STAR TREK: PHASE ONE
KHAN!
Khan Noonien Singh sat in his home, which was located in the southern part of Punjab India. It was the middle of the afternoon, and it was raining. The monsoon season had passed, but the humidity still remained, and with it, the rain as well.
This would be his last night on Earth for quite some time. The Enterprise would be leaving for Mars in one week, but all essential personal were required to be aboard the ship in the next two days. So, he would spend this last day, at home, with his family.
Sonali, his wife, was at the local college, attending class. It was early in the afternoon and she would not be home until later in the evening. Their child, Harhjiwandha, or Harsh for short as they called him, was at school as well. He was only nine years old, but he was already learning at an advanced level. Khan was proud of his son's success.
As Khan sat in the chair, he stared at his reflection in the mirror, and he was silent. For all of his success, his life all seemed so hollow to him. For the past few days he had a detached sensation in his mind, and it seemed that everything around him was a dream. In fact, as he stared at his face in the mirror, sometimes he felt he was staring at the face of a stranger.
What Khan didn't know, nor could he, was that he was the product of illegal genetic engineering, and false memory enhancements. In fact, his name wasn't even Khan, and the face he was staring at was someone else's. His memories were those of another man, who was killed, so as to steal his memories and put them into Khan's mind. The career he enjoyed as an engineering maintenance specialist aboard the new USS ENTERPRISE had been the dead man's career. But none of this was known to Khan, because in his mind, he was that man; he was Khan.
Khan's actual physical body was one of sixty persons that the world had thought were destroyed decades ago, when they were still embryos. They were actually kept alive by a man, John Gill, who hoped to use these enhanced beings to take over the world and to install a world government that he thought would be best for all. He would model the new government after the example of Hitler's Germany.
When the United Space Agency announced plans to go to Mars, John Gill saw it as man's first ability to leave Earth, and to establish his footprint into space. But what good would a new world order do on Earth unless the coming colonies on Mars were not part of it.
To that end, Gill decided to use his race of enhanced humans, to infiltrate the mission so as to steer it into the direction he wanted. Khan was just one of seven enhanced beings who had infiltrated the Space Agency, and had been assigned to the first mission to colonize Mars. Each was given face grafts of real people, all of whom had been killed, and after their memories had been applied to their replacements.
John Gill would use whatever power was at his disposal to assure that his seven 'children' were part of the crew that would be left on Mars to build that world. Khan, with his unique abilities, would become one of the leaders, and the Space Agency would be forced to reward his contributions.
And with his magnetic personality, Khan would, in a few years' time, be in position to rule Mars, or so that is how John Gill had planned it.
But, on this day, Khan was sitting alone, staring at his image, and slowly losing his mind. He subconsciously had taken out a pair of sharp scissors from his wife's sewing kit, and had carved a sliver of marble from the sink covering. There was an urge inside of him, and he didn't understand it and was not normal.
Sometime later, it could have been hours, Khan couldn't tell, he heard a voice calling for him. It was far in the distance, and as he stared at his face in the mirror, he felt his hand gripping the scissors even tighter. The voice belonged to Sonali, his wife. She must have come home from college.
Khan looked up at the clock on the wall of the room and saw that it was nearly 6:30pm. He had been staring at his face, and lost in his hazy thoughts, for nearly four hours. And now, all he wanted to do was to use the scissors. When she came into the room, Khan decided, he would stab her several dozen times, and kill her. He didn't want to, but he couldn't stop himself. It was as if he were becoming someone else, and that someone else wanted to kill. He stood up from the chair, and waited for her to come through the door; and then she would die in a pool of blood.
The door opened and then his son, Harsh, ran through the door looking for his papa; Khan. Seeing his son jolted him from his trance and then his wife came into the room as well.
"What are you doing?" She asked pointed at the scissors.
He smiled at her. "Nothing important," he lied. "I just wanted to cut the tags off of my backpacks before I leave tomorrow."
She shook her head. "Are you crazy?" she asked him as she took the scissors from his hand. "You are much too important to risk cutting your fingers. I shall cut them for you."
Harsh ran over and hugged Khan at the waist.
"I will miss you, papa," Harsh said looking up at Khan.
"And I shall miss you my son. I shall bring you back something from Mars to make up for our being from you for so long," Khan said as a smile.
Khan knelt down on his knees and hugged the little boy. The boy's presence had saved Khan from becoming a cold blooded killer, for now. Had he known the boy wasn't actually his, it was quite likely that both the mother and child would have been killed.
He was a walking time bomb. And as Khan watched his son run off for supper, Khan looked back into the mirror and saw the stranger again.
"Who am I?" Khan whispered to his reflection.
Continued…