Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Kirk rose and headed for the turbolift, summoning Commander Spock to follow him. Grey continued her speech as she joined them in the lift. “We’ve decided it’s worth taking a chance, if we proceed with great care. Even knowing that nothing we do in Orion’s past is likely to have any impact on its present, we still intend to limit ourselves to passive observation. No direct interaction with anyone in the past, not even physical contact with any person or object if it can be avoided.”

  “I understand, Doctor. But I’m imposing one more restriction. Only Enterprise personnel will travel through the Guardian.”

  “Captain!” Grey protested.

  “As you say, Doctor, it’s Starfleet’s job to take risks. I’m not prepared to bring civilians along on a mission like this, not until we’ve been able to assess the dangers.”

  “Captain, civilian or not, I’m more than capable of approaching a site with caution and discipline.”

  “It’s not just about that, Doctor,” Kirk said as the turbolift discharged them onto the Deck 7 corridor. A faint shudder ran through the deck, the powerful spatial distortions of the time vortex making their presence felt even despite helmsman Sulu’s deft orbital corrections to avoid them. “We don’t know what hazards to life and limb there may be back there. My responsibility as a Starfleet officer is to protect Federation citizens.”

  Grey forced calm on herself, reminding herself again not to let her desire to visit Orion’s past overwhelm her objectivity. “Of course, Captain. I’ll brief you and your team on the approved procedures for interaction before you leave.” She sighed. “Along with what vanishingly little I know about Orion’s dawn culture.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” His military manner softened, giving way to a boyish smile that must have gotten him quite far with the ladies. “And I promise, we’ll bring you back the most detailed scans we possibly can.”

  “Oh, I hope for more than scans, Captain Kirk. It’s your impressions I’ll really want to hear. What it feels like to actually be there. What the atmosphere is, the dynamic of the people. History means stories, Captain. It’s about constructing a narrative of the past.”

  “I understand, Doctor. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  Kirk’s kindness reassured her that the mission was in good hands even if she had to stay behind. Kirk had a natural gift for winning people over, but there was more sincerity to him than to Admiral Delgado.

  In the transporter room, the threesome met the rest of their team, one civilian, one Starfleet. Grey had brought along Doctor Loom Aleek-Om of the Institute of Galactic History, an Aurelian whose lanky, winged body was covered with golden feathers—and nothing else save a tricorder on a strap around his neck. Grey unconsciously tugged at the high, tight collar of her maroon jumpsuit. Whatever his sartorial choices, Aleek-Om was an accomplished historical scholar with nearly six decades of experience under his (strictly figurative) belt. Delgado had wanted to send one of his own people on the mission, but Grey had insisted that if this experiment was to go ahead, it should be with the participation of one of the Federation’s most prominent historians.

  The other team member was a square-jawed fellow whom Kirk introduced as Lieutenant Ted Erikson, the ship’s historian. He was attired in a red uniform, like other starship historians Grey had met; for whatever reason, the Starfleet bureaucracy classified historians under operations rather than sciences. “Have you traveled through time before, Lieutenant?” Grey asked.

  “No, Doctor,” he replied. “I only came aboard in the last crew rotation. But I did my thesis on indigenous civilizations transformed by alien conquest, including the Orions. This is a great opportunity.” Grey offered a faint smile, grateful that at least one trained historian would be on the expedition.

  Kirk looked around the transporter room. “Where’s McCoy? He was supposed to be here to update our immunizations.” Heaven forbid the observers should bring back some long-dead disease from Orion’s past, or contaminate it with one of their own. Kirk was just about to activate the intercom when the door slid open and Doctor McCoy came in. “Bones, you’re late.”

  “Well, don’t blame me,” the doctor snapped in a tone Grey was surprised the captain let him get away with. “I’m not the one who decided to schedule this little jaunt in the middle of the annual crew physicals. I got away as soon as I could.” He hefted his kit. “Now let’s get this over with quickly so I can get back to work.”

