I don't own Star Trek.

Please let me know what you think.

X

The Truth of Time Travel.

Azalea leaned over her brother's body, gazing down at him with concern. Her brother usually slept little since his mental health issues haunted him at all others, but thanks to the 24th-century drugs he had been given and were now being circulated through his system, Zefram looked peaceful and resting. Azalea could hear the sounds of muffled talking from outside, and she had no problem recognising Riker and La Forge, but she didn't know what they were talking about and she didn't care. She was more interested in her brother's well-being and not what a bunch of jumped-up astronauts were talking about. This was all their fault.

After Zefram was shot by their laser beam, they had carried him down from the forest. Zefram was barely conscious, by the time they'd arrived at the village he had fallen fast asleep. Riker and La Forge had helped her carry him down, although she had made it clear she wanted them to stay away from her and her brother, they had wanted to know more about how she knew they were in an alternate time to the one they were aware of. Azalea had told her Zefram was more important than such a conversation and he was more important than a future which might not even happen in their reality. They hadn't liked that, of course, but then again arrogant people didn't like what they sometimes heard, especially if their beliefs were proven to be false.

But at the same time, Azalea thought about the meeting she was going to have with Riker and La Forge. She wasn't looking forwards to it. She knew it was going to come up and there was nothing she could do about it. They wanted to know more about the Phoenix's Faster than Light drive and they wanted to know how she knew they were from a different universe. She had seen it clear on their faces, and more than once the two men had tried to ask her questions on the matter.

Azalea had shot them down.

Deep within herself, she had actually been delighted to throw Riker and La Forge's 'we know better than you do because we're from the future' attitude, as she had come to see it. She had become so heartily sick and tired of their arrogance, the way they swanned around, fixing the Phoenix and telling them things about the future they felt they had the right to. It had been brilliant putting them all in their place.

But at the moment, Azalea was still trying to accept the realities of what she had just learnt. The Enterprise crew were not from this reality, they had time travelled to this reality - her reality and Zefram's, and instead of realising what had happened, they tried to ignore the differences, thinking that their history was just different.

Why hadn't it occurred to them they were not in their home reality? Didn't they know anything about temporal theory, that you could not just travel back in time unless you had a time machine which had existed for a long time and you could effortlessly transport yourself to any point after the time machine was activated?

Didn't they know about that little kink to temporal physics? She decided it didn't matter. She wanted them gone. She wanted them to leave and go back to their ship, to go back to the 24th century, and Azalea truly, honestly did not care if they ended up in an alternative 24th century. It was not impossible the world they knew, they could never return to. She felt no sympathy for them, not after what they had done to her brother. They had driven him almost insane by telling him about the stuff they knew their Zefram Cochrane had done, what he had received. They had foolishly told her Zefram he would have honours galore, that he would have books written about him and his warp flight. And they had not even thought about the consequences. They hadn't realised they were causing her brother emotional turmoil, and it angered her to the point she wanted to throw herself at them and tear them apart with both hands.

Zefram's groan snapped her out of her thoughts and she looked down closely at her brother, and she saw he was waking up. "Hey," she cooed while she started to work herself up to rant at him. He was just as bad. What in the name of God had he been thinking, running off like that? Did he really think he could have done it?

Zefram woke up and stared blearily back at her. Both Cochranes stared at each other. "Lea?"

"Yeah, it's me." Azalea's voice was grim, making him wince and he knew he was going to get it. His reaction almost made her smile.

Zefram looked around, noting they were in the caravan. "So, we're back in the village. What happened?"

Azalea grit her teeth. "You ran off," she didn't bother sugar-coating the harshness of her words, and it made her brother wince. "They told you that you would be immortalised as a statue and you ran off. What were you thinking?"

Cochrane felt terrible for putting his sister through this whole mess, but he didn't have time to tell her his reasons. He decided to let her go on.

"I went with them when they started to hunt you down because I didn't want anything to happen to you, but what were you thinking?"

"I had to get out, Lea," Zefram said sharply. "They were driving me mad."

"I know. That's one of the reasons why I want to have a go at them once I'm sure you're okay," Zefram sent her a look, and she looked down and went on, "and because I wanted to make it clear they were making a mistake. They're delusional, Zef."

"What kind of mistake?" Cochrane asked puzzled. "What do you mean, they're delusional?"

Azalea sighed as she considered the best way to put this explanation, she didn't know if she should just make a blunt statement and tell him or not. "The Enterprise crew are not from our universe, Zef. They and the Borg travelled into this universe, a reality with some differences and some similarities when they travelled back in time, creating a new branch of history along the way. That's how backward time travel works, Zefram," Zefram winced when he caught the displeasure from her, she was clearly annoyed with him, "to avoid Hawking's Chronology protection hypothesis and to prevent potential paradoxes like the classic Grandfather paradoxes, alternate universes are the only way to travel back into the past. And they come from a different world."

Zefram had not expected that. "What?"

Azalea rubbed her face. "Do you remember when we started work on the Shunt Drive, how the drive folds time by merging with an alternate universe? They travelled back into the past, and they opened a hole in our reality. We won't travel into a different time or a different timeline, but the Enterprise crew have."

