignment, and in the interests of simple fairness to an ideological opposite—one who nearly persuaded Worf to join him about thirty years ago.

  I will allow Pascal Fullerton’s own words about the state of the Federation before, during, and after the Long War to speak for themselves.

  For Immediate Release

  New Century Begins with UFP Security

  at Lowest Ebb since Undine War

  Phoenix, Arizona, 2 January 2401—The Rally for Human Greatness will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 6, at the Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Join the New Essentialist movement in protesting the morally lax and inhuman policies of (Saurian) President Okeg!

  “The Federation was already in an advanced state of cultural decline long before the Undine appeared,” New Essentialist founder Pascal Fullerton said during a rare recent appearance on the public affairs holoprogram Illuminating the City of Light. “The rot had set in even before the Dominion and their Cardassian and Breen allies were at our throats. Far too many of our people simply wanted to escape in those days, fueling Earth’s skyrocketing rates of holo-addiction and an alarming upsurge in retreats to so-called vacation paradises like Risa and Argelius and Pacifica.

  “After our relatively humanoid Dominion War adversaries were replaced by utterly unsympathetic, inhuman monsters—monsters whose talent for stealing our identities exceeded even that of the Dominion’s Founders—we became even weaker and more morally bankrupt than ever before. We’ve even begun to manifest a new psychosis during recent years, a disorder that manifests itself as the delusion of being one of those demons from fluidic space, disguised as a human being.…

  “What’s the remedy for our decadence, for our collective lack of will? The answer lies with a deliberate disconnection from the quasi-magical technologies-of-abundance upon which we have allowed ourselves to become overly dependent. We need to recover our moral roots, giving our primary allegiance to all things human, or at least humanoid. How far we’ve allowed ourselves to drift from those eternal verities. I cite as an example the creature who currently dwells in the Palias [sic] and runs the Federation government. President Aennik Okeg is not only inhuman, he’s not even mammalian. The vast majority of the populace of Earth, the Federation’s primary founding world, has nothing in common with the UFP’s current president—not even a common phylum.

  “Could Okeg’s decidedly nonhuman perspective and influence have anything to do with some of the most dangerous interstellar policy decisions the Federation Council has made over the past several years? I number among these Starfleet’s many fruitless attempts to reason with foes like the Undine, creatures so alien and antithetical to our way of life that the only truly safe recourse is to deal with them decisively, using the deadliest imaginable force. One can neither reason with, nor make peace with, fiends who have already demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to hold up their end of any treaty.”

  The issues Mr. Fullerton raised on Illuminating the City of Light, along with many others, will be raised at the Saturday rally, which will be followed by panel discussions and/or a public Q&A.

  The New Essentialists for a New Federation is a nonprofit enterprise devoted to reclaiming the lost moral and ethical greatness of the United Federation of Planets and its human founders.

  Contact:

  Kopyc K’narf, Director of Public Relations

  The New Essentialists for a New Federation

  2 Goldwater Square, Paxton Annex

  Phoenix, Arizona, Earth

  PAST AND FUTURE

  WORLDS IN COLLISION

  PROXIMA NEWS SERVICE

  Dateline—Barnard system, Stardate 86003.6*

  Charles Ryerson disappeared almost twenty years ago, along with his small warp-drive-capable skiff—or so the crew of the U.S.S. Zife discovered last week when they picked him up near Barnard’s star. According to Ryerson, time essentially stood still for him during most of his lengthy voyage, even though his vessel’s computers confirmed that he and his ship had indeed been in space continuously for more than nineteen years.

  “He appears to have coasted without engine power once his impulse engines had accelerated his vessel to a speed of just under warp one,” said one of the Zife’s officers, on condition of anonymity. “Newtonian momentum and Einsteinian time dilation took care of the rest.” Though contemporary interstellar travelers rarely experience it today, time dilation is a relativistic phenomenon, predicted by the theories of Albert Einstein, that greatly slows down shipboard time for those traveling in normal space at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The closer one approaches light speed, the more pronounced the effect of time dilation becomes. “From Mr. Ryerson’s perspective,” the Zife officer explained, “he’s only been out here for a little over two weeks.”

  Leapfrogging over two entire decades of history would probably be more than enough to satisfy anyone’s appetite for strangeness and adventure. But Mr. Ryerson’s time displacement turned out to be only the start of the strangeness he was to experience, a truth that he discovered only after one of the Zife’s communications officers made contact with Ryerson’s family on Alpha Centauri III. Ryerson’s relatives greeted the news of their missing patriarch’s unexpected reappearance not with joy, but with disbelief. Ryerson’s wife, Eileen, seemed to react with particularly intense incredulity, and not because she had remarried and moved on since her husband’s disappearance.

