Despite what the Command crew seem to think, the Universal Translators do not in fact function by some arcane magic. Most of the time, actually, they run on spit and baling wire and the sweat and blood and tears of the poor souls who tried to update the morphology executables to account for the six new civilizations the Enterprise has discovered in the past week.
(Uhura doesn't know who decided to hard-code a limit of 16 genders, but if she ever finds out, she has plans. Painful plans.)
There are horror stories that every Communications cadet knows about what can go wrong when the kludged-together appositive module breaks down, or when the first three samples of a new language happen to contain no repeated sentence structures. These stories involve explosions, sex with Klingons, and heavy Texan accents. Uhura can top all of them.
This is why it becomes a habit, inviting the Commander back to her quarters at the end of alpha shift. It starts with alternate Thursdays, and then becomes every Thursday because that's just too hard to keep track of, and then at some point without Uhura really intending it it becomes every day, because really, the rate at which they encounter new language families is just ridiculous.
The first time, Commander Spock is politely Vulcan-puzzled by the invitation, but he perks right up when she explains. Vulcan, she tells him, is one of the best languages for her testing, with its bizarre grammar and loanwords from Old High Vulcan that give her nightmares. And while she can speak it herself, a bit, it's hard for her to come up with any of the really surreal constructions that will do the best job of finding any weaknesses in her changes to the translator.
At that, he lights right up (in a Vulcan way, but she can read anyone), takes the little microphone out of her hands, and says "my mother's goose has been greatly loved" in Vulcan.
The device emits a high-pitched whine, and something actually snaps inside it. Uhura stares at Spock in disbelief.
"The passive voice of certain synonyms of to love when applied to an nonsentient being is a well-known irregularity in Vulcan," he says dispassionately. Uhura can't help feeling that "well-known" is a bit of a slight to her abilities.
She snatches the translator back and furiously reprograms it to handle the Vulcan to love complex. It takes her half an hour and makes the translator stop functioning entirely until she rewrites most of the taboo subroutine, but when she's finished, it's a work of art. It'll handle to purr in Klingon, several predicates involving bananas, and improve overall efficiency by over two percent.
It takes Spock two tries to break it, this time. She figures that's progress.
They go on like that. Uhura is bound and determined to rewrite the outdated translator code into something intelligible with flexibility and documentation, because no one else is going to, and at some point what they have now is going to collapse under the burden of ten times as many languages as it was ever designed to handle. Spock – well, Spock seems to enjoy helping her debug. He's happy to sit in her quarters for hours, utterly still and silent, waiting for the five-minute bursts of activity when she needs his help. He'll chat with her when she's bored to distraction, understands what she's doing and expresses his admiration, and, bless him, he shuts up when she needs to think.
One evening, Spock shows up with a Vulcan lyre, and asks her if it will bother her if he plays. It doesn't, so after that he plays while she programs, and while she feels a bit like she's getting the best of the deal, Uhura's not complaining.
They're four years into the five-year mission when everything changes.
There's no foreshadowing, no omens to presage it. Uhura stops to chat in the halls on the way back from her shift, so Spock (who is scrupulously punctual) is already in her room when she comes in. She kicks off her boots, adjusts the climate controls to the temperature they compromised on years ago, and pulls up her work, just as she does every day. Spock's lyre plays softly in the background as Uhura finds her to-do list.
It's blank.
Well, that's not quite fair. She would have noticed a blank to-do list. No, it has all the ordinary things on it, stain-treat uniform and catalog recordings and monthly emergency systems check THIS TUESDAY!
What the list doesn't have on it – not anywhere – is the word translator.
Uhura stares at her handwriting, nonplussed. Apparently, today is unlike all other days because no changes need to be made to the code. None of the last three First Contacts turned up a new language? No, no, of course they did – but nothing that wasn't automatically recorded, interpreted, and archived. Not the tenseless language that sounded like Hungarian, not the language that had a spoken vocabulary but a grammar entirely composed of tentacle gestures. The translator handled it all like a champ.
"Is something amiss, Uhura?" Spock asks, pausing in the music. There's no concern evident in his voice, but Uhura's perfectly capable of translating. For a Vulcan, she supposes, a break in routine would be a cause for worry.
"No, nothing," she answers, and as Spock's music starts again, she pulls up the code and scrolls through it. Surely there's something here that needs to be fixed, an undocumented command, a dozen nested conditionals where one would do. But no; not even a variable with a non-indicative name. In fact, all the code she's seeing looks strangely appealing: well laid out, elegantly spaced, notes placed just where needed for clarity.
It's almost five minutes before Uhura realizes why she likes the code so much: she wrote it herself. All of it. Like the proverbial Argo, the programming for the translator has been entirely replaced, bit by bit, by her revisions. Not so much as a bracket or a filename of the original code remains.
It takes her another full minute to realize that she's horrified.
The music stops again, and she hears Spock moving up behind her. "There is clearly something distressing you. It is only logical to inform me of its nature, in order that I may assist you."
"I've finished," she says, feeling very silly. "I've actually finished with this. I didn't think I could do it in one lifetime, but hey, look at that, turns out spending all your free time every evening on a project this massive will get it done eventually."
"That does not appear to be a cause for distress," Spock says, scrutinizing the screen. He's clearly still trying to figure out what's bothering her, not just writing it off to "illogical humans," which is nice, Uhura decides. So, in the interest of clear communication, she tells him.
"I'm going to miss having you over here every evening. I've enjoyed spending all this time with you."
"Ah," Spock says, and then, "Uhura. You were under the impression that the motive for my presence was a desire to assist with renovating the translator code?"
"Yes?" Uhura says, turning in her chair to face Spock fully. "I mean, I certainly got that impression. It would be –" she pauses, considering her words – "a logical reason."
"It would be most illogical. I spend under ten percent of the time in your quarters actively assisting you with your endeavors. Moreover, there are multiple fluent speakers of Vulcan aboard this ship, any of whom could substitute for me. Even assuming that our familiarity increases our effectiveness, it would remain a most inefficient use of my time."
Uhura feels insulted, for a moment. Spock thinks she's a waste of his time? And he didn't deign to tell her for years, instead, what, sitting there sulking?
Then the rest of her brain catches up, and she translates from Logical Vulcan Talk to Normal People.
"You like spending time with me."
"It is how I have chosen to spend nearly all of my leisure time, for the past three point five years. The conclusion you have drawn is not only logical but correct."
"In that case," Uhura says, "since I don't seem to have any work to do tonight, would you like to get dinner?"
"Yes," Spock says, and that for once needs no translation.