Star Trek: Erin

Part 18: A Story of Finite Infinity

Just a warning: This part is a bit darker than others and describes the origin of the monster in the engines. If that isn't your thing, you don't need to read this part to keep up with Erin's life and the main plot.

     Perhaps you've heard before that the multiverse is like a loaf of bread. Slices of reality packed in together, differing by every choice ever made, from the decision of a lizard to lick one eye or the other to the choice of beginning a generations-long war to the organization of a rather critical sentence like, "Will you marry me?"

     Like any loaf of bread, the multiverse is finite, but there are so many slices the human brain might as well call it infinite.

     It is in one special slice of the multiverse that many things had to happen to be made possible. The first was rather large: Vulcans didn't make first contact. Klingons did.

     A single scouting ship stumbled upon a tiny, insignificant blue planet with a dominant sapient race that refused to die. In this set of realities, the right Klingon was at the helm, and instead of bombing the threatening species out of existence, they descended, saw a very useful ally and some good poetry, and adopted the human race as a protected species in the growing Klingon Empire. With some good old human ingenuity, great wars were won, and eventually one banner united six galaxies.

     Which is pretty damn big.

     It was a Klingon peace: focussed on military, glory in the name of the empire, and the many rituals that defined their way of life. Bizarrely, humans had a seat at this table, and through subtle influence managed to change some key areas. Perhaps it was a human who planted the first seeds for open borders and trade with other races.

     By 2201, the Empire was imperfect, brutal, but technically at peace. And technical peace was all the humans of the twenty-third century ever known.

     The second incredible event that occurred in this reality was that the parents of Erin Cobos still met. In the known reality, Chloe and Faringer Cobos met on Earth, which was a hub of human activity and not a mining planet. In this reality, the couple met on Glock V at a family reunion mix-up that involved Chloe receiving an invitation with an address on the wrong side of the planet—which was an intentional trick played by her terrible cousin—and a stressed Chloe being invited to join the nearby Cobos family reunion by one Faringer Cobos.

     So, Chloe met Faringer's parents, siblings, and extended family on their first date, the ensuing hilarity prompted a second date, and three years later Chloe decided to marry the dashing young Faringer to her cousin's eternal shame. Where they'd met was a quiet section of the six galaxies, mostly left to do whatever the hell it wanted, and Chloe and Faringer settled down on Glock V, orbited by a Klingon space outpost nicknamed the Moon. Because humans.

     The third miracle was a matter of DNA. Hundreds of ways for an offspring to turn out from the DNA of two people, and it was the same as another reality. Erin Cobos was born. Unfortunately, still more realities stemmed from this moment, one for every name and inflection possible for the couple to choose—an event that occurred for each one of the astronomically huge number of births that ever has or will happen—with all the mindless persistence of a monkey hammering on a typewriter.

     From this moment branched a finite infinity of more choices, but by following one thread you reach a reality where something Very Important happened.

     Technician Erin Cobos was stationed on the Moon. She'd joined the Klingon Empire's military as a specialist in weapons systems. She found weapons fascinating, and the industry on Glock V had fostered her interest into passion. She'd struggled through school with her eyes set on the prize called 'employment in her field' and graduated.