  Her reaction was spurred instead by the bizarre fact that Charles Ryerson had never left home, and remained at her side even now, though he appeared to be some two decades older than the man who was calling her from the Zife. “It’s a little like Einstein’s twin paradox,” the renowned science popularizer known as Doctor Jack explained when asked to comment on the story. “Except that we can’t account for the prodigal twin that left home.”

  According to an unconfirmed report, Starfleet Intelligence took both Charles Ryersons into custody early yesterday, presumably to ascertain whether either man might be an Undine sleeper agent. No agency in Starfleet or the Federation government will make an official comment on the matter, and th
e local authorities governing the Barnard system and vicinity are maintaining a like silence.…

  JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #DTI-1

  The Federation Rehabilitation Center at [LOCATION REDACTED BY STARFLEET INTELLIGENCE]

  Despite their penchant for maintaining a low profile, the participation of special agents Adam Lucsly and Wolf Dulmer in the fight against the Undine made headlines across the Alpha Quadrant. As career investigators for the Federation’s notoriously clandestine Department of Temporal Investigations, both Lucsly and Dulmer examined dozens of so-called temporal incursions—trips through time, often but not always taken inadvertently—during their many decades of service in the ranks of the Federation’s most accomplished “time cops.” Of necessity, such investigations have always been conducted quietly, in the figurative shadows. But the Undine effectively dragged the DTI’s activities at least partly into broad daylight, even as the aliens’ attempts to destroy all sentient life in our galaxy changed the course of history itself.

  Though the spotlight of public attention had caught Lucsly and Dulmer squarely in its unblinking glare during the Long War, no one ever would have described either man as talkative. Therefore it shouldn’t come as a shock that this was not an easy interview for me to obtain. Even years after the conflict had ostensibly wound down, and Wolf Dulmer had at long last agreed in principle to grant the Federation News Service’s request for a “public debriefing session” regarding his career as a temporal investigator, two significant stumbling blocks stood in the way. The first of these was Agent Dulmer’s eight-year-long-and-counting inpatient residency at a psychological rehab center (a place whose coordinates I couldn’t disclose even if I wanted to, since our destination was kept from me during my carefully stage-managed transportation to this secret facility). And the second came in the person of Adam Lucsly, Dulmer’s former partner at the DTI.

  Over the years, Lucsly became the closest thing Dulmer now has to a family member, and he is understandably protective of his longtime DTI mentor and colleague—particularly after the temporal incident that precipitated his long-term rehab in the first place. But because of the services my father rendered to the DTI long ago—for security reasons, Lucsly is closemouthed about the exact nature of the temporal crisis that Ben Sisko helped him resolve—I have become the first representative of the media to quiz both former DTI agents together since the height of the Long War.

  I somehow manage not to fidget nervously in the rehab institution’s sterile reception-area-cum-conference-room while Lucsly presents his credentials to one of the orderlies, a tall but otherwise nondescript human male who promptly vanishes behind the door of an adjacent antechamber. As Lucsly and I take our seats at the pastel-blue table whose circular expanse dominates the sparsely appointed room, I feel a gnawing apprehension that belies the intended calming effect of the color scheme.

  Do you mind answering a few preliminary questions while we wait for Agent… for former agent Dulmer?

  LUCSLY: Mister Sisko, I only agreed to do this as part of a… tag-team effort.

  And thank you again for that, Mister Lucsly. However, your perspective is bound to be a bit different from that of former agent Dulmer, in view of his… present circumstances. And you may be able to shed some additional light on the DTI’s involvement in the Undine War.

  LUCSLY: Regardless of what the news-holos were saying at the time, we never played a truly pivotal role in the war. In fact, I can only think of one particular Undine-related incident that involved the DTI even peripherally.

  At the time, the Undine were supposedly trying to use time travel against us, the way the Borg did. Are you saying that that isn’t true?

  LUCSLY: I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for me to talk about any of this.

  For what it’s worth, whatever you say for the record will be thoroughly vetted by Starfleet Intelligence before it’s released to the public.

  LUCSLY: All right. Go ahead and ask your questions.

  After it came to light that Undine operatives had infiltrated at least one of the department’s key temporal monitoring stations—that’s undoubtedly the lone incident you just referred to—you and Mister Dulmer suddenly found yourselves drawn into the heart of the conflict, at least according to the media reports of the time.

