Stardate: 60806:0647
Title: Nuts and Bolts
Author: Lt. Vilmer
Time: Just after "Building Bridges, Part 1"
Scene: Main Engineering


The blonde wasn't a particularly religious man and hadn't been for some time. Most of his notions of right and wrong had been smashed when the Borg smashed his planet and killed his wife and children. He'd found over his time in Starfleet that most claims of divinity could be explained away as mind tricks and sleight of hand, if not down right manipulation of a given group's belief system. Usually with just enough high technology thrown in to make the show pretty good and somewhat believable until one figured out the trick and pulled back the curtain.

Kal had a very low opinion of the Q. They claimed to be almost godlike and while their power was immense it was generally destructive and subject to temper tantrums similar to that of a privileged five year old.

The engineer thought back to all the different things he heard about the progenitors over the years. For gods, they were pretty elusive, they had no doctrine, expected no worship as a matter of fact they had left no expected code of behavior behind them. They seemed to have sown their wild oats and left. Letting the galaxy develop as it would.

It would at first be easy to put the progenitors in the same category as the Q or any other number pseudo-divine races or beings. Except for one thing: the progenitors didn't have any tricks or hide behind the curtain. They had handed the crew of the Relentless the primer to their "tricks". The fact that the instructions were in English, stuck out in the engineer's mind like a warp core going critical.

Earlier in his life Kal had known a religious man who claimed humans were the closest known species to perfection. At the time Vilmer had found that hard to believe knowing what he did about most of human history, but the fact that it was an Andorian priest giving him the sermon kept the idea from being completely laughable. As the engineer thought back to that day he also realized that the Andorian didn't put any value judgment with his statement, it was simply a fact.

Kal had questioned him then, if humanity was the ideal and we were all created why had so many different species and abilities developed. The priest had met Kal's skepticism with patience and good humor and had gone into a surprisingly knowledgeable discussion about environmental factors and evolution. The priest had also mentioned as a part of his belief system that all the races were part of the same family and that we were all progressing, some farther than others, some in different paths but all progressing.

It was an inescapable fact that the instructions were in English.

The blonde's mind whirled with the equations and instructions that were contained with in the console. He hadn't found it much of a surprise when they'd been beamed or transported back to the Relentless. He understood how it was done. Not only had their teachers given them the advanced equations necessary to use the device but they had taught them the foundational equations as well. In short line by line.

Kal and Maxine didn't have to work very hard to install the device. It was designed to fit in with the Relentless' systems. And it fit seamlessly. Crewman would later report that it seemed as if the CEO and CSO were speaking in another language and also that the device was installed with out apparent use of tools. It appeared that time and space had shifted and Relentless' structure had taken on mercurial appearance and shifted, accepting the new device as if it had always been there.

Kal had had one final experience that puzzled him during the installation. He had come into contact one of the Relentless' bio-neural gel packs. The engineer felt his consciousness expand and could feel the entire Relentless as if it was his own body. The sensation lasted only a split-second but before it ended he thought he'd brushed against a female presence.

As the pair finished the installation, the blonde thought that he should ask Maxine if she'd felt anything strange. He laughed at the thought however, what in the past several days what didn't feel strange.


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Lt. Kal Vilmer
CEO
USS Relentless
NCC-11966
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