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There is a camera overlooking the bridge. Its lens is minute, only noticed by those who look for it and by the light that passes through. This camera is only used when establishing visual communications with another vessel. At any other point in time, it’s turned off, yet the light does not care. The rays begin their journey in the overhead lights or, in the case of the shyer ones, in one of the many bulbs and switches of the control panels; they reflect off the metallic surfaces, leaving an ephemeral smudge of colour as a memento; they caress the skin of the crew, and, at some point, they bounce off a surface at just the right angle to end up trapped behind the glass lens.
When the camera is recording, these rays of light are immortalised in the memory banks of the ships involved. When it’s not, they are as good as lost to every known humanoid who wishes to recover them.
The power of the omniscient narrator allows us to recall some of these rays — the amber twinkle of an eye, the gaze shifted towards the Science Station, or the shine on the leather coating of the captain’s chair tracing the shape of the long fingers that had recently let go of the backrest. It does not allow us, though, to find in the memory of the glass those that never arrived, such as the ones that were entrapped by the closing doors of the turbolift, hiding the two commanding officers from all but each other.
Inside those same doors, having resisted dozens of layers of chemicals and cleaning products, remain traces of a message, invisible to the naked eye, in which a madman once wrote in generous brushstrokes, “SINNER REPENT.”
The turbolift system is complex, connecting every deck through a net of vertical and horizontal tunnels. One of the exits connects to a corridor which leads to the main transporter room.
The soles of hundreds of boots have stepped on each of the six transporter pads, totalling thousands of footprints. They are well-maintained, so we cannot see them, but let’s imagine we could separate each of the trips and illuminate them in turn in a faint milky glow, retracing the rhythm at which they appeared. We could then focus our attention on the impossibly uniform footprints of a humanoid —presumably tall, due to the separation between them— that come in through the door and come to a stop by the controls, not close enough to operate them, but waiting. Waiting for whom? Minutes pass, and the footsteps barely move; their owner is acquainted with patience, and comfortable in stillness. We are unable to see the rest of his body, so we can only make a guess of where he occupies his hands. Is the man at attention, with his arms behind his back? Does he open a communicator awaiting news? The one thing we know for sure is that, after some time, new footprints materialise on the transporter pad. Each pair quickly makes his way to find the other, and they make their way out at the same pace: two left footprints and two right footprints, simultaneously alternating, making their way down the corridor without faltering.
We lose track of them. It is possible they made their way to the mess hall, where we find ourselves at, at a different point in time. We slide past the crew, ignore the conversations, and do not even pay attention to the wonderful technology that replicates the molecular structure of food. Our attention is focused instead on the trash chute on the far end of the room, the opening of which has just closed after the hand that opened it mindlessly let go of the handle. Whatever has been thrown is quickly falling, so we will now allow ourselves to stop time before we lose it to the ship’s resequencers. The object freezes, and now we take a look.
It is a paper cup of greyish blue. It’s crumpled and empty, stained by the coffee it previously held, and nobody will remember its existence once it lands. One person, who didn’t drink from it, will remember the thoughts it invoked in his mind. Lips that were an unidentified object of desire had graced the edge of the paper cup, and his eyes had followed this movement, fixated on the tongue that barely came out to lick them after the sip. The cup, now reduced to trash, had been exalted with the highest of honours. Even as it falls, though, the saliva is still there. The man wonders — is this simple object more worthy than him?
The cup resumes its fall as time resumes its course. Wait three seconds. Two. One. It no longer exists: it has joined the ship’s inventory of available matter, and said matter will become something else when necessary, in the same way it was formed by molecules that used to belong to a piece of paper on which a traumatised human wrote down the words of a tyrant before handing it over for him to read, by atoms of one strand of hair belonging to a woman in New York, born too early for her time, that was woven within the fabric of the clothes of a grieving, broken man.
Such is the fate for almost every piece of trash produced in a starship, but there are exceptions to this rule. We can find one such exception if we proceed to sick bay. It is in the form of a hypospray, still loaded with an empty cartridge of neural paralyzer. This hypo saved a life over the red sands of Vulcan after its contents rushed through the veins and arteries of a man fighting another, the life functions of the former ceasing —by chance if nothing else— at the same time that climax shook the latter. In a hurry, the hypospray had been abandoned in a tray atop a cabinet, awaiting its disposal, and from that privileged position it became one of the recipients of the sound waves produced by a single word, a name three letters long, pronounced with such bliss it could never be matched.
Hours later, an ensign bumped into the tray, scattering its contents across the sick bay floor. Everyone helped put its contents back in their places, but our hypospray had slid under the cabinet, where no one would miss it, and where it will remain until the refit of the Enterprise, when a worker with no knowledge of its importance to the lives of two men will dispose of it years after the fact.
Briefer will be the existence of the data contained in a deleted personal log, recording a voice that had started speaking with eloquence but had slowly drifted into divagation, exploring for the first time thoughts and feelings that had never been considered. The recording ends with a command to the computer, and it was scrapped. But the memory allocated to the recording is not yet overwritten, and thus the data remains in a limbo, existing, but on the brink of deletion, when brand new bits of information flood the memory banks.
The computer is advanced, but not sentient. The only words it understood were the commands that activated it, entirely missing the meaning behind every word spoken in between. And so, it missed the love with which they left his heart, the inflection as he understood his feelings. It missed, as well, the uncertainty in the man’s gait as he crossed the door to their shared bathroom and the lengthy conversation that took place two walls apart from where we stand, which comes to us as a muffled murmur.
There is one final object to which we must direct our attention, and that is no other than a standard Starfleet bed. It’s too small for their sleeping bodies to fit comfortably, but that poses no problem, as they are not trying to sleep. The mattress curves under their combined weight, constantly pushed down against and constantly recovering its shape once let free, warming up under human and Vulcan skin; it supports them the whole time and then some, until their dance quiets and sleep takes them, one atop the other, breathing as one, steady and peaceful.