I don't own Star Trek in any way sadly.

Please let me know what you think.

X

Running away is Futile.

Zefram Cochrane was increasingly becoming more and more ill. by daybreak, he had given up any kind of hope of sleep - alcohol, drug-induced, or not - after the attack on the silo and the community, and the conversation with Will Riker and his people had stripped away much of his self-control over the mania which sometimes grabbed him. For much of the night afterwards, he had retreated to the caravan he shared with his sister, giggling and speculating on the fantasy worlds he was invariably going to open up with space travel, encountering aliens, all of which elevated himself and Azalea into the realms of godhood.

Without his sister, he would never have realised the warp drive which created a bubble that contorted ordinary space-time and pushed a starship through the interstellar void was a waste of time; while the theory and the physics were easy enough to grasp, the drive came under so many limitations the further the Cochrane siblings had realised as they'd gone through the math on warp theory before they gave up on it, the more power you pushed into the ratio and transformed the antimatter reaction into the exotic matter for bending space, the more the ship would just stall and not get much further.

After that Zefram had given up hope on that type of faster-than-light drive. But the way he had seen space travel was, the simpler the method and the idea, especially the one that made up a faster-than-light drive, the better.

Wormholes were out. While the idea of travelling to distant places in the blink of an eye all while not breaking the light speed limit was compelling, neither Cochrane knew how they could make it work. Maybe there was a technique, some kind of scanner which could uncover the existence of microscopic or quantum scale wormholes, like the ones in quantum foam which had the power of crossing the entire universe, but the Cochrane's had never found one. So wormholes were out.

That left only one avenue, time. Something his sister was an expert on, but he had quickly become an expert on himself.

Like himself Azalea had been fascinated by the notions of space travel although she was much less euphoric than him; Lea had always been calmer than Zefram. But she did get excited, especially since the Phoenix could truly make humanity rise up and make the dream reality. But it wasn't until the early morning when the euphoria had worn off and panic took its place.

Eleven A.M.

The launch of the Phoenix.

That moment….everything changed.

He wasn't sure he could hold it up, he wasn't sure if he could take what was going to happen. He just had to last that long. If he could keep himself together, then perhaps he wouldn't explode as the panic got to him. With that thought in mind, he knew he shouldn't, but Zefram had included a flask of booze on his person. Booze usually helped keep him sane, especially with the implant. In the early hours of the morning, he had seen Azalea leave the caravan. She had told him she was going to check some things out, but she wouldn't say what, and he didn't know where he could find her. Dimly he remembered how Lea had been looking increasingly doubtful, made even worse by the way she had gone almost without sleep herself.

What she was doubtful about, Zefram didn't have a clue. All he knew was in the early hours of the morning she had left him. As he walked around the community camp looking for something to eat, a part of him knew only too well he couldn't function on an empty stomach in his current state despite not being extremely hungry due to the butterflies in his stomach from nerves. After he nibbled something he realised it didn't work.

Deciding ultimately to just see what needed to be doing in the Phoenix while keeping an eye out for Lea - he was hoping to have a word with her so then she could tell him what it was that was bothering her - but as he went out, he realised there was a second reason for finding Lea.

To stop him from dealing with the stares.

The moment he went out of his caravan, Cochrane had to deal with the stares from the people Riker and La Forge brought down with them to see if the attack had damaged the Phoenix. Everywhere he went, they were there, stopping to stare at him, and it was driving Cochrane mad. He had wanted to find something to take his mind off of the confusion and the panic he was feeling, but they were making it worse. Frustrated, Cochrane waved them away. He turned and found a man he didn't know holding some copper tubing in his hands and a permanently nervous look on his face, trying to say something, but Cochrane waved him away impatiently when the man just couldn't open his mouth.

Sneaking into a corner, he took a deep breath. It wasn't working. These people were everywhere and they were making his panic much worse. Reaching for his flask, Cochrane was only able to take half a sip. Less than he wished, because La Forge suddenly called him before he could pull a massive swallow from the flask.

