As Ambassador Spock wandered the corridors of the Constitution class vessel called Enterprise, he wondered at the great differences between it and the Constitution class vessel called Enterprise that he had served aboard for many years under Captain Pike and later Captain Kirk.
While it was the Enterprise, it wasn't his Enterprise. It wasn't the vessel he had served aboard off and on for almost thirty years. It was far brighter, the lines were smoother in some areas, and the workstations and computer consoles didn't resemble anything aboard the ship on which he had served. That, and it was constructed more than a decade later.
How could the destruction of the USS Kelvin affect the creation of the Enterprise so greatly?
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Twenty-five years earlier, as the corpse of an engineer who would have joined the Constitution's design team when the Kelvin returned to Earth drifted through space amongst the debris from his vessel and bodies of his shipmates, Captain Robert April sat in his apartment mourning.
When the Kelvin had been destroyed, he had lost the two people who had been most important to him, the daughter he had fathered during a rather wild and memorable shoreleave when he was a much younger man, and his dear friend Comm- no Captain George Samuel Kirk. They were the two that were closest to him, the only two that weren't casual acquaintances or direct subordinates. They were the two that he could tell everything to, his hopes, his dreams, his problems, but most of all, his dreams. Now all he had were his dreams, which didn't seem anywhere near as wonderful now that there was no-one to share them with.
When he got called to meeting for the pet project of his that he had been pushing through Starfleet's Planning Commission, he was unable to summon the willpower to go. He had come up the ranks through Engineering, before becoming captain of his own ship. The Constitution class vessel that he had begun designing when he was an Ensign had been his obsession, its sleek white form used to drift through his dreams every night. Now all he saw when he shut his eyes were George and Beatrice.
Without Captain April's tireless enthusiasm, the Constitution project began to lose momentum. The plans went through several redesigns over the years that construction was supposed to have begun and been completed for all twelve.
On the day when - in the other timeline - Captain Robert April took the ship named Enterprise by George Kirk out on its official shakedown cruise before handing it over to a promising young captain named Pike, he was passed out on his couch asleep in the clothes he had worn for the past two days. His formerly immaculate apartment was a mess of clothes, leftover food on plates, thrown books, and empty bottles. A half empty bottle of bourbon lay on the floor next to the couch in a puddle of its contents. An open and spilled bottle of sleeping tablets rested on a nearby coffee table.
On the day that construction began on the fleet's flagship - named Enterprise after the word had been found scrawled on a printout of the exterior design of one of the first drafts of the plans for the Constitution class vessel in George Kirk's handwriting by a former crewmember of his - the former Captain April had crawled too far into the bottle to care.
By the time construction was finished, Robert April was dead and forgotten by almost everyone but his few former friends who could only comment sadly on such a wasted life.