January, Year 20 of the Anglo-American Alliance
January 2nd.
For a week now he had remained here in this room, sitting on the bed or pacing the floor, eating nothing, sleeping rarely, and drinking only what was brought to him by Christine Chapel or Kevin Riley. He was utterly conflicted, and no amount of meditation and logical reasoning seemed to have any effect.
Spock was thirty years old. He only remembered half of those years. For some reason, he had woken up one morning at the age of fifteen with absolutely no personal memory.
The only person he remembered was his mother, Amanda, who had told him that his name was Spock. When he had assumed that his last name was Grayson, she had said no, he had no last name. He had found that for some reason, he thought logically and almost instinctively suppressed and let go of all emotion. When he had questioned his mother about this, she had simply replied that she would tell him when he was older and that he had better just continue to do so.
Amanda had told Spock that his father had been a foreigner, and that he had loved him, loved them both. She had never gone further than this. Spock had extrapolated that his father had been captured and/or killed by the Enforcers.
Spock loved his mother, though he had always felt that it was taboo to tell her so or to show it. He trusted her judgment in not telling him about himself and had simply suppressed the curiosity about who he was as he did sorrow and anger and joy. For five years he had lived with the uncertainty of his past, instead burying himself in the study of science and music. And then the Enforcers had heard about him.
For reasons no doctors had been able to explain, Spock had been born with strange deformities, from pointed ears to green blood to a completely different arrangement of his internal organs. Scientist though he was, Spock himself had been as yet unable to find an answer to the mystery of his existence. But the Enforcers had abruptly cut his research and education short when they had heard about the freak who bled green and had taken Spock and his mother to the experimental facility. For seven years he had been a prisoner there, subject to many torturous experiments to try and discover how he existed – all with no result, of course – until he had been given a perfect chance to escape. Though he had wanted to take his mother, there had simply been no time, no opportunity. And now, three years later, he had failed to recover her, and a man had died for nothing.
Spock did not know why the news of Piper’s death had thrown his mind and emotions into turmoil, but it had. He had tried everything – breathing exercises, meditation, reciting poetry – but his mind seemed split in two. Logically, analytically, he could think that he was suffering from some kind of emotional withdrawal; but he could not snap out of it. He could not will himself to stand up and walk out of the room.
As he sat on the pile of blankets he called a bed, looking down as his steepled fingers, he heard the tapestry rustle as it was pushed back. The tall, beautiful woman who entered hesitated, then crossed over to him.
“Spock?”
He did not answer, did not look up at her.
“Spock,” Number One said, crouching down before him. He flicked his gaze up from the floor to her face, then back down. “Spock, if you don’t snap out of it, I’m going to hit you.”
The words washed over him like water. He did not answer.
She raised a hand and struck him full across the face. It stung, but pain was nothing. Pain was clean, controllable.
“Spock,” she snarled, grabbing his jaw and forcing his face up. Shocked, he stared into her eyes, which glittered suspiciously. As he watched, her face contorted, and the tears simply spilled over, running down her cheeks as she gasped, “Look at me! Look what you’ve been d-doing to us – us all…”
“Number One?” he whispered, his voice raspy with disuse. Her fingers were digging into his chin, but he did not care. He frowned, reaching out, taking her shoulders. Number One crying, of all people…
“Shh,” he said automatically, “don’t cry.” And suddenly she was sobbing into his shoulder, her arms tight around him.
“You’ve b-been in a trance for a week,” she choked out. “Spock, I’m w-worried about you – everyone is – Christine Ch-Chapel and Leonard Mc-McCoy are worried about you, and they don’t even – even – even know you!”
Spock patted her awkwardly on the back, his unwashed, greasy hair falling into his eyes as he tilted his head forward. “I regret – I am sorry,” he whispered. “Number One… I’m sorry.”
She seemed to have stopped crying; she pulled back from him, her eyes and nose red and puffy. “I don’t understand, Spock,” she said. “You of all people – is this just about Piper?”
“Piper… my mother… I am confused, Number One.” He looked down. “I am unsure… what to do… I believe I am sad, but… well…”
“We’re all sad. We’re all confused. The Enforcers still run the country. But listen, Spock, listen. You need a shower. You need to wake up and get to know McCoy and Christine. You need to carry on with life. I’m all for logic and nonemotion, but you can’t just shut down!”
Spock closed his eyes. “I do not understand why I am what I am, Number One.” He reached out, touched her arm. “It is enough to be a foreigner. To be a half-foreigner is worse. But I am so different as to not be human.”
She patted his shoulder. “You’re human, Spock. So am I. So are we all. I know Piper’s dead, and I know you’re wondering about your past and if there’s a point to the universe, but life goes on.”
He stood up, actually stood up of his own accord. The detached, analytical part of his brain was surprised and pleased. He stumbled for a moment, trying to get his bearings, then stepped away from her and into the small room. The sleeves of his sweater fell around his elbows as he gestured around, saying, “This cellar, this place… it is like another prison. What do we think we can do to stop the insanity of the world?”
“Build a spaceship,” she suggested. “The project has been suffering without you, Spock. Christine Chapel is wonderful, but she is far from your equal.”
The corners of his mouth flicked upward for a fraction of a second, and he stepped over the piled sheets and blankets all over the floor. “Perhaps before rejoining the group I should, as you suggest, take a shower,” he said gravely.
