Prologue

The year was 2460. Two years prior, construction had begun on a sleek, beautiful new starship that had been dubbed by its creators as the USS Victory.

Its creators. Now, they were an odd trio. One was humanoid, one was a hologram and one was an android.

The humanoid was a man by the name of Benjamin Del Ponte. He’d been a friend of the other two for a considerable number of years. He was going to captain the brand new ship.

The hologram was the former Emergency Medical Hologram of the long-since-decommissioned USS Voyager. He was known only as “the Doctor”, for, in eighty-nine years of activation, he never did pick a name he liked. Now, he was a valued member of Starfleet Medical.

The android, most importantly of all, for it was because of him that the Victory was being built, was known as Data. Formerly of the USS Enterprise, he now was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. A position, unfortunately, he would have to retire from very soon.

It all started two years ago, when Data had been active for one hundred twenty years. The android had found that his power cells weren’t holding their charge as well as they should have been.

Unbeknownst to Data’s girlfriend, a humanoid woman named Lisa, he saw the best engineers Starfleet had to offer, but all of the results were the same: His power cells had degraded to the point that they would fail completely in a few years, even with continuous recharging.

It was this knowledge that caused him to get the idea to build a starship. Not telling Lisa of his intentions, he sought out Ben, the Doctor and a team of contractors to design and create the new ship.

Keeping the secret of his imminent death wasn’t easy to keep. While Lisa remained ignorant – aided by the fact that, as he was an android, she couldn’t read his mind, nor the mind of the Doctor, and Ben had the ability to block her – Ben and the Doctor suspected something was wrong, so he was forced to tell them, but he made them promise not to tell Lisa. She had always been afraid that, one day, she’d someday lose him.

Indeed, eighty-one years ago, Lisa had had a terrifying nightmare that Data had died aboard an alien ship, alone. The images had haunted her for a very long time before she’d finally put them out of her mind. She didn’t need to know that her fears were justified.

End prologue.

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