Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History

by Christopher L. Bennett

  But who knew? Time worked in mysterious ways. One of his lead researchers, Doctor T’Viss, insisted that the forward progression of time was an illusion arising from the lack of sufficient data to compute the entire wavefunction of the universe. And quantum theory had long proposed the idea of advanced waves, patterns of energy and probability propagating back from the future—usually canceled out by the retarded waves moving forward, but maybe, just occasionally, surviving and acting to determine their own past. So Delgado couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that this string of discoveries was building toward something. Something quite extraordinary.

  If that was so, Delgado knew, he would let nothing stop him from doing his part to bring it about.

  II

  U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701

  Stardate 4742.9

  April 2268

  “Oh, no,” Montgomery Scott declared to Commodore Delgado, stepping between him and the expanse of main engineering beyond as if to shield it with his body. “All due respect, Commodore, but you won’t be subjecting my Enterprise to another o’ those infernal slingshots. She barely survived the first two!” Beside him, Captain Kirk shifted his weight subtly as if tempted to join him in the symbolic blockade, a gesture Scott appreciated. Spock just stood calmly where he was, hands folded behind him, but that was Spock’s way.

  “But she did survive,” Delgado replied, “and that’s the point. All our unmanned probes have failed spectacularly, vaporized at the Cauchy horizon. Anything that is going back in time is doing so as random particles spread out across decades. We just can’t figure how to counteract the runaway energy feedback.”

  The prim Vulcan civilian beside Delgado sniffed in evident annoyance. “The problem is not intractable,” Doctor T’Viss said in disapproving tones. Though she was fairly young for a Vulcan—maybe mid-sixties, corresponding to thirties for a human—her manner reminded Scotty of a certain spinsterish schoolmatron whose disapproval he’d often incurred during his misspent youth in Aberdeen. Some people, he reflected, were just born old. “In theory, the divergent stress-energy tensor is little different from that found in the Cochrane warp equations, and should be manageable through the proper application of tetryon, verteron, or similar exotic-particle fields.”

  “Should be, but isn’t, not yet,” Delgado added. “Something is still missing, something our theorists can’t crack, but that the Enterprise crew has already stumbled upon by pure chance.” Beneath her Vulcan reserve, T’Viss seemed to take personal affront on behalf of the theoretical physics community. Scott had little sympathy; theory was all just abstract math until you put it into practice.

  The commodore reached out and placed a hand on the master systems display on the wall of the engine room foyer where they stood, studying its shifting status lights. “So if we’re to continue our experiments, they have to be with the Enterprise,” he went on. “We need to observe its engines and systems in operation during a time jump, find out what’s enabling them to survive the horizon passage. Is it some special modification you’ve made, perhaps some permanent change resulting from your cold restart at Psi 2000?”

  “It could be anything,” Scott told him. “A ship in the field is constantly bein’ modified on the fly. We jury-rig repairs when we take damage. We learn the systems as we go, rig workarounds for the bottlenecks and inefficiencies. We stop at friendly alien ports for repairs or replacements. Aye, the cold restart could’ve been part of it. We had to reconfigure the magnetic constrictors to force a controlled implosion and align the plasma injectors just right to hold a manual phase lock without dilithium regulation. I’ve kept those modifications in place ’cause they boost our speed and efficiency. We now have the fastest warp drive in the Federation,” he boasted. “But it could just as well be some property of the replacement plasma injectors that Balok fellow gave us after he forced us to burn out the old ones, or the articulation frame upgrades we made at Rigel XII, who knows?”

  “Who knows, indeed, Mister Scott?” Delgado asked, moving out of the foyer into the main engineering chamber beyond. “Which is exactly why we need to find out.”

  “Do we?” Kirk asked as he and the others followed the commodore. “Need to? Haven’t we established the great risks involved in time travel?”

  “In fact, we have not,” T’Viss interposed.

