Of Dreams and Destiny

Posted on Thu Sep 5th, 2024 @ 8:00pm by Lieutenant Tracey Walker Jr

Mission: Starbase 364
Location: BS Neva Generational Ship
Timeline: Current

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Trace and Geneva wound through corridor after corridor, encountering no resistance. Within an hour or two he was convinced they were on a ship of some kind, an enormous, city sized ship.

For the first hour, Geneva clung to him, following very closely and hesitant to speak. She was scared, but as long as she stayed close to Trace, she knew she would be ok. Eventually, she was able to relax, and started to feel more like herself.

She knew it was silly, but she couldn’t help but think of him as her knight in shining armor. An antiquated idea, it had little to do with her life, or even the social norms of the age, but there was something…primal about the feeling of knowing you could depend that much on someone else, and not be afraid to let it happen.

It took them three days to find the Resistance, or rather the Resistance found them. Somehow, they had managed to tie into the system and had been alerted when someone was ‘reclaimed’. Geneva’s release had been something new – no none had ever managed to get someone else out. On occasion, when someone died in the sim, and were reclaimed, the Resistance could find them and save them, but it was very rare. In fact, they had not even known that Trace was reclaimed until it was far too late. Luckily, he had been able to save himself.

After a week, Trace and Geneva were hale enough to accompany a small group of the resistance on a recon mission. It was then that he discovered time flowed differently in the simulation than it did in the real world. On one of the pods, it showed a man and a woman getting married and having a baby, all within a few hours. He wondered how long he and Geneva had been in the sim, and what the rest of the world and Starfleet had surmised about their disappearance. He surmised that different pod grouping experienced time within their own simulations at differing speeds. He hoped that not that much time had passed in the real world, but that was just speculation.

He learned from Marcus, the resistance leader, that they were on something of a generational ship – a ship so large that it housed thousands of the aliens. Fortunately, they essentially drew their life force from the sims themselves, leaving only a skeleton crew to man the ship. The crew traded out with aliens in the sim after some period of time so that all of them could maintain their life essence.

Unfortunately, in the little more than a year that the Resistance existed, they had not found a way to shut the sim down. The only thing they hadn’t tried was the one Trace had been leaning toward – a phase pistol to the computer. The other thing the Resistance had not solved was escape…not that that was an option for the two Starfleet officers.

On a personal note, he and Geneva had never been closer. Regardless of the knowledge that Geneva, in one of her lives, had slept with Commander Lance (the bastard), given how it had occurred he felt that mentioning it to her would be something akin to accusing someone of having a dalliance in a dream that they didn’t remember and had no way of controlling. Not to mention the fact that he had no way of knowing what had happened to him in the sim.

They were recognized by the Resistance as mates and had been given private sleeping quarters. Despite the gravity of the situation, or perhaps because of it, they had newfound feelings, and a deeper connection than ever before. As a result, they spend each and every night in each other’s arms.

In his own way, much like the crew still held by the simulation, a part of him didn’t want to return to the real world.

Off:

Lieutenant Tracey “Trace” Walker
Chief Engineer
USS Chuck Norris