Living Memory

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Once seated at the desk in his quarters, Spock leaned back and steepled his fingers as Cartwright’s stern features appeared on his screen. “Captain Spock.”

  “Admiral Cartwright. I believe I already know why you have contacted me.”

  The admiral glowered. “Why don’t you tell me, then, Captain?”

  “No doubt Starfleet Security has arrived at the same conclusions I have regarding the possible correlation of vacuum flare outbreaks to locations visited by Enterprise crew members during shore visits. As only two members of the Enterprise crew from the period in question are aboard the Asimov…”

  Cartwright nodded. “We suspected it had something to do with Nyota Uhura. What just happened at Denobula clinches it. Only she was present at every location struck so far, and in reverse order.”

  “Indeed.” Spock recalled the Enterprise’s visit to Denobula Triaxa, which had occurred late in Christopher Pike’s tenure as captain. It had been a period of rest and recuperation for the crew after a turbulent mission, taking advantage of Denobula’s advanced medical facilities as well as their extensive leave facilities. Though most Denobulans preferred not to travel beyond their world, their society was unfailingly welcoming to visitors.

  “I understand why you and Admiral Kirk were hesitant to bring her name into this without solid evidence. But over a hundred people died at Denobula, Spock. This is no natural phenomenon—this is a targeted, ongoing attack on Federation worlds. And Commander Uhura is involved somehow.”

  “Admiral, I have known Commander Uhura for the vast majority of her Starfleet career. I can state with confidence that the probability of the commander having any voluntary involvement with any force or entity hostile to Federation security is effectively zero.”

  “Spock, you’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard that from the friends and colleagues of people who turned out to be enemy agents. Or at least assets, through extortion or neural conditioning. It’s possible that the side Uhura presents to the public is not her true face.”

  “It is premature to derive that conclusion from the available evidence, sir.”

  “Don’t give me the Vulcan runaround, Spock! You’re trying to protect a friend, the same as anyone else would.”

  “I assure you, Admiral, I am able to retain my objectivity. I will follow the evidence where it leads—but as yet, we have too little evidence to act upon.”

  Cartwright reined in his temper. “Which is why your orders are to bring Nyota Uhura back to Earth for questioning. We need to find out everything she knows, whether she’s an active part of this or an unwilling dupe.”

  “Or to clear her if the correlation is determined to be spurious.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. All we want is to get to the truth.”

  Spock raised a brow. “In that case, Admiral, you and I are already committed to the same goal. If that is all, sir?”

  The admiral glared. “You have your orders, Captain. Starfleet out.”

  Golden Gate Park

  San Francisco

  Leonard McCoy frowned on Ashley Janith-Lau’s behalf as the two of them strolled together in the park. “It sounds like your Academy visit didn’t ease your concerns.”

  The activist doctor sighed, watching a group of children run past in the middle distance. It was a warm, clear Saturday afternoon, the first chance she and McCoy had gotten to touch base since her visit. “In some ways it did. Most of the Warborn seem genuinely committed to the goal of finding a peaceful purpose.”

  “But in other ways?”

  “I’m more concerned than ever that Starfleet could succumb to the temptation to use them as soldiers. Commander Rakatheema as good as said he was hoping for that.” Her lips narrowed. “As for Jim Kirk, I’m not sure which side of the question he’s on. Though I give him credit for listening with an open mind.”

  McCoy smiled at her. “So… you’re calling him Jim now, eh?”

  She smiled back, a bit quizzically. “Sure. That’s what you do when you make friends with someone.”

  His face sank. “Just friends?”

  “What else would you expect? I mean, heaven knows, the man has a reputation, and I can see why women fall for him. But come on, did you seriously imagine I’d ever pair off with a military man?”

  “Oh.” He furrowed his brow. “I guess I’ve gotten so used to associating with Starfleet people that it didn’t occur to me.”

  Janith-Lau finally registered his disappointment. “You were hoping something would happen! Is that why you set up our meeting? Some kind of matchmaking ploy?”