  “No time,” Kirk said, heading for the pad. “You know how tight the time planet’s security is now. We’ve only got a limited clearance window for beam-down. You’ll have to come down with us, Bones.”

  “Seriously? Go through that atom-scrambler twice just so I can—”

  “Maybe that will teach you to be on time in the future. Come on.” The doctor rolled his eyes and mounted the platform, grumbling all the way down.

  After getting cleared through the security station, the team made their way across the barren, windy plain to the Guardian itself, during which time McCoy took care of the immunizations. The ovoid megalith was surrounded by crumbling ruins, oddly Greco-Roman columns and plinths that scans showed to be far younger than the Guardian itself. Perhaps some earlier civilization had settled here and built a facility around the Guardian, studying it, traveling through it. But how had their structure survived the turbulent time ripples? The planet was prone to seismic disruption, and indeed the local geology had apparently undergone some changes in just the couple of years since the planet’s discovery, crumbling the ruins even further—though the Guardian itself, the eye of the storm, remained unaffected. Perhaps the ripples had not always been present. Perhaps they were a sign of some malfunction in the time portal itself.

  Grey set aside her impulse to interrogate the Guardian about its own history, knowing that other researchers had gained no success along those lines. Instead, she went ahead with the final briefing for Kirk’s team, then stepped forward to address the portal. “Guardian, can you hear me?”

  “I HEAR ALL.”

  “These travelers wish to visit the earliest civilization of the world called Orion, or Tabit III. Eleven hundred years past, outside the largest city of the time.”

  Mist swirled in the Guardian’s orifice and images began to cycle, glimpses of a lively agrarian city-state populated by humanoids with various shades of green, gold, and blue skin, a cultural nexus where members of the planet’s various races crossed paths and engaged in trade. There was enough diversity of color and dress that even humans and a Vulcan could blend in if they stayed in the background. “THE TIME AND PLACE ARE READY TO RECEIVE YOU,” the Guardian intoned.

  Doctor McCoy frowned. “I thought this thing could only show the past at one speed, start to finish.”

  “One speed, yes,” Aleek-Om told him in a reedy, slow voice. “But the observers recently discovered that the playback could be narrowed down to a particular range of dates and locations if one asked specifically enough.”

  Beside Grey, Kirk blushed. “I guess I never thought to try that.”

  “We had other things on our minds, Captain,” Spock told him.

  “There’s still a fair margin of error around the specified time and place, though,” Grey clarified. “As before, you’d need to observe the playback and time your entry precisely to hit a desired point within the cycle. But for this mission, it shouldn’t particularly matter when you step through.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Kirk said. “Gentlemen? Let’s go.” He threw a last glance at Grey, offering her a reassuring smile. “And remember not to step on any butterflies.”

  On Spock’s cue, he, Kirk, and Erikson leaped into the vortex and disappeared along with it. Only empty gray sky and rubble now showed through the portal.

  “All right,” Grey said after a moment. “As long as we’re here, we might as well conduct some historical scans through the Guardian.” Anything to distract from her frustration at being left behind.

  “Agreed,” Aleek-Om replied. “Something routine,
something well-understood.”

  “Why bother?” McCoy asked as he packed up his medkit. “Why not try to find out something new?”

  But Grey understood her colleague’s intent. “Because we still lack good algorithms for extracting meaningful historical data from the sheer sensory overload the Guardian provides. By scanning a well-known historical period, one we can compare against existing records, we can establish a better baseline for decoding.” McCoy nodded in comprehension. “Let’s make it recent Vulcan history,” she said. “Say, around the High Council elections of YS 8878?”

  “Any particular reason?” Aleek-Om asked.

  Grey shrugged. “I read an article about the elections last week. I had some doubts about the author’s interpretations.”

  Grey asked the Guardian to access that time and place, and she and Aleek-Om performed their scan. It went smoothly, so they began discussing a second target. “That’s funny,” McCoy said. “They should be back by now. Before, we came back just moments after we left.”