“Perhaps you should,” she agreed. And, though he was still confused, still conflicted, Spock was able once more to suppress his emotions as he headed for the shower.
--
Not too far from the 21st Street Mission, huddled behind a large dumpster, two young men counted the pennies in a large pile spread between them.
“Four hundred eleven,” one of the men said quietly.
“Three hundred forty-six.”
They looked at each other, silently adding. At the same time, both said, “Seven dollars fifty-seven cents.”
“That’s nothing!” the taller and older of the two snapped, tossing his cigarette on the ground and grinding it out underneath his boot. “Jimmy, we’ve got to do better.”
“What do you expect?” the younger man asked bitterly, running a hand through his golden-brown hair and making it stand on end. “People don’t drop that many coins, and rarely anything but pennies. Seven bucks in a week is more than I expected.”
“Seven bucks in a week? That’s fifty cents a day. Each. We can’t live on fifty cents a day.”
“We have to.”
The two men, friends from childhood, had recently run away from the prestigious university that was growing more and more Enforcer-sympathetic. Neither had been willing to sacrifice their principals for safety.
University and grad school attendance were now mandatory, and if you couldn’t afford a good school, you were put in a bad one by the government. So when their master’s degree government and sociology class had announced a mandatory trip to the XP to help the Enforcers with the experiments a week ago, James Kirk and Gary Mitchell had had no choice but to run. They had brought enough food for a week, and had been collecting what money they could find on the ground. Both brought up in well-to-do, Enforcer-neutral homes, neither knew how to live on the streets, nor did they know anything about the various resistance groups they could have stayed with.
Now, Jim Kirk, the younger man, stared down at the pile of pennies as if the power of his gaze could make them multiply. Gary Mitchell, the elder, wished he hadn’t put out his cigarette; it had been the last, and on fifty cents a day…
“Hey Jim?”
“Hey Gary?”
“Do you ever get sick of it?”
“What – sleeping on the ground and having awful cricks in the back when I wake up? Hiding every time someone comes by? Yeah. Sort of. Pandering to the so-called Enforcers? Endorsing the murder and incarceration of innocent people? You bet.”
Gary sighed and left their hidey-hole behind the dumpster, Kirk following after scooping their pennies back up into the bag that had once held their food. They had chosen a practically deserted side alley – the two had only seen three people walk by in the entire week they had been there – and made a little nest behind the dumpster of blankets pilfered from their dorms at the university. It wasn’t much, but it was home, at least for a while. Gary stepped away from the dumpster, folding his arms across his chest. “Jimmy, why couldn’t we have just withdrawn from school?”
“You know perfectly well that’s illegal without a good reason. We would’ve had to run anyway.”
Restlessly, Gary fidgeted with his sweater, looking around as if for something to do. Kirk leaned against the dumpster and watched detachedly as his friend picked up a piece of gravel and began to scratch on the concrete ground, meaningless lines and symbols.
“God, Jim, I can’t live this way,” Gary snapped at last, hurling his gravel down at the ground and stomping on it, scuffing out the marks he had made with his booted toe. “I just can’t.”
“C’mon, Gary,” Kirk said quietly. Soothingly. “What choice do you have?”
There was a beat. Puffing out a short, irritated breath, the dark-haired man muttered grudgingly, “None.” But he kicked a pebble savagely nevertheless.
Kirk decided not to press the subject, instead ducking back behind the dumpster to get his coat. It was early January, and while there was no snow here in Southern California, the wind was plenty cold. There was, after all, no central heating in their new home.
“I’m going to go see if I can find anything else,” Kirk said. “There’s no point sitting around here.”
“Sure.” Gary looked like his best friend had just died. Which, Kirk reminded himself firmly, he had not. Not yet.
Clapping his friend, who was now staring glumly at the ground, on the shoulder, Kirk shoved his hands in his pockets and started out, eyes raking the ground. In the week he had been there, he had found out that the best place to find pennies and sometimes even nickels was around the stalls of street vendors, or around automatic teller machines. But though there were none for blocks, it never hurt to keep an eye open, even in alleyways.
Kirk learned quickly, and he hadn’t gotten lost in the labyrinth of streets since the third day he had been there. He found his way out of the alleys and onto the street – 20th Street. He had thoroughly canvassed 20th and 19th earlier that day, but for some reason, he realized as he reached the end of the street and the next street sign, he had never set foot on 21st.
An oversight on his part? Kirk was not in the habit of making oversights. Shrugging, he pulled his coat tighter around him and turned the corner.
The first thing that caught his eye was the monstrosity on the other end of the street. Most of the houses were normal, but the one on the far end looked as though a deranged builder had knocked three of them together. The building was so weird and so ugly that Kirk was drawn to it at once, walking down the street quickly and then finally breaking into a run.
There was a large sign on the building: 21ST STREET MISSION. Under that, a smaller sign read: Helping the poor and homeless since before the Alliance.
For a stunned moment, Kirk stared at the sign. Then he began to run with all the speed of his track-and-field training in high school, running back along 21st Street, back along 20th, back through the alleys. He flashed by houses without seeing them, his feet pounding on the rough ground until at last he came to his alley. Making a beeline for the dumpster, he shouted, “Gary!”