  McCoy cleared his throat. “I set it up because Jim asked me to, like I told you. But, well… Jim’s a lonely man. And you’re quite the catch, my dear. You can’t blame me for hoping two of my friends could find happiness together.”

  She stared at him. “Really. Is that why you haven’t made a play for me yourself?”

  He stared back, stunned into silence. “W-well,” he finally stammered, “I’m certainly not the type to poach on another man’s… I mean…”

  Janith-Lau scoffed, arms akimbo. “ ‘Poach’? What is this, Capella IV? I’m not a possession, Leonard.”

  “No, of course not. That’s not what I…” He sighed. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing for me to say. I just meant that I wanted Jim to have a shot at being happy.”

  She relaxed and gave him a beautiful smile. “You know what? Jim said something very similar about you.” Her expression sharpened again. “And he was rather quicker to accept that I had a say in the matter.”

  McCoy didn’t trust himself to reply. He was feeling lost. Was she angry at him or flirting with him? “I… thought you weren’t interested in military men.”

  Her head tilted in confusion. “Then why did you think I’d be interested in Jim?”

  “Well… because he’s Jim! I don’t know. Maybe I figured he could win you over. I never expected you to make the first move. Least of all with me.”

  She stepped closer. “You, Leonard McCoy, are the least military Starfleet officer I’ve ever met. You’re a healer, a man of great compassion. The fact that you tolerate being in Starfleet at all is my greatest source of reassurance about its intentions.” She smirked. “Even if you do act like a relic of a less enlightened age sometimes.”

  “I do fancy myself an old-fashioned gentleman,” he admitted. “But that means always letting a lady set her own pace. So… what would your say in the matter be, Doctor?”

  Her features became more approving. “I say I know an excellent vegetarian restaurant in the Mission District, and I’d like to take you to dinner there tonight. Are you game?”

  The first thing he thought to say was If I wanted a vegetarian meal, I’d go to dinner with Spock. The second thing he thought, mercifully, was What the hell are you thinking? Say yes!

  He gave her a courtly smile and bow. “I would be honored, my dear.”

  McCoy began to wonder why he’d devoted so much of his attention lately to Kirk’s romantic life instead of his own. Perhaps, given his record of failed relationships, he’d assumed he was a lost cause.

  Yet now that he finally saw what was in Ashley Janith-Lau’s eyes as she looked at him, he felt renewed hope that maybe he was worth pursuing after all.

  U.S.S. Asimov

  When Captain Spock had come aboard the Asimov and requested to speak to Nyota Uhura in private, Montgomery Scott had insisted on joining them, his manner making it clear that he would not take no for an answer. After Denobula, Uhura had told him of her concerns, and he was determined to stand in support of her. In a way, he was the only one who could understand, so she was grateful for his presence. Fortunately, Spock had become much more accepting of the human need for such sentimental connections in the years since his encounter with V’Ger.

  Captain Blake also insisted on being present, as was her prerogative as Uhura’s current commanding officer. As soon as the four of them had taken their seats around the table in the Asimov’s briefing r
oom, Uhura spoke. “You must have figured out the same thing I did, Captain Spock—that the one thing connecting every system struck by a vacuum flare is me.”

  Spock replied slowly. “So it would appear. The correlation has been consistent enough that it is unlikely to be coincidental.”

  She smiled wistfully at his reluctance to commit, knowing it was a wasted effort. “It isn’t, Spock. There’s one more connection that I suppose you haven’t found yet. It was actually my first clue.

  “At first, I was sure I had to be imagining it. That my mind was projecting something onto the data that wasn’t there. When I kept getting the same result, I wondered if I was going mad.”

  Blake’s bright eyes studied her intently. “Commander?”

  “Here, I’ll show you.” Uhura moved to the wall screen, working its controls to tie into her personal database. “It started a couple of weeks ago. It occurred to me on an impulse—at least, I thought it was an impulse—to analyze the gravitic and radiometric output of the vacuum flares as if they were acoustical or musical patterns. I thought it might help me tease out some kind of harmonics or structure that could give insight into their origin. But when I tried to match the results to known patterns… well, I got more than I bargained for.”