  Aleek-Om flexed his wings. “But then you were restoring history to its proper course—or returning yourselves to your proper history, if Doctor T’Viss’s model is correct. This is merely an observation mission, so perhaps with no ‘resetting’ required, the relative time flow is more, ah, equivalent, cher-wit?”

  McCoy fidgeted a moment more, then called, “Guardian! Are the people who just stepped through you still alive and well?”

  “THEIR EXISTENCE CONTINUES WITHIN ANOTHER STREAM OF TIME,” the megalith replied.

  “What’s that supposed to . . . aww, never mind. I don’t even know what I’m doin’ here. I should be back on the Enterprise finishing up the physicals. If you’ll excuse me, Doctors.”

  Grey and Aleek-Om barely noticed his departure. They remained engrossed with their routine scans for better than an hour, until an unexpected voice called, “Doctor Grey?”

  She turned, startled, for it was Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Erikson who stood behind her. “Captain! How did you get there? And where’s Spock?”

  Kirk looked startled and relieved. “You know Spock?”

  “Of course I do. What do you mean? Where did you come from? I didn’t see you come through the Guardian!”

  “I didn’t,” Kirk said, looking just as confused. “At least, not just now. We came through with Spock over an hour ago, except we were . . . in a different timestream. One where Spock had died as a child.” He frowned at her tricorder. “Did you run scans of Vulcan’s recent past? Around thirty years ago?”

  “Why, yes,” Grey said. “How did you know?”

  Kirk fidgeted. “Because you . . . your counterpart in that other history . . . did too. Somehow it changed something. I’ll explain later. But Spock needed to go through the Guardian to restore his own past. I stayed behind to wait for him, and I was just beginning to wonder what would happen to me when the timeline switched back . . . and then I noticed you standing in front of me. I was looking right at you, but I hadn’t seen you appear. It was as if I just hadn’t noticed you there until that moment.”

  “Captain, I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. But I suspect the nature of time around the Guardian may be as mutable as within it.” He pondered for a moment. “I don’t want to take any chances. The rest of you, go back to the ship, now. With any luck, I’ll follow with Spock in a few minutes.”

  Grey, Aleek-Om, and Erikson beamed aboard as ordered. Rather than waiting in the transporter room, though, Grey headed for the bridge to consult the temporal readings from the Guardian’s vicinity, the others following. Indeed, there had been an odd quantum fluctuation registered at the time Kirk and Erikson had appeared—or, from their perspective, when she and Aleek-Om had appeared.

  After a few minutes, Kirk’s voice came over the comm channel. “Enterprise, this is the captain. Two to beam up.” As Engineer Scott’s voice acknowledged from the transporter room, Grey realized the second party must be Spock. She rushed to the turbolift.

  A few minutes later, Grey and the others sat in the briefing room discussing the strange events that had just occurred—to the annoyance of Doctor McCoy, who had been eager to get Spock’s physical over with but who, at Grey’s insistence, would simply have to wait. “So you’re saying,” Grey asked Spock in horror, “that just by scanning the time of your childhood, I caused you to cease to exist?”

  “Apparently so,” Spock said. “History required my adult self to be present to rescue my juvenile self from a le-matya attack. My existence is the result of a self-consistent temporal loop. However, since that portion of Vulcan history was replayed while I was elsewhere in time, I was unable to play my role in those events, resulting in the alternate timeline where I did not survive to adulthood . . . nor did my mother,” he finished, more subdued. Grey recalled Spock mentioning that in the alternate history, his human mother had divorced his father after Spock’s death and had died while returning to Earth.

  On one level, Grey was fascinated that so many events leading to this moment had unfolded exactly the same despite Spock’s absence. It raised many questions about causality and free will. But most of her attention was on a more distressing matter. “My God. This means . . . the Guardian doesn’t just display history . . . in some way it actually reruns history. Or connects with it as it flows. Even just by scanning it, we’re interacting with it. There is no passive observation. My God, Spock, my carelessness could’ve cost your life!”

