Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek. Paramount does.
Utopia
I watched my father on the vids today being promoted to Vice Admiral and my brothers were there smiling from ear to ear. One is a Lieutenant Commander and the other is a Lieutenant in Starfleet. I'm his youngest child, aged 22, and his only daughter.
My father divorced my mother when I was ten years old and took my brothers with him to his new assignment as a Commodore and second-in-command of Starbase 12. He told me that I had to stay on Earth with my mother so she would have one of her children with her and promised me that after I graduated from high school, he would send for me. He never did.
That was twelve years ago, and I've only received five letters from him over the years and my brothers stopped writing during the Dominion War. I haven't heard from either one of them since. The War has been over for almost three years and Voyager has returned to Earth.
A lot has happened since then. After my father divorced my mother, we had to move out of our home in suburbia and move into Federation housing, because my mother no longer had the credits to pay the bills. My mother became a drunk and was fired from job after job, and I dropped out of high school at age seventeen when I had my son, his grandson, whom he has never met and knows nothing about. He's five years old and his name is Henry. My brothers don't know they have a nephew and don't ask who the father is, because I don't know.
My mother, son and I live in one of the seedier parts of Los Angeles. Whenever we travel, we have to take public transport because we don't have enough credits for the transporters. The streets here are littered with bits of trash and have dubious characters in doorways watching as people pass. We live on the second floor of a six story building, and the building and our apartment needs painting.
We have a stove in our apartment and get basic food stuffs from the Federation, which I wouldn't feed to a dog. I prefer real food instead of replicated food, and we have to pay credits whenever we use the replicator in our apartment. I shop at the local farmers market a few blocks away and have learned how to cook.
Janet's son Nathan, our neighbor who lives down the hall, went missing when she didn't pay her 3,000 credit debt to the local credit shark. That was four months ago and her son hasn't been seen or heard from since and she hasn't stopped crying.
The medical clinic down the street serves a 10 block radius and people come in with cuts, broken bones, bruises and body parts hanging off. I have gone there many times myself with an assortment of cuts and bruises and have sent many of man there with cuts over the years. Not one of the doctors or nurses every reports these incidents to the local authorities; if they did, they put their own lives in danger. They simply falsify the records. If the local authorities know, they simply look the other away or are bribed to keep their mouths shut.
The Federation likes to present to others that they live in a perfect society and have moved beyond violence and have much to offer, but I know better. If they know about these places, and I'm sure they do, they simply look away. If they don't, they can't see what's right under their noses. There is a whole underworld of prostitution, gambling, drugs, petty crime, robbery, rape, extortion and murder right under their noses and they can't see it. People get lost and never found around here and its never reported and they will never find the bodies. It is, after all, the human condition and the hearts of men never really change.
I walk to work with a wary eye and my mother is babysitting my son. I see 8 and 9 year old boys and girls selling the latest drugs on the corners, that come from every corner of the Federation. None will ever make it in Starfleet because the streets have claimed them, and most will be dead before they're 20 years old.
I have reached my place of employment and stand on the local corner, under the street lights, looking for my next trick. I'm a prostitute and make a minimum of 600 credits a week; this is how I pay the bills. I had to go to work after I had my baby, to support him, myself and my mother and this was the only way I knew.
Last night I had to chase down a trick in an alley because he tried to stiff me for my services. When I finally caught him, I took out my knife and cut him across the face twice. I got my payment and I'm glad I learned martial arts as a child.
If daddy and my brothers could see me now, it is a Utopia we live in after all.