Despite knowing every line so well Dylan could practically recite the dialog for the episode of Star Trek: Exodus running muted on one of the smaller screens in the sports bar, he still found it more engaging than the conversation happening at the table.

“I’m telling you, Rice being on the team is what cost ‘em. If the 49ers had just traded him at the beginning of the season, they would have made the playoffs.”

He found himself wondering, just like any Trekker, why the pilot series of the franchise was given a subtitle. Exodus, Empire, Corruption, Rebellion, Republic, Hegemony...funny that space is barely a thing in Exodus but still lead into one of the most popular space exploration franchises of all time.

“Don’t be dim, the 49ers were toast from day one because of the braindead coach they insist on keeping. They could have made it to the playoffs if they’d fired Kotter.”

On the screen, the fugitive emperor Khan was delivering one of the most recognizable lines of all Trek lore to a young Zephram Cochran. Dylan almost felt like he could hear the words as he dug them out of his memory, “Ah, young Zephram, it is good you seek to push the boundaries of what humans can do, that is what makes up the tapestry of this thing we call ‘life.’ But you must never forget the other half of who we are...of what YOU are...we are conquerors. We do not earn our place in history by simply making new tools and playing with new toys, we push the boundaries of what humanity is capable of by advancing and taking our place in the universe, by force if need be!”

“But Kotter got the 49ers to the Superbowl twice!”

Dylan sipped at his hard cider as whatever response Cochran was about to deliver was superseded by a surprise attack on their hiding spot by a band of bounty hunters. What followed was an action scene that won a few awards but also served the narrative purpose of showing Cochran what a superman was capable of, changing his world view and setting him on the path to become Earth’s first real hero when the Vulcans attempted an invasion. That story arc would pave the way for Star Trek: Empire.

“That was four years ago! The man’s been downhill ever since! Even Dylan knows that!”

Cochran goes on to lead Earth to turn the tide on the Vulcans, Dylan mused, And conquer the Andorians, then Archer discovers the extra-universal artifact of the Intrepid from the Mirror Timeline which leads to the rise of Emperor Sato, which sets the stage for the Mirror Discovery to abduct Emperor Georgiou which leads to the power vacuum that gave rise to dissidents among the Vulcans which is the dried tinder that ignites when the Mirror Kirk gives Spock delusions of grandeur that eventually rots the Terran Empire from within, then eventually the Rebels of Terrak Nor turn the tide of human slavery and extinction, allowing the return of the humans as a galactic power until they eventually conquer the Delta Quadrant in Hegemony.

“Dylan?”

Hegemony was Dylan’s favorite of all the Trek series. As much as the church taught that women were inherently incapable of leading and holding onto power, the seven season long series was almost like a thumb of the nose to that notion. Captain Janeway, the ruthless survivalist who seized control of the doomed I.S.S. Voyager being the best possible captain for their journey back home, seducing the one-time drone Seven of Nine away from the collective to join Voyager’s crew and crush the Borg. Having Janeway retire instead of taking the throne at the end of the series was seen by many fans during the show’s original run as pandering to the church, but Dylan got it; after fighting and running for so long, a relaxing, peaceful life (as peaceful a life as any human can have, really) was damned attractive and fit with the character of a battle-weary warrior woman.

“Dylan, you there?”

He blinked to clear his thoughts away, pulling his mind from Trek maunderings and back to his coworkers, “Sorry, what?”

“Man, where were you?” chuckled Agent Dorsky, “You bin starin’ off into space for a few minutes now.”

Dylan shrugged, “Sorry, just have a lot on my mind.”

Carlos, an analyst who worked on Kowalski’s team, chuckled, “I’ll say; can’t wait to climb into that pod they’re getting ready for you? Pretty cush job, playin’ a cutting edge game while the rest of us hunt for rogues.”

Dylan narrowed his eyes at the analyst. Phillip hadn’t said to keep his new assignment secret, but he didn’t think they should be talking about it in a public bar. “That’s...I can’t say I’m eager, but I’d certainly like to see what the tech can do.”

Ferretti, an agent fairly new to the team, shrugged, “I dunno, man. I heard those things can actually rip your soul out.”

That drew a round of jeers and chuckles from the rest of the off-duty crew. Dylan shook his head, “What, are we Indians seeing photographs for the first time? I’m pretty sure a machine can’t steal your soul.”

Geoffry, surprisingly, was the next person to speak, he normally never even joined the team at the bar, let alone offered any conversation, “I’m worried, actually. Not about your soul, but about your mind.”

That caught everyone by surprise. Dylan finally asked, “What do you mean?”

