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“Personal log,” Spock says, the recorder springing to life at the sound of his voice.He stands in his quarters, hands folded behind his back, facing the small window. He takes a breath - slow, deliberate, purposeful - and he begins to catalogue his experience of the world. He can see the expanse of the galaxy opening out in front of him, full of possibility and potential. He can hear the gentle whirr of the Enterprise, and the intermittent beeping of his transmitter. He can feel the starchy press of his new uniform, tickling slightly on his arms and the back of his neck.But no matter how much he tries to gather his thoughts and sensations, they spill and reform into seven separate lights, seven mysterious beacons, seven points in a new constellation. He has seen them before, he thinks.“As a child, I had what my mother called nightmares,” he says aloud. He had always wondered at the term. It was an attempt to categorise a dream by giving it an emotional valence, separating it so it could be disregarded as falsity and fantasy. He does not see the point of recognising a dream only when it offers a pleasant experience. It is meaningless to ascribe hierarchies of truth onto the emotions, for every one has its own honesty: the purity of joy, the candour of envy, the revelations of anger.And, of course, the sincerity of fear.“She taught me to control my fear by drawing,” he continues, “rendering fear powerless.” It had felt like a diversion, at first, but it was an activity to share with his mother. Where Michael had words, he had images. He supposed it was his mother’s way of teaching them opposing values: showing Michael how to construct barriers of sentences, weaving words together in ways that could protect or clarify. And teaching him how to visualise the things and feelings he did not understand, to set them apart from himself so he could interrogate them line by line, stroke by stroke.His mother taught them too well, he thinks, for Michael’s words are as finely tuned as any weapon, and his own sketches consume his thoughts until he can see little else.“The nightmares have returned.” He had never spoken to his father about the dreams. Sarek had set a course for his life before he was even born, a set of expectations and checkpoints. A hypothesis, perhaps. The Vulcans had often referred to Sarek’s children as "experiments", a half-human Vulcan and a Vulcan-raised human.He remains unsure which of them was meant to be the control.It had been Sarek who had taught him how to use computers. He had shown him how to break a programme down into lines of code, to see how complex systems are simply a mater of taking the right route through a series of branching pathways. And it had been Sarek who had taught him how to catalogue his sensations and thoughts. He had told him it was a means to ground himself in the present: if the past was coloured by emotion, then only the present could be accessed through logic.But he had not mentioned the future, and so Spock was left to blindly navigate his own private binary star system.“The same vision, again and again.”To prove a hypothesis, you repeat the experiment. To debug a code, you run it multiple times. And if you cannot solve the problem, you have two options: to accept your work as a mistake, or to see it as the discovery of something entirely new.He remembers the day he had informed his father he would not be taking up a position with the Vulcan Expeditionary Group. Sarek had asked no questions, and Spock had provided no answers. They had simply regarded one another in silence until Spock had turned on his heel and walked away. That silence remained unbroken.He is an outlier in Sarek’s experiment. He wonders if he has been dismissed as such, disregarded in favour of Michael, whose actions remain somehow more accountable within Sarek's hypotheses and expectations.Perhaps that is why he is drawn to his own outliers, all seven of them, unknowable in the distance.“I now understand its meaning, and where it must lead me.” He had debated these ideas again and again with Pike. The captain had often called it a matter of science versus faith, but he thinks it is more complex than such a glib opposition. It is equally a matter of the known and the unknown, and of control and chance.The obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you, Pike had told him once, quoting an old line of human poetry. The words had stayed with him, holding an essential truth that could not be expressed in prose. New growth is painful, and fruit is bitter before it ripens. It is far easier to dismiss the unknown discovery as simply a distorted dream. “In the event of my death, I have encoded it within this audio file.” It will either be Sarek or Michael who finds it. It will always be one or the other, in the end.“This may be my last entry aboard the Enterprise.” Saving the log, he returns his gaze to the window. He does not see the paired opposites of light and dark, and he does not feel the magnetic oppositions of logic and emotion. Instead, he perceives seven dreams, seven pathways, seven new discoveries.