The Line: Trekworld

"Dockmaster, zero-zero-seven, on inbound approach."

"Engaging."

In the shuttle's cockpit, Stephen April activated a virtual view through external sensors.  Elbows resting on the pilot's chair, he interlaced his fingers, index tips touching the point of his nose; a pensive posture.  Eyes shut, he concentrated, visioning Noram's landscape.

Home.  Below, the Sierra Nevadas emerged, amidst green-gold agrobelts, split by urbania, cities and nascent megacities: Quarterville, Trajax, Twentieth Century, Mojave.  Air traffic overtook, to a lesser extent, land vehicles.  April had leased a lakeside cabin in the Molli Serevi community, where skiers were hitting the slopes, scuttling the snowy mountainsides in the full-day sun, while below, adults and children enjoyed the lake.  He would be going there soon.

In moments came San Francisco, nearly identical to the city he remembered thirty years ago, the last time he visited Earth in person.  Fine-tuning and directing his examination, he made out people in the parks, on pedestrian paths and motor-ways, in and on buildings and rooftops, coming, going, occupied with whatever occupied them at that moment.  A woman in a pink dress, with tiny gleaming sequins like stars, walked a dog, alongside a young boy; both blonde.  The child might have been her son.  About thirty men in business suits – sensors said twenty-nine – milled the opposite side of the street, engaged in animated conversation.  An older couple sat in black metal-frame chairs, watching them pass.  April had a thought to eavesdrop, curious to the subject of conversation, but didn't.

Earth was still alive.  It still bustled.  And the majority of its populace, unlike decades and the three centuries past, was human.  Almost no non-humans appeared to be found.

Almost.  He spotted Klingons on a balcony in the Presidio, bat'leths swinging in the sun – martial arts practice or combat exercise.  Biosensors revealed two as human, altered, bodies surgically transformed around their central nervous systems.  Some people emulated aliens, and took it too far.  Way too far.

Some people.  Many people.  Too many.

Home.  But it was not home.  Nothing had changed.  Everything had changed.

Switching optic-virtual to direct, he viewed Starfleet's complex, nesting the organization's headquarters, as he landed.  The local academy nearby was the one he had attended.  Starfleet still existed.  Earth was still part of the Federation... more or less.  On the surface, it was the world he had always known, and once served, and once called home.  It looked the same.

But probing would unveil what he knew to be otherwise.  It was not his Earth.  It was not his home.  He had not seen that home in a long time, and never again would.

It was an illusion.  There were people.  Cities.  Earth orbited its sun.  But many lived in a dream, a massive shared fantasy.  The Federation was only a concept, an experiment in pretense.  Aliens did not exist; nor did starships, or Starfleet.  For any of them to exist required warp drive, ability to travel faster than light via subspace; also imaginary.  Alternate universes, timelines, other dimensions, were not real.  Only one true reality existed, where the fantastic remained fantasy.

There existed another world beyond this one; below, beneath and above.  That world was the real one.  Not everyone accepted or believed in it.  Few wanted to see that their exciting, color-filled world, a world of aliens, travel, mystery, adventure, war, peace, and drama, was fake, a sham, based on an ancient promotion for greed and merchandising, a television show, as empty and pointless as life itself.  It was called "Star Trek": an entire universe, in their minds.

The informed called it Trekworld.

Stephen April was part of it... but he wasn't sure which part.  He walked The Line, the fuzzy nether-partition between fantasy and reality, equipped with the knowledge of one, existing in the other.  The Line separated reality from this shared fantasy.

He was not alone.  People in the Federation, some he had known and worked with, had awoken to the truth.  They still lived and worked here, really or virtually.  They were the Believers.  The knowledge of who and what they were, at their cores, changed everything.  None had parents or families in the biological sense, despite data and memories of mothers, fathers, ancestors, siblings.  None did anything they remembered doing.  Time itself was skewed.  Days, years, centuries could elapse in months, days, or minutes, with or without their awareness.

Armed with such knowledge, they walked The Line together.  They formed groups, self-defined families with different missions and agendas, based on who and what they were, what they represented in the Metaverse, that place beyond The Line, and what in some cases they hoped to achieve.  They declared alliance, and their discovery, with a symbol, a circle split by a wavy horizontal line.  Some wore it visibly as a patch, or a tattoo.  April's adorned the left arm of his uniform, below the shoulder.  Each carried an extra marker of group identification denoting factions, varying degrees of belief or modus operandi.  April's was a stylized T, resembling a cross.

Inside the fantasy, a recent war split the Federation.  The Topaz solution provided a reprieve, a return to the familiar order, but only a reprieve.  It was not, could not be, a true solution, to that which had no easy solution, no quick fix.  Truth brought change, but only so much as everyone accepted or was willing to accept.  Everything from before the Revelation of Ultimate Truth still existed.  The structure beneath the surface, however, beyond the limited scope of their fantasies, whether they liked it or not, had changed.  No one could stop it.  No one could stop change.

The figure waiting to greet him on the platform bore an old, familiar face.  He and April had never met, yet April knew him, and rather well.  The man stepped forward, smiling, to shake his hand.

"Welcome to Trekworld."

"Gee, thanks," April said.

The man gave a low laugh, amused.  "Should I call you Mr. April, or ambassador?"

