“Nomad’s creator was Jackson Roykirk. When the hybrid probe heard the name ‘Captain James Kirk’ in our hails, something clicked in its damaged memory.”

“That’s… odd. Why would a space probe be programmed to know the sound of its creator’s name?”

“Roykirk was an eccentric and arrogant inventor,” Spock explained. “He followed the precedent of the earlier Voyager probe series and included a digital recording extending greetings to extraterrestrial life and information about the probe’s planet of origin. Due to his vanity, Roykirk recorded the message personally, repeatedly emphasizing his name and his role in the probe’s creation. Evidently Tan Ru retained enough intelligence after the collision to interpret what remained of this recording.”

“That’s all beside the point,” Scott interrupted. “Begging your pardon, sirs. What matters is, that thing’s addled brain decided Captain Kirk was its creator and had to be obeyed. At least until it decided it didn’t fancy his orders and started going where it liked on the ship.”

“It found me on the bridge,” Uhura said. “I was singing to myself, and it couldn’t understand the purpose of music. It… probed my mind. Scotty…” She reached over and clasped the engineer’s hand. “He tried to protect me, and it… killed him.”

Blake’s expression was growing exasperated, as if she were tired of being surprised. Scott shrugged. “It didn’t stick.”

“To be precise,” Spock explained, “Nomad possessed sufficiently sophisticated matter reconstruction capability to restore Mister Scott’s damaged organs and restart his life processes. Fortunately he was revived in time to prevent the onset of neurological damage.” The Vulcan captain’s lips narrowed. “However, Ms. Uhura was not so fortunate.”

Uhura sighed. “Nomad didn’t just read my memory—it wiped it. The scanning beam it used was so intense that it disrupted my memory pathways. I suffered near-total amnesia, losing all my episodic and autobiographical memory, and all but my deepest, earliest semantic memories. I remembered Swahili, but not English. I knew how to walk, to feed and dress myself, even how to work a computer, after a little prompting; the procedural memory was still there. But I didn’t recognize my crewmates or remember any of my past experiences.”

“My God,” Blake sighed. “Couldn’t Nomad replace what it took?”

“It claimed it could not,” Spock said. “I would surmise that, as it considered the data it extracted from Uhura’s mind to be imperfect and irrelevant, it simply… erased it from its own memory.”

“I had to be re-educated,” Uhura said. “Doctor McCoy and Christine Chapel used Arcturian quick-learning techniques to bring me back up to speed on English, Starfleet procedures, and so on. It helped that…” She let out a small, bitter laugh at the irony. “I have an eidetic memory. I only needed to relearn everything once. I was back on duty within two weeks.”