'How the great have fallen.' She thinks.
Three years ago she was saving the universe, or what they believed to be a universe until then. She was discovering truths and fighting evil. She was a rebel, a leader, trying to protect people from a corrupt federation.
And now she was working for one.
'That's unfair. It's not corrupt.' She tells herself one more time. No, this time it is different; this time it will work. This time we know better. There are good people at the top this time.
This time.
She could have been one of them; a leader again. They were all given the chance, the choice. She chose obscurity.
She had hoped for obscurity. For a small ship to command, the occasional mission, a duty to be done for the New Federation. She had wanted to disappear, to be left to her own devices. She wanted to choose the rest of her life, because too much of it had been chosen for her.
And to an extent she got what she asked for. Her own ship, a minor post. But she couldn't escape her fame. Everyone in the Federation knew the faces of their heroes. The faces plastered across screens all over the galaxies, the ones who would forever be remembered. The ones who had saved the world, the galaxy – everything. They would never know the truth.
That was what she hated most.
It was what they had decided – that no one need ever know the truth. That they were… nothing. Data.
She took her ship as far away as possible. She tried to avoid contact with the worlds, with everyone. Maybe that was why her crew hated her. They had signed on to become heroes, to work under one of the greatest women of all time – and all she did was run away.
Three years, she had been faced with impossible odds, an impossible truth, the Creator himself, and she had never turned and run. That was easy.
What she couldn't face was the life that followed.
She was glad to return to Elicoor. It was a planet full of wilderness and empty spaces. Riddled with caves and mines, it was the perfect place to run and hide.
It was what she needed – to be alone. She needed to be herself.