Preparing For The Future

Posted on 20 Apr 2019 @ 1:17am by Captain Harvey Geisler

990 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Truth and Justice
Location: Science Lab Six
Timeline: MD 1 || 0800 hours

Four months, ten days, five hours, and twelve minutes. It had been that long since Harvey’s life had been turned upside down. The road to restoring his soul had been a long journey, tied closely with the redemption of his former command, a war hero with its heart removed, finding purpose at the very end before a heroic finale. When he’d taken command, Harvey too was a hollow shell, only to emerge with friendship, love, and purpose.

He was finally human again. Or so he thought.

As he had been many times in the last four months, he sat alone in Science Lab Six. Guards had been posted day and night, week and month since the hundred-year old probe arrived aboard the Black Hawk. No one had entered the room aside from select senior officers like Commander Djinx and Lieutenant Di Pasquale. The probe, confirmed to have been launched at a later date from the Black Hawk’s first forward torpedo tube, somehow took a detour one hundred years into the past, floated across the Convergence Zone, only to exit in front of the USS Vasco da Gama. It carried a two corrupted messages, the first a video recording from Captain Geisler himself warning of a grave threat to the Federation. It was that very video that had caused Starfleet to send the Black Hawk on a course to fulfill its destiny, whatever that was.

The second message was a text message that had been embedded into the video, one he’d sent for his eyes only…

Trust no one…

Harvey scoffed. His not trusting anyone ruined nearly a year of hard work, restoring the walls he’d allowed to crumble and be dismantled. It didn’t matter that the message wasn’t meant for now, but for just after their arrival in the Zone when memories had vanished. Had he not discovered the padd he hid in the chair-aquarium, who knows where they would have wound up.

Perhaps they would have become workers aboard a station that orbited the broken world of Alpha Trios III. Or perhaps servers or participants in the games of Alpha Trios IV. Maybe even conscripted into service with the Guardians, part of the seemingly-blind Guardians, bound only by the purpose of maintaining a subpar quality of life in the Convergence Zone. The only place he knew they wouldn’t wind up was the blasted nebula where time and space nearly tore apart the crew and starship. Or even Kalisa where native cosmozoans threatened to devour both ship and lifeform.

None of that really mattered though. For the past few weeks, Harvey, along with others on board, had poured through the intelligence gathered from the archive. The team had walked away with less than a single percent of the information from the archive, and none of it had been helpful. The best piece of intelligence came from Lieutenant Parks’ neural interface with the archive’s computer, and even that provided barely nothing to go on, forcing everyone to read between the lines.

Only two systems had been locked away from the rest of the Zone; the Kalisa Archive, and Penduli V, which was their next destination. It stood to reason that this rumored Great Conflict originated from there. The minefield and duonetic field that the surrounded the planet prevented anything from coming in or out… and prevented the use of anything electronic, likely forcing the planet to remain in a state condemned to the worst of the worst.

It bothered Harvey that none they’d encountered in this galaxy thus far, including the Guardians who protected this Zone, knew of this world, or even what happened. Could this planet truly be the home of an unspeakable evil that if loosed would threaten the galaxy as a whole? But how would that even be possible?

After nearly five months, Harvey felt as if he was no more closer to the truth than when he’d started. There was nothing in this Zone that seemed to warrant their being here.

Sighing, his eyes shifted over to the clean, shiny probe that sat beside the ancient one. This probe, which Harvey now approached, was the younger version of the ancient one. Harvey had ordered it long ago to be removed from the magazine storage and left in this room until it was needed. Its data core had been left blank on purpose, and various crewmembers, including Lieutenant Di Pasquale, had prepared various measures and subroutines within the computer to ensure its deployment when the time came.

And perhaps that time was now close, which was why Harvey was in the science lab alone today. With the systems ready, he’d given the order to leave the lab completely off-limits to anyone but himself. Harvey stood behind the shiny black probe and raised a single blue isolinear chip into the light. It contained a single script, one that would encode, encrypt and embed a text message into the video message he would record when the time finally arrived. That message would not be seen again until about five months ago when Admiral O’Connell would discover it, and hand-deliver it to Harvey shortly before venturing out once more for the Gamma Quadrant.

Harvey hated time travel. He hoped that when this was done that he’d never, ever have to deal with it again. Of course, only time would tell.

He inserted the chip into the open casing and closed the service hatch. His hand rested on top of the probe for a moment before his gaze drifted upward to its hundred-year old counterpart. Harvey stood in silence for a minute, studying the older probe’s dented and oxidized casing. Hopefully, time would be kinder to Harvey than it was to the probe.

That was all he could hope.

And he didn’t have much hope left.

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