LegotrekkerTales

--- Asheville, North Carolina --- June 3rd, 1969 ---

Theodore Lam, age 8, sat quietly at the dinner table with his parents and stared at his plate. He'd eaten his meat and peas, already enough of a task for the boy, but now he was gazing at his mashed potatoes with trepidation. At least, the trepidation existed inside of him. His mother was chatting away to his left about some church gossip, which his father, to his right, was not paying any attention to. Rather, he watched the boy's expressionless face with a growing sense of frustration.

"In any case, I just don't think it's appropriate for someone in her position to-" Theodore's mother cut herself off as his father placed a hand on top of Theodore's.

"Teddy, eat your potatoes son."

Theodore sat silently, nearly motionless, but he did attempt to make eye contact with his father, a behavior he'd been struggling with for some time now on its own. After several seconds of silence, the boy's mouth opened, but it was another second or two before the words he'd spent that whole time concocting finally came out "I am trying".

"No, you aren't Teddy. You're just sitting still."

His father's fingers began to curl around his tiny wrist, and the boy's breathing began to intensify as he tried to hold back tears.

"Here son, come on."

His father guided his little hand, spoon tightly gripped, down into the mashed potatoes, and then back up, approaching his mouth for what felt like hours. With some effort, Theodore forced his own mouth open and tried to imagine cotton candy as he felt the warm metal of the spoon brush against his lower lip and press onto his tongue. Theodore held that pose for a moment. It felt silly, and he had to look away from his father's condescending gaze, but he was afraid of the sensation he would experience when the roof of his mouth touched the white stuff on the spoon. Nonetheless, he pressed his upper lip down over the spoon and his father gently but firmly guided his hand and the spoon along with it away from his mouth.

Theodore imagined a pile of dung in his mouth, resting on his tongue, and tears began to roll down his eyes. His father didn't notice.

"See Teddy, it isn't that hard, is it? Now, swallow and-"

Theodore gagged but caught himself as he saw his father's exhausted expression. He tried so hard to swallow, but it didn't come. Instead, all he could do was hold the food in his mouth for a couple of seconds longer before he vomited onto the dining room table.

"Teddy…" his mother sighed, as his father turned and left the room.

A couple of hours later, at exactly 7:29, Theodore turned on the television and carefully tuned it to NBC before perfectly aligning the volume knob to the half-way mark. He took a steps back, all precisely the same length, before sitting with his hands in his lap on the green shag carpet of the living room. Behind him, his father grumbled to his mother about how he wasn't particularly excited about returning to this particular tradition. Star Trek had been off the air for two months. The episode airing tonight was "Turnabout Intruder", and Theodore had been significantly distressed when its original airing was canceled due to the death of President Eisenhower. For the last 67 days exactly, Theodore had been waiting for Star Trek to return. Checking every TV guide that he could get his hands on religiously, sometimes the same issues multiple times in one day, and often rechecking back issues to ensure that he hadn't somehow missed an episode of his favorite show.

While his parents spoke to one another quietly behind him about how they'd get Theodore to eat food like a normal person, Theodore stared fixated by the story playing out in front of him. In that night's episode, a woman, one of Captain Kirk's old friends, steals Kirk's body in a desire to become captain of the Enterprise. That a science fiction program would present a person as being more than their physical form fascinated the child. Although he went to church with his parents, the boy was already an intense skeptic and struggled inside with the ideas being presented to him by Christianity. But here he was given an alternative idea of a "soul". Theodore wondered what it would be like to occupy a different person's body or to have someone occupy his own.

Theodore was also intensely excited when Spock used the Vulcan Mind Meld technique later in the episode to confirm Kirk's identity. Theodore leaned in at this point, the first motion he had made since sitting, and stared intently at the expressions on Spock's face. He wondered what it would be like to share thoughts like that, to communicate his ideas perfectly and without words in a way nobody could misunderstand.

Theodore's father tucked the boy into bed. The man was gentle, but not particularly patient, cutting some of the nightly rituals out of bedtime Theodore some mild distress when he realized he wouldn't get storytime that night. Nonetheless, he was obedient and lied very still as his father finished adjusting his blanket and went to turn out the light.

"I love you, Teddy," his father said to him from the doorway. Theodore looked at his father and tried to put the words back together for himself. Several seconds passed and his mouth finally opened in the dark, but his father's voice continued before he could say what he wanted. "Tomorrow night, if you don't eat all your dinner and keep it down, there won't be any TV."

The door closed. Exactly fifteen seconds passed. "I love you, Daddy." Theodore finally spoke as he stared at the ceiling. The boy wished he could put his hand against his father's head and think the words to him. Theodore wished his father could be inside of his body for one day and know what it felt like to put dung in his mouth. Theodore wished his father could believe him. Theodore wished he was normal. Theodore wished he wasn't alone.

Theodore didn't sleep that night.

--- GRAY COUNTY, TEXAS --- DECEMBER 12, 1993 ---

Two black helicopters flew over the almost-but-not-quite ghost town of McLean Texas, nearly inaudible and practically invisible on such a stormy night. The small army of black vans testing the decrepit old streets was significantly more noticeable, although it was gone nearly as soon as it arrived, heading north onto highway 273 off of Historic Route 66. About eight miles north, the helicopters touched down, joining a third that had arrived about an hour earlier in the large back yard of a modest old home. In the front yard, where the fleet of vans would arrive in just a few minutes, sat a silver Ford Crown Victoria marked "SHERIFF", "GRAY COUNTY" immediately beneath. Floodlights surrounded the scene already, powered by a large diesel generator, itself currently being attended to by several field engineers also connecting it to a mobile field station about two hundred feet from the building.

Dr. Theodore "Teddy" Lam, Junior Researcher, lowered himself shakily from the UH-60FT Black Hawk along with the other two members of his field research team, currently assigned to MTF Epsilon-6, "Village Idiots". Ahead of him, Dr. Carol Gross, the senior researcher assigned to his team, shouted ahead to a man in a