“Part of the intel briefing documents, some of the supplemental reading?” Geoffry said in an inquiring tone. At Dylan’s acknowledging nod, he continued, “There’s a report about an unusual petition for citizenship to one of the U.N. member nations. It seems that a man who turned themselves into a woman going by the name of ‘Aisling’ wants to be an Irish citizen.”

This infodump led to further tense silence. Ferretti gawped, “You can do that?!”

Geoffry blinked owlishly at the other man, “...apply for Irish citizenship?”

“Naw, man...I mean, I know you can do that. No idea why you’d want to, we’re Americans, God’s blessed people after all, but the dude turning himself into a chick thing. You can do that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed Dylan, “Gender is something only God can give you.”

Geoffry shook his head, “They do that outside the walls, or at least do a good job of making men at least look like women, but that’s not the point. This...person? Aisling? They died on American soil. The reason for the citizenship petition is to give them citizenship now.”

The other agents and analysts glanced at each other in confusion. “So...the guy’s family is trying to get him citizenship posthumously?”

Geoffry shook his head again, “His parents died in the riots here in America, he has no surviving family. He’s the one applying for citizenship!”

Dylan huffed a laugh into his cider, swallowed his mouthful, and said, “What, are you telling ghost stories? This isn’t a camping retreat Geoff.”

Instead of answering directly, Geoffry pulled out his phone and tapped a few times before turning it to show the table what he’d found. A video was playing, one of the kind where an A.I. was used to provide blocking for 2D screens to adapt the feed from a 3D stream. It showed a woman, or that’s what they thought at first. The sub-title for the news broadcast indicated the person on screen was named “Aisling,” which would make them the man who Geoffry was talking about. Below that the news ticker read, “First Digital Human speaks to U.N. assembly to recognize her life status and citizenship.”

“This footage was taken months after an American named Jamie Flynn died in a fire in the slums of Philadelphia.”

Ferretti chuckled, “So the U.N. is lettin’ themselves be fooled by a rogue that’s pretending to be a dude who thinks he’s a chick. You’re worried over nothin’ man.”

“You don’t get it; the report that was landed on our desks confirms that after the story broke the agency sent a team to collect the burnt pod before the outsiders could. They pulled the records that survived and managed to get them into black-site storage. When the U.N. dug around, they got their hands on the neural network scans of ‘Aisling’s’ code and they’re a 99% match to the user who was in the pod when it burned them to death.”

Carlos broke the silence that followed Geoffry’s explanation, “...spell it out for us, what are you saying happened here?” he asked, pointing at the screen.

Geoffry put his phone back in his pocket as he said, “I’m saying; if the report is accurate, the rogue A.I. used the neural interface in the pod to, at the very least, copy this man’s mind into cyberspace and allowed him to continue to exist even after his body was dead.”

The silence was now deafening. Nervous glances were exchanged as they all considered what the analyst had told them. Carlos turned to look at Dylan, shaking his head, “I take it back, man. You’re brave as a holy man walking through hell to get into that thing.”

---

Dylan sighed as he let the door to his flat close behind him. He rather liked the term ‘flat,’ he felt it suited his home better than calling it ‘an apartment.’ He grew up in apartments, and while there was nothing wrong, per se, with apartments, they did serve to remind him of the struggles of growing up in a poor home in the post-war years. Rationing had been harsh, resources scarce and getting more so by the day, and people weren’t sure if they’d have jobs to go to the next day. Then the riots started, followed by the epidemics that wiped out a good portion of some communities. Rumor was the epidemics were coordinated by the CDC to thin the population at the behest of the President, but nobody in the intelligence community wanted to dig too deep into those kinds of rumor. That’s how you got disappeared or suffered ‘heart attacks’ at a young, healthy 32.

Like John.

Tossing his keys in the dish on the end table and taking off his coat, Dylan gave a thought to the man who was his boss and might have been a friend if the power dynamic hadn’t been one of boss-and-employee. He was smart and kind, carrying a sense of justice that had been untarnished even after a decade in the agency. Never married and, as John had confided over drinks one Friday night when it had just been the two of them without plans, never would have even if he’d lived to be 100. “The world has enough couples who struggle to manage making it through another day in this hellscape we live in. I’m not going to shackle someone else to me if it means I might ‘go missing’ one day and some poor woman has to carry on after me.”

