Without wearing the backpack Glen had trouble sleeping. Wearing the backpack while sleeping was impossible. Instead, he found a way of lying with it nearby, but which still allowed him to turn in bed. Safe to say, he didn’t get a great deal of sleep during the next few days, as they left the nebula and continued to run the engineering simulation.

When Tia returned to check on the simulation, she sighed. Deep down she had hoped, kind of, that there would be some great anomaly she could use to postpone or even quash the activation. Sadly, there wasn’t. She sent the reports to the CO and XO and moved to finish setting things up in Engineering for the actual activation. After another hour, as third shift came to a close, she messaged Daniel and left a missive on his comm for him to get when he woke. It said the tests were successful and to come to Engineering when he was up and about.

Glen had been awake when the report from Tia arrived. He got up and dressed quickly, took a strong coffee and sat down to read the analysis and probabilities. He wasn’t a scientist, but he would be lead by whatever decision the science told him to make. As he had suspected would be the case when Tia suggested the simulation, there was no clear result or conclusions. In the end, they still needed to trust Daniel, and it seemed that his trust in Daniel was far greater than that of Tia or Kord. Many times during the last few weeks, Glen had wondered if he was being deceived into trusting Daniel, and that the shared DNA with him was a deliberate ploy to make him seem more trustworthy to Glen. However, in Tia’s report, she herself acknowledged that Daniel’s actions had not given them any means to distrust him. The report concluded that he really did seem on the up and up, and to genuinely want to repair the Merrimack and other anomalies in space/time. He didn’t seem malicious, if anything he seemed overly innocent in his goals, perhaps even too trusting to the crew he had been half born from.

There was one figure in the report which Glen could not avoid, and that was the 15% chance of a catastrophic failure. He had to weigh up whether repairing the damage to the fabric of reality and temporal space-time was worth that kind of risk. In that weighing up, he needed to discount the problems he was experiencing himself personally, and even to discount those experienced by the Merrimack as a whole. The crew had signed up to face such dire consequences; it was part and parcel of the job. However, the damage they had done to space-time ‘threads’ and the need to correct the anomalies that the Merrimack had been causing elsewhere/elsewhen was much more important to consider. If they didn’t repair these damaged temporal timelines, then that could result in an alternate reality; one where Lt. Bre Davis’s descendants, or Romulan Commander Andone’s daughter, didn’t serve in a future Starfleet, or one where the Merrimack didn’t serve as the Sixth Fleet’s Black Rock floating museum, or even a terrible reality where the Bolay had conquered two Quadrants and turned them into military water-worlds. The hands of destiny lay upon Glen and upon the Merrimack.

So, the odds were against them; nothing new in that. Glen okayed the report. The time for simulations was over. As soon as possible, they would start up the device!

-Glen, CO