"Doctor!"

Cochrane choked a bit as a large amount of booze went down the wrong tube. "Yeah," he gasped as he looked around.

La Forge was standing on top of the silo hatch, looking surprisingly cool with the shades he was wearing, and with the computer tablet in his hand, he reminded Cochrane of a movie director, strangely enough. "Would you mind taking a look at this?" He asked.

Cochrane, cursing his lack of luck, nodded. "Er, yeah." He coughed uneasily as he walked over to the engineer to see what he had. As he took a look at the tablet, he saw the screen was full of schematics and equations. Much of it looked familiar and Cochrane realised he was looking at the equations and the schematics of an antimatter intermix chamber. It was familiar, and after a moment he realised where he had seen it before.

It was the intermix chamber of the Phoenix.

Cochrane had designed it himself with some degree of help after a bit of work. "I've tried to reconstruct the intermix chamber from what I remember at school. Tell me if I got it right," La Forge added with a hopeful smile towards him. But Cochrane didn't smile back. Nor did he say if La Forge got it right. Instead, he gaped down at the tablet.

"School? You learned about this in school?"

"Oh yeah. 'Basic Warp Design' is a required course at the Academy. The first chapter is called 'Zefram Cochrane'."

Did people learn about his work in school? Cochrane had trouble believing it.

After a moment Cochrane accepted the fact that if he had turned Earth's entire future around from a society of idiots aiming to wipe themselves out because someone looked at them funny it was logical that his work would be taught to school kids. But this was news Cochrane could have done without. For some reason it only made him feel more crotchety. "Well, it looks like you got it right," Cochrane said with a fake smile.

Before La Forge could say anything else, especially if he sensed the annoyance and the frustration, the nervous man hurried over. Apparently, it looked like he had gotten his second wind. "Commander. This is what we're thinking of using to replace the damaged warp plasma conduit," the man explained before he finished with one of the cheesiest grins Cochrane had ever seen in his life.

But Cochrane wasn't looking at him.

La Forge had taken off his shades and he studied the copper tubing closely with those strange cybernetic implants. Cochrane watched with fascination as the implants seemed to zoom in as he examined the tubing. He had seen very little of the 24th century so far, but from what he could see they had come a long way. La Forge was a blind man and yet they had the medical technology that could give him his sight. It was incredible. "Yeah Reg," La Forge said at last once he was finished with his examination. "Yeah, that's good, but you need to reinforce this copper tubing with a nano-polymer."

The guy, Reg, took the copper tubing he planned to use to replace the damaged plasma conduit but he wasn't leaving. Instead, he looked like he was fighting his own desire to either run and hide or bury his head in the sand just to say this to Cochrane. "Doctor Cochrane. I know this sounds silly, but can I shake your hand?"

Cochrane didn't want to shake anyone's hand. All he wanted to do was to find his sister and try to nurse some sanity back into his life while they worked on the Phoenix together. But while the idea of snubbing the man or politely letting him down gently was appealing to the scientist right now, he realised he didn't have the heart to do it. With a sigh, Cochrane held out his hand….and the guy, Reg seized it so enthusiastically and shook it so hard Cochrane became convinced the other man wanted to yank the whole thing off. "Thank you, Doctor. I can't tell you what an honour it is to work with you on this project," Reg gushed.

Fortunately, La Forge saw how unsettled and, hopefully, horrified expression Cochrane was positive was written clearly on his face, and he intervened gently but forcefully. "Reg!"

But Reg was too excited and gushing to listen. "I never imagined I'd be meeting the man who invented the warp drive."

La Forge barked, "Reg!"

Reg stopped when he realised he had gone too far, and luckily for Cochrane and his hand, not to mention his temper, he let go. "I'm sorry. Right. …Thanks." With that, he turned around and ran off.

