Chapter 1: Awakening
[USS Enterprise-D — Crew Quarters — 2364, Morning]
The gasp tore through him like a defibrillator jolt.
Cole jackknifed upright, hands clawing at sheets that weren't his—too smooth, some synthetic weave that slipped between his fingers like water. His chest heaved. His throat burned. Every nerve ending fired at once, a full-body static charge that left his teeth aching.
Wrong. Everything was wrong.
The bed was too narrow. The air tasted recycled—clean, almost sterile, stripped of the humidity and car exhaust he'd breathed for thirty-four years. No traffic noise from the street below his apartment. No neighbor's dog barking through thin drywall.
And his body—
Cole looked at his hands. They were his, except they weren't. Younger. Stronger. The calluses on his palms were in different places, formed by tools he'd never held. He flexed his fingers and they moved too fast, responding with a precision his old hands never had. Like the difference between a sedan and a sports car—same basic design, completely different under the hood.
He swung his legs off the bed. The room was small, efficient, lit by ambient strips along the baseboards that brightened as he stood. A desk, a chair, a narrow closet. A viewport showing—
Stars.
Not the muddy orange glow of a city sky. Not the pale suggestion of constellations through light pollution. Stars. Thousands of them, hard and white and burning against absolute black, close enough that he could almost reach through the viewport and close his fist around one.
Cole pressed his palm flat against the viewport. Cold. Real.
The last thing he remembered before this was headlights. The wet squeal of tires on rain-slicked asphalt. The steering wheel juddering under his grip as the eighteen-wheeler crossed the median. A fraction of a second of pure, crystalline certainty—this is how it ends—and then nothing.
No light at the end of a tunnel. No life flashing before his eyes. Just the headlights, the impact, and then this room. This body. These stars.
The bathroom mirror confirmed what his hands had already told him. A stranger stared back. Late twenties, strong jaw, dark brown hair cropped regulation-short. Hazel eyes—not his brown ones—with tiny amber flecks near the iris that caught the light strangely. Taller than he'd been by three inches, leaner, built like someone who trained regularly without obsessing over it.
Cole gripped the edges of the sink. The stranger in the mirror gripped back.
"Okay," he said. The voice was wrong too—deeper, smoother, lacking the slight rasp from years of too much coffee and not enough sleep. "Okay, so. Not dead. Possibly worse than dead. Let's work the problem."
The PADD on the desk answered most of his questions.
Lieutenant Nathaniel James Coleman. Engineering specialist, propulsion systems. Graduated Starfleet Academy, class of 2360. Previous posting: Starbase 74, warp field maintenance. Current assignment: USS Enterprise-D, NCC-1701-D.
Cole read the name three times.
Enterprise-D.
He set the PADD down very carefully, like it might detonate. Then he picked it up again and scrolled through the service record. Family: none listed. Emergency contact: none listed. Medical history: standard Starfleet physicals, no anomalies, no chronic conditions. A ghost of a personnel file—the kind belonging to someone with no one waiting for them anywhere.
The kind of file nobody would look at too closely.
His hands were trembling. He placed them flat on the desk until they stopped.
Star Trek. This is Star Trek. The Next Generation. That's what this is.
The thought should have been insane. It was insane. But the stars outside the viewport didn't care about what was sane, and neither did the body he was wearing, and neither did the PADD in his hand with its Starfleet insignia and its service record for a man who apparently didn't exist until Cole opened his eyes in this bed.
He went through everything in the quarters. Methodical. One drawer at a time. Coleman's personal effects were sparse—a few civilian clothes, a toolkit that Cole's new hands itched to open, an old-model tricorder that looked like it had survived academy training. No letters. No photographs. No trace of who this man had been beyond the uniform.
Family: none listed.
Cole memorized the service record. Starbase 74—he'd need to know specifics about the posting if anyone asked. Propulsion systems—his old career as an aerospace engineer would help, but 24th-century warp theory was a different language entirely. Academy class of 2360—four years of training he'd never experienced, full of professors and classmates and traditions he knew nothing about.
