Blake frowned. “I understand that on a frontier mission like the Enterprise’s, you don’t always have the luxury to put off injured crew at a starbase for recuperation. Still, after an ordeal like that, it seems it would’ve been kinder to let you go home. Rebuild your connections to your past.”

“I was given the option,” Uhura told her. “But to me, that past didn’t exist anymore. All I knew about my life started at the moment I woke up after Nomad attacked me. The Enterprise was the only home I knew, its crew my only family. It was the only place I felt safe.”

“You must have tried to reconstruct your past before then. You must have had personal logs, family correspondence, albums…”

“With my eidetic memory, I barely needed them. I searched voraciously through what logs I had, but they were superficial. So much in them was left implicit, because I assumed I’d always remember the things I alluded to. Without those memories, I couldn’t piece together what I was talking about.”

“All the more reason to go home. Talk to your family and friends, let them remind you.”

Uhura blinked away a tear. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

“You see, what Nomad couldn’t erase were my feelings. When I thought about my family, when I looked at their faces in old holos, I still remembered loving them. I remembered joy and hilarity and pain and frustration, everything you feel for your family… but I couldn’t remember why I felt those things. I couldn’t remember the time we shared, not a single thing we ever did together. I didn’t even consciously recognize their faces! I just knew they provoked an emotional response, one I had no context for.”

She turned away, unable to face the others’ sympathetic gazes. After a moment, she went on speaking. “To put my family through that… to go home to them and demand that they give me back my life, when I could give them nothing in return… it would have hurt them too much. I couldn’t bring myself to face them, not like that.

“So instead, I focused on the family I knew. My crewmates on the Enterprise. They were my whole life now, and I embraced them more than ever before. I built a new life with them, a good life… and I kept up a brave front and gave as little thought as possible to the person I’d been before.”

When she turned back, she saw tears glistening in Blake’s bright eyes. Spock and Scott both looked somber and respectful, though there was deeper emotion smoldering beneath Scott’s avuncular features.