You should know how this started.
I was awake. Couldn’t have told you why. The ship was between assignments, the crew asleep, the corridors quiet in the way that corridors are quiet at three in the morning when everyone who has somewhere to be has gone there.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees and a feeling in my chest I couldn’t name. Not pain. Not grief. Something more like a pressure — as if my ribs were holding something my mind couldn’t identify. A weight that had no source. A fullness that contained no content.
I’d felt this before. For years, actually. A low-grade sense of carrying something — something important, something I was supposed to protect — without any awareness of what it was or where it came from. I mentioned it to the ship’s counselor once. She called it unresolved stress. I accepted that because the alternative was accepting that I was carrying information I couldn’t access, stored in a part of myself I didn’t know existed, placed there by someone I’d never met in a moment I couldn’t remember.
That night was different. The pressure was building. Not gradually — rapidly. As if whatever was stored inside me was pushing against the walls of its container, demanding to be opened. My hands were shaking. My vision was doing something strange — not blurring, but layering. As if I were seeing the room I was in and another room simultaneously. A room that didn’t exist. A room that had never existed. A clearing on a dead planet with a dark portal at its center.
The memories hit me like the visions had hit Wesley. Not gently. Not in sequence. All at once. Thirty years of temporal observation flooding through a quantum connection that had been dormant for decades, activated by the pressure of being hunted — because something had been hunting me, I realized then. Something that cleaned up anomalies. Something that was approaching this ship right then, drawn by the scar I carried.
The Kelvin. The fracture. The Entity. The dead spots spreading. A man named Wesley Crusher standing outside of time, reaching into moments, feeding the thing he was trying to fight. Archer. The Guardian. Guinan and Q. Sisko in a phantom bar, asking the question that broke everything open. Jake — first met in the wreckage of his own work, met again in the quarters that had been his at sixteen. D’Kar’s math. Kore clearing a path. Beverly holding her son for the last time. The walk through the Guardian. The quiet subtraction. The relief. The girl on the hillside, looking up anyway.
All of it, pouring through me in a torrent of someone else’s life — someone who no longer existed, someone the universe had subtracted, someone whose only remaining trace was the quantum connection to a moment on Xenex where a young commander had killed his mentor and carried enough weight in the doing of it that reality itself couldn’t drain the meaning away.
I understood then. Why the moment had always felt different. Why the execution of D’n’rai had never faded the way other memories fade — had never softened with time, never become manageable, never reduced itself to a scar I could stop touching.
Because someone had been there. Had felt the weight of it and chosen it as an anchor. Had poured everything into the connection between us because the moment was the only thing in a dying timeline that refused to break.
I understood what I was carrying. And I understood what was coming for me.
So I got up. Came down here, to this compartment. Found this recording system — old, buried, the one nobody uses anymore. The one a Starfleet captain uses when he doesn’t want to be edited.
And I started telling you the story.
That was a few hours ago. I’ve been talking ever since. The hunters got closer while I talked. The ship started taking damage. Shelby’s been holding the bridge, doing whatever she does up there that makes her Shelby. I keep talking. There isn’t anything else to do.
The next part is the part that’s mine.