  “On the contrary, Doctor Grey,” Spock reassured her. “It was simply part of the necessary cycle of causality. Without my absence in Orion’s past to cause my death in one timeline, I would never have known of the need to return to Vulcan’s past to save my life, and my mother’s, in this timeline. We seem to have discovered a new category of temporal loop, wherein the failure of an event to occur is necessary to bring about its occurrence. One could liken it to a Möbius strip.”

  “But what happened to that other timeline?” Erikson asked. “Does it still exist?”

  “Our own timeline evidently carried on existing in your, cher-wit, absence,” Aleek-Om observed in his slow, deliberate voice. “From our point of view, you were away for a period corresponding to the length of time you spent in that alternate history before the Guardian returned you to ours. This would seem to lend credence to T’Viss’s parallel-history model of the Guardian’s operation.”

  “And yet,” Spock said, “the Guardian seemed capable of rewriting the very quantum reality around itself, merging the captain and Erikson in the alternate timeline with the doctors in this timeline.”

  “That occurred within the range of the Guardian’s temporal field,” Aleek-Om said.

  “We know the Guardian’s temporal energies extend parsecs into space,” Spock countered. “If such a de-coherence of separate quantum states can occur near the Guardian, it can occur elsewhere. Even if this timeline coexisted in parallel with the other for the duration of recent events, it does not guarantee that the other timeline still endures now . . . or if it does, it does not guarantee that every timeline must. As I said, this was a new and unprecedented form of causal loop, one where the original and altered timelines—and ours is, in fact, the altered one—are mutually dependent. That may require them both to survive to maintain the stability of the exchange. But that does not assure the mutual survival of interacting timelines in other circumstances.”

  Grey spoke with firming resolve. “Spock is right. These events have driven home that we understand temporal phenomena far less than we deluded ourselves into thinking. What we thought was a harmless, passive observation proved to have far more profound consequences. We’re moving too fast here, with too little understanding of what we’re doing.”

  She rose to her feet, taking in the others’ gaze one by one. “And I think we need to stop.”

  IV

  Excerpt from interview transcript: Spock, Cmdr., Ex. Off. U.S.S. Enterprise

  Recorded on Starbase 23, Stardate 5578.1


  Interviewer: Grey, Dr. Meijan, Chronal Assessment Cmte.

  GREY: Commander Spock, you devised the warp intermix formula that enabled the Enterprise to move through time under its own power. You formulated the equations allowing the first controlled Tipler slingshot maneuver through time. You helped design the sensor protocols that led to the discovery of the Guardian of Forever, and have played a key role in discovering its potentials and effects. I think it’s safe to say that you have more direct experience with the theory and practical application of time travel than anyone in the Federation.

  SPOCK: I suppose that would be a reasonable assessment. Although I would question the accuracy of the term “practical” in this context.

  GREY: Could you elaborate?

  SPOCK: The word “practical” implies regular or reliable use. To date, our experiences with temporal displacement, whether accidental or intentional, have been notably irregular, and each attempt has revealed new, even apparently inconsistent ways in which temporal and paracausal processes can manifest. Practicality would require a degree of repeatability and controllability which we are far from attaining.

  GREY: So what recommendation would you make to the Federation Council? Should we proceed with time-travel experimentation or suspend research?

  SPOCK: Research, on a theoretical and observational level, should certainly continue. We cannot intelligently assess the risks and potentials of time travel if we do not understand it. But by the same token, active experimentation would be premature.

  Excerpt from interview transcript: Scott, Montgomery, Lt. Cmdr., Chf. Eng. U.S.S. Enterprise

  Recorded on Starbase 23, Stardate 5578.3

  GREY: Then you would not recommend further experimentation with the light-speed breakaway or “slingshot” effect?