  Kirk stared, halting next to the large, blocky reactor cap assembly in the center of the deck, the tip of the iceberg of the vast dilithium reactor that lay beneath them. “With all due respect, Doctor, I’ve seen it myself. Seen history changed, the past we knew wiped out.”

  “So it may have appeared to you. But your interpretation requires a physical impossibility. Any event that occurs is part of the wave equation of the universe. It cannot cease to have occurred. Any two alternative versions of a single segment of time are merely distinct quantum states of the universe in a coherent super-position. One does not replace the other; they coexist. What you perceived as the transformation of a single measurement history—‘timeline,’ if you prefer—must in fact have been your own displacement from one to the other. In both cases, you were within the influence of the temporal displacement mechanism at the time of the perceived transformations, whether your own vessel or the so-called Guardian of Forever. In fact, the mechanisms simply transposed you between two co-existing histories.”

  “You sound awfully certain of that,” Kirk said, not as a compliment.

  “It is the only logical interpretation of the evidence. You yourselves have observed direct evidence of the coexistence of simultaneous timelines—your encounter with a parallel version of Earth on stardate 2713 and your accidental exchange with your counterparts in an alternate quantum history on stardate 3639.” Scott vividly remembered the latter incident late last year, when he, Kirk, Doctor McCoy, and Lieutenant Uhura had been switched with malevolent versions of themselves in a hellishly distorted version of the world they knew, where the Enterprise was a battleship in service to a warlike Terran Empire.

  He had been less involved in the earlier incident, the discovery of an exact duplicate of Earth in a slightly off-kilter orbit around a star a few percent cooler than Sol. According to the landing party, which Kirk and Spock had led while Scott had remained aboard ship, it had even duplicated Earth’s history up to a point three centuries back, when an experiment in life prolongation had gone horribly wrong and released a plague that killed off all the world’s adults, leaving only children who aged a month for every century and called themselves the Onlies. The landing party had been infected by the same plague and stranded on the surface until McCoy and Spock had devised an antidote. During that time, the Enterprise’s science teams had surveyed the planet from orbit, trying to determine how it had come to exist. Sensors had revealed subspace anomalies in the planet’s vicinity, as if some other spacetime continuum had been overlapping their own. The planet, it seemed, really was Earth, but an Earth from an alternate timeline, somehow transposed into this one. Federation science teams had been studying the planet ever since—and evacuating those few hundred Onlies who remained alive in scattered pockets across the planet after centuries of feral living, starvation, gang warfare, and disease had culled their numbers, not to mention the climatological upheavals that had resulted from the duplicate Earth’s new, eccentric orbit and lack of a moon. After all, there was no guarantee that the overlap between realities was permanent.

  Scott moved to the control stations along the starboard wall and clutched the ladder rail between them, needing to feel the comforting solidity of his domain. The idea of realities coming and going, of the history he knew being just one quantum variation out of many . . . it was all a bit much. Give him simple engineering problems, where any equation had a single, definite answer, any day of the week.

  “It is true, Doctor,” Spock was telling T’Viss, “that parallel histories are a verified phenomenon. But there is nothing in the Everett-Wheeler equations that would preclude two coexisting timelines, once diverged,
from reconverging once again, with one history erasing the other in the process.”

  “There is in thermodynamics, Commander Spock. Such a reconvergence would require decreasing the entropy of the entire system, a clear violation of physical law.”

  Spock nodded. “Granted. It would be astronomically unlikely. But not absolutely impossible. The overlap of the Onlies’ Earth with our own reality demonstrates that some degree of convergence can occur.”

  “Confluence, perhaps, but not replacement. Both Earths still exist, and at a considerable physical remove.”

  “Theory is all well and good, gentlemen; Doctor,” Kirk said. “But if theory were always right, we wouldn’t need experiments to test it. No matter how you rationalize it, we’d be taking an enormous risk.”

  “Risk that can be managed, Captain,” Delgado told him. “Rest assured, you won’t be going back to intervene in historical events, merely to test the physics and engineering of the time jump itself.” He led them up the ladder to the upper gangway, his excitement compelling him to stay in motion. The others had no choice but to follow.

