Tomorrow’s yesterday was today, but yesterday’s tomorrow was no more, and that meant today’s tomorrow was now uncertain. It wouldn’t be how he remembered it. It couldn’t be. Not anymore. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, but now it was. And so he was adrift.

After the battle beyond the galactic plane, there hadn’t been time to think. There’d been a war to win. But now that the Vaadwaur had retreated, he had ample time. Where his colleagues mourned the people that’d been lost, he mourned the future itself.

Standing at his board, Dr. Tom Brooks scribbled furiously, but none of it made any sense. How could it? A butterfly had flapped its wings, and a tornado was born. But what was that butterfly? Or, more accurately, when was that flap?

As he thought back, he realized what it was. One comment. One assurance. One moment when he’d felt bad for a friend plagued by uncertainty, hanging in limbo, someone who had not his clairvoyance, and in doing so, he’d shattered what he had. He’d shattered the future he knew.

Or wait, which moment had it been? It hadn’t happened once. It had happened twice. There were two points of divergence, two times he’d slipped up. Which one was it? Was it the moment when he’d returned from Montana and sat with Allison Reyes? Or was it the time Ayala Shafir came to him in his office after the labyrinth closed the first time? He needed to know which. 

He dropped his marker on the floor and raced out of the room. 

Maybe, just maybe, there was a way he could fix this. Tomorrow relied on yesterday, but not their yesterday. Go back to yesterday’s yesterday, and maybe tomorrow could be saved.

Dr. Brooks tapped his combadge: “Computer, find me Reyes.” He gave no thought to the late night hour, a brief bit past 2300 hours at this point. This couldn’t wait. Or maybe it could. Time didn’t care about the wait. But he did. He couldn’t wait. 

“Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes is in her quarters.”

So off he went down the hall, into the turbolift, and then back out again, emerging on deck three just a couple quick turns from her quarters. He’d never been to the admiral’s quarters before. It’d hardly be appropriate, but also, she was rarely there, the workaholic that she was.

Tonight though, the admiral had taken a night to herself. After all they’d been through, the losses that they’d suffered and the burden and guilt heavy on her shoulders, she had made a promise to their counselor, Lieutenant Commander Grace Ellander, that she’d put work aside, at least for one night, and focus on her own personal well-being.

At least that had been the plan, but then her door chimed.

“Yes?” came Fleet Admiral Reyes’ voice, her tone more subdued than usual.

“Allison, it’s me,” Dr. Brooks announced. “It’s Tom.” His foot tapped impatiently against the deck outside her door as he waited for her to respond. “We need to talk.”

Oh well. So much for a quiet night. “Come.”

The door hissed open, and in stepped the mad scientist. 

Fixated on his thought as he was, Dr. Brooks didn’t notice the dimmed lights and the candles lit, nor did he process the ambient music playing softly in the background, the sweet fragrance of essential oils wafting through the room, or the soft silk nightgown draped loosely over the admiral’s slim frame. None of it mattered. It wasn’t real.

“We need to go back,” he declared as he walked straight into the middle of the room, knocking over a small end table. A tea cup that’d been perched atop it fell too, shattering as it hit the floor, but he didn’t notice, neither the cup breaking, nor the sound it made. It didn’t matter. None of it would happen. Not like this. Not after they fixed this. “We need to go back to the divergence.”

“Well, good evening to you too, Tom,” Fleet Admiral Reyes shook her head bemusedly as she set down the jar of Risian body butter she’d just been about to use to emolliate her legs. She’d deal with the broken tea cup later, but right now, she was more worried about the man before her. She could tell something was very wrong.

“Evening, morning, day, or night, it’s all relative, but don’t you see, Allison?” Dr. Brooks just kept going, his eyes wide, looking not at her, but past her. “Fix today’s yesterday, so tomorrow’s yesterday is not today, so the tomorrow that should be, will be.”

Oh boy, this was going to be something to unpack, Fleet Admiral Reyes thought to herself. She knew about his diagnosis. She knew how Dr. Lisa Hall had helped him work through it after he’d been released from the New Zealand Penal Colony. Temporal dissociative disorder was what it was called, a nasty consequence of his travels. Something had clearly retriggered it though. “Have you spoken with Lisa about this, Tom?”

