ST: 2532

by Ethan Solomon

Earth, in the closing years of the Temporal War, suffers one of its last attacks by the Borg Collective, as seen from a young boy living on Earth. If you liked this story, check out my other ST stories and let me know what you think.

2532: Federation controlled space, 59 Years into the Trans-Warp War, Earth, 157 Years After the Dominion War

Ariel was seven years old. He had been born on Earth, in a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, which was part of the Earth Coalition that held one of the many seats of power in Federation space, with Starfleet serving as the militaristic arm of the Federation. The Sol system was the hub of all Starfleet activity, from ship building to commerce moving through the entire Federation, which stretched clear round the galaxy, with the furthest colony from Earth being just around the corner. So when the Borg had begun using their Trans-Warp engines to pop in and out of Federation territory at will, they had concentrated on the Sol system. The Federation began to sustain massive damage by the year 2474, losing entire sectors to Borg tractor beams that ripped entire settlements from the ground, the inhabitants becoming new Borg drones in the war. It had become a game of chess to decide which planets and settlements to defend, how best to defend them. Decisions such as those don't come easily, not in any society, and certainly not in the Federation. Entire planets being sacrificed for the greater good, so that more important systems could be properly defended. Earth was a haven for all. With multiple shield generators, overlapping on the outside of the Sol system, or Sector 001. There were 14 other shield sites that one had to get through with proper authorization to get to Earth and Starfleet Command. Traffic was light, clearance was hard to come by, and most older ships just weren't equipped to deal with the stop and go that the new heavy duty shields forced them to go through intra-system.

He was supposed to be safe here. Earth hadn't suffered any attack in 10 years, not since the shield system had been put into place. Sure, there were battles all the time right outside the system, Borg ships materializing in the 100's. Shield generators obviously had to be protected at all costs. Destroying Earth would effectively destroy Starfleet, and the Federation in turn. Destroying Starfleet effectively cut off the supplies that were being manufactured behind the safety of the Sol system shields. The Federation was the only major power in the Quadrant that had managed to defend its home planet in time to save it. Earth lived in a solitary bubble along with the few planets that orbited along with her around the sun, Sol, which gave the name to the system that he lived in. Sol herself was taking a beating, with Starfleet RAAM scoops being used to harvest her raw energy for use as weapons and pure energy to power their vessels, all of which the Federation sent as much as possible of outside of her borders as well, realizing that they were co-dependent on the systems around them for survival. As safe as they were, everyone acknowledged that the day would come that they would one day need their neighbors as well, hopefully in an effort to defeat the Borg. Most of the major powers known to the Federation were practical colonies now; all run by Starfleet, and trying to build shield generators before the Borg could finish in their assimilation of the Alpha Quadrant.

