Meaning in Chaos
Posted on Mon Aug 18th, 2025 @ 10:52am by Lieutenant Sivek
Edited on on Tue Aug 19th, 2025 @ 8:09am
1,004 words; about a 5 minute read
Mission:
In The Nick Of Time
Location: Sivek's Quarters, Deck 3, DTI Herodotus
Timeline: MD005, 0330 Hours
He dreamed of stone first.
Not Vulcan stone, scorched and sharp-edged from the desert's fire, but something far more polished and smooth. Columns without weight. A corridor without end. The kind of corridor you might encounter in a story told to children, except here there were no children, no laughter, no storyteller. Only the sound of his footsteps against the marble that could never be real.
He paused. In dreams, Vulcans rarely pause--training against that--but the human brain insisted. And somewhere in Sivek, long-forgotten human dreams had seeped into the cracks of his meditation.
There was a sound, as though the wind might be trying to pronounce his name. He did not answer it.
Ahead, the corridor narrowed until it became a throat of stone, then widened further into a square court. Twelve figures stood there, silent, their faces jarringly blurred, their robes pale. He knew them all and none. Some were old colleagues from the Vulcan Science Academy, others were nameless guards from Limonu. There was also the bald, muscular El-Aurian with the intimidating presence. Thorrin. And the last was his mother, or someone who carried her silence.
None spoke.
He waited.
At last, one raised a hand--palm out, in the gesture of peace. But peace did not arrive.
The dream tilted.
Now he was in the prison again, except it was not. The walls and doors were gone. In their place stretched lines of bookshelves, high as cliffs, their ladders swallowed in shadow. He walked between them. Some books were open already, though no hand had touched them. He glanced at the text:
"Sivek, son of Sovek, died in the twenty-second year of the century."
He blinked. Read it again. This time something else entirely had been written:
"The inquiry has concluded. Sentence carried out."
He moved faster, scanning spines, pulling volumes that dissolved in his grip like dust. None remained. He thought he heard a voice reciting statistics in an even tone: probabilities of failure, probabilities of absolution, probabilities of things ending as they must.
He did not know if the voice was his own.
He remembered a childhood meadow. Impossible! Vulcan had no meadows. But here was one, broad and green, and he walked barefoot through the grasses that rustled against his legs. The air was gentle, not searing. Not Vulcan air. Somewhere nearby, water bent its voice over stones. He knew it was a memory not his own--something he must have read once in a Human text. Maybe the old writings of Thoreau or Wordsworth. Human writers who dawdled too long in their flowery prose.
Still, he stood there as if it all belonged to him.
His father appeared at the edge of the meadow, young, spry, hands behind his back the way Sivek had walked the corridors of Limonu. His father opened his mouth, but no words came. Instead, birds fell from the sky, one after another, their wings folded and limp like broken parchment. They landed soundlessly at his feet, and he could feel the weakening sigh of their dying hearts.
His father pointed to them, then turned away.
Sivek bent to lift one bird, but it crumbled into ash between his fingers.
Darkness pressed in, not like night but like a sealed subterranean chamber. He could not see his hands. The air tasted metallic and thin. A vibration seemed to surround him, the kind a starship makes at warp speed. Or when it forgets it's being listened to. Perhaps this was the Herodotus bleeding into subconscious.
He thought he heard Major Hastios, calm as ever: "Redemption rarely walks out under its own power."
And then another voice--quieter, closer. A woman's, though not one he could name. "Then why are you still walking?"
He turned, though there was no direction to turn toward.
The darkness seemed to breathe and he felt the air in his lungs turn hot.
He was in the desert now.
Yes. This part he definitely recognized.
The Forge stretched before him, the air veined with heat, sky molten and merciless. His feet found the stone paths by instinct, as they had when he was young. But the Forge was wrong: no suns hung overhead, only a pale cold moon. Shadows bent in directions that betrayed the laws of physics.
He heard someone behind him.
Turning, he saw himself.
It was not the self of now, not the prisoner or the agent of a fractured past--but younger. A Starfleet cadet in crisp uniform, angles still sharp, his obstreperous conviction visible in that posture. The younger Sivek stepped backward, dissolving into the silvered air.
Sivek stood alone again. He did not move. He let the wind carry sand across his face until the desert, too, disappeared beneath his feet.
He woke--or nearly.
The sound of the Herodotus's life-support cycle blended into his awareness. His room was dim, the lights timed to his own circadian preference.
Sivek lay there, eyes open to the dark, pulse steady but not entirely calm. The fragments of the dream clung to him like the dust of a desert: birds turning to ash, voices without faces, corridors that ended in nothingness and silence.
He did not attempt to interpret it. That was entirely a human impulse, to make narrative of chaos. Vulcans, when disciplined, did not chase meaning from the unmeaning.
And yet--
He wondered if the dream had been less about meaning and more about amplitude. A reminder that even in silence, even in exile, something always pressed down.
He exhaled, slow, until the breath emptied his lungs.
He considered rising for meditation, but did not. Instead, he let the silence stretch longer and remain unbroken, as though the dream may still have more to impart.
Sivek's first day aboard the Herodotus would begin now.
A Post by
Lieutenant Sivek
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
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