Any sensible ensign would have kept their mouth firmly shut, but then, any sensible ensign wasn't necessarily one Wesley Crusher, whose incorrigible desire to please anyone who sufficiently dazzled him resulted in chaos no matter where he went.
Archer had proven sufficiently dazzling in any event, and in this case the chaos he had left behind was one holodeck program, a full scale replica of the NX-1, complete with histories two hundred years old reconstructed from personnel records, psych reports and the many incomplete and fragmented logs that Archer and his crew had recorded. The ship was a good facsimile, of course; the people? Ghoulish copies of friends he had once known, some who were long dead, and others from which he had been snatched in their hour of victory by Q, an entity who had as so far ignored his entreaties to thin air and personal willingness to strike a bargain. He liked Starfleet's rules and regulations, they were good directives, but they weren't his - not yet - and he'd be damned if he got stuck here for no reason other than Starfleet inflexibility.
Still, any sensible ensign would have steered him away from any flimsy doppelganger of home, knowing what a final blow it would be to the bruises he'd taken so far. It wasn't as though he wasn't used to being whipped around through time--that wasn't the problem--but this Enterprise wasn't his ship. She was big beyond any comprehension, buzzing with life, dozens of different species of aliens, and very few he recognized. She was full of families and bristling with weapons, broke warp nine, had holodecks... There were miles of Jefferies tubes--miles of them, what was with that?! She was out of his league. A few minutes in the twenty ninth century couldn't come close to delivering the shell shock that several weeks on the Enterprise had done to him.
It had taken several wary attempts for Archer to trust a single holomatrix was 'real', or at least real enough to respond to his touch, but by the time he'd deleted the characters and toured the whole ship, he fell into the Captain's chair without even thinking about it twice--it felt so natural. It felt so safe.
This should all make him feel so proud, to be a part of it, to be remembered, honored. Without him, none of this would have happened, or at least not by now. Why, then, did he feel so very alone?
Jonathan Archer | Star Trek: Enterprise | Holodeck
Archer had proven sufficiently dazzling in any event, and in this case the chaos he had left behind was one holodeck program, a full scale replica of the NX-1, complete with histories two hundred years old reconstructed from personnel records, psych reports and the many incomplete and fragmented logs that Archer and his crew had recorded. The ship was a good facsimile, of course; the people? Ghoulish copies of friends he had once known, some who were long dead, and others from which he had been snatched in their hour of victory by Q, an entity who had as so far ignored his entreaties to thin air and personal willingness to strike a bargain. He liked Starfleet's rules and regulations, they were good directives, but they weren't his - not yet - and he'd be damned if he got stuck here for no reason other than Starfleet inflexibility.
Still, any sensible ensign would have steered him away from any flimsy doppelganger of home, knowing what a final blow it would be to the bruises he'd taken so far. It wasn't as though he wasn't used to being whipped around through time--that wasn't the problem--but this Enterprise wasn't his ship. She was big beyond any comprehension, buzzing with life, dozens of different species of aliens, and very few he recognized. She was full of families and bristling with weapons, broke warp nine, had holodecks... There were miles of Jefferies tubes--miles of them, what was with that?! She was out of his league. A few minutes in the twenty ninth century couldn't come close to delivering the shell shock that several weeks on the Enterprise had done to him.
It had taken several wary attempts for Archer to trust a single holomatrix was 'real', or at least real enough to respond to his touch, but by the time he'd deleted the characters and toured the whole ship, he fell into the Captain's chair without even thinking about it twice--it felt so natural. It felt so safe.
This should all make him feel so proud, to be a part of it, to be remembered, honored. Without him, none of this would have happened, or at least not by now. Why, then, did he feel so very alone?