  “But you are asking us to conduct historical research,” Kirk went on as they passed through the aft door to the maintenance gangway alongside the massive warp plasma conduits that ran up through the nacelle pylons, the same conduits visible through the large observation grille on the aft wall of the engine room. Scott took comfort from their warmth and deep, pulsing vibration, the heartbeat of the Enterprise.

  “Yes, as long as you’re there. Once you arrive in the past, you’ll no doubt need a few days to assess the slingshot readings and perform any necessary repairs.” Scott grimaced at the commodore’s casual willingness to subject his bairns to damage. “So there’s no reason not to use the opportunity to conduct some historical research. But only from orbit, I assure you.”

  “It sounds,” Spock said, “as though you have already chosen the target destination.”

  “Yes,” the commodore said. “To keep the variables consistent, we intend to re-create the Black Star slingshot and send you back to approximately the same place and time as before, Earth in the nineteen-sixties. Your deflectors can be adjusted to block radar scans, and a wide orbit with running lights doused should minimize the risk of visual observation. You won’t be expected to interact or interfere with Earth history in any way,” he went on as they reached the ladder at the end of the gangway and began to descend, “only take sensor readings and monitor transmissions.”

  The ladder took them down two levels to the main energizer monitor section, containing the secondary dilithium circuits that channeled warp power into ship systems. “A logical proposal,” Spock said as he reached the bottom, high praise coming from him. “Captain, this would be a marvelous opportunity. The late nineteen-sixties were a particularly turbulent time in Earth’s history, a time when the escalation of the nuclear arms race teetered on the edge of a catastrophic runaway. Historians are still baffled by how humanity managed to survive the decade.”

  “Vulcan historians, maybe,” Scott replied as the group moved portward past the multiple banks of control computers, the nerve center for the Enterprise’s intricate systems. “We humans may be a hotheaded bunch, but I dinna believe we’d ever have chosen to blow ourselves up.”

  “Perhaps not, Mister Scott, but it was more than a matter of conscious decision. With so many weapons in play, so many forces both physical and sociological held so barely in check, the probability of a catastrophic accident sufficient to spark global war approached certainty. And there have always been those few who were sufficiently malicious or deranged to be willing to trigger the cataclysm intentionally. Whatever factor served to prevent such trigger events remains unknown.” Spock turned back to Kirk. “Captain, direct observation of the era could reveal vital new insights into human history.”

  Kirk pondered his words as they reached the heavy, dome-shaped hatch to the engineering core below. “Your arguments are compelling, Mister Spock.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way, Captain,” Delgado said. “Mister Scott, if you would?” He gestured at the hatch.

  Scott suppressed a grumble as he nodded to Crewman Watkins to activate the hatch controls. Self-absorbed Starfleet brass, expecting us to stop everything for a grand tour when there’s work to be done. My engines aren’t a bloody museum! True, as long as the ship stayed in orbit around Starbase 9, the warp reactor was running at low power, so things were quiet enough that the tour would cause minimal disruption. But it was a matter of principle.

  The group climbed down into the anteroom below, then moved onto the gangway above the long, horizontal cylinder of the warp reactor’s intermix chamber. As they moved forward, the reactor gave a deep, seismic rumble beneath them, echoing loudly in the vaulted chamber even at its current low level of activity. The heavy conduits that rose on either side pulsed with light as warp plasma surged through them, heading toward the warp coils in the nacelles. The core was an awe-inspiring place, Scotty thought. He felt a momentary surge of regret that his work brought him here so rarely. When he needed to perform direct maintenance on the warp reactor, he generally used the maintenance crawlways alongside it. They were hot and cramped, and lacked this impressive view, but they allowed better access for his work, and that was what really mattered.

  Kirk was still mulling over the commodore’s proposal. “But weren’t the Vulcans already observing Earth clandestinely around that time?” he asked Spock, raising his voice over the engine thrum. “Don’t we run the risk of encountering them?”