“She’d just tell me to come to you,” Dr. Brooks shook his head, not following her train of thought. To him, she was mentioning Dr. Hall because she’d be an operator on the journey, not because he recognized the spiral he’d found himself in. “She’d go, that I know. But she’d want your nod first.”

“To go where?” Fleet Admiral Reyes entertained his line of reasoning. “And to do what?”

Rather than answering, Dr. Brooks just switched topics, his eyes finally locking on her. “Tell me, Allison,” Dr. Brooks begged as though it was the most important thing he’d ever asked. “Do you remember that conversation we had?”

“Which conversation, Tom?” Fleet Admiral Reyes inquired. She’d need more than that. They spoke a lot about a good many things given that he was the head of astrophysics research for the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, and she was its executive director.

“After Montana, on Archanis, in the Drifter’s Den,” Dr. Brook answered. He still remembered it, and how foolish he’d been. He knew better. He should have said nothing, but he’d felt bad for her. He’d wanted to give her assurances that he had, but had that been the problem? Had that broken this?

“Yeah, I recall,” Fleet Admiral Reyes chuckled. How could she forget? He’d dragged her to what had to be the shadiest place in all of Archanis Station to have an off-the-record conversation. “The one where you explained what you had found, the start of what eventually led us to K’t’inga to have that little conversation with General Kloss.” While hunting for clues about the Serenity and the Ingenuity, they’d stumbled across a Gul on Montana Station that was involved in the proliferation of illicit technologies to parties that sought to destabilize the borderlands.

“Yep, that one,” Dr. Brooks clarified. “But not that part.”

“The part where the Gul admitted he’d ejected Lewis and Lee from the Underspace, and that they hadn’t been destroyed?” Fleet Admiral Reyes asked. It had been a quite happy moment, to hear definitively that the Serenity and the Ingenuity were stranded, not destroyed, and that they had a chance of reuniting someday. It had let her finally breathe again.

“Yes, but no,” Dr. Brooks recalled. “Think back. I said something to you. Something I shouldn’t’ve. Be brutally honest with me… did what I said change what you did?” Dr. Brooks asked flatly. “I need to know.” 

“I… umm… I’m not following?” Fleet Admiral Reyes shrugged.

He thought back, recalling the words he said. “Trust me on this. They’re okay.” He looked at her gravely. “That’s what I said. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Fleet Admiral Reyes nodded. But she still didn’t get where he was going.

“Did it change the outcome?!” Dr. Brooks pleaded with her. “Did it change your course?” He needed to know. This was the root of everything. Either this, or his comment to Shafir. He needed to know which it was. Or was it something else, something he’d missed altogether? “Did my assurance, a moment of weakness, of empathy, did it change what you did?”

“I don’t know, Tom,” Fleet Admiral Reyes admitted, realizing where he was going with this. Even when they sat in the Drifter’s Den, she’d known that bit he’d shared wasn’t from what they’d found, but rather because he knew something more. She’d been so hungry for assurance though that she hadn’t questioned it in the moment. “I don’t think so, but like, I dunno. Maybe it set me at ease a bit?” She took herself back to that moment, to the feelings she’d had then. Had that little bit of knowledge changed her approach? “If you hadn’t given me that, maybe I would have made it my mission to get them home rather than waiting for it to happen.”

“The flap of a butterfly’s wings,” Dr. Brooks sighed

“Huh?” Fleet Admiral Reyes inquired.

“A butterfly’s wings flap, a tornado is spawned,” Dr. Brooks elaborated. “The butterfly effect, a small change in a deterministic nonlinear system that results in something far larger.” He had told her something so small, but subtly it had influenced what she did, and that’d had major ramifications. It had removed a piece from the board, one the future required.

Suddenly, she understood his insinuation. “Are you saying…”

Dr. Brooks nodded. “This isn’t the future. Lewis still has a role to play in what’s to come.”

“He had a role to play in some other timeline that didn’t come to pass,” Fleet Admiral Reyes corrected, trying to bring Dr. Brooks back to the present. Their present. Not whatever present he’d dissociated himself into. “But in this one, in our reality, Captain Lewis didn’t make it home.”