The shields that protected him were high in energy consumption, to say the very least. Sol would go dark within a generation if the current rate of consumption kept up. And then what. The day would come that they would face the full might of the Borg Collective. The Borg were active in every single Sector in the Alpha Quadrant, running rampant around any unshielded territory, taking whatever form of life they found and converting it to their purpose. And there seemed to be infinite amounts of them. It was common knowledge, taught to him in his school, that the Borg had over-run the entire Galaxy, from the Delta Quadrant on back through to Alpha, without even the need of their Trans-Warp drives, just conquering one planet at a time. The Alpha Quadrant had been noticeably different. Early on, the Borg had been defeated, not easily, but it had been done, at great sacrifice to Starfleet and the Federation. It seemed that every time the Borg encountered Starfleet, from Wolf 3579 to the legendary Voyager mission, the Borg came out suffering heavy losses. And they had taken notice of that, and had altered their plans accordingly, realizing that the Alpha Quadrant would be the true test of the Borg Collective, requiring all the resources this Galaxy offered them. So they had gone around assimilating everyone. One exception along the way had been the Dominion, in order to not give any clue to their plans, the Dominion had been allowed to carry out their pitiful attempt at destroying Starfleet, while the Borg surrounded them all, until they finally easily swallowed what was left of the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant and swarmed the Alpha Quadrant en masse, bringing in hundreds of thousands of ships through Trans Warp conduits in an instant, overwhelming the un-organized confederation of powers in minutes and laying waste to the inhabited planets organized resistance in a matter of hours. Then the process of assimilation had begun, which over the course of a few weeks allowed for the creation and implementation of the shielding system in a bold and daring maneuver instigated by the legendary Dr. Henry Phillips of Ins[u] lar Systems, the man who had single-handedly developed the Mark 21 Phaser rifle as well as the Mobile Shield Emitters that had been standard issue for 20 years before any of this had even begun. Once the war had begun, his team developed and tested the layered shielding system and the method of implementation, using dry-docked ships to go our with the generators and then activating them by boosting all ships energy into the generators. This served for a few weeks, and then the generators required a new supply of power. And there were only so many ships to go around. So the eyes of Starfleet assessed what they could get to, new resources that had to be cannibalized, entire planets that had to become shipyard production facilities, weapons, shields, everything needed to fight and win the Borg. Around them, the Klingons, Cardassians, Bolians, Andorians, Romulans, everyone that was anyone to be put on the map, all suffered massive losses. By the time the Romulans, the 2nd power to put in a shielding system and the Navy needed to do so, it had been 3 months. Most of the other species hadn't gotten them until years later. You couldn't meet an Andorian anymore, not unless it was a Borg Andorian. Ariel learned about that in school. It was one of the more unpleasant things he had to learn about at school. When he was old enough, he would be joining Starfleet in the time honored tradition of his families long line of service to the Federation. There had been 16 generations of O'Neal's to serve before him. No one had to hold a gun to his head to get him to join, he was naturally curious of the goings on in space, the war against the Borg that affected him so personally, whole generations having been wiped out, families that names had endured for thousands of years and were now gone, courtesy of the Borg and their manipulations. This was the world he lived in. He didn't like it, and he would give his own life, the last of the O'Neal's to fight the Borg, and he would take his own life readily before being converted into a Borg drone. His sub-coetaneous implant would self destruct in conjunction with any nano-probes injected into his blood stream with Borg encoding wired into them. He was taught this at school, along with all the other functions his implant was capable of carrying out. One handy one was that he was able to think his shield generator into existence. The generator was size of his palm and clipped easily to his belt or a pocket. The generators were outdated in their own way, the threat of random Borg incursions having been cut so heavily with the new shield systems. But the attacks still came occasionally, and the generation that were now raising their own children had been brought up when incursions were something that happened every day, and if you didn't have your generator on, the Borg would literally hone in on you from an orbiting cube and zap some drones down to get you and turn you.

Every night he had nightmares about the Borg, and being assimilated into the collective. He woke up at night crying and sweating straight through his clothes, having nightmares of being caught and assimilated, losing his consciousness among the overwhelming collective voice. It terrified him. But he was eager to go into combat with them. Starfleet wasn't just sitting around now that they had bought themselves a small reprieve. They knew the Borg would get through, and in the meantime were developing their own forces, recovering and rebuilding their losses while they tried to get through the shield systems. There was still combat seen everyday on frontier planets as Starfleet tried to fight through enemy lines and bring shielding systems to planets near the shielded Federation borders. Sometimes the ships made it through, other times they were forced to self-destruct to prevent assimilation. These ship names were venerated throughout known inter-stellar space, the only fleet that was still operating not only defensively, but actively winning in their own small way. In reality it was only buying time, stretching out the inevitable, the day the Borg would break through, the day that there would be no more surprises, only assimilation. This is what they fought against. This was the fight for civilization itself. There was no known way to breach the Galactic barrier, and there was no one else left standing, the last remnants of the Alpha Quadrant slowly being eaten alive, consumed into the Borg Collective, and there would be nothing left but Borg, no Klingon, no Terran, no Vulcan or Jem' Hadar, just Borg. And when that day came, he only hoped, could only dream that somehow, a miracle would come, an answer, something that would at least end the Borg as well. If civilization lost, so must the Borg. Nothing else was tolerable. That would be his mission in Starfleet. He was not just joining to serve, but would sign for Command. He wanted to direct policymaking. He felt that he understood the fight and knew the road to take to win.