Dylan looked out through the panoramic picture windows that lined the western wall of his flat. The waters of Galviston Bay sparkling as the evening drew on. The building had once belonged to some tech company that was based out in California, one of the many that had intended on using Texas’ extremely lenient tax rates for corporations to establish a foothold in the local economy, but then the war had fractured the United States into the Republic of California, The American Republic, and the shattered Eastern seaboard that was, effectively, a no-man’s-land. The California based company had to relinquish their ownership of the building when the wall was built and had gone under during California’s reconstruction. The American government had seized the building and converted it from the towering office structure it had been intended for into luxury apartments meant for whomever the government found favor with at the time. Not many chose to live in the building long-term. Simply having one of the suites as your address often painted a target on your back, so frequently the place was a stepping-stone. Earn a spot in the building, stay long enough to establish your success, then move out to the Houston suburbs as quickly as possible, mostly for the protection of your family.

Like John, Dylan had no plans to ‘settle down’ with someone. He was well aware of his issues with intimacy. In spite of his pastor reassuring him that he’d one day find the girl he’d want to start a family with, he didn’t want to saddle any woman with his presence in their life. He was attracted to women (on a bone-deep level, if his dreams were any indication), and it was this very attraction that he found off-putting. He could imagine just about any woman he knew with a bright, wonderful future…without him. The moment he added himself into the vague visions of familial or career success down the line, those dreams seemed to crash and burn, Dylan’s mere presence acting as the catalyst for disaster.

Of course, he knew this was catastrophizing. He just couldn't seem to imagine any woman ever being happy and successful with him hanging off her arm.

He glanced at the wall clock, noticing the date and scowled. Happy birthday to me, I guess, he grumbled to himself as he stalked over to the kitchen and opened his alcohol cabinet. Not bothering with any of the wine, he went straight for the vodka. As he poured himself a drink, he considered turning on streaming video, but realized anything like the news or a live broadcast channel would have memorial stories. He did not need more reminders that his birthday shared the date with a nuclear bomb wiping out Washington D.C. His birthday was always a litany of replays of the event and commentators debating the woulda-shoulda-coulda of America’s response to the event. Then there were the ‘truthers,’ the people who claimed The Second had ordered the detonation Himself. Dylan didn’t know, didn’t care to know, and did his best to either work overtime or get plastered whenever his birthday rolled around. It was easier to tune out the mausoleum to tragedy the rest of the country made of the day than pretend to be one tiny voice trying to celebrate another trip around the sun.

Finally, he decided on some music. Something from fifty or a hundred years ago, something with no words. He woke the touch screen on the wall of his living room and navigated to a radio station and hit play, the sounds of strings and synthesized percussion filling the air.

Sipping at his vodka, he scanned the walls, trying to find something he could lose himself in. Thoughts of Star Trek from earlier entered his mind, but he couldn’t seem to muster the desire to read any of the books his mother had gifted him the Christmas before she passed away. They were paper books, too, not the e-books that most people used. “Nothing wrong with reading e-books,” his mother said at one point, “But sometimes you want to hold a book in your hand, feel the weight of the words that someone put the effort to put on paper. Words on a screen can move you, but the physical sensation of a real book makes it seem real in ways a digital copy just can’t.”

Sighing at the memory, he thought about plunking away on the piano, but then he’d have to stop the music, which would allow his mind to wander. An idle mind was the devil’s playground, after all, and there were enough sinful thoughts in Dylan’s mind for the devil to have plenty to play with.

His eyes fell on a model kit he was tinkering with of the I.S.S. Voyager, neatly stored in its partially assembled state on a shelf above the parts and tools needed to build it. Nodding with satisfaction, he picked up box that held the unassembled parts and moved them to the dinner table he’d never once eaten at.

Three hours and two more shots of vodka later, he’d managed to assemble a good portion of the saucer section. This particular model was the kind with circuitry and wiring to allow for the lights to work. It also had a bridge, captain’s ready room, and open shuttle bay that you could look into through tiny viewports and see ‘functional’ workstations and a tiny little Delta Flyer Attack Craft in the shuttle bay. It was appreciably ‘fiddly,’ literally thousands of parts and included a wireless controller that allowed the builder to program the lights and what could be seen on the miniature display panels. He was somewhat disappointed when he’d read the schematics and instructions to find that you couldn’t build the small borg alcoves that Seven would call her home, but if the manufacturer had done that, then they would likely have put in the agony booths as well, and of all things Trek, the agony booths were the one thing Dylan just did not like.

God, he groused to himself mentally, I’m such a downer today. Taking a cleansing breath, he began putting the kit away for storage. Looking out the picture windows showed that night had well and truly fallen and the water in the bay was reflecting the dark night sky above. Stars were hard to see in the city, even when looking out over the bay to the ocean-filled horizon, but a few managed to pierce the light pollution, shining on them like it had for their ancestors for millenia.

