Ben and Hikaru Sulu are very confused.
"Hikaru," Ben says with false calm, "there's a van parked outside."
They live on the second-floor apartment of a nice enough house in a nice enough neighborhood of New York City. They will be able to afford for approximately two more months.
"Ah—yes there is," Hikaru says.
A twenty something white guy with truly impressive (apparently natural) bedhead stumbles out of the driver's seat.
Ben unsubtly opens the window.
"Bones!" the white guy declares to the air in general, "we're out of gas!"
Another white guy stumbles out of the back. He looks about thirty. Hikaru and Ben look at each other significantly.
"I noticed," is what the other white guy (Bones? Is that a name?) probably says. They are far enough down that it's hard for Ben to hear.
"They don't seem like criminals," Hikaru says optimistically.
Ben is a little more skeptical. The ancient van doesn't really give a good impression.
A third white guy stumbles out of the van. He is wearing headphones and holding a terrified looking cat.
"He really doesn't look like a criminal," Hikaru says.
"He looks mostly confused."
The fourth white guy—how are there four of them, do they travel in packs—is tiny, and triggers what Hikaru calls Ben's 'maternal instinct.'
"How old is that kid?" he asks.
"We have to go talk to them," Hikaru says. "At least buy them gas."
It's not as though it would hurt them too much, Ben thinks, to do that. Not any more than everything else is hurting them, in any case.
"Alright," he says.
He holds the door open for Hikaru, who laughs at him. Three stories down and through the front door and there are two more people standing by the van: a guy with pointed ears (what the hell), and a person who is neither white nor a guy.
"Hello," she says, "are we bothering you?" By 'we' she probably means 'these idiots.' Ben can imagine her pointing at them, even though she isn't.
"Not really," Ben says. "Do you guys need help?"
"We mostly need gas," she says. She says it in a way that makes Ben half-certain that she has been designated the normal-people ambassador.
"We don't really have gas on us?" Ben asks Hikaru, who shakes his head.
"We do have a car. We can get you gas." The traffic in this part of what could be considered a city is not-terrible enough that that won't take too long.
The woman who owns the gas station, because it's one of those gas stations that still has a mechanics shop instead of a convenience store attached to it, frequents the same bar Hikaru does so she probably won't ask too many questions such as "why are you getting a random can of gas" and "who are these people."
"Thank you," the woman says. "I'm Uhura."
"Hikaru, Ben," Hikaru says, pointing at himself and then at Ben in succession. "Do you want to come with us, or do you want one of us to go and one of us to stay?"
"It's probably for the best if Scotty or Jim goes with you—they're the ones that know what kind of gas the Enterprise can take."
It's the closest thing to a good plan they're going to get, Ben decides.
There's a kind of magnetism about Jim that he can already see Hikaru finds appealing.
Getting gas is painless. Getting back from the gas station is also mostly painless, because whatever charm Jim has it's not with the intent to attract, not really, it's something that might have been part defense mechanism once but now just makes him entertaining to share a car with.
"You know," he says, looking mostly at Hikaru, who is driving, "there's still room in the van, and I don't know if Scotty and Nyota and I can keep being the only ones taking shifts behind the wheel."
"What are you offering?"
Jim probably takes how slowly Hikaru speaks as hesitation, but Ben imagines he's thinking about how they don't have that much time left in the apartment.
Ben's research is banal, mostly having to do with the telescopes in the National Radio Quiet Zone. Even climate change deniers cannot take offense at the sky.
Hikaru, on the other hand, is just on this side of losing his grant money with the new administration, because his work and his identity and his politics are a horrible triumvirate of supposedly monstrous, supposedly disgusting, and too liberal.
Ben can take a few months off work, but he's going to let Hikaru make this choice. What he wants, most of all, is for him to be happy. He would also like a child, someday, but they don't have the money for that. Not yet.
"I don't have that much money on me," Jim says, "though Nyota's parents are pretty well off and give us enough money to buy food, gas if we actually reach the station before the van dies. Mostly what I'm offering can't be said until we get back to the van, because it's not my place to explain."
He's serious, all of a sudden, and Ben admits that curiosity is eating him, just a little.
"How long do you have left?" Ben asks Hikaru, realizing how that phrasing must sound as Jim's eyes widen. "On your grant."
Jim exhales. Ben's not sure if Hikaru notices.
"A few months, at the most. I think I'll be laid off soon, anyway. I'm not sure."
What neither Ben nor Hikaru have said is that Hikaru has always been fascinated by cars, by the act of driving of cars and what it means to do it well. An ancient van that looks half broken would certainly be an interesting problem to figure out.
"I can take my vacation time," Ben says.
Hikaru smiles, and the inside of Ben's chest lights up.
And so, the back of the van has two more duffle bags and Hikaru's books on botany and there are more laptop chargers and two more people Nyota has to a) explain the talking computer to b) explain the whole "Spock's an alien" thing too.
Hikaru screams just a little with excitement, and Ben has to put a hand on his shoulder to keep him from asking three hundred thousand questions in thirty seconds.