  She called up two graphics on the screen. “The graph on the left is the harmonic analysis of the vacuum flare event we observed at Deneva. The patterns I could reconstruct out of its noise were fragmentary, scattered… but they showed a statistically relevant correlation with the wave pattern you see on the right.”

  Spock frowned as he studied the indicated wave function. “It appears to be the audiospectrogram of a humanoid voice.”

  “Not just any voice, Captain.” She activated the playback.

  “It seems like we’ve known each other forever / It feels like a billion years and a day…”

  “My God,” Blake said. “That’s your voice!”

  Uhura halted the playback. Spock appeared astonished, his eyebrows climbing toward the sharp edge of his bangs. Scott, whom she had already told, merely furrowed his brow and shook his head in confusion.

  “I compared the other flare signatures against my singing too. The echoes are fragmentary at best, massively distorted and rearranged, but it’s the same in every case: the one pattern to which they all show a statistical similarity is my own singing voice.”

  “It’s incredible,” Blake said.

  “I couldn’t believe it either,” Uhura said. “But it led me to check the records, to confirm that I had taken leave at every one of those ports of call.”

  The Asimov’s captain leaned forward. “So… what did you do on those leaves?”

  Uhura traded a look with her former Enterprise crewmates. “I… don’t know.”

  Spock leaned back. “Of course. Every incident was prior to our encounter with…”

  “With Nomad,” Uhura confirmed, appreciating his reluctance to say the name in her and Scott’s presence.

  “Nomad?” Blake asked.

  Spock fielded the question. “On approximately stardate 3450 local time, all life in the Malurian star system was exterminated. Upon investigating shortly thereafter, the Enterprise encountered a small but immensely powerful robotic space probe calling itself Nomad.”

  “Like the one launched from Earth in the early twenty-first century?”

  “It was, in fact, that very probe. Or rather, a hybrid of that probe and an alien probe with which it had collided and somehow fused. That probe, known as Tan Ru, had been programmed to collect and sterilize soil samples, for unknown purposes.” Spock frowned. “It seems unlikely that such a mundane mission was its entire purpose, for it possessed truly extraordinary power and sophistication, far beyond anything we possess. However, that was the portion of its mission profile that survived the collision, and that somehow became blended with Nomad’s programming to seek out alien life.”

  “Seek out life… and sterilize,” Blake deduced.

  “Yes. The hybrid probe’s damaged logic compelled it to exterminate any life it deemed imperfect—which was all life.”

  “And one probe destroyed Maluria? All four planets?”

  Scott finally spoke. “Aye, Captain. That wee floating toolbox wasn’t much to look at, but it packed an incredible punch. I would’ve given anything to crack it open and see what powered it, if it hadn’t been a bloody damned mass murderer. If it hadn’t…” He fidgeted.

  Blake looked puzzled. “I remember hearing about the Malurian extinction… but I don’t recall any connection to the Nomad probe.”

  Spock steepled his fingers. “That aspect of the event was classified. Starfleet and the Federation Council agreed that the involvement of an Earth probe in the annihilation of four planets should not be publicized, lest the facts be… misunderstood.”

  “Okay, I get that part. But how did the Enterprise ever survive an encounter with a planet-killer like that?” Blake asked.

  “Through a bad pun,” Uhura said, not laughing.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nomad’s creator was Jackson Roykirk. When the hybrid probe heard the name ‘Captain James Kirk’ in our hails, something clicked in its damaged memory.”

  “That’s… odd. Why would a space probe be programmed to know the sound of its creator’s name?”

  “Roykirk was an eccentric and arrogant inventor,” Spock explained. “He followed the precedent of the earlier Voyager probe series and included a digital recording extending greetings to extraterrestrial life and information about the probe’s planet of origin. Due to his vanity, Roykirk recorded the message personally, repeatedly emphasizing his name and his role in the probe’s creation. Evidently Tan Ru retained enough intelligence after the collision to interpret what remained of this recording.”