Cochrane felt a scowl creep over his face. The frustration was beginning to get to him. It had been growing within his soul from the moment La Forge showed him those schematics, even worse telling him he had worked on it from the memory of what he had learnt at school; if the other man, Reg, had not come over when he had and shook his hand, gushing the way he had, and if he had gone off like he'd planned and found Azalea, perhaps he would not be feeling this way. He needed to calm down and relax, but these people were making it increasingly hard for him to do so, and the panic that was gripping him was making it just as increasingly hard for him to concentrate.

"Do they have to keep doing this?" Cochrane snapped, waving a lazy hand in the direction Reg had run off to. Surprised by the hostility, and taken aback by the irrational question - or what he assumed to be an irrational question, La Forge took a moment to think of the best way to reply. Cochrane didn't hold out much hope the other man would get the hint. La Forge was unable to see what he didn't want to see.

"It's just a little hero worship, Doctor. To tell you the truth I can't say I blame them," La Forge admitted, confirming Cochrane's worst fears. "We all grew up hearing about what you did. Or what you're about to do. You know I probably shouldn't be telling you this but I went to Zefram Cochrane High School."

Oh great, not only is my work being taught at school, there are places named after me as well! Cochrane thought to himself, feeling the frustrated panic rising in his chest. "Really?" He said, knowing he couldn't say much after hearing something like that. He threw up a hand in frustration, wondering what he was going to do now.

La Forge either didn't see his frustration or he didn't care. He was looking around the compound. "You know? I wish I had a picture of this."

"What?" Cochrane snapped in exasperation. Right now he wanted - no, needed to escape so he could get his mind in shape without people demanding he shake their hands, or telling him what they knew was going to happen. He didn't care. Surely these people knew about things like butterfly effects, and grandfather paradoxes that his sister often talked about whenever she was thinking about the nuances of time travel?

But these idiots didn't seem to care about things like that. They seemed to think they could say and do whatever they wanted, whenever they wished without any kind of consequence. He needed to talk to Lea about that. It was worrying him. "Oh well, you see, in the future, this whole area becomes a historical monument," La Forge interrupted his thoughts. "You're standing almost on the exact spot where your statue's gonna be."

What the hell? "Statue?" Cochrane barked feebly in horror.

"Yeah! It's marble, about twenty metres tall and you're looking up at the sky. Your hand sort of reaching to the future," La Forge actually turned on the spot he was standing on, and he mimicked this statue he was describing with such enthusiasm. The sight of it was making Cochrane feel physically ill, not just to listen to but to see. He had to escape, he realised as the panic infected his brain so profoundly that he didn't even dare try to stop it. He knew if he didn't try to make his escape now, he never would. He didn't want to be a statue. He didn't want to usher in a new era for humanity, no matter how appealing, he didn't want his hand shaken, but most of all he didn't want to let these people who looked at him so with hero-worship down.

And then there was his sister, but the panic overrode those thoughts in his desire to escape. "I gotta take a leak!" Cochrane called and he walked off; it wasn't the most inventive, nor the best excuse, but it was all he could think of in order to escape. But he realised a moment later in hindsight he could have crept away silently while La Forge was occupied and gone off on his own, but this worked as well.

"Leak? I'm not detecting any leak," La Forge walked to the edge of the silo hatch, looking around in puzzlement.

Cochrane sighed. Wouldn't he ever get away from these idiots? "Don't you people from the twenty-fourth century ever pee?" He asked pointedly.

Finally, La Forge realised what he meant, and he chuckled in embarrassment. "Oh, leak, I get it," he laughed, "That's pretty funny."

Cochrane chuckled himself despite himself, although he wondered how many more pieces of slang had gone the way of the dinosaur by La Forge's time. He didn't care. "Excuse me."

With that, he walked off, although he heard someone say "Commander?"

But Cochrane did not look back. He just wanted to escape. He moved as casually as he could before he started to run when he reached the point in the Montana woods where he knew he was out of sight. He didn't know how long it would take before the whole lot of Riker's mob realised what he had done, but he hoped to get a head start.