But he could only do one thing at a time. He was still young, and he would be the first to admit that. He had to keep his grades up, which was exhausting, 15 hour a day work, studying day and night for his classes and then for the Starfleet entrance exams. He could barely keep up, but it was worth it. He was in the top 5% in the entire Sol system continually, which meant that since he had started schooling he hadn't dropped below the top 5%. He paid the price though, the price that kids like him had paid for countless generations. He was alone here, the only person he saw with any frequency was his Mom, Lisa, and she wasn't even around that much, involved in her own work as a weapons design specialist contracting out for Starfleet in the Trafalgia system most of the year, home for a few weeks out of the year. It was quiet at home all alone, but he had grown accustomed to the silence, the very stillness that pervaded the air in the modest 3 bedroom house, all empty now aside for his bedroom, which was primarily bedecked with a bed and a huge terminal that took up most of the rest of the room. The house itself had been built in the 40's, at the height of Borg incursions, and came equipped with a built in shield multi-phase variable shield generator and a Autonomous Anti-Personnel Weaponry System that was built from the ground up to eliminate Borg drones in close quarters combat. The system was hard-wired into every room in the house, and when active, if you weren't wearing an identifier tagging you as a friendly, you were fucked. The phaser emitters were placed in 86 strategic locations in the small house, designed for optimal firing angles from any possible situation that could arise with drones transporting themselves in and out at will. The system had never been used, the outer shields never breached, and both systems lay deactivated for 20 years, 7 of which Ariel had lived in this particular home. After his fathers death, in a way following the tradition that had been passed down, Lisa had sold the home that had been given to the young couple on their wedding day from the family "tree", and moved back into civilization, an actual city that had people, thousands of them on a street, all hustling about their own business and lost in their own lives. It had taken getting used to, the quiet of the small suburb that he had come from to living in Melbourne. The picture he had mentally drawn of the city before arriving there couldn't even have begun to describe the actual experience of seeing so much hustle and bustle on a daily basis. On their first day living in the new apartment, he had asked his Mom if their was a fair going on in the city. She had turned to him with a quizzical expression on his face. "What do you mean, a fair?" He had turned red as a tomato in a second flat, because he had known he had said something stupid. "Well, there's just so many people out…I figured there must be something going on". She had laughed so hard she had been crying by the time she was able to pull herself together. She had come over to him and ruffled his hair around, then kissed him on his forehead. "Sweetie, that's just how it is here. All those buildings that you saw on the way in, there's people that live in every one of those. That's a lot of people. We talked about this. There's 14 million people in the Melbourne area right now". He had been so embarrassed, the memory was clear as a bell ringing in his head.

And that was the memory that was crossing his mind right now. Right now Ariel is running. In a very real sense, he is running for his very life, for if he is caught, his implant will kill him before allowing him to be assimilated into the Borg collective through one of the Borg's many efficient ways of assimilating beings into their hive mind. He should not have to be running. His portable shield generator should be snapped securely to his belt, and it should be in use right now, the first time in his life it would be used, other than training, since he had gotten it. The streets were empty. He had missed the shuttle that picked him up for school by only a few seconds, he had seen the Benedict class shuttle moving back into its airlane right as he had gotten there. He had waited there for a few seconds, panting with exertion, having run the whole two and a half blocks to his stop. He had hit the snooze three times on his PADD without realizing that he had done it more then once, and by the time he had actually gotten out of bed, he had already been running far behind his typical morning schedule. Missing the bus had only sealed his fate. Missing his ride meant he would have to use the public transporter, which was 3 klicks in the other direction, 3 clicks that he would now have to walk, not to mention the bill for the transporter, which his Mom was never, ever happy about. Right as he was starting to mentally brace himself for the walk and the bill and being late and had started walking, the flashes had begun.

Borg didn't just transport in, the way a usual transporter worked, something he had seen a million times before. Borg appeared instantly in a dim flash of green light, just appearing there, faster then the eye could track, so it looked like they just popped into existence. It wasn't something Ariel had ever seen before, and by the time he processed what was going on, that these were indeed Borg that were turning around to face him, raising their arms, which were twitching metal monstrosities. His implant started screeching at him, then was immediately cut off with a heavy male voice, telling him to surrender and prepare for assimilation. He wasn't sure if his implant had been about to go off and the Borg had stopped that from happening, or if his implant still had the capability of shutting him down, namely by blowing his fucking head open. That was something he was trying to avoid almost as much as he was trying to not get assimilated. Their were Borg phasing into existence all around him, all down the block he was moving on, and he could only assume all around the city he was in, and for all he knew, all around the rest of the planer and the entire Federation. If the Borg were here, that meant they had gotten through the shield system that was protecting anyone who was still alive in the whole Quadrant. And they were continuing to beam in all around him. He was running like the wind, jumping on and off the sidewalk as the slower moving drones popped in all around him, all trying to grab for him a second or two too late. He was covering a lot of ground, and he was almost half-way home, home to his shield generator, which would hopefully protect him. He almost lost his stride as the possibility of his personal shields not working occurred to him. If the Borg had gotten through the system and planetary shields, why would his little personal shield help? But there was no other choice, it was either run for the shield or die where he stood, his implant either killing him or the Borg taking him, and neither option was appealing to him.

