“Not only that, but what they were sending us was… eclectic. We were sure of it by then. Math and science, music, dense information that might’ve been written records, history, literature, art. Why would they send such a range of information types into the far future? It couldn’t just be some kind of accidental wormhole spillage. It was too consistent, too persistent over years.

“So we realized—what if the signals were an attempt to leave a legacy? To make sure their knowledge, their culture… even their music was remembered by the universe that came after them? It was the only explanation that made any sense to us.”

Even Spock was stunned to silence for a few moments. At length, he spoke. “If true, this represented an astonishing discovery.”

“We knew that, Captain.” Shastri turned back to Uhura. “We talked it over for hours, and you decided that it was time we told people what we were doing. We wrote up a formal report and submitted it to our faculty advisor. We were hoping we could convince Starfleet that this was worth applying its full resources to—even if it did come from a couple of cadets.”

He paused to take a sip of water. “We didn’t hear anything for a couple of days. Then we were called in to a meeting with an officer from Starfleet Intelligence—Rupert or something.”

“Conrad Reppert,” Uhura supplied.

“That’s right. He made it very clear to us that we were forbidden to pursue our project any further. Apparently Starfleet got pretty nervous about research involving time travel or communication with the past. They were afraid that if we sent messages back the other way, it might change things in the past—maybe even wipe out our own history.” He scoffed. “Bizarre, right? Can you believe that?”

Shastri sobered at the serious look that passed between the two officers. “Oh. I… see Reppert wasn’t the only one who thought that way.” He blinked. “I’ll… take your word for that.

“Hm. Well. At the time, Nyota, you didn’t react the way you did just now. You and I were on the same page then. We argued that these plasma beings, as we’d started to call them—or, well, as I called them and you put up with—anyway, we insisted they were so far in the past that they might as well have been in an entirely separate universe. Nothing they could have done in the fireball universe could have prevented it from ending and producing the universe we know.

“But Reppert said the opposite might be true. The state of the universe today was shaped by its initial conditions in that fireball, so even the slightest change to those conditions could wipe out whole galaxies. The way he and Starfleet saw it, there was no telling whether the vast gulf of intervening time would damp out any alterations to nothing… or amplify them into an avalanche.