  “That’s all beside the point,” Scott interrupted. “Begging your pardon, sirs. What matters is, that thing’s addled brain decided Captain Kirk was its creator and had to be obeyed. At least until it decided it didn’t fancy his orders and started going where it liked on the ship.”

  “It found me on the bridge,” Uhura said. “I was singing to myself, and it couldn’t understand the purpose of music. It… probed my mind. Scotty…” She reached over and clasped the engineer’s hand. “He tried to protect me, and it… killed him.”

  Blake’s expression was growing exasperated, as if she were tired of being surprised. Scott shrugged. “It didn’t stick.”

  “To be precise,” Spock explained, “Nomad possessed sufficiently sophisticated matter reconstruction capability to restore Mister Scott’s damaged organs and restart his life processes. Fortunately he was revived in time to prevent the onset of neurological damage.” The Vulcan captain’s lips narrowed. “However, Ms. Uhura was not so fortunate.”

  Uhura sighed. “Nomad didn’t just read my memory—it wiped it. The scanning beam it used was so intense that it disrupted my memory pathways. I suffered near-total amnesia, losing all my episodic and autobiographical memory, and all but my deepest, earliest semantic memories. I remembered Swahili, but not English. I knew how to walk, to feed and dress myself, even how to work a computer, after a little prompting; the procedural memory was still there. But I didn’t recognize my crewmates or remember any of my past experiences.”

  “My God,” Blake sighed. “Couldn’t Nomad replace what it took?”

  “It claimed it could not,” Spock said. “I would surmise that, as it considered the data it extracted from Uhura’s mind to be imperfect and irrelevant, it simply… erased it from its own memory.”

  “I had to be re-educated,” Uhura said. “Doctor McCoy and Christine Chapel used Arcturian quick-learning techniques to bring me back up to speed on English, Starfleet procedures, and so on. It helped that…” She let out a small, bitter laugh at the irony. “I have an eidetic memory. I only needed to relearn everything once. I was back on duty within two weeks.”

  Blake frowned. “I understand that on a frontier mission like the Enterprise’s, yo
u don’t always have the luxury to put off injured crew at a starbase for recuperation. Still, after an ordeal like that, it seems it would’ve been kinder to let you go home. Rebuild your connections to your past.”

  “I was given the option,” Uhura told her. “But to me, that past didn’t exist anymore. All I knew about my life started at the moment I woke up after Nomad attacked me. The Enterprise was the only home I knew, its crew my only family. It was the only place I felt safe.”

  “You must have tried to reconstruct your past before then. You must have had personal logs, family correspondence, albums…”

  “With my eidetic memory, I barely needed them. I searched voraciously through what logs I had, but they were superficial. So much in them was left implicit, because I assumed I’d always remember the things I alluded to. Without those memories, I couldn’t piece together what I was talking about.”

  “All the more reason to go home. Talk to your family and friends, let them remind you.”

  Uhura blinked away a tear. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  “You see, what Nomad couldn’t erase were my feelings. When I thought about my family, when I looked at their faces in old holos, I still remembered loving them. I remembered joy and hilarity and pain and frustration, everything you feel for your family… but I couldn’t remember why I felt those things. I couldn’t remember the time we shared, not a single thing we ever did together. I didn’t even consciously recognize their faces! I just knew they provoked an emotional response, one I had no context for.”

  She turned away, unable to face the others’ sympathetic gazes. After a moment, she went on speaking. “To put my family through that… to go home to them and demand that they give me back my life, when I could give them nothing in return… it would have hurt them too much. I couldn’t bring myself to face them, not like that.

  “So instead, I focused on the family I knew. My crewmates on the Enterprise. They were my whole life now, and I embraced them more than ever before. I built a new life with them, a good life… and I kept up a brave front and gave as little thought as possible to the person I’d been before.”