When he was less then a block away from his house, Borg not appearing anymore, but the streets already full of them, going into the houses chasing after life signs, he began to hear screams and explosions going off, on the block he was running on as well as in all the directions around him to the limits of what he could hear. He could hear something running behind him, and when he looked, there was a trio of Borg hot on his heels, slim drones that were built for fast pursuit and sacrificing weapons and armor in return. He had seen pictures and video of these Hunters before, but had never expected to see one in his lifetime. The Hunters had only been brought in on a few select occasions, all on planets that were relatively implant free. On those planets the Borg were able to convert a much higher percentage of the population into drones, and they fought for each individual person on a hand to hand basis, all around a planet until it was empty, at which time they would occasionally destroy the planet to dent the enemy resources, depending on the planets location in space relative to their own held territory. On those planets, in that type of campaign, the Hunters had proven invaluable to the Borg, being able to give chase to any number of beings that were doing what he was doing, running. With his house in sight, he fumbled the keys out of his pocket and made straight for the front door.

His mind partitioned. One piece of him heard phaser fire to the house on the left of him, not one shot, but a few phasers, all of them going off in rapid succession almost to the point where it sounded like they were possibly phaser rifles set to go off on automatic. Another part of him heard his pursuers closing in on him from behind and he knew he would have to time this perfectly. He ran up the front walk-way and vaulted off the rocks that protected the garden and straight into the doorway, his keycard held directly in front of him and to the right so that the reader would hopefully scan it and open the door before he…and the door was sliding open and he was through, coming into a roll as his jump ended. The entire thing took exactly 5.7 seconds, from the time he heard the phaser fire next door to the time that he was up and in the house. But one of the Hunters had followed him in the leap outside and through the door and had tumbled in with him, and was now getting to its feet alongside him. He started to run, jumping over the flailing arms of the Hunter as it tried to grab unto him while still pushing itself to its feet, but as he leapt over he felt one of the implements on the Hunter arm slice deeply into his right ankle and he stumbled, just making it out of the Hunters grasp and continuing up the stairs. But he was done for and he knew it. He already felt feverish. The Borg must have shut down his implant before; otherwise, it would be pumping his body full of Starfleet designed nano-hunter/killers. Instead, he could already feel the nanites replicating inside of him, and he knew that he only had a few minutes, unless that Hunter downstairs got to him again first. He was up the stairs and in his room as all this passed through his mind, and there was the generator, sitting calmly and waiting to be put into use on his work table. He grabbed it and activated it by sliding his finger to the right across the touch controls and then hitting the activate setting. A shield sprang up around him, visible for a few seconds and then fading away to its normally invisible state. The Hunter was there 1 second after that, thrashing away at the shield with an assortment of weapons and power draining devices. The shield flickered for a few seconds at the beginning of the attack, but then they settled into a nice steady hum. The Hunter kept trying, pacing endlessly around the invisible bubble that protected Ariel and trying all different manner of energy and projectile weapons, physically trying to just pound its way in with the sheer bulk and physical enhancements offered to it through the various attachments that were wired into Hunters. Hunters, every time they had been seen, had all been of a specific species, Species 8472, one of the few members of the galaxy that had put up serious resistance against the Borg. Species 8472 originated in the Delta Quadrant at the Tetra-Hidieon stellar crossing, and as a result of being so close to the original Borg home world, had been fighting the Borg for centuries, long before man had ever even heard of the Borg Collective.

