She could have beamed directly to her mother’s residence—indeed, she should have, given that this was fairly urgent Starfleet business. However, she had chosen to beam to the local transporter depot and take in the city for a bit, both to delay the inevitable and to see if it sparked any memories. Nairobi was certainly a stimulating environment, a multispecies melting pot of Federation cultures almost as rich as San Francisco or Paris. The Green City in the Sun had always been a place where cultures blended, for better or worse—from its turbulent early decades as an anchor of British colonialism to its post-independence role as a center of tourism and trade. True to its nickname, it was an interface between civilization and nature as well, directly abutting one of Africa’s largest nature preserves and blessed with an abundance of parks interspersed among its towering skyscrapers, its elegant museums and churches and mosques, and its colorful shops and restaurants. Many cities on Earth were like that now, but Nairobi had been one of the first.

Still, none of it sparked any recognition in Uhura, any memory of herself as a part of this environment. There was an occasional, subliminal sense of familiarity, but far from bringing comfort, it unnerved her. To someone with eidetic memory, the inability to know why something evoked an emotional response was disturbing.

If just the city did that to her, what would it be like going home?

As she walked the streets, Uhura noticed others’ eyes following her, reacting to her Starfleet uniform. She was not the only Starfleet officer in town, to be sure, and she wore dark glasses against the bright tropical sun; yet the crew of the Enterprise had become well-known in the years since V’Ger, and the Nairobians were presumably aware of their native daughter within that crew. But was that all she saw in their eyes? Or could some of them be old friends surprised to see her home after so long—wondering why her own gaze brushed past them with no recognition?

The more she contemplated that, the more she realized what a mistake it had been to waste time like this. If she had to face this kind of discomfort, she should at least do it in private, to limit the variables.