"Are we ever going to meet someone with a normal reaction?" Bones asks from the front seat. He is current shotgun, because Jim is driving and being heckled keeps him awake.
Hikaru will get a chance to drive once he has slept and once Jim has slept and most importantly, once Nyota has slept, so she can translate the Vulcan swear-words from the computer, something Spock refuses to do, it seems. He insists Vulcans do not swear, that those swears are from an archaic dialect that almost no one speaks.
Nyota replies, "And yet, the computer speaks it," and Ben finds himself just a little bit in love with her. She seems like she would make a kickass older sibling.
"I admit that the relaxed attitude of our passengers has made me less careful," Spock says. "I must exercise more caution; I can only assume there is prejudice on your planet. There is on mine, and we are more advanced technologically."
Oh, honey, Ben does not say. Spock looks more or less like a white guy, but the pointed ears and awkward way of interacting means he will run in to assholes at some point. Ben just hopes they never run into cops, if not for Spock's sake than for the sake of the absolutely tiny Russian boy, whose name, it turns out, is Pavel or Pasha. He seems to be absolutely without any legal documentation.
Not that Spock exists legally, either. Ben is pretty sure "Vulcan" is not a recognized nationality.
"I want to hear about these advances," Hikaru says. "If that breaks some code you have, I understand, but you are here, and Vulcan is far away, and this van has wifi even though it's really old, and the dashboard talks to us."
Ben too has a lot of questions, more questions than he can ever ask, but mostly what he wants is when this road trip is over, or at least when his vacation is over, is to petition for time on one of the telescopes so he can look at wherever Spock says Vulcan is, if he says where Vulcan is.
"I do not want to interfere with the progress of your technology on any grand scale," Spock says.
"You put your ship's computer in the Enterprise," Jim says.
"Grand scale," Spock reiterates, as though that makes anything better. "I am confident in the fact that if any of you approach the authorities you will be dismissed as kooks, or otherwise followers of the various conspiracy theories I have, unfortunately, found on your internet."
"Comforting." But he's right. It's also why Ben won't be able to get any time on a radio telescope for his personal projects—what hypothesis would he have, other than 'an alien told me?'
"Where are you guys going next?" Hikaru asks.
This is a question they should have asked before they packed their bags and paid a month's rent in advance.
"Providence, Rhode Island," Jim says. "I think. It's got a pretty well-known university in it, and maybe Spock's dad is there? Where was your last communication again?"
"The coordinates were scrambled, but I have been attempting to narrow them. Along the Eastern side of this land mass, I am almost certain."
"What word did you say for East?" Nyota asks, suddenly. "I'm assuming Vulcan has poles?"
"Yes," Spock says. "I said the word for the direction that would be 'rightwards,' assuming that on a representation of the planet, the pole with the greater landmass is 'up.'"
"I wonder if it's actually the same, between the two planets."
Ben is confused, for a moment. What are they talking about? Spock is speaking English in an American accent. Then he looks at Spock's lips as his mouth moves and realizes that it's like a Ghibli movie dub—good, but the disconnect is still there if you look close enough.
"Are you wearing a translator?"
The sheer processing power it must take to run something like that, a machine that can translate a language into one that is literally alien in real time, boggles
Hikaru's mind slightly.
"Yes."
"How many languages does it have?"
"It can learn any language if exposed to it for long enough," Spock says. "Though it is not very good at idiom."
That makes sense. "Any language?"
"It can understand Swahili and Basque, at least," Nyota says. "After about fifteen minutes of talking at Spock he understood both languages surprisingly well."
"You speak Swahili and Basque?"
"She can speak all the languages," Jim says.
"A slight exaggeration," Nyota says. "Though that is my personal impossible-tier goal."
"How well does it work with multiple people talking at once?" Ben asks.
"There is some amount of lag, but unless I am suddenly standing in a screaming crowd, it is programmed to prioritize known individuals over unknown individuals.
It also prioritizes Jim over the good Doctor." Spock says this with such utter blandness that it takes Ben a few seconds to realize that this is actually an amazingly clever insult.
"Your translator seems perfectly able when you need to insult me," McCoy responds.
"I am never insulting," Spock says, and Ben realizes that his humor is sarcasm so dry it probably makes Antarctica seem jungle-like in comparison. "I merely speak plain fact in response to emotional outbursts."
"They are lovers," Chekov, the tiny Russian boy, says. He has just woken up from where he has been curled against Scotty.
McCoy sputters, while, to Ben's amusement and surprise, Spock blushes green.
"You have green blood?" Hikaru asks, thankfully diverting the topic from who in this van is having sex with whom. That's going to be interesting to negotiate, in any case, no matter what the answer is.
"Yes," Spock says. "I am, however, not a lizard person."
"Are you sure?" McCoy asks.
Spock sighs. It is the smallest, most sarcastic sigh Ben has ever heard.
This is road trip, it seems, is going to be far from boring.
"What kind of sitcom did we just walk into?" Ben asks Hikaru.
"A Logo one, I think," Hikaru says.
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