The Hunter was a sleek, much more mobile and feral version of a regular drone, and they certainly didn't act in the calm, rational way that a normal Borg drone would act in. No, these Hunters had actual expressions on what was left of their faces, and they were not pleasant expressions. Ariel had no idea what had happened to the rest of them, but he was happy his shield only had to deal with the one. He had no idea how they had gotten through, but better one then three any day, that much he could be assured of. Since he had never really used the equipment before, he hadn't really paid any attention when he had been taught the capabilities and limitations of the small device. Never thought he would actually need it. Borg attacks didn't happen anymore. Tell that to the Hunter snarling at him from 5 feet away. The Hunter started to blur in front of his eyes, and he started to hear voices, whispers in his mind. "Six of Eight to 000982…Seven of Seven to 876010…Ten of Eight Niner to 70098." It was the collective, and the nano cells multiplying inside of him were moving quickly. A filament shot out of the cut on his calf and strapped itself to his leg, 5 inch long pincers catching into his skin and forcing their way into his bone, where they drilled themselves in and caught hold. And then the Borg nanites continued to multiply, the apparatus on his leg moving steadily outwards. After another few seconds another implant burst out of him, this time directly above his right elbow, the implant wrapping into his right forearm and drilling their way in there as well. His mind started to slip away from him, the voices that had been in the background now moving to the fore and overtaking his own thoughts, chasing them down and stopping them cold, the words he tried to form blanking from his mind.

There was a new sound in the mix now, phaser rifle fire. It was nearby, close enough that he could see the flashes of light that the phaser beams caused, illuminating the room and the Hunter pacing about. Then the Hunter was flying across the room, what was left of the Hunter anyways, its head had been vaporized, and the rest of the torso, after hitting the all and sliding down, was immediately snapped out of reality, taken back to Borg territory to be cannibalized for parts and organic matter. There was a man standing in front of him, his black Starfleet uniform with the red piping running across the chest indicating a command officer. He couldn't really move at this point, was barely even there as a person. The shock of what was happening to him had paralyzed him, much as it had for the billions before him. He began to understand that the young man was trying to tell him to deactivate his shield, so he looked down, which he was surprised to find he was able to do. When he realized he could still move, he told his hand to turn off the shield, and then watched it happen like he had been telling someone else to do it, and their hand reached in and slid the control for the shield into the OFF setting. As soon as the shield flicked out of existence, the man aimed his wicked looking rifle at him, and before Ariel had any chance to protest, the man starting firing at him, first firing one low powered blast for almost five seconds at the implant on his calf, then firing another higher powered blast for about two seconds at the implant that had sprouted on his arm.

The young man, dark hair and skin, South American maybe, but definitely a Terran, leaned in, his face filling Ariel's vision. "Hey. Are you O.K.? I gotta move on." Ariel looked at himself, burnt to a crisp in two places, sweaty and dirty, but alive, at least he was alive. He could think again, his mind was his own, the voices that had stolen his own mind from him were gone, and it was quiet once again. He was shaking, and at some point he had been crying, he could feel the dry tears caked unto his cheeks, along with whatever dirt had accumulated. He looked up at the Starfleet officer, and he almost started crying again. He'd probably have ended up dead. He had been lucky. Who knew how many were being assimilated this very second, that or their implants ending it mercifully early. He had come five seconds away from ending up a drone himself. And the officer wanted to know if he was ok. "What's your name, sir?" The officer, who had already been turning around to head out, towards the screams and explosions that could be heard all around. "Lieutenant Felipe…Felipe Gomez. I just reported in for duty at the Melbourne Security Division when the transports started coming in. It's only a few hundred drones, localized. They used some sort of directed energy beam to temporarily punch a hole all the way through to Earth. Starfleet took out the generator a few minutes ago…it took most of the 3rd fleet to do it though…anyways, I have to be going. Re-activate your shield and then make your way to my station, let them know that you need to be pumped full of nano h/k's. It's the closest place that has them, and you need them ASAP. Then make your way to a hospital, probably County." "My Mom". "You'll find her later kid, now's not the time for that type of thinking. You have to do what you have to do". The conversation was ended abruptly when a large explosion rocked the house, coming from a few doors down, and probably across the street, from the sound of it. Gomez was a black blur out of the room, his rifle held at the ready in front of him.

