Son, if you are reading this, I am gone, and unable to explain these things in person. But it also means that our starship was successfully built right under the Vulcans' noses. The look in my old friend's emotion-controlled eyes when you tell him we have a Warp 10-capable starship should be priceless. He'll say we aren't ready. Please laugh in his face for me, then apologize. See, we were more ready than they ever allowed. But by that same token, we aren't ready for a ship more advanced than any of theirs. They should have given us more, but what we have now is something we should never have gotten.

It was 2111. You were about ten or so, and you didn't even know you were a hostage to Zef's and my good behavior. Lily's passing had taken its toll on old Zef, and when he vanished soon after, I didn't wonder why. It'll become another part of his legend, like the marooned Vulcan tennis players and his being from AC 4, and the time travelers, and the Immortal backers, and all that. T'Soar and her husband even forgave him for the affair, right after FC. They named him godfather to their youngest, T'Nia. His apologies to their oldest daughter, Sra Sra T'Pau, did't go as well. She's a young one to run a place like Vulcan. A bit like a Victoria figure. That may be why they became newly uptight. Heh. Uptight--er.

It was that anal tightness that had us running so much of what we did in secret. At least, that's what I told myself, the day the shadowy agents showed me the scoutship, and its cybernetic pilot. My God, son. These implants weren't inserted into him--they *were* him. The agents told me flatly that if I didn't dissect the pilot, I would watch you being dissected. I still felt like I should have fought for this poor creature's life. I always will.

I came to call it a Psi-Borg, a twist I used to indicate a latent psionic hookup to a now-extinct hive mind. Zef managed to collate one thermal image from the ship. It was still fuzzy. It looked like three great vines with tendriled mouths, only on a cosmic scale.

These agents turned back all Vulcan attempts to learn our--their--plans. Scary sorts, they remind me of Fox Mulder's final manifesto, warning that the 'Octopus' he and his wife defeated had a 31st tentacle, still writhing and growing.

So, son, despite Vulcan and my own objections, we are moving out at speeds we once thought impossible. In a century, we will be where we would have been in two centuries. Earth to Vulcan will be a day.

But Jonathan--please watch out for yourself. See, the poor thing I butchered on that table wasn't just lost. He was a refugee, a survivor of the fall of a great and vast empire. Something shrugged, and pushed that empire over. Thanks to those strange men, we are now rushing out to meet it, and this is one FC I'd just as soon avoid. The future it seems, holds some great peril, and for this, we truly are not ready.

Love And Pride,

Dad.