  LUCSLY: We’d been in the “heart” of other wars, too, Mister Sisko. The Undine were just the first enemy that managed to get us onto people’s morning news-padds.

  But why would the Undine want to “out” DTI agents? What was in it for them?

  The door to the anteroom opens again before I’ve finished asking my question, interrupting the flow of conversation. Wolf Dulmer, clad in a light blue hospital coverall that closely matches the color of both the table and the walls, enters the room, followed by the same orderly who had left a few minutes earlier. A tall, dark-haired, middle-aged human male, he now looks much more nondescript than he did before, perhaps even passingly familiar. He identifies himself only as Quelle as we finally get around to exchanging perfunctory greetings. The orderly doesn’t leave the room this time, but rather fades into the background, remaining as a watchful yet otherwise mostly unobtrusive presence as Dulmer takes a seat at the round table, roughly equidistant from both Lucsly and myself.

  LUCSLY: The answer to your last question should be obvious, Mister Sisko. The Undine wanted to sow confusion throughout the Federation and beyond.

  No doubt. But the Undine already had far more efficient ways of doing that, wouldn’t you agree?

  DULMER: You’re talking about their impersonations of various Starfleet officers, Earth politicos, and even Klingon warriors.

  LUCSLY: Not to mention Romulan military officers and senators. You may not be aware of this, Mister Sisko, but they even succeeded in placing some of their infiltrators inside the Gorn royal family.

  My point exactly. The Undine were obsessed with wiping out every sentient race in the galaxy, but they went about it very patiently. Sometimes they’d attack directly. At other times they’d use fear to play people against their own public institutions, or to pit one government against another. Those were the places where they sowed confusion, and pretty damned successfully—because they made us begin to doubt that the best and brightest of us really were us. They made us wonder if even our best-protected leaders might not really be alien monsters under the skin.

  DULMER: And some fears are even more fundamental than those the Undine invested so much of their energies into stirring up. Being afraid to trust the admiralty at Starfleet, or even the UFP president, is one thing. But being afraid to trust reality itself—that’s something else entirely.

  I have always suspected that the Department of Temporal Investigations—or at least the two of you—played a much more significant role in the Undine War than the bureau’s previous public statements ever let on. Do either of you care to comment on that?

  LUCSLY: If we were to confirm that kind of speculation, we’d just look like a couple of former minor bureaucrats trying to polish their own reputations.

  DULMER: Come on, Adam. That’s just tail-covering Department boilerplate. The Undine made the DTI at least as big a front in their war against humanity as they did any of their more public targets. We just happened to have been the only ones who knew it at the time.

  Except, of course, for the Undine.

  LUCSLY: Don’t you think you might be overstating your point a bit, Wolf?

  DULMER: Not in the least. The Borg weren’t the only adversary we’ve faced that had the ability to engage in deliberate, directed temporal displacement. The Undine knew how to do it, too. Maybe it was a function of their ability to navigate back and forth between our universe and their own. We were never quite sure about that.

  To put this in plain, non-DTI English, you’re talking about time travel, right? Deliberate, on-purpose time travel. You’re saying that the Undine used that ability as a weapon against us, even though the DTI has publicly denied that ever since the war ended.


  DULMER: Exactly. And with a few notable exceptions, DTI agents like us were the Undine’s only serious obstacles—at least in terms of their temporal operations.

  Agent Lucsly, did an Undine temporal operation ever force you to travel into the past to correct some injury the enemy had inflicted on the timeline?

  LUCSLY: I can recall only one major temporal incursion committed by the Undine—and we managed to nip that one in the bud. We canceled out everything they had done, or tried to do, to the timeline.

  You say that you had to stop an Undine time-travel attack only once. Did you have to respond to a lot of other similar incidents perpetrated by others?

  LUCSLY: I’ll admit, there were a number of occasions—and I’ll refrain from going into any of the details here—when we had to perform a bit of “emergency surgery” on the timeline here and there, to undo something that some Federation time traveler or other had done.

  Time crime, so to speak?

  DULMER: At least half the incidents Adam is referring to were just innocent accidents.

  You mean like when a ship loses its warp drive and has to travel under high impulse long enough to get seriously out of sync with the calendar?

  LUCSLY: That’s simple time dilation—fly long enough at a high enough percentage of c, and subjective shipboard time can slow enough to put you in the wrong century. The DTI considers those sorts of accidents natural phenomena, and doesn’t get involved. Trying to undo that breed of time travel runs too big a risk of getting the universe tangled in one of the worst possible crosstime cat’s cradles.