Chapter 70: Acceptance
August 2415
Kirina sat alone, quiet, on the darkened bridge of the IRW Liefvi as a battered old transport approached. The turbolift door slid open, though Kirina didn’t even bother looking.
“It’s not too late you know,” a young Romulan officer called to her from within the lift, “you could still come with us.”
“Go,” Kirina replied, closing her eyes, “before they change the price.” The officer didn’t wait very long. Kirina didn’t often change her mind, once she’d made her decisions. The door closed and the lift carrying the last of vessel’s volunteer skeleton crew to the transporter room, departed for the last time.
Kirina daydreamed, as had become a common occurrence, while she waited for the signal that the crew had gone. Obviously preprogrammed, the Liefvi cloaked, and the already-dim consoles around the bridge one by one began to shut off completely. The whole ship was entering a power-save mode. Kirina wasn’t expecting to need to use many systems anyway.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, as she sat there in command over her empty ship. Eventually, she decided that she was hungry, and left the inactive bridge unattended as she made her way towards the mess hall. She walked slowly, unmotivated, as she pondered her own existence. In her hand, she carried the PADD that had become her life.
It had started as a letter to an old friend. She wanted to try to explain the events of the last few months, from her own perspective. She wanted there to be someone, anyone, who could understand why she did what she did. She never made it past the first few paragraphs. She wrote and she erased and she wrote and she erased. No matter what she said, it all sounded hollow. How could anything she wrote even begin to explain why she murdered eighty thousand innocent people?
She knew that she would probably never see her friends again. She knew that she would probably never start a family. She knew that she could never have a normal life again, thanks to the things she’s done. These were things she could live with. Even things she could come to accept, because they were things she felt she deserved. What she could not live with was the concept that all those people died for nothing; that everything she’s ever worked for, amounted to nothing more than a body count.
As she sat down at her preferred table, with her replicated dinner-for-one, her mind raced with the same thoughts she’d been having for weeks on end. She thought about turning herself in. She thought about flying blindly into Borg space. She thought about activating her ship’s self-destruct. Now that the last of her accomplices were gone, those options were all within reach. But after a while, something changed. She had a new thought, that hadn’t occurred to her previously. What if she could still make a difference? What if there was some way that some small amount of good could still come from all of this?
So she picked up her PADD again, and erased everything. Then she began to write again. But this time, it was different. This time, she was telling the whole story, from the beginning. She decided to write for the colonists of Doza IV; for the survivors of Ecurai; for everyone who had ever been hurt by her experiments or her inventions. She decided to write for everyone she’d betrayed. And she decided to write for everyone she couldn’t help.
It would be her explanation and her allocution. It would be her life story and the culmination of her life’s work. And one day, it would be available to everyone.