X

In her laboratory in the silo complex, Azalea was reading the history of the United Federation of Planets while looking at the technical readouts of the warp drive engine they relied on. She had managed to get hold of one of their computer tablets, a padd they called it, and she had to be thankful these people were more concerned with repairing the Phoenix than they were keeping an eye on their toys.

Azalea had been curious ever since she and her brother had learnt where Riker and his people came from, and she had wanted to find out as much about their history - future history, as the case proved to be - as she could.

When Riker and his crew had explained to her and Zefram about the future of humanity - the first contact which would come from the first launch of the Phoenix, and the creation of this Federation, Azalea had been excited by the prospect. But then she became a bit worried. For a start, she had been hearing how 'different' Phoenix was, how the warp engine design seemed off to the engineers. She had heard of a few of their theories; the Phoenix was designed to test a theoretical collection of technologies and principles that would be phased out with the development of the engine. She could understand how they reached that conclusion, but there were too many things that worried her.

But the biggest reason for her worries was time travel. They were time travellers from the future, but they didn't recognise or know about her.

At first, Azalea just assumed they had missed her since the design was Zefram's, but they knew about Lily and some of the other members of the Phoenix team. Why wouldn't they know about her? Azalea had been thinking about that during the night, but it wasn't until she had been hit over the head with the answer that she finally understood, and it hadn't taken her long. But she had decided to wait until morning and get some sleep. If there was going to be an encounter up close and personal with aliens, she wanted to do it rested.

She had left her brother in their caravan and she had made her way to the silo where she had found it relatively simple to get her hands on one of their tablets. It didn't take her long to master its controls and access its database. Azalea was not bothered about changing history; if she was right, it made no difference anyway.

She had wanted to learn more about the Federation and what happened over the next 300 years. But when she checked the map of the galaxy and the amount of space humanity had actually explored, she was surprised; while she was pleased wormholes existed, especially since one had been discovered in this part of the galaxy and led to the other side of it, Azalea was surprised their lightspeed drive hadn't gotten them too far. That should not have happened.

The drive she and Zefram had worked on since she had shown him that his idea for FTL was flawed…was being used by the Federation. While the warp engine design pioneered by Miguel Alcubierre worked perfectly and was a perfectly simple and easy design that conformed to the laws of physics, it was flawed. She and Zefram had come to realise such an engine would need thousands of years to cross half of the galaxy unless its bubble could be expanded and if new intermix formulas allowed it.

The biggest clue that had her thinking was the general reaction to her presence. When it was learnt Zefram Cochrane had a sister, everyone had been surprised and very few of the Starfleet officers had even known how to approach her. Azalea had checked the database on Zefram. It all looked the same as what she herself knew although there was the type of exaggerations you would expect to find in a history book whose sources were contemporary facts and observations lying about.

Azalea didn't know whether or not she should laugh or be frightened for her brother when there was no mention in any part of the file about his health or psychological issues. It was strange given how the file talked, talked, and talked about Zefram's life during and after the war and the building of the Phoenix, but there was nothing about his motives for it. The file just stated he was doing it to create a dream of interstellar travel and to better himself and the rest of humanity.

Azalea knew her brother's motives. She shared them herself, especially after realising that humanity was just not worth it. They had reached the conclusion after seeing their own people lash out against one another, seeing them all cramped, starving from a lack of food and shivering from the cold because there was no heating while those who were better off did nothing. Before that, she and her brother had both tried hard to resist the misery, but in the end, they both realised humanity was in the gutter and was not worth it. They even burnt ancient books just to live one night in warmth.

There was nothing about the numerous money-making schemes Zefram had made and failed at over the years. Where were the stints in the hospital during his moments of acute depression? Where were the mentions of the inventions he had tried to sell in order to make life better for them both? It was like the Third World War was a time when Zefram ignored the war in favour of this dream.

But these people believed that. They didn't realise that the Cochrane siblings and everyone else were more interested in caring about themselves and their few loved ones, they could not give a damn one way or another about anyone else. It was sad and depressing, but it was the truth.

