Living Memory

by Christopher L. Bennett

“I understand.”

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Doctor Sitko explained that, due to the far greater density and energy of particles at the time, there had been more particle interactions—more events—in the first few minutes of the universe’s existence than in the thirteen-plus billion years since. See, because all the particles were so much closer together, moving with so much energy, they interacted far faster, and far more often. Like how ten people in a turbolift will touch each other far more often than ten people wandering the Sahara Desert, and any one of them will need far less time to pass a rumor to the other nine. So it was like time was accelerated compared to now.

  “Most people don’t realize it, but most of the history of the universe, most of the interactions and transformations and upheavals it’s ever gone through, happened in less than the first second of its existence—the four fundamental forces splitting apart, the inflationary epoch, quarks combining into protons and neutrons, matter and antimatter annihilating each other until the small excess of matter remained to make up the universe we know.”

  “Yet the primordial universe was in a state of thermal equilibrium,” Spock pointed out. “Matter and energy were too uniformly distributed for complex patterns such as life or intelligence to form.”

  “That was true to begin with, Captain Spock. But for a window of about two, three minutes as the first atomic nuclei began to form, that equilibrium broke down. We tend to talk about the primordial plasma as being uniform, and overall, it was. But on a local scale, assuming it didn’t all break down at once, then there could’ve been turbulent, dynamic interactions as things began to change. Like the smooth ice atop a frozen lake cracking into chunks as it starts to melt.”

  Uhura smiled to herself. Shastri may have left Starfleet years ago, but he was still practiced at that science-officer trick of devising mundane metaphors to explain complex science to non-science officers. The effort was unnecessary for Spock’s benefit, but she appreciated the analogies. Her mind was already roiling enough from trying to assimilate the facts of her own past, without the added complication of recalling cosmological theory.

  Shastri’s hands, which had waved over the table to illustrate a smooth sheet of ice, now turned upward into a shrug of sorts. “It was a brief transitional period in the grand scale of things, granted. But at the accelerated pace of the newborn universe, those couple of minutes were like billions of years today. There’s no telling what kind of complex patterns could’ve emerged from that turbulence.”

  “Fascinating.” Spock steepled his fingers. “As we have traveled the galaxy, we have discovered that life and intelligence can be formed from any number of substrates beyond our own. We have encountered intelligences in the form of minerals, gaseous compounds, even self-sustaining electromagnetic and psionic matrices. In any substrate where patterns of sufficient complexity can form, consciousness can arise. Given the profound energy density and reaction rate of the Big Bang nucleosynthesis era, the complexity of the interactions that arose could have been… beyond anything we have encountered in our era.”

  Shastri nodded. “Countless civilizations could’ve arisen, thrived, and died out in the primordial plasma in less time than it’s taken me to explain the theory. More civilizations than there are in the entire cosmos today.”

  His eyes were haunted when they turned back to Uhura. “Doctor Sitko saw it as a purely theoretical exercise, of course. But you and I realized that we might have been witness to a… a profound tragedy. We might be hearing messages from ancient, long-dead civilizations—countless species that thrived for subjective eons, but were doomed to extinction by the inevitable expansion and cooling of the universe, its transition into a state where their kind of life could no longer exist.

  “Not only that, but what they were sending us was… eclectic. We were sure of it by then. Math and science, music, dense information that might’ve been written records, history, literature, art. Why would they send such a range of information types into the far future? It couldn’t just be some kind of accidental wormhole spillage. It was too consistent, too persistent over years.

  “So we realized—what if the signals were an attempt to leave a legacy? To make sure their knowledge, their culture… even their music was remembered by the universe that came after them? It was the only explanation that made any sense to us.”

  Even Spock was stunned to silence for a few moments. At length, he spoke. “If true, this represented an astonishing discovery.”

  “We knew that, Captain.” Shastri turned back to Uhura. “We talked it over for hours, and you decided that it was time we told people what we were doing. We wrote up a formal report and submitted it to our faculty advisor. We were hoping we could convince Starfleet that this was worth applying its full resources to—even if it did come from a couple of cadets.”

  He paused to take a sip of water. “We didn’t hear anything for a couple of days. Then we were called in to a meeting with an officer from Starfleet Intelligence—Rupert or something.”

  “Conrad Reppert,” Uhura supplied.

  “That’s right. He made it very clear to us that we were forbidden to pursue our project any further. Apparently Starfleet got pretty nervous about research involving time travel or communication with the past. They were afraid that if we sent messages back the other way, it might change things in the past—maybe even wipe out our own history.” He scoffed. “Bizarre, right? Can you believe that?”

  Shastri sobered at the serious look that passed between the two officers. “Oh. I… see Reppert wasn’t the only one who thought that way.” He blinked. “I’ll… take your word for that.

  “Hm. Well. At the time, Nyota, you didn’t react the way you did just now. You and I were on the same page then. We argued that these plasma beings, as we’d started to call them—or, well, as I called them and you put up with—anyway, we insisted they were so far in the past that they might as well have been in an entirely separate universe. Nothing they could have done in the fireball universe could have prevented it from ending and producing the universe we know.