“No, this isn’t right,” Dr. Brooks shook his head furiously. “This shouldn’t exist. Not like this. We need to go back.”

“We can’t go back, Tom,” Fleet Admiral Reyes replied firmly. “That’s not how this works.” Even if they had the means, which they did not, and even if it didn’t violate the Temporal Prime directive, which it did, they still couldn’t just go back and change it.

“But it’s important, Allison,” Dr. Brooks pleaded. “He’s important.” Enough so that he’d seen it in the history books. But those books, they would no longer be. Not as they had been. Not as he knew them. Not unless they fixed this. “We need to fix this.”

“I wish we could,” Fleet Admiral Reyes’ tone softened as she opened up. “I really do, but Tom, what’s done is done. It is, now and forever, our history as it unfolded.” If there’d been some other outcome Dr. Brooks had seen, it wasn’t the one that had come to pass.

“Time is not immutable, Allison,” Dr. Brooks insisted. “There are ways.” He knew. He’d used them before. He’d been locked up for it. But this one was worth the risk. The future depended on it.

“Alright, let’s take for a moment that you’re right, and that there’s a way, and that we’re not all going to get locked up by the time cops for it,” Fleet Admiral Reyes posited. “If you go back, what are you to do? Kill your younger self?”

“No, don’t be foolish,” Dr. Brooks shook his head. “That would have implications too, and I rather like living. I’d just go back and tell myself what not to say. I – the old I, the one a few months younger – I just need a nudge in the right direction, and I’ll not tell you. All will be fixed.”

Did he not see the lunacy in what he was saying? A nudge had been what had started all of this in the first place. “You give that nudge, but then what else changes, Tom?”

He didn’t know. How could he?

“You see, that’s the problem with all of this,” Fleet Admiral Reyes pointed out. “A nudge this way, and a nudge that way, but it will never be as it was. Even that little piece of knowledge given from you to you, that too might change something… And did you ever think for a second that maybe the timeline was meant to unfold this way? That your travels and what you carried back, they were actually just a projection that would center the timeline on this outcome.” She subscribed to the notion of a convergent temporal probability density function, and that convergence – not a divergence – had led to this point.

“But this outcome, you don’t want it, do you?” Dr. Brooks probed.

“There are many outcomes I don’t want,” Fleet Admiral Reyes admitted. “But they are as they are. If we go back and we try to change this, why not go back and change the Vaadwaur invasion? Or Frontier Day? Or the Dominion War? But if we do, what happens then? The timeline is a tangled ball of yarn. You untangle one strand, but in doing so, you tangle something else. You’ll never untangle it all. It will just drive you mad.”

It had driven him mad. The what ifs and the could haves were what had dissociated him. They were what he and Dr. Hall had spent months working through. He needed to be in the present. This present.

“I’m sorry, Tom, but my mind is made up on this,” Fleet Admiral Reyes concluded, her tone equal parts firm and compassionate. “We will not go back to fix this, and you will not go back and fix this either.” This was not negotiable. She might take risks, far too many by Devreux’s calculation, but even she wouldn’t entertain the thought of playing with time for their own convenience.

Dr. Brooks frowned.

“But what you will do is go see Dr. Hall again,” Fleet Admiral Reyes added. “That’s an order.” He needed to get this sorted out, and while she was not the counselor that Lieutenant Commander Ellander was, this was far more her cup of tea so counselor she would be.

The frown stayed plastered to his face.

“Settle in and grab a paddle, Tom,” Fleet Admiral Reyes smiled.

Now he was the one not following.

“You are now exactly where the rest of us have always been,” Fleet Admiral Reyes offered. “In untested and uncharted waters, what lies beyond the horizon unknown, and our future unclear.”

That was all there was to it, and she would discuss it no further, so he took his leave.

As she watched him go, Fleet Admiral Reyes wondered Dr. Brooks had a point though. Not about Captain Lewis, for she would not play with time like that, but about the need to have someone – or something – to fill that void. She started turning it over in her mind, the ambient music, the essential oils, and the body butter all forgotten as she took a seat at her desk and got to work.

An hour later, she put in a call, and an aurora was born.