The Starfleet people just didn't see it.

All they saw was a dark page in history.

Zefram's file contained attachments about his family. Their family. But she was not a part of it. There wasn't a mention of her anywhere. Azalea had both suspected and dreaded something like this. There was no other explanation.

Riker and the Enterprise crew - Deanna, La Forge, and the others who had transported down while others had gone back up to fight the cybernetic creatures who'd come back into the past to change history in the first place while endangering Lily's life without even knowing their enemy still lived - were from an alternate reality, created by time travelling back to the 21st century.

It fit with the theory of time travel mechanics, and it was something Azalea herself was an expert in. The universe, trying to avoid the creation of the types of paradoxes that had haunted them for years whenever they thought once about travelling back in time, out Hawking's chronology protection hypothesis, created a new branch of history, or the time travellers simply reached back into the past and latched onto a reality where everything was fundamentally the same, just a little bit different.

Science fiction was full of stories about time travelling back into different timelines and alternate universes. By sidestepping the types of paradoxes so many scientists dreaded, alternate universes were seen by many quantum physicists and mechanics as the key to making time travel work. Most scientists' attempts at building a time machine depended on solutions that led to a loophole in Einstein's equations, but many scientists believed the only way to time travel was to slip sideways into other universes and take advantage of the time travel conditions there.

But these people seemed ignorant of the truth.

They were trying to keep what they believed was history from being changed, but it was impossible. They seemed ignorant of the fact that their fears of changing history were meaningless because they were not in their own reality.

Azalea looked up when the door of her laboratory opened and La Forge stood in the doorway flanked by Riker. "What's up?" She was about to tell them what was really going on, but their expressions told her it was not a good idea. Both men looked worried and harried.

"Do you know where your brother is, Miss Cochrane?" Riker had enough politeness to be diplomatic.

Sensing trouble Azalea stood up. "No, why?"

"He's gone missing."

"What?" Azalea couldn't believe this. "When did this happen?"

"We've only just realised it," La Forge bit out, shaking his head in annoyance. "We were talking and he told me had to….relieve himself, and he went off into the woods. I thought he would be back, but nobody's seen him."

Azalea closed her eyes and groaned when she realised what her brother had done. "Oh no."

She could kick herself. She should have brought her brother here and they could have gone over the history of the Federation and him, but she had wanted to clear everything up quickly. She knew what Zefram had done. There was no point in searching the silo, the compound, or the community village. "He's run away, but what did you do? My brother wouldn't run off without feeling like he was being pressured or pushed into a corner, so what did you do?" She demanded.

Riker turned to La Forge. The engineer looked down. "He was agitated when Reg shook his hand, and he wasn't happy with the hero worship."

Azalea wanted to scream at them that they had brought this on themselves, but she restrained the urge. "My brother has run off," she told them bluntly as she put the padd onto a desk. She noted that Riker was the only one of the duo who had noticed she had it, but in her current frame of mind, she was too angry to care what they thought. "Come on, we need to find him."

"You're coming, why?"

She couldn't believe they were asking such a stupid, pointless question like that. Didn't they know what her brother was going through? One look at them made it clear they were terrifyingly ignorant. If they found Zefram on their own without doing her the courtesy of even asking if she had seen him, Azalea knew it not end well.

She knew her brother was having one of his panic attacks. When he was in the grip of one of those, Zefram was almost impossible to talk down, that was why she was coming along. Whether they liked it or not.

"Zefram is suffering from a panic attack," she decided to come clean with them so they could accept the gravity of the problem, a problem that they had brought onto him, "And because I need to find my brother before he or you make another stupid mistake, but I need to tell him something important and I can't do that if he's gotten away, can I? At the same time I know my way around these parts," Azalea grabbed her coat and moved to the door but Riker wanted to know what she was doing with the padd.

"Dr Cochrane, what were you doing with one of our padds?" Riker asked as they left the silo.