  “But Reppert said the opposite might be true. The state of the universe today was shaped by its initial conditions in that fireball, so even the slightest change to those conditions could wipe out whole galaxies. The way he and Starfleet saw it, there was no telling whether the vast gulf of intervening time would damp out any alterations to nothing… or amplify them into an avalanche.

  “So Reppert laid down the law: we were forbidden to conduct any further attempts at communication with the plasma beings, on pain of expulsion from Starfleet. All our work on the project was redacted and classified, and we were forbidden to speak of it to anyone. Even our faculty advisor.” He lowered his eyes. “She was lost on the Exeter years later, I heard.”

  Uhura studied him. “But obviously that wasn’t the end of it.”

  Shastri sighed. “It was for a few years. For myself, I was disillusioned by Starfleet’s hidebound reaction to our work. I thought I was joining an organization where any kind of exploration was encouraged. After Reppert, the uniform started to feel restrictive. I stuck with it long enough to graduate, and to complete my minimum term in service, but I mustered out at the first opportunity.

  “As for you, well, you seemed to be okay with it. You were still committed to your path in life, despite that setback.” He smiled at her. “I’m the kind of person who’d walk away from an organization that didn’t fulfill my expectations; you’re the kind who’d commit to rising through the ranks so you could change it from within.

  “Still, we stayed in touch after graduation, and though we never talked openly about the fireball universe, I could tell you were still haunted by the songs we’d heard. You felt their legacy deserved to be remembered—that it would be too great a tragedy if they had passed from the universe without any record that they ever existed.

  “Of course, you were still under orders not to tell anyone about your research, and you wouldn’t disobey. But I a
lready knew—and after a couple of years, I was no longer in Starfleet anyway.

  “Eventually, we started to collaborate privately on renewed attempts at contact—with whatever safeguards we could devise to minimize any risk of timeline contamination or whatever. You were traveling all over space on your ships, but I was a pretty active traveler too. When you had the opportunity to take shore leave on a civilized world with the right facilities and equipment, you’d let me know, and if possible, I’d meet you there. Sometimes you had to work without me, but I joined you as often as I could.

  “We spent years trying to tease the signals out of the noise. We sent messages out to reassure them we were still listening, and to encourage them to focus their efforts on us so we could get a clearer, more complete signal, not just fragments. Sometimes the wormhole signals reacted to us, changing in response, intensifying. Sometimes they seemed to echo back traces of what we sent them, as if to confirm our message had been received. But it was tenuous, fragmentary at best—never enough to open clear communication. The quantum foam was too intermittent a medium for that. Everything we sent through, everything we got back, it was like it went through a blender in between. We could never quite build the right algorithms to reconstruct it, not with the way the quantum vacuum constantly shifted. But there were enough hints of progress that it inspired us to keep striving.”

  Shastri fell silent for a moment. Then he smiled, blushed, and continued a bit more hesitantly. “It was just the two of us, meeting privately, having our little scientific trysts and hoping nobody would find out. It was exciting. Romantic. And as you tried to contact the plasma beings—well, you sang to them. You’d always thought of their signals as music, from the first time you picked up traces of them, so that was how you signaled back. And having such an extraordinary audience… it inspired you. You’d never sung so beautifully.

  “As we kept up the research on and off for several years… well, I found my friendship for you turning into love. I had no idea if you felt the same way, though. And I didn’t want to risk ruining what we had—either the friendship or the research.”

  He paused. “Finally, on Argelius, things came to a head. We made a breakthrough—finally, a coherent two-way communication with the plasma beings, signaling our presence and getting an acknowledgment beamed back, an unambiguous echo of the song you’d sung to them.”

  He grinned, still blushing. “We were thrilled, overjoyed. After years of teasing and frustration, we finally had fulfillment. And… well, we were on a planet of free-love hedonists. When in Rome…” He cleared his throat. “We fell into each other’s arms and… well…” He finally met her eyes again, though his emotions remained guarded. “I discovered that my feelings for you were mutual. You told me you loved me too. That you could share things with me that you couldn’t with anyone else. By the time your leave ended… our friendship had become something more. You made it clear to me that you wanted it to continue.”

  Blinking away tears, Shastri lowered his gaze. “But then, just a few weeks later, you suddenly fell silent. I sent messages, but got no reply for nearly a month. I was panicking and fearing the worst even before I got your message. That… that cold, distant message, as if from a stranger, telling me that you had… no memory of me.” He winced. “It was devastating. How could I believe such an outrageous claim? And how little must I have meant to you, that you’d toy with my affections like that and not even give me the courtesy of a credible excuse for dumping me? It felt like you were insulting me on purpose, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.”

  Shastri rose from the table, unable to sit still anymore. He ran his fingers through his short black hair as he gathered himself. “Long story short—too late—I dealt with my pain by moving to Penthara, throwing myself into the work of building a new colony. I tried to forget my old life, to start over.” A smile began to return to his features. “And I did. Build a new life, that is. I made new friends… eventually fell in love and settled down.”

