And for Jim.
He leaned over Kirk. Using both hands, he splayed his fingers against the sides of Kirk’s face. It was a delicate touch, barely grazing the skin, but sufficient to anchor the neural connection. Kirk’s flesh was cool to the touch compared with his own. Spock closed his eyes and concentrated on achieving the meld.
“My mind to your mind,” he intoned. “My thoughts to your thoughts.”
A minor tremor threatened his resolve as their individual minds began to blur together, but he took a deep breath and pushed past his natural impulse to protect his own identity. He had melded with Kirk before, on several occasions, so he reached out for the familiar signposts he had come to expect. Boyhood memories in Iowa. His proud parents, George and Winona. Older brother Sam. The massacre on Tarsus IV. Starfleet Academy. Carol Marcus. Ruth. The U.S.S. Republic. The attack on the Farragut. The launch of the Enterprise under his command. Gary Mitchell, his eyes glowing like pulsars. Sam Kirk’s death on Deneva. Klingons. Romulans. Edith Keeler. Miramanee…
But instead, he found himself lost in an unfamiliar psychic landscape. Strange memories that had nothing to do with James Tiberius Kirk flooded his mind:
Earth, more than two centuries ago. Smoggy skies. Automobiles clogging endless highways. Television. Video games. High school. Making Eagle Scout. His first car. College. Marrying Debbie Lauderdale. Babies being born, then growing up right before his eyes. Kevin. Katie. Rory. Air Force training, just like Dad. Area 51. The DY-100. Shannon O’Donnell. NASA. The divorce. Docking with the Lewis & Clark. Months in zero gravity. Fontana. O’Herlihy. A stowaway? Saturn looming in the distance, growing nearer by the day. The probe, floating in space. His hand reaching out to touch it—
A blinding flash lit up Spock’s synapses. The shock jolted him from the meld, and he staggered backward, reeling from the sudden dislocation. For a moment, he wasn’t entirely sure who or where he was. Foreign memories and emotions fogged his mind.
“Fontana,” he murmured. “Alice…”
“Spock!” McCoy rushed toward him. “What is it? Are you all right?”
“A moment, Doctor. Please.”
Spock struggled to regain his composure and sense of self. He placed a hand against a wall to steady himself. The borrowed memories began to recede. Years of mental discipline and training restored order to his thoughts.
I am Spock, son of Sarek and Amanda. My mind is my own.
“Talk to me, Spock!” McCoy pleaded. He took hold of Spock’s arm. “What happened?”
“Forgive me, Doctor.” He straightened and stepped away from the wall. He politely but firmly removed his arm from McCoy’s grip. “The meld was broken abruptly, and the transition back to myself was rather more jarring than I would have preferred.”
McCoy examined Spock with a palm-sized medical scanner. “Well, you seem to be more or less normal. Your blood pressure, heart rate, and neural activity are a bit elevated, even for a Vulcan, but they seem to be dropping back to their usual freakish levels.” He lowered the scanner. “So, what did you find in there? What’s wrong with Jim?”
The anachronistic memories lingered at the back of Spock’s mind. The evidence was irrefutable; there could be only one conclusion. He turned toward their unconscious patient, who twitched and murmured in his sleep. The man’s fingers drummed restlessly.
“That, Doctor, is not James T. Kirk.”
McCoy gaped in astonishment, but the truth had to be faced.
“Despite all outward appearances, that is Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher.”
“I can’t believe it,” McCoy murmured. He sank into the chair in his office, still trying to process the astounding diagnosis Spock had just delivered. He had no reason to doubt Spock; the Vulcan usually had his precious facts in order. It was just a lot to take in. “This is insane.”
Spock remained standing, seemingly unshaken by his discovery. “At least we now know that the captain is not insane,” he pointed out. “Merely… dispossessed.”
That was small comfort.
“Dammit, Spock,” McCoy cursed. “I’m a doctor, not an exorcist. What are we supposed to do now?” An urgent question came to mind. “What about Jim? Is he still in there somewhere? Beneath Shaun Christopher’s memories?”
“Negative,” Spock said. “I regret to say that I found no traces of the captain’s consciousness still remaining within his body. His mind appears to be entirely absent.”
“Good God,” McCoy said. “You don’t think it’s been… erased?”
The thought that all of Jim Kirk’s personality and life experiences — everything that had made him who he was — might have been wiped away forever filled McCoy with despair. It would be the same as if their friend had been vaporized by a Klingon disruptor. He would be gone for good.
“Or perhaps merely displaced,” Spock suggested. “It could be that Colonel Christopher’s memories were not simply copied into the captain’s brain. There might have been a two-way transference instead.”
“Across time?” McCoy’s mind boggled at the notion. “Is that even possible?”
“There are always possibilities, Doctor. Some are simply more probable than others.”
McCoy wanted to believe him but had his doubts. “But isn’t it more likely that the probe simply replaced Jim’s mind with a copy of Shaun Christopher’s? I mean, I hate to be the one citing logic here, but what about Occam’s Razor? Isn’t that a simpler and more plausible explanation than assuming that Jim and Shaun somehow switched minds over a span of centuries — and umpteen light-years to boot? What makes you think Jim’s mind is still around… somewhere?”
“A feeling, Doctor.” Spock grimaced, as though the admission pained him. “I cannot put it into words precisely, but what I sensed just now did not feel like a copy of Shaun Christopher’s memories but rather his actual living consciousness, somehow displaced in time and space. Which suggests that the same might have occurred to the captain’s mind.”
“A ‘feeling,’ you say.” McCoy couldn’t help being amused. “Look at us. I’m the one talking logic, and you’re relying on some vague impression you can’t really explain.” He snickered at the sheer irony of the moment. “Somebody check on Tartarus Prime. I think it may have frozen over.”
“Mind-melds do not lend themselves to spoken vocabulary,” Spock replied, perhaps a tad defensively, “let alone your own unsophisticated human languages. I believe my reasoning is perfectly sound, given my observations during the course of the meld.”
“Uh-huh.” McCoy didn’t buy it. “Sounds more like wishful thinking to me. Not that I blame you. Anything’s better than thinking that Jim’s mind is lost for good.” He settled back into his chair and crossed his arms. “All right, then. Let’s run with that theory. What now? Where do you think Jim is?”
“If my hypothesis is correct,” Spock said, “then the captain’s mind may now occupy Shaun Christopher’s body, during the Saturn mission approximately two hundred fifty years ago.”
“Then let’s go find him!” McCoy urged. He seized on Spock’s theory as their last, best hope of getting Jim Kirk back. Hope flared inside him for the first time since Spock had revealed that Jim’s mind was truly absent. If there was even a chance that they could save Jim, they had to take it. “Saturn is a ways from here, but if we hurry at maximum warp, we can be there in a matter of weeks. And we’ve traveled back to that era before. More than once, actually. Jim’s probably wondering what’s keeping us!”