"Studying your history and confirming a theory about you. Now come on. We have to find Zef."

As she went with a large party of Starfleet officers Riker had found to help hunt down her brother, Azalea wondered as they went into the Montana Landscape what Zefram hoped he could achieve. Surely he knew they wouldn't let him go. And with their technology, she had little doubt they'd find it relatively easy to find him in the end. But Zefram was likely acting on panic, and he was not thinking clearly. That worried her because while she knew her brother, she didn't know what kind of state he was in right now.

It only took Azalea and the Starfleet group two hours to find her brother. Jogging with Riker and La Forge while the blind engineer was consulting his scanning computer - a tricorder, Azalea thought it was called - brought them to a halt.

"Hang on. There's a humanoid life sign up ahead. Five hundred eleven metres," La Forge gestured towards a thicket of trees some distance away.

Azalea listened to the subtle sound coming from La Forge's ocular implants, and she realised he was zooming in on the view. She watched his expression turn grim with disappointment.

"Cochrane?" Riker asked.

"It's him all right," La Forge confirmed with a grimace, and they jogged after him.

As they got closer to the trees, she spotted her brother's lanky frame quickly enough. She spotted him taking an unbelievably long swig from his flask. She grimaced. When he was this drunk, it was going to be hard to talk to him, and he was going to be three times as unbearable. What the hell had these idiots said to him?

Once they were close enough to be heard, Azalea shouted. "ZEF! Calm down!"

Zefram froze, and like a jackrabbit, he exploded into speed. Azalea doubted he would get too far; while he was a tall, thin man, physical exercise wasn't really on her brother's priority list compared to hers. It didn't take long for them to catch up to the panting Zefram, who was running up a hill where he was confronted by a group of guards.

"Doctor!" One guard said, but Zefram didn't listen, he just ran back down the hill again when he saw it was hopeless.

"Sir, " another guard said, but Cochrane came to a halt before Azalea, La Forge, and Riker.

"Still looking for the bathroom?" La Forge's voice was thick with disgust and disappointment.

Zefram lifted his gaze and Azalea gasped. Her brother looked terrible. His face was feverish with panic and horror, and he was panting so hoarsely it put her in mind of a blacksmith's bellows. What the hell had these idiots said and done? She didn't know, but what she did know was that their expectations had made him snap. The smell of booze was so repugnant, but he appeared too agitated to be drunk. Azalea gasped as she realised this attack, alcohol-induced, was much worse than normal.

"I'm not going back," Zefram said, and with that simple sentence, she knew these idiots had caused this latest panic attack. The last time she had seen him like this had not been pretty.

"Zefram, look at me, I'm here," Azalea said before Riker or La Forge made another of their stupid mistakes and made her brother do something they would all regret.

"Lea?" Zefram said in surprise, and she realised in his hysteria he hadn't even realised she was there.

"Yeah, it's me," she smiled at her brother. Brother and sister stared at one another, and for a brief moment, it was just them.

"Why did you bring them after me? I don't want to go back," Zefram repeated while looking at her with a look of such betrayal that it hurt her to see it.

"I was afraid you might hurt yourself, that's why. Zefram, what did these morons say to you?"

Unfortunately, Riker chose that moment to speak. For the last few moments, the group of Starfleet officers had been ignored by the Cochranes, and he hadn't liked that, any more than he had liked being described as a moron, and neither did the others.

"You need to come back, Doctor. I don't know what was said to make you run off like this, but-."

"I don't care," Zefram snapped out of the moment with Azalea, making her mutter a few nasty curses about the intelligence of people from the 24th century. One more minute, just one, and she might have made Zefram calm enough to think this through rationally. But no, these people had to interfere.

"Look, Doc, we can't do this without you," La Forge snapped.

Azalea had just about had enough of these fools making life a living hell for her brother, and she had a scathing remark on the tip of her tongue to tell him and Riker they were deluding themselves, and the world they were in was not the world they had read about in history books, but Zefram spoke again.

