Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to 15 Minute Ficlets' Challenge #51.

"You don't understand." That's honestly how he put it. I'm not psychoanalyst; that's not my field, I'm in the hard sciences. So it's quite possible that what he said was true.

"You can't just stay stuck in your little ivory lab for the rest of your life. It's like, like just – oh, how did Newton put it - I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

I exhaled, blowing my breath out so it lifted the hair falling over my forehead. "I'm impressed. I didn't think you were, erm,--"

"Didn't think I knew Newton?" He grinned, and there was something wrong with it, too wide, or too toothy; I just know it was unnerving. "Of course I knew him. I was in a lab too, dumbass."

Now, that rankled. It was uncalled for, and untrue, and we both knew it. And then I thought, I think he means 'in a lab' in a more experimental sense...

"You need to get yourself out of a lab and do something," he said. "You can't stay locked up over a microscope. It's like being on the shore, like Newton said. Except, damn, how can I say this," his hands fluttering like moths trying to escape flames. I have to quash my own urge to do the same when I talk. "There is so much to life, now that we're free. We have so much ahead of us, and so much time, and it's a damn waste to just throw it away on lab work. You already spent a lifetime on it. You don't have to spend another lifetime, too."

I sighed. "My work is important, or rather, it will be. We need to break the Creator's code –" He made a foul curse, but I continued: "and I've been chosen to work on it. How can I just turn my back on the work and jaunt off?"

"You need to get your head out of a beaker and look around. We're all adaptable." He gave that strange grin again, and I looked at his hands. My hands, only different. Same look to the knuckles, same delicacy of purpose and movement, same tendency to talk way too much with them if we don't keep it in control. When our series was Created, it had its flaws like all the others did, but of course only flaws that were deemed minor. Like fluttery hands.

I missed the continuation of his speech: "- need to be there all the time, someone else can do the work. I'm just saying, you should broaden your horizons. What's the point of deep knowledge about one thing, like a trench in the ocean, when you could spread out like a current and cover everything?"

The river is deep and the river is wide, Hallelujah. Milk and honey on the other side... The lyrics came back to me from long ago. He's oddly poetic for one who's expressed such an interest in killing Earthlings.

"It's not just the knowledge," I explained. "It's the interruption of the work. Don't you care if we can't reproduce?"

He laughed, the barking yips that make me cringe if I hear them coming from myself. "What's it matter right now?"

I can't argue with someone like this. I stood to leave, and for a moment he looked at me with a serious expression: as though for once putting aside his personality and really thinking about what I'd said.

"If you want to do it, so be it," he said with a shrug. "You're a fool for it, to work yourself from a rut into a trench. You'll regret it later."

"I won't," I retorted. "We're going to save our people, Dina and I and the rest in the labs. We're going to save our future." I nearly spat the word, hoping it would somehow get through to him. "I don’t have time to waste in 'broadening my horizons.' "

He looked at me, and gave a broad, toothy grin, and sniggered. I turned on my heel and left.

Now, of course, I think of a dozen other things that could have been said... but what happened, happened. And he's wrong – the deeper I get into this research, the more I will understand it, and the better the outcome for our people, even if not for me personally.

At least, I hope so....

~Personal journal of CRC-16 "Grif" Reproductive Researcher

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com