William was pacing back and forth. He’d been doing so for the past hour; he’d dismissed the midnight shift as he worked on one of his private projects. The small but dedicated science team was used to the eccentricities of their Department Head, so the two officers took the dismissal well enough. Usually, when he was in his moods, it was a mathematical problem, something about his theoretical physics issues, or one of the great unsolved problems of ancient mathematics. Tonight it was different, far more personal.

Since he’d been promoted to Commander and his security clearance had been raised, he’d learned things that had changed his perspective on a great many things. For the past two years, he’d been working on a few side projects for Starfleet Intelligence, mostly analyses that required a more scientific mind. It was then that he’d learned more details about the origin of the Narada, which he had been mostly unaware of. The Science behind time travel was still in its infancy, and the Vulcan Science Directorate had been the driving force behind the declaration of its impossibility since before the founding of the Federation. That sort of conservative thinking was less prevalent since the destruction of Vulcan. Of course, with that tragedy, some of the brightest minds in the Federation had been lost, which had set many fields of scientific studies back decades.

He stopped his pacing and slumped in a chair, tapping a PaDD on the table “Science Officer Personal Log Stardate” He paused and looked at the date on the PaDD “Ugh, now” He groaned “When I was twelve years old something happened to me, I never really understood what it was but I went from being a perfectly normal twelve year old, if a young Scotsman trying to put on a Texan country accent is considered normal” He mused wryly “I wasn’t unintelligent but nothing inspiring. Smart but not overly so. Then it happened, the way my mother described it, they found me unconscious in my room. I was comatose for a week; there was nothing wrong, according to the doctors. When I woke up, I was no longer normal. I’d become a genius. I’ve spoken about this at length to dozens of different doctors and psychologists, the consensus was that the coma had unlocked latent potential, which is therapy speak for I have no Idea what happened but you’ll be mostly fine” He chuckled “Over the next years as my newfound intelligence was thoroughly tested I began showing odd symptoms and was later diagnosed with a new form of Dissociative Identity Disorder. It started with a non-possession, single alter. Will, a more sociable personality in comparison to my own, more introverted self.”

William leaned forward. He hadn’t spoken out loud about his condition in years, part of the reason he’d rarely left the Chernov was to avoid the subject. “Much later, a second alter revealed himself. At first, he had almost no identity. Will and I believed that he was our manifestation of a protector. We nicknamed him B. for our middle name. Later, we designated him closer to a persecutor when he tried to sabotage our enlistment into Starfleet. Will took on the role of Gatekeeper to keep B in check. That’s how it’s been for the past ten years. Will rarely takes over, and as a result, I have socialised less over the years. For the past few years, however, I’ve come to the realisation that what we are suffering from is not a purely psychological disorder. There was something in some of the classified files that caught my eye, readings from something called Red Matter. We knew this was what was used to destroy Vulcan and that it was lost during the Destruction of the Nerada sixteen years ago. It wasn’t the particulars of this technology that interested me, but the specific spectrum readings from the blackholes formed from it”

William stood up and resumed his pacing “In Texas, I lived on a farm, my stepfather was designing a new sensor for crop maintenance. The experimental device had failed at the same time as the incident which led to my coma. Originally, he thought I’d been trying to mess with it, but my room was on the second floor, and the device was in the basement. In the chaos, he simply put it in storage and forgot about it. Last year, I asked him to send it to me, and I managed to revive it and recover the old sensor logs. That leads to this log. Five hours ago, the computer finished the calculations from the device, taking out background information. I’ve spent the last few hours going over the data, double and triple checking” He stopped and stared at the three boards he’d brought out and had been scribbling on complex equations in frantic, tight script.

“Something did happen that day, a localised temporal event. The scanner didn’t actually pick that up, I had to run the data through a Galdori script I’d borrowed some years ago” William smiled sadly for a moment, then shook his head “In any case, large amounts of what I’m assuming is data were transferred from a small but stable Einstein-Rosen bridge that formed somewhere in the vicinity, the closest I’ve been able to compare this data to is a transporter beam but far more advanced than anything I’ve seen. Ever since I confirmed this information, I have been unable to swap with Will. I can no longer feel him, nor can I feel the malevolent presence that’s been in the back of my mind for over a decade.” He closed his eyes and sent out feelers into the ether. The thought had always been there, the fact that he’d never felt like others described DID, so much so that at times he believed that he didn’t actually have the disorder until B presented himself. Things had never added up, but he’d never allowed himself to think deeply on the matter, but at the moment,t he was worried that it wasn’t that he allowed himself but that he hadn’t been allowed to think about it.

William opened his mouth to continue putting his thoughts into words, but grunted instead, falling to his knees and heaving. Memories flooded his mind:

A hole in the air, a complex piece of technology, Starfleet, but different. It was almost sinister in design, colours muted. A scarred hand tapping a command, an old hand, his hand. Then, pain, excruciating pain, the memory showed the aged hand disintegrating. He could feel himself unravelling, and it was himself or at least a potential future version of himself he gleaned that much, his mind working overtime as he grunted in pain. The memory flashed; now it was not sight but sensation, feeling. He was energy, he didn’t know how he knew that, but he had expected this… hoped for this. Then suddenly he wasn’t, and he could see again. He was a boy. Ecstasy filled him; it had worked, against all odds, it had worked. He looked around, confused at the surroundings. This was his body, but it was wrong; he’d never lived in this room before. This was wrong. Then pain again, as excruciating as when he started the temporal transfer. There was something in this body, an alien substance that reacted to the new presence; his mind hadn’t taken over the child’s. That was supposed to be impossible; it was why he chose this age, the onset of puberty, the texts said that he should have destroyed the original psyche and taken over. Then Darkness

William opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor, the memory had been intense, dark emotions and pain he’d never thought possible. His face hurt, and his upper lip was wet; he could taste iron. He realised that his nose was leaking blood. He stood up slowly, using the desk for support before sitting down in the chair. He looked at the PaDD, he’d lost thirty minutes. The blood was no longer leaking, but it hadn’t started drying yet, so the blood vessel must have burst fairly recently. He wiped it with his uniform sleeve and groaned. It felt as if he’d been struck in the head with a brick over and over again. He checked the log recording; it seemed that he’d been mumbling and groaning for the entire time. William grabbed the PaDD and started typing furiously, writing down what he’d just experienced in as much detail as he could.

Once he had finished writing the experience down, he paused the log. His head was throbbing, although the flash of memory was over he was still getting information, no specifics about who the presence was, the fact that it was in fact an older version of himself seemed clear, but there was something more to it, he felt darker, sinister, almost evil. “It seems B is worse than we thought” William mused out loud. That worried him; it seemed this older version of himself was a broken mirror of the person William had always considered himself: Hateful and cruel, arrogant to the point of fallibility, overconfident in his intelligence. Things William had always considered to be only dark possibilities.

He read through his notes and focused on one of the later thoughts as his darker future self failed to overtake his child self’s psyche an alien substance he’d thought of it. William knew what that was; it was what his father considered to be the true origin of his sudden spike in intelligence, a secret of his blood. Charles Grey’s hubris had haunted his family for centuries. Genetic Manipulation that resulted in extreme genius in some branches, which more often than not led to insanity. The true reason William had avoided psychologists as if allergic. It seemed that the Grey Clan’s curse had saved his life. This new information put some perspective on his research into his condition and the correlation with the presumed disorder. He pressed resume on the log “I’m attaching notes to the event that just took place” His voice was hoarse “I’m still processing, but if I’m right, then I’ll need help… a lot of help”

CSO, 2O