April briefly contemplated.  The name 'Stephen April' meant little anymore.  People called him different things.  Names were symbols, and the perfect use of symbols: Like the lives of people, of everything in this make-believe world, they were subjective, and prone (or made) to change.  Everyone had two layers of being, dual existence on either side of The Line.  On one side they were different people, yet manifestations of the same person on the other side, where they were mere figments of imagination.  Grasping that truth, each presumed that they had a choice to determine who and what they wanted to be.  Yet one truth yielded another: They really had no choice, no control whatsoever, when their common source, beyond The Line, decided and determined for them.

Results could be unexpected.  Many simply changed their names in time, as they grew, matured, and came to feel that they were different people, not the same as they had once been... like April, and the man standing before him.

"April is fine."  He rarely went by anything else, nor had he ever officially changed it.  "And do I call you Mr. President, or...?"

"Mr. President will do.  It may not be real, but I feel like I've earned it."

April looked about.  "No security?  No aides or bodyguards?"

"Oh, they're around.  But you know how it is.  They don't need to be physically present.  I'm well-protected, I assure you.  In fact, I'm sitting in my office."

As April suspected.

"Don't take offense that I didn't physically come to meet you."

"Not at all."

"Shall we?"  The president motioned him along a stone path, between color-splashed bushes of green, purple, yellow, red and orange; imports from some distant, alien world.  "So you're Stephen April, descendant of the great Robert April."

"No."

The president blinked, then understood.  "Of course.  I forgot that about you."

"I'm not so sure he'd be called great.  He's certainly not held in as high a regard as James Kirk, or your namesake, Picard."

"Well, I knew him.  Or, I remember knowing him."  The president made a face, an expression April recognized.  Many made that face when trying to reconcile the disparity in their lives, between memories and understanding that those memories were not, in fact, memories.  "He was a great man," the president said.  "A good man... a good friend... and a good captain.  Like yourself, once upon a time."

April wasn't sure if that was a compliment or an insult.  He ignored the remark, with no desire to think or talk about the old days, for him.  "And you're 450 years old."  He had looked it up.

"Four hundred and fifty-four.  Or four-eighty-four, depending on who you ask.  I don't look a day over fifty, do I?"  The president spared a grin.  "That would make you the same age, wouldn't it.  If you were who you resemble."

"If."

"It's strange," the president said.  "I remember serving under your ancestor, as his first officer.  He gave me my first command."

"I thought you died on Talos Four," April said, hoping to make a point.

"Retired.  Died... Not exactly.  Like you said: Not really.  I don't have to tell you how death is seldom permanent in this life."

"Don't I know it," April quipped.  No one knew that better.

"The Talosians sustained me in a fantasy with Vina... but like any fantasy, it grew stale.  We got old, until we mutually decided that we'd had enough and wanted to die.  I don't know if the Talosians provided an illusion of dying, or if we went to sleep, but... When I awoke, and realized even the Talosians weren't real, I decided that I needed to leave."

April nodded.  "I understand."  He had been the same, once: a man of action.  To an extent, he still was.

"Except I ended up trading one fantasy for another, it seems."  The man named Christopher Pike let out a sigh.  "It's a brain twister, realizing everything you knew, or thought you knew, isn't real."

April understand that well, too.  That fact brought him here.

"Can you convince the Humanists to listen?"

"I'm not here to change anyone's minds," April said.  "They'll believe what they believe.  All I can do is share my perspective, what I've learned.  They'll have to decide what to do with it."

"Do you know what happened to Robert April?" the president asked.

The answer to that was as subjective as anything else.  April remembered visiting the April family cemetery in Michigan, where a grave marked the final resting places of Mark Robert April and his wife, Lucille Henderson April, parents of Robert Mark April... the captain under whom the president once served.  His memory was fogged: There was another Robert April, Robert T. April; the T stood for Todd.  The thought gave him pause.  In the strangeness of this multilayered, perception-driven reality, where alternative realities could coincide and fluctuate and overlap, both/all existed, in a sense.

On record, elderly Robert April vanished in deep space, following the so-called "counter-clock incident".  April knew what few others did, and the record didn't show.  In one future he was found in suspended animation aboard a living vessel, a bioship calling itself Sarah, after his spouse.  That April took command of another Enterprise, a Cluster-class starship, NCC-1701-G, due for construction later this century.  With a band of rebels, he led a revolution against a tyrannical future Federation, in what Earth's old calendar marked as the 30th century.

This was all past tense to April.  He had been to the future, to its farthest reaches and ultimate end.  It was why the president, Pike, asked.

"I do."  He didn't tell him that currently Robert April was somewhere in deep space, in suspended animation, aboard the bioship who would become, six centuries hence, his home, his companion, and lover for a time.

Rather like Cadie, April thought.

"But you don't want to tell me."  The president got it.  "I'm heading home after the conference, to Mojave.  I'd be honored if you'd join me."

"What for?"

"I'd like a chance to pick your brain... get accounts of your dealings with the Klingons, Romulans, the Borg, the Dominion... personally, one on one.  If you don't mind.  If it's not too much of a problem."

All of those races he mentioned were big news, making headlines daily, with constant running attacks, counter-attacks, wars, feuds and rivalries.  And the Federation's Starfleet was right in there with them, in a state of almost perpetual war... unlike the Earth Starfleet, Earthfleet, making efforts to distance itself from the battle-prone aliens.