Bc4 Qh4+
The Bishop's gambit. Black forces white to move his King and makes White unable to castle. Risky since puts Black's Queen in peril and allow White to eventually attack it with gain of tempo with Ng1-f3. A usual response is to move in with Knight instead, enabling the quick defensive strategy of 'castling' the King in the corner of the board;
Thesis.
His fingers skimmed over the fragile dust-jacket once more, picking up faint hums of childish delight, images – hundreds, all different, all overlaid in a transparent sensory lattice, of stars and garish implausible rockets and the flashes of solar flares – a century of childish human minds conjuring fantasies of space and other worlds as they read, the impressions pooling and scattering under his fingers, tiny and insubstantial as dust motes.
Spock stood, the strict freshly-purchased charcoal instructor's uniform following the rigid lines of his body. He walked over to the bookshelf and slipped it in between a pair of costly antique treatises on early flight machines that Star fleet considered suitable decoration for his otherwise sterile, gleaming new office.
This book, Spock realised, this childhood Terran fiction that he had pushed aside as soon as his father had found him reading it, was an apt metaphor for the reason he was currently a senior Starfleet science and not a stiff, starched-robed acolyte of the Vulcan Science Academy. Insults to his maternal heritage aside, they would never have truly claimed him.
Vulcans had postulated the existence of sentient life in the universe beyond the confines of their own planet as soon as someone had calculated that the likelihood that every star in the known firmament failing to produce the conditions sufficient for the organic evolution of life (as we know or otherwise) was approximately Seventeen-hundred million eight-hundred and ninety-two thousand six-hundred and fifty-nine to One… Even if it did require the requisite minimum 1.5 hundred million years to have passed for it to have developed beyond protoplasm to a point of recognisable sentience. Vulcans had known it was not so much a matter of if, as a matter of when: the early diplomacy with Earth to form the nascent Federation had been a formal speech of protectionism that hadn't needed all that much dusting of after several hundred years. You stay on your planet, we stay on ours, we share things of value: knowledge and information. Vulcan would not be debased by unnecessary contact with inferior life forms.
But Humans… Humans hadn't calculated the odds. Humans had simply intuited that they were not alone. They had felt it somewhere in that fictitious imaginative organ they referred to as a 'gut'. They had written books, plays, vid-scripts, creating visions of a future in space of which they could not possible conceive. And of course, vainly and naively, their depictions of alien life did little to elucidate on the unknown and were largely superficial reflections of Humans themselves in different guises… simply exploring elements of their own humanity presented back to them. But they still challenged themselves, offered themselves up to the criticism of the unknown, the different. It was no coincidence that Earth was the driving force of the Federation's exploration and diplomacy.
And that was what Spock wanted. Not to simply extrapolate a little bit further from what he already knew, chipping away at a known uncertainty with logic until the probabilities narrowed in on new understanding.
He wanted revelation, immersion, to stand in darkness and experience that sudden Human flood of light as whole new vistas opened up, new galaxies and new worlds. All I know is that I know nothing. If nothing more, he sympathised with his mother's people in this way most of all. Compared to the universe, he was small, he was fallible and he was ignorant. But he wanted that to change. Vulcan smug surety was a hard position to maintain if you didn't fully believe it.
And what did the universe consist in? Vulcans would say principles, regressions to patterns and certainties that needed to be charted, predicted, understood. Humans would say people, perceptions, diversions, anomaly after anomaly after fascinating anomaly.
This, Spock was sure, was the home of true science.
But if they insisted on approaching it in that romantic, irrational, entirely chaotic and incompetent manner, he did not have to like it.
Spock switched on his tertiary screen and began scanning the first results his senior astro-technician had processed, apparently, with the finesse of a Parvik-mincer wielded by a Galvatian lumberjack. Long fingers flew in a blur across the PADD as he furiously began to annotate, eyebrows drawn down with concentration, efficiently eviscerating the sloppy code and weaving it into something concise, tight and functional.
Antithesis.
A couple of months later Jim had tried giving up on school altogether, but then then the attendance monitor had rung Frank and then Jim had been rewarded for his three days of freedom with a smarting backhand and a chipped canine. It had been almost casual: this is what happens if some snotty teacher gives me a blue ear again.
He'd managed to memorise about six-hundred standard chess opening sequences for both dimensions in that time and been soundly thrashed for the first time by the Vanderblik Matrix – the most sophisticated chess program currently available to the public.
Neither hide not hair of Sam had been seen for four days straight, this time.
Finally his grousing motor could be heard spluttering in the drive before cutting out with a cough of exhaust. It was Saturday morning and Frank had some day-work at the loading bays.
Sam'd come into the kitchen, leather jacket loose on his narrow shoulders, blood-eyed with the previous nights' excesses, pupils blown unnaturally large. He poured himself a tumbler of orange juice and started at the Formica work-top, where it had been chipped and scuffed with a kitchen knife, for a long moment before turning to the silent shadow in the doorway. He recognised his old baseball pullover hanging loose on the gangly boy.
"Hey, Squirt."
"Hey, yourself." Jim found it hard to keep the relief out of his voice. Sam's voice was gravely and hoarse. He sounded much older than he looked, the cloy of cigarettes lingering, his brown hair wild from the helmet. He was slight for seventeen and not tall. Jim's runty frame would no doubt follow suit.
"What happened to your face, huh?"
Jim shrugged one arm, "I skipped out on school and Frank found out."
