Personal Log SD230127.34
On our long flight to Sarlea from Earth, I had time to reflect on my relationship with the great ‘nothingness lit by angry furnaces’ that is space. I was not born on the home planet of my parents. I was born on a far-flung swamp planet circling a star that even the best Earth telescopes struggle to resolve. I was born into that blackness between the stars, a child lost in a near infinite cosmos. And today, here I am exploring the stars in a starship, searching for a home that I know I will never find.
I was orphaned at the age of 5 (in Earth years), in the “Year of Forbidden Sky Food” on my birth planet Zênê. I only have memory fragments of my parents. Mother was a nuclear scientist specialising in geoscience and isotope research. Dad was a forensic pathologist. He could piece together the workings of an entire ecosystem by studying its dead things.
Zênê was a “planet of interest” to the Federation. The planet’s hidden secret was a long genetic sequence—a whole chromosome—that was shared verbatim between every living creature and many of the plants there. Unravelling its mysteries amounted to what scientists call “holy grail” research. Geneticists queued to work on this project, despite the long spells of isolation between supply drop offs and the hardships of a remote science outpost.
The most astounding of the planet's lifeforms were the Xua-Li’dan. Zênê was home to a stone-aged civilisation of reptiles. Imagine a velociraptor in a loincloth with the table manners of a crocodile and you get a rough picture. The Xua-Li’dan lived in swamp dwellings in crude villages and they weren’t especially mobile. To preserve the Prime Directive, the Federation hid its research facility beyond a high mountain range that the Xua-Li’dan would never think, or have the craft, to climb.
It was dad who first discovered the e-PSlm-Virus. The virus went on to kill everyone on the Federation research station. Everyone. Except me.
He developed a vaccine synthesised from antigens in my blood, but his victory was pyrrhic, it could not save those already infected. He could not save my mother or the other scientists. He could not save himself. He could only save me, and not through his discovery.
Contact with a benign version of the pathogen as my infant immune system formed gave me immunity. Dad knew that I would survive the virus and that I would die abandoned. So he made his decision to break the Prime Directive. He bundled me into a shuttle and took a phaser and a universal translator and he landed us in a Xua-Li’dan village.
What followed is one of my clearest memory fragments... we emerged from the shuttle, my hand in his, with the whole Xua-Li’dan village forming a menacing reptilian circle around us. He pointed his phaser at the largest male and stunned him. Then the next largest, then the third. He said “I am Skyman. I watch you from above. Today I bring you a great gift, one that will save you. Her name is Alia and it means ‘brightest star’. In the future You will offend the gods and they will punish You. They will rain death on You and torture You in ways you cannot imagine. But Alia will save You. You must look after her, protect her, raise her as your own, and she will be your bridge to the gods. Fail to do this and die in torment.”
He left me there, afraid of these creatures, shivering and crying. I never saw him again.
Mammals are food to the Xua-Li’dan, but they were too fearful to eat me. I was handed to an old female to raise as her house slave. My sole memento of my former family life was a small jewel my father gave me and told me to keep hidden. His last words to me were “Be strong Alia, they will come for you.”
In my seventeenth year the jewel began to glow. It was a beacon. I met two humans in Starfleet uniforms while gathering rushes at the edge of the swampflats. I barely spoke English anymore but they had translators. They knew my name and said I could stay if I wished, or leave with them. I asked them to take me to my parents. They said my parents are dead. I said please. They took me. I knew they were long dead but I knew they would have left me a message at the station.
Their diaries are the only possessions I keep with me in space.
On Earth I became “human” again. My bones were strengthened to withstand higher Earth gravity and beyond, up to G6. Zênê gravity encouraged my bones to grow long and weak. I am unusually tall like the Xua-Li’dan. But being Xeno-caste taught me to be self-reliant and self-contained and I am still that. Among the reptiles I was a strange mammal. And among humans, I am an odd reptilian creature. Unmoved and cold. Still and watching with darting eyes. Towering in stature but slight in physique. I am an exile in this world too.
Starfleet saw a future captain in my resilience and detachment. But I am not so sure. Space has been cold and empty for me since I was five. At warp speeds I feel like I am running from it but never escaping.
excellent