Zefram had recovered enough to gain some awareness and he was stunned. "But everything they've said about the future they come from, it seems too plausible."

"And it does," Azalea agreed. "But they are from a parallel universe, nothing they know can really apply here. And there are dozens of differences."

"Like what?" Cochrane asked.

"For a start, I don't exist in their reality," Azalea looked sadly down at her brother, and she stood up and walked around the room, pacing up and down as she thought about how she could expand on the statement. But Zefram was stunned. For a long moment, he assumed he'd just imagined what she'd said. He vaguely remembered hearing something before he was hit by their laser beam, but was this it?

"What do you mean, you don't exist in their reality?" Zefram asked slowly.

Azalea sighed. "I don't exist in their world," she whispered, gazing at her brother solemnly. "I got hold of one of those computer tablet things of theirs, and it took a few hours of trial and error but I got into the historical database. Their historical database. I took a look at it, and I looked up First Contact and the days before it. Zef, there are no rumours of the Borg attack. I spent hours trawling through that database. There wasn't just no notice of the Borg, rumour or otherwise, but when I checked your records and our family tree, I saw I wasn't on it.

"Mum and dad had you, but they didn't have me. There was a small footnote, it was barely a sentence, that said mum was pregnant a second time….but she suffered a miscarriage," Azalea looked down at her hands, tears welling up in her eyes as she thought about the miscarriage her mother's counterpart had gone through and her sorrow for her mother's counterpart and her other self who hadn't even had the chance or the opportunity to be born, to go to school, to become a scientist.

Zefram, horrified by his sister's tears, leapt up and hugged her tightly.

Azalea wrapped her arms around him. "I found out you had launched a warp ship, not a Shunt Drive ship. You made first contact with a race called the Vulcans, and in fifty years Earth changed completely, just as Riker and his people described. But the thing is, Zef, that ship up there… its proof warp drive is a dead-end technology."

Zefram didn't say anything, he knew where this was going. He knew because Azalea had shown him a number of potential timelines with a derivative of the Shunt Drive. It didn't allow time travel. It just showed potential futures. And in the ones where warp drive was the FTL method, Earth barely expanded across the galaxy.

"Their warp drive is just like the ones used in those timelines, aren't they?" Zefram whispered, unable to hide his curiosity.

Azalea nodded. "The design has barely changed in 300 years for them, Zef. Oh, they've made improvements and they've even developed a few more drives, but they are certainly taking their own sweet time exploring the universe."

Zefram chuckled. It was down to his sister that his views on warp drive had taken a nosedive. At first, their researches had been separate - while he had been designing and building his warp engines, Azalea had been working on time travel technology and she had been refining her theories. In the end, the two of them had combined their talents, and Azalea had shown him a device she called an Alternate Viewer, a kind of time television and they had seen different futures where the Earth used warp drive. And Azalea had not liked it. She hadn't seen the logic of the reasons why the technology of warp drive just had a few adjustments over the decade. It was crazy. From the time viewer, the warp engine would only be improved but in the long term, there was no real improvement.

"They barely got out of this part of the galaxy, did they? I know you, Lea, you must have checked how much of the galaxy these people explored. We only took a brief glance at those futures, but while we didn't see enough, which you made sure of with that computer program, we saw enough for your point to be made. That while warp drive is good for faster than light, it has a power limit and there are only so many times a warp field can be augmented."

"They haven't," Azalea confirmed with a nod, which Zefram felt. "I checked. They've only explored a small but growing chunk of this side of the galaxy, and aside from a wormhole, they discovered they haven't visited anywhere else in the galaxy for a long period of time. That's why I created the Shunt Drive with you, Zef, so we would have a Faster-Than-Light drive which would allow us to go anywhere and instantaneously, so we could make humanity's dream of travel through space a reality."

Zefram wondered, especially when he saw how his sister looked uncertain if Azalea was having second thoughts about the distance factor. But they could work that out later. Right now they had to deal with the Starfleet crew. And these aliens.

"Lea," he began slowly, "do you think we should go through with this First Contact?"

The question was so unexpected. It had come out of nowhere, but in hindsight, Azalea had to admit it to herself, it was logical for her brother to say it. Azalea wasn't sure about the answer. Last night, she had been excited at the prospect of humanity growing up, developing into a space-faring civilisation, no longer cooped up on Earth, no longer fighting pointless wars amongst each other.

But after the way her brother was treated, Azalea had been tempted to rip the Phoenix apart, destroy the drive contained within its bodywork for good. But now she was not so sure. She could still see the advantages, but she didn't want her brother to go through any more pain and grief, he had suffered more than enough.

"I don't know," she said softly. "A part of me wants the Enterprise crew to just leave, go back to the future, and leave us to it. I just don't know."

X

Until the next time...

By the way, one of the most important reasons why I wrote this new FTL technology into the story is because warp drive is a dead-end technology. While there were advances such as the Soliton wave and transwarp - yes, I know there were problems - but no more research was developed, and warp drive has stagnated with only marginal advances.