"I don't care," Zefram glared in feverish panic. "I don't want to be a statue."

"A STATUE?!" Azalea hissed, realising what it was that set her brother off.

"Doctor!" Once more Riker tried to be the voice of reason and calm, but it didn't work. The brief moments he had been allowed to properly rest without taking a swig from that fucking flask had given Zefram the chance to get his energy back, and he swung around and ran off.

"You stay away from me!" Zefram yelled.

"Zef, no, it's no good-!" Azalea yelled, but at the same time, she heard Riker say to La Forge, "We don't have time for this."

Azalea screamed in shock when Riker pulled something out of his pocket with a snub-nose, and a beam of orange-red energy hit her brother in the back, making him cry and sending him hurtling towards a bank and roll down into a small creek.

"Zef!" Azalea rushed towards her brother and dropped to the ground by his side, he was picking himself up, looking around in shock. "Zef, are you….are you okay?" She whispered.

"Lea… Lea, I'm sorry, but I had to get away," Zefram whispered.

Tears pricked in Azalea's eyes as she looked at the shattered and shaken expression on her brother's face just as Riker and La Forge drew closer. She couldn't believe they had the gall to look concerned when they had done this in the first place. Didn't they realise this was their fault? Didn't they realise what had happened?

Riker turned to La Forge in disbelief. "You told him about the statue?" He asked. Clearly, he hadn't known that part.

That made Azalea snap. "Pick my brother up. And we can take him back to my lab. There he can get some rest," she ground out. "Well, what are you waiting for?"

Riker and La Forge stepped forward and dragged Zefram to his feet while Azalea helped support him. As she held onto Zefram, wrinkling her nose at the strong stench of moonshine and wondering how much of that stuff her brother had drunk, she murmured soothing words while hoping the idiots didn't say anything else.

Finally, La Forge spoke while her brother was still dazed. "I don't get it; why did he run? I mean, it's crazy; it's like he doesn't care about the Phoenix."

Azalea had been planning on actually telling these idiots the truth about the so-called great Zefram Cochrane. But La Forge's question made it clear they needed to understand something important. And fast.

"Oh, that's where you're wrong. He does care about the Phoenix, just like I do. But he doesn't like what you think is going to happen. Zef and I spent years working on the faster-than-light project. We launched probes into space that experimented with the final design of the Quantum Warp Drive, or the Shunt Drive-."

"The what?" La Forge was so stunned that he stopped.

Azalea nodded while she held onto Zefram gently, "You heard me. That is what I was doing with your padd, Commander. You are not using the FTL drive Zefram and I installed onboard the Phoenix. You're using a continuum warp drive that creates a bubble that contorts and distorts ordinary space thanks to subspace. My brother and I stopped using that theory long ago when we realised that it held more flaws than advantages, and so we turned it into a time-travel drive. Shunt drive. It folds time, sending a ship across vast distances instantaneously."

Azalea couldn't help but smirk at the stunned and dawning horror on their faces. It was good to finally show them up after the way they had thrown around their so-called knowledge of what her brother was going to accomplish over the years to come.

"Do you finally get it, now?" She asked, mindful of how her brother was paying more attention to her than the Starfleet officers actually realised. "It's a fact of time travelling; it's physically impossible for anyone to travel back into the past of their own universe, it's the universe's way of protecting itself from the dangers of paradox and the butterfly effect. Unless of course, you time travel into a parallel universe, a world where everything is the same but has diverged from another reality, and that is what has happened here. You are not in your own universe. Thanks to the cybernetic aliens, you have time travelled back into an alternate reality. Nothing here is what you know. You were just too stupid to see it!"

It was cruel, but Azalea could not help but be amused by the horrified looks on the faces of the Starfleet officers as they finally accepted the truth. She could see denial, worry, and shock. Somehow she knew she was going to enjoy shaking up their world, but after they had shaken Zefram up so badly he'd resorted to running off, she didn't care.

X

Until the next time...

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