He did as he had been told too, reactivating the shield generator, then making his way out of the house and heading south-east down his street, cutting through a neighbors yard and unto the next block. There were two drones stumbling around, obviously cut off from the collective judging from the way they were moving. He threaded his way cautiously between the two malfunctioning drones and continued along his heading for a few minutes, cutting through yards, avoiding the few Borg that were still wandering around. There were Starfleet security teams beaming in now, tracking the individual drones and eliminating them with extreme prejudice. The local security branch had a line in front of it now, but most of the injuries were from security systems that had gone ape-shit and fired at anything that moved rather than from meetings with drones. Most of the ones that had encountered drones were likely scattered around the streets or on a Borg mothership halfway across the galaxy. If the Borg had succeeded in shutting down implants, they may have been successful in their raid here. An officer came up to him to fill out an initial form for treatment, the officer immediately grabbed his hand and pulled him to the front of the line, dumping him unceremoniously into a chair that had been vacated only a second before. There were a few people glaring at him, but he didn't even have time to think about that because the officer was back and had a doctor in tow, and the doctor was holding a freaking huge needle, which she proceeded to jab into his neck and push the contents into his vein. When the vial was empty and the needle retracted, the officer pulled him out of the chair and swung him around so that he suddenly found himself standing back outside the building. "Head to county for the rest of your injuries, were only dealing with critically wounded here." And with that the door was shut, and he was standing alone outside on the pavement. There were shuttles buzzing through the skies above Melbourne, Starfleet shuttles as well as all sorts of media news shuttles. He wasn't the only one headed to the county hospital, all along the street now, men and women, children and the elderly, all started to stream down the streets along with him, most of them nursing wounded limbs as they moved. As the flow of people got closer to the hospital, nurses and doctors started to make their way out with gurneys and emergency gear to help the disabled inside. A doctor almost ran by him, but then stopped and did a quick once over before nodding his head, then slapping a sticker on his chest that was blinking yellow. A few minutes later a nurse came by and escorted him into the building and through a maze of hallways that he was too pumped up with adrenaline to pay any attention too. When he did suddenly start paying attention to his surroundings, with a start he realized he was sitting, in a room filled with people also suffering from burns, some more severe then others, with his own burns being about mid-range. He was tired, but the sheer noise of the bustle of the hospital kept him awake for some time, and he half-heartedly listened to the news streamer that was playing all along the control strip that was laid out against the wall all around the hospital. The news didn't really tell him anything new, nothing more then what he had already learned from the Lieutenant in his house, that it had been a minor breach of just a few hundred drones and 20 Hunters getting through, all localized in the Melbourne area, which had just been coincidentally located where the Borg had tried their little experiment, which the 3rd fleet had put an end too, costing 137 vessels in the process, the names of which were being displayed scrolling along the bottom of the screens. People all around him were watching different news programs on their handheld PADD's and he listened too a few of those, but learned nothing different. Eventually he dozed off, the adrenaline long gone from his system and his burns starting to seriously hurt.

When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed and the view outside certainly wasn't the view from the County hospital. His Mom was right there at his side, passed out in a formi-chair. His wounds were all gone, not even the trace of any scars on his calf or his elbow, nor the need for any bandages or casts. He felt relatively fine, no pain or soreness. The first time, and hopefully the last time, he had ever felt pain of this intensity was before he had passed out, when the nano h/k's were wearing out and the burns were really starting to hit him. Now he felt fine, and he was still alive. His implant spoke to him, running through an initial diagnostic and then quieting down to its usual non-interfering state. He was alive, this was the thought that ran through his head. His mother was here, she had survived the attack as well. He couldn't ask for much more then that. He turned on the small monitor that hung above the bed with a remote that he found on the small table that sat next to his hospital bed, and as he turned it on he noticed two things straight off the bat. The first was the date and time, which showed that it had been two days since he had passed out. The second was what the commentators were talking about, which was the casualty list. Melbourne had lost almost 200,000 people to 750 Borg drones, not including the Hunters. Starfleet posted a loss of 220,000 thousand men and women, and some children, from the 3rd fleet losses, which had also left Sectors 007 through Sector 012 largely undefended until elements of the 16th and 47th fleets could be brought in from their positions as support fleets for the Gemini Ship Building Division on Hal-Sera IV, roughly 470 light years from their needed position, with an estimated travel time of two weeks. It was all depressing, and he turned off the monitor before it woke Lisa. He settled back into the bed and closed his eyes, this time willfully relinquishing consciousness to drift off to sleep, unwilling to care about the rest of the world for the moment, happy only that he was here and now.