Anyone who'd known the real Coleman could trip him up with a single question.
He pulled the uniform from the closet. Red-shouldered, command-division adjacent—no, wait. TNG era. Red was command, gold was operations and engineering. This one was gold. His fingers found the combadge and he almost dropped it. A real combadge. Functional. Connected to the ship's computer, to a transporter system that could disassemble him at the molecular level, to a civilization that had solved hunger and poverty and disease.
The uniform sealed itself as he pulled it on. His body knew the motion—shoulders back, spine straight, hands smoothing fabric without conscious thought. Muscle memory from the original Coleman, embedded deep enough that his new nervous system fired the patterns automatically.
That's useful, Cole thought. That's also terrifying.
He was almost at the door when the viewport caught him again.
Earth hung in the distance, blue and white and impossibly beautiful against the black. He'd seen photographs. He'd seen the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image on his apartment wall. But this was real—real curvature, real oceans glinting with reflected sunlight, real wisps of cloud formations he could track with the naked eye.
Beyond Earth, the Enterprise's saucer section curved away, the hull plating catching starlight. Beyond that, the spacedock framework, enormous and industrial and graceful all at once, the skeleton of a cathedral built to launch ships into the unknown.
Cole stood there. His chest ached—not with pain, but with something he couldn't name. Terror and grief and wonder all compressed into a single tight knot behind his sternum.
He was dead. He had to be dead. The old him, the one who drank too much coffee and argued with his boss about turbine specifications and fell asleep watching reruns of a TV show about a starship.
That man was gone.
This one was standing on that starship. Breathing its air. Wearing its uniform.
A smile cracked across his face before he could stop it. Small and helpless and slightly unhinged.
I'm actually here.
The smile faded. Because being here meant being here—in a universe where an omnipotent trickster god was about to put humanity on trial, where the Borg would come to strip the flesh from civilizations, where friends were going to die in ways he might be able to prevent if he was smart enough and fast enough and careful enough.
Cole turned from the viewport.
"Computer," he said, and the word came out steady. "Direct route to Main Engineering."
"Deck thirty-six, section twelve," the computer replied. A woman's voice, pleasant and precise. Real. "Turbolift access is located twenty meters to your right."
The corridor was wider than he expected—carpeted, warmly lit, more hotel than warship. A few crewmembers passed him with nods. An Andorian woman with ice-blue skin and antenna that twitched as she walked. A human man carrying a container of what might have been soil samples. Cole nodded back, keeping his face neutral, his pace unhurried.
You belong here. You're Lieutenant Coleman. You've done this a hundred times.
The turbolift opened at his approach. He stepped in.
"Main Engineering."
The lift moved—no lurch, no vibration, just a subtle shift in the gravity that his new body registered and his old instincts didn't quite understand. Smooth. Silent.
Cole leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. His heart hammered against his ribs. Four hundred meters of starship separated him from the bridge where Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be preparing for the maiden voyage. A crew of over a thousand people surrounded him, none of whom knew that the man in this uniform wasn't the man they expected.
He had no idea why this had happened. He had no idea what had happened to the original Coleman—whether he'd died, or been displaced, or simply ceased to exist. He had no idea if anyone else in any other universe was looking at a stranger's face in a mirror and trying not to scream.
Work the problem. One piece at a time.
Step one: get to Engineering. Step two: don't draw attention. Step three: figure out what the hell he was becoming and why his hands moved like they belonged to someone better than him.
The turbolift doors opened.
The warp core dominated the space—a towering column of blue-white light pulsing with a deep, rhythmic thrum that Cole could feel in his teeth. Consoles ringed the chamber in concentric arcs, displays showing readouts in a language of numbers and symbols he half-recognized from the show and half-understood from instincts that didn't belong to him. The air smelled of ozone and clean metal and something else, something electric, like the moment before a thunderstorm.
A man looked up from the central console. Fifties, square build, sandy hair starting to thin. Direct eyes. Midwestern handshake energy.
"You must be Coleman." Chief Engineer Argyle checked a PADD. "You're early."
Cole straightened. "Reporting for duty, sir."
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