Sam didn't blink, eyes raking his younger brother's livid jaw, as he took another long swig of juice. He swallowed, gullet pulsing, then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was a deliberate gesture, one that dispensed with social niceties. Jim catalogued it for use later, liking it.
"Why'd'you do that, Jimmy? Why give him an excuse like that?" Jim didn't point out Sam's own truancy statistic, currently hovering in the mid-eighties, nor his latest four-day nonappearance and simply shrugged again.
"I'm seventeen, Squirt, and flunked out eleventh grade twice. You, kid, are like some sort of genius. School is your ticket out of this dive." Jim felt the blush starting under his collar at his older brother, his hero's, casual praise. Sam nodded out the kitchen window, planting the tumbler down, dirty, in the drying rack. He indicated the battered bike, keeling on its kickstand, "That there? That's mine."
He paused, just gazing at it, his hair making him look windswept and a little wild. He spoke his next words quietly, to the wall. "I've been working at a spacer garage down in Mountford; not much but I can save up."
Jim could feel his heart constricting painfully in his chest. Sam had talked of leaving every day in the last five years. Ever since mom just stopped coming back at all. This was just more of the same.
"What about Mom?" Sam had always insisted she was coming back. Jim knew better but his brother's naïve trust was infectious and sometimes he too stared at the horizon as though willing the headlights of her transport to wink into existence.
Sam's eyes, a watery insubstantial sort of blue were glassy and reflected the low clouds, "I dunno, Jimmy. She'll just have to come and look me up, I guess."
He turned, shoulders bunched and vulnerable, and he finally met Jim's eye and managed a proper smile. Jim moved forward almost involuntarily until he was clasped in the familiar loose embrace, tucked into the taller side. Sam smelt of motor oil, burnt rubber and the acrid burn of spirits. "I dunno how I wound up with a genius for a kid brother, Jim, but I guess I'm glad that someone got the brains. You still got your little nerd cave hidden in the old cow shed?" Jim smothered a grin into the leather, welcoming the teasing, pushing aside the irritation that Sam pretended to be stupid in order to be popular. He caught a faint whiff of stale perfume – something floral and sickly - and frowned.
"Yeah, you haven't seen it in a while. I've rigged up some new processors and I'm working on getting into…" He paused, re-choosing his words, "… into some extra classes at some of the Colleges."
If Sam spotted the hesitation he didn't show any sign; his fingers were idling at the nape of Jim's neck, playing with the blonde strands, and Jim wanted to lean into the rare contact like a puppy.
"School not enough for you now, huh?"
Jim smiled, regretfully as the fingers withdrew and Sam turned away again. He answered proudly, as he had done when he'd handed his mom his first school report and she hadn't been able to look at him for a week. He's so like George. I can't stand it, Frank, I can't stand him watching me. "I've finished the whole standard curriculum and I'm just working through the last of the AP humanities. I'd like to do some more computer science stuff, mainly, I guess."
Now Sam's eyes narrowed, dark brows beetling, "You haven't been hacking into anything again have you? The school went bat-shit when you were caught. And Frank…" They both remembered the crash as the baseball bat had shattered his PADDs into splinters and the sparks as the screen started belching smoke.
They'd caught him aged nine, hacking into the advanced class materials. At first they had accused him of cheating and threatened to kick him out. It had taken him six-months to let the dust settle and pluck up the courage to simply ask. Now, he had a scholarship and was allowed to read what he wanted. Now, he hid his brains in the loft where Frank's bad leg – the one that stopped him getting regular manual work, that had seen his early retirement from 'Fleet security services – stopped him entering. Now, he made sure his virtual trail was almost invisible, chameleon-like as it snuck between the firewalls and scattered into nothingness at the first hint of detection. Sub-routine after sub-routine made sure he'd never be caught so easily again.
Jim knew he looked shifty, but Sam wasn't looking. He had snagged one of Frank's beers and had chipped it open on a chair back in a way that just looked forced and not even slightly badass. Just inexplicably distant and wrapped up in his own thoughts, not sensing how much Jim needed him, wanted from him.
"You sticking around today?" Jim didn't like how pathetically hopeful he sounded. "We could play chess?" He liked that idea, that this could be a thing for them, something of their parents that they could share.
Sam barked a laugh, "Chess! You really are setting you heart on being the Nerd King, ain't ya? I don't do chess." Something must have shown on Jim's face, some hint of hurt or disappointment or something. "But I can sure as hell whip your ass on the vid-cube, come on!" And in an instant he was back to being bright, young, geeky Sam, flopping onto the old sofa – not the one Frank liked – and was sliding on the goggles, game-control in hand. Jim was on him in an instant, in a tamgle of spindly limbs, laughing, fighting for the better control-stick, being nudged none too gently in the ribs and loving the easy rough and tumble of having his brother back - if only for now.
Somewhere in the Riverside loading bay, Frank Sullivan was being laid off for another month as the Fleet had finished up for the winter. The bars on the route home were looking inviting and his mood was darkening and gathering like a storm at sea.
High in the milking barn loft, a .textfile was painstakingly churning out endless combinations of decryption data. Pages and pages of flickering lines of code, churning through Jim's latest algorithm.
A pause.
Denied.
30 lines.
Denied.
Another line.
There was a pause.
And a beep.
Accepted.
The StarFleet logo, silver on crimson, flooded the screen with its generic welcome message to Academy students.