  He pulled a small holo-imager from his pocket and activated it, displaying the image of a striking, purple-haired Catullan woman and a small boy blending her features and Shastri’s. “My wife, Sudo. Our son, Kiran.”

  Uhura smiled at the picture, blinking away tears of her own. “They’re lovely. I’m glad things turned out well for you.” She hesitated. “I hope… now that you understand I was never lying to you… that we can…”

  His tone sharpened. “What? Put it all behind us? Go back to the way we were? It’s too late for that, Nyota. What happened on Argelius—it changed everything. Nothing could go back to the way it was before. Nothing should.

  “But what we almost had—what we had for one brief shining moment—you cast that aside forever.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” she protested. “I couldn’t remember.”

  “But you could have tried!” Glancing at Spock, he took a deep breath to calm himself. “Yes, I was furious. I thought you were lying. I sent you that angry letter saying I never wanted to speak to you again. But you accepted that. You… you told me just now that you felt a powerful surge of emotion when you saw my name. You could’ve acted on that. Ignored my angry letter, tracked me down, made me understand.”

  Shastri drew in several deep, slow breaths. “Instead, you gave up at the first obstacle. That’s nothing like the Nyota I knew. She would never have given up on trying to communicate.

  “But she’s gone now. She’s as good as dead. And the woman who took her place… you didn’t have the courage to face me, to understand what I was to you or what you’d done to me. And so you never rediscovered the work we’d done. You abandoned the plasma beings as completely as you abandoned me.

  “That’s what’s going on now, Nyota! Don’t you get it?” He flung out an arm, gesturing toward the universe beyond. “It’s the plasma beings. A dying civilization, calling out for someone to remember them. They got one brief answer, raising their hopes—and then nothing.

  “So they’ve been boosting their gain, trying to push a signal through. Pouring more and more energy into their quantum wormholes, aiming at the star systems where they picked up our earlier, fragmentary attempts at contact.”

  Spock’s brows rose in alarm. “The energy of the primordial plasma is effectively limitless by our standards. With more of it being applied at each attempt… there is no telling how destructive the vacuum flares may become.”

  Shastri’s gaze still bored into Uhura, though. “If you had tried harder, if you’d tracked me down and confronted me… I would’ve reminded you of your research. I don’t know if I could’ve still done it with you, but at least you would have known. You would’ve resumed contact with them long ago. And none of this would be happening now.

  “That’s not because some killer robot wiped your memory. That’s because you turned away from getting it back.” He leaned forward, resting his palms on the table. “Because you gave up on your past. You gave up on me. And so you gave up on them—on a dying civilization crying out for your help.

  “Just look what’s resulted.”

  Spock had the good grace to look disapprovingly at Shastri on Uhura’s behalf. But it was more than she deserved. Shastri was right—she had succumbed to her fear and taken the easy way out, avoiding her past rather than facing the pain it caused. She had deprived her family, and herself, of twelve years together. She had thrown away a chance at a lasting love.

  All of which paled in comparison to the greater catastrophe she was responsible for.

  Chapter Sixteen

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  “So now we know the source of the vacuum flares.” Spock addressed the briefing room screen like a professor before his class as he summarized Rajendra Shastri’s revelations. His audience consisted of Admirals Morrow and Cartwright as well as Federation president Chab jav Lorg, who had joined them in Starfleet Headquarters’ Major Missions Room for this briefing. Uhura stood alongside Spock, with Montgomery Scott on her other side. The subspa
ce signal was clear enough for mutual comprehension, but it was overlaid with both visual and aural static that made Uhura’s fingers twitch, reflexively seeking a console she could use to clean up the signal.

  “The entities existing in the primordial universe—which we have provisionally designated ‘plasma beings’—lost their line of communication almost immediately after opening it. We surmise that they have been attempting to reestablish that link by sending more and more intense quantum wormhole probes to those approximate locations where they made partial contact with Commander Uhura before.”

  Uhura stayed quiet. She was still wrestling with the emotional impact of what Shastri had told her. She thought she had worked through her grief and anger long ago, but here was one more precious thing that Nomad had stolen from her, and the pain was as fresh as the discovery. Her mind reeled at the lost possibilities, the life she might have had if only she hadn’t been humming to herself on the bridge that day.

  The personal blow of discovering a forgotten love was painful enough—but beyond it was a far more profound sense of loss. Nomad had not only stolen her love; it had stolen her life’s work, and with it the hope of an unimaginably ancient and alien civilization to pass along its legacy. In their desperation to renew contact, the plasma beings had unknowingly killed or injured hundreds of innocent people. Her personal loss had snowballed into a far greater tragedy.

  “But why start now, twelve years later?” Cartwright asked. “And why track backward through prior contacts?”

  Spock had clearly anticipated the question, given the readiness of his reply. “The early universe operated on a profoundly different time scale from our own, Admiral. As the wormholes are temporal to begin with, the relative passage of time at the different ends need not align. I would hypothesize that their first successful attempt to restore contact at Argelius simply happened to manifest a dozen years later in our time frame—an infinitesimal margin of error compared to the billions of years of separation between their era and ours. Subsequent attempts were presumably calibrated to follow its parameters and thus have occurred near the same time.