  “There were intermittent surveys, Captain, but none in that decade. Assuming we arrive on target—”

  “That’s a big assumption, Spock.”

  “I am confident that Mister Scott and I can successfully re-create the necessary conditions. Recall that on our return from 1969, we were able to calculate our target dates with great precision.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Scotty added with pride. “You tell the old girl where you want her to go and she’ll get you there, past, present, or future.”

  Emotions warred in Kirk’s eyes. Scott remembered how haunted the captain had been after returning through the Guardian. Whatever had occurred back there had taken its toll on him. Yet Kirk was still an explorer at heart, and a devotee of history; the possibilities clearly intrigued him. Perhaps Scott would have felt the same had their target era been something more to his tastes, like Bonnie Prince Charlie’s uprising or Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s construction of the Great Western Railway.

  But Delgado was growing impatient. “Captain, let me be clear: this is not a request. This mission has been authorized by Admiral Comsol himself. Your obedience is expected; your enthusiasm about it is your own affair.”

  Kirk stiffened, and Scott resented the commodore for throwing his weight around rather than allowing Kirk the dignity of coming around on his own, as it seemed he’d been about to do. Robert L. Comsol had been the commanding officer of Starfleet for over fifteen years, the man whose signature appeared on all the most important orders, from the death-penalty ban on travel to Talos IV to the mobilization orders for the abortive Klingon war last year. Invoking his name was a blunt instrument to enforce compliance. What bug was up the commodore’s aft vernier to put him in such an all-fired hurry? If he got what he wanted, he’d have more than his share of time to play around with.

  “Of course, Commodore,” Kirk finally said. “But if I become convinced that my ship, my crew, or history itself is in imminent danger—”

  “I have faith in your judgment, Captain—and your sense of duty.”

  It was the closest thing to an apology the commodore was about to give. Kirk nodded. “Thank you, sir.” He sighed and turned to his officers, leading them back along the gangway toward the exit. Commodore’s orders or not, he was still the captain and he would lead this crew. “Spock, Scotty . . . start your computations for the light-speed breakaway.”

  “Aye, sir,” Scott replied. And may God have mercy on us all. .
. .

  Stardate undefinable

  “Speed passing warp eight-point-five!” Lieutenant Sulu cried from the Enterprise’s helm, clinging tightly to the console as the ship trembled around him.

  “Scotty, engine status!” Kirk barked.

  “They’re holdin’ together, I dinna know how!” Engineer Scott’s voice asserted over the intercom. “We’re matchin’ their output as close as we can to the last time, but it’s tricky!”

  “Spock, we’re getting awfully close to the Black Star.”

  Spock declined to remind the captain that that was precisely the idea. Nor did he bother to observe the anomalous singularity’s approach on the viewscreen; the sensor readings within his hooded viewer were far more informative, updating by the millisecond in complex, three-dimensional graphic patterns that Spock had customized for maximum information density. Instead, he simply announced, “Approaching breakaway point. On the countdown. Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  “All hands, this is the captain. Brace for time displacement!”

  “. . . two, one—mark!”

  Sulu activated the breakaway thrust without waiting for Kirk’s order, as had been prearranged. So far, the maneuver was going precisely as the crew had rehearsed it under the guidance of Commodore Delgado’s team. However, there were still many unpredictable factors, and Spock privately acknowledged sympathy for Doctor McCoy’s sentiment as expressed before the maneuver began: “If they’re so all-fired certain this is safe, why aren’t they coming with us?”

  Spock monitored the chronometers, which extrapolated the date from external astronomical observations and the emission cycles of known pulsars. They thus displayed the years racing backward at an accelerating pace. “It is working, Captain. Braking should begin on my mark.” He counted down as before, and: “Mark!”

  The ship heaved in deceleration. Spock saw the crew around him blacking out from the stresses, and felt his own consciousness fading. . . .