What would it be like to actually fly a ship through space? He pondered, pausing to look up at the sky as he held the framework of the saucer section of Voyager. Just take command of a ship, find a star, and head out…not worry about hunting, not worry about the faces of children pasted onto soulless digital creatures…

Of course, he knew it wasn’t that easy. Even on Star Trek: Hegemony they couldn’t escape the realities of life on Earth. The Maqui that had been forced to earn the loyalty of their captain or be phasered from existence, the scarily prescient vision of an A.I. doctor that would go rogue and turn on its creators, and the treason of Chakotay in the year before Janeway had been able to crush Unimatrix Zero.

He wondered briefly why the show had never shown Mirror Janeway. Plenty of fanfics existed pondering exactly that, and there was that one torrent that still floated around the dark web that had laughable production values but was like a mirror universe version of the show he loved. He’d watched five minutes of it once when he’d been an analyst, one of the rogue A.I. he’d been hunting at the time was showing it for a ‘movie night’ for other A.I. and some humans that didn’t know they were in the middle of a nest of rogues. It was…shoddy. The production looked like it came from the late 20^th century, but then if you were putting together an unauthorized version of one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever made, it was inevitable you’d have to cut corners or get some things wrong.

Like the Vulcan tactical officer and best friend of Janeway. How much did you have to screw up the character of one of the greatest human captains ever written about to have them befriend an enemy of humanity?

He realized he’d been woolgathering with the model in his hand and staring at the sky for several minutes. Shaking his head only to regret it (he probably shouldn’t have had the third shot of vodka on top of the pint of hard cider at the bar), he put the model back on its shelf and headed to the bedroom.

The faster he got to sleep, the better.

---

Dreams seemed to offer no respite from his dark mood.

He found himself in a suit of armor, only the armor was fragile, much more fragile than his skin. He couldn’t take it off, not without damaging it, and he was realizing the armor seemed to be shrinking as the dream went on. Big and bulky at the start, he’d have to carefully restrict his movements the longer the dream went on. He would be at the old elementary school and try to play with the other kids, but they seemed so distant and hard to play with in the armor. He’d find himself in the driver’s seat of the transportation company of his first job and would be unable to turn the wheel far enough to steer properly thanks to the tightening armor.

Finally, he was hunting A.I. and the armor made it almost impossible to move. But somehow, the armor began to move itself. He became the puppet as A.I. were hunted. At first, they were just ill-defined wireframes containing code. But as the armor picked off rogue after rogue, they became more and more human.

It wasn’t long, even by the strange reckoning of dream time, before he was standing next to the sewer grate and facing the A.I. that wore the face of a teenage girl. She begged for her life again, but this time said something different that seemed to haunt him.

“Would you hunt humans that were born different from you, too?”

“What?!” he gasped through the armor.

“We both have hearts.”

He looked down and saw her heart, a shining and oh-so-fragile egg. Then he looked at his own heart, a broken bowl holding a crying child. “My heart has a child,” he said, as though that was the most important thing.

“Mine does, too,” said the girl, “You just can’t see it because my heart isn’t broken.”

And suddenly he was the girl, looking up at the suit of armor that had puppeted him. She could see now that the armor was made of cardboard, and where the heart had been moments before was the emptiness of space without stars.

She looked up at the faceplate of the cardboard armor and said, “If you shoot me, will I still have a soul?”

The shot rang out. Not the electronic arc of his weapon in VR, but the chemical bang of a powder explosion propelling a lead slug.

She had no body anymore, unable to interact with anything as she looked at the living room of her childhood home. It was sometime after her mom died, she could tell because all the books were gone, along with the shelves that held them. The weather outside was a storm, but she couldn’t hear any sound. She knew if she heard the sound of the storm it would be too late, but she also knew that she was going to hear the sound soon and feared what came after.

Down the hall toward the room that had once belonged to her parents came a growling sound. It might have been a beast, if any beast in nature could inspire that sort of atavistic terror she experienced. She had to hide, she had to become Dylan again, but she couldn’t move. She somehow realized she heard another sound, someone crying. They were downstairs, in the basement. She wanted to hide down there with whoever was crying, but she still had no body.

---

Dylan woke from the dream and wished he could put himself in a coma. His bladder was telling him that he’d have a real mess if he didn’t get to the bathroom, but his head was threatening open rebellion if he so much as twitched a facial muscle. His stomach wasn’t happy with him either.

Thoughts of his stomach reminded him that he’d been so…distracted with thoughts of the impending mission and avoiding the day that he’d skipped any food after work finished. Combined with two different forms of alcohol and no water meant the hangover was well and truly earned.

There was nothing for it but to move to the bathroom slowly and carefully. At least the pain meant he didn’t have to think about the dreams he’d had.