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Space is… dark. It is not the kind of darkness that one’s eyes can adjust to, it is not that kind of darkness in which faint outlines of objects make themselves known after one stubs their toes on them. It is not the kind of darkness that hints at a giant ball of rock in the sky reflecting the hidden sun. In fact, it is not the kind of darkness that allows for the very idea of light ever coming back at all.
It is, also, not a darkness one can truly, genuinely, understand until one sees it.
On any normal day the Enterprise has more ambient and direct lighting to approximate a bright sunny day on Earth. It has the capacity to outshine the sun’s influence on the Earth’s surface twice over if it truly came to that. Similarly, it has fail safes upon fail safes to ensure that this light never truly goes out. Even if energy input is cut, even if systems fail and power drains, this ship will continue to provide what measly light it can to the desperately sight-dependent creatures on board.
When not redirected someplace specific, the ship’s auxiliary power dynamically splits carefully curated energy reserves between air, heat and light. What not many are aware of, is that this is actually a layered system. One which, in only the most extreme cases allows heating to go out first, air second and only then light.
This might seem counterintuitive, until one realises that a starship is huge. Even after circulation stops the sheer amount of livable space holds enough heat in the still breathable air for long and crucial minutes after even auxiliary has given out.
Light, on the other hand, goes out in a matter of milliseconds. The fastest thing in the known universe, the moment it leaves, any sighted creature will know about it.
For the first second after this ever-encompassing, suffocating, total darkness enveloped the bridge, Jim’s subconscious expected auxiliary power to kick on any moment now. Then his higher order functions realised what had happened. Then those functions waited patiently for auxiliary lights to penetrate the death of perceivable reality around him. Then, around four seconds in, it dawned on him that something was very… very wrong.
He looked about the nothing surrounding him, something primal and human in him expecting to see at least the glint of the eyes of his crew. But of course, those too, are merely a reflection of an external light. Of which there was currently none.
“Mister Spock?” Jim asked, finding that he had to convince himself that the addressee was still around to hear it. It had not even been half of a minute and already his mind interpreted the total nothingness around him as solitude. “Report?” It was not meant to come out as a question.
“Something appeared to have redirected all power away from the lighting circuits.” Spock’s voice tore through the darkness like a spark of hope. Somewhere in front of him Kirk could hear the telltale sound of Chekov’s breathy exhale- did he too begin to wonder if alongside the light, all life left the invisible universe?
“Where’s the auxiliary?” Jim asked, dumbly. The only answer he knew Spock (or anyone for that matter) could give was
“Not available, captain.”
“I can’t see my console readout.” This was Sulu, whose station routinely displayed information about the ship’s power consumption and reserve. Jim could only imagine him squinting at the screen inches below his eyes as he bent down to try and make anything out. He could not.
Of course he could not.
By nothing but muscle memory, Kirk located the armrest of his chair and the communicator button on top of it. Pressing it gave a quiet sound, but that was the only indication that something happened at all.
“Communications is also out.” He said, because no one could see him perform the action.
Then another horrible thought occurred to Jim- ever since the power outage he heard nothing from his communications officer. Not even a small peep, indicating that she was still… Well- there. “Uhura? Report!” He called out, perhaps a bit more loudly than he needed to.
“Still here, captain.” Uhura’s confirmatory voice carried through to Jim from an unknowable distance away. Jim knew, intuitively, where she sat, but without the ability to see, that distance meant nothing.
Similarly, Jim’s previous call for her report was unnecessary. Logically, she couldn’t have gone anywhere. Jim knew this, now that he has heard her voice, and could have reasoned so even before then. It was the darkness clouding his mind and veiling his rationale behind an impenetrable wall, which made him ask. He did not know if he could have stopped himself. It was his primal humanity again, which protested against the very notion of trying.
In the moments that followed Jim forced himself to regain composure, calm his mind, and talk his crew through what really should have been a pre-trained scenario. Unfortunately, in between the many species which collaborated on designing this ship and its protocols, most relied on sight, much like humans. As such, no one ever even considered the loss of it to such an atrocious degree to make a security drill about it.
Now, systems were tested with blind movements. Jim instructed everyone to remain seated before they lose their already minimal orientation in the suddenly incredibly vast space. Fickle memories of past glances to their consoles were all the ship’s officers had as means of assessing their situation. Eventually the consensus became that someone would have noticed if both the ship’s primary and auxiliary power was running out.
This was a relief, of course, seeing how it suggested the entire ship’s crew wasn’t about to die. The disquieting result of this was however that whatever the problem was, it was somewhere where the bridge crew could not locate it. Minutes passed with spoken instructions, suggested causes and solutions and the inevitable yet obvious fact that none of these solutions could be implemented by touch alone.
Assuming this wasn’t a ship-wide issue, the outage would have been noticed within the first minute. If it was a ship wide issue, it wouldn’t take more than a fraction of that. In any case, somewhere, someone would eventually happen upon a flashlight. There were many on the ship, stowed away in emergency kits and in specialised gear stores. With them, eventually the bridge crew would be rescued from this ever-encompassing blackness.
It didn’t feel like it.
The thought of light ever returning to the universe was as laughable as the idea of it ever truly going out would have been not even half an hour ago. Yet, the darkness was simply a fact of life now- so quickly did Kirk’s brain forget that which it so desperately relied upon to make sense of his surroundings, that even the memory of it was now hazy.
Kirk was a captain of a starship- fearless, knowledgeable, capable of cold and calculating rationale which both haunted and saved him more times than he could count. The simple fact of the matter was that Uhura was still there, much like the rest of the bridge and its crew were, even if they gave no indication of it. The rest of the ship was also still very much there, however impossible that might have sounded right now.
Unfortunately Jim was still human. At the loss of one of his primary senses- at the deprivation of something so inherently a part of him- he could not stop the doubt weaseling his way into his mind. Much like the famous cat from Schrödinger's thought experiment, once the box had closed, there was simply no way of knowing what state the animal was in.
Then something loud rattled in the space next to where Kirk vaguely remembered the turbo lift being. It was coming from within the ship’s hull- a fact Kirk knew only because of the dull thudding in the wake of the rattle.
Uhura gasped, Chekov yelped, both moved instinctively to curl in on themselves on their respective chairs.
Jim was out of his own seat before he could really think the idea through. Which he should have. Years of training forced him into action, his own conviction placed himself between the danger and his crew. Jim reached for his hip, he did not find a phaser there. He wished he did. Because suddenly, with his hand on his pant leg, and his feet planted firmly on the ground, Jim had effectively deprived himself of all points of reference.
His legs had carried him someplace into the space of the bridge all on their own, where he now stood. He had yet again begun to feel alone. Like the only thing left in the entire universe.
He wondered now, if the theoretical cat in its theoretical black box, filled with nothing but the cat’s own body, a vial of poison and that very unbreachable darkness, felt just as exposed as Jim did. If, that theoretical vial of poison, threatened to jump out of the nothingness surrounding the nonexistent cat, much like a predator in the wilderness. Much like the rattling in the bulkhead which returned now- closer.
Jim felt exposed.
And he was just Jim, now. Not captain, not even a Kirk, but Jim. Singular, small, alone.
The sound was closer still.
Then something new, almost like a grunt, almost like something was straining against something else, or perhaps against the darkness itself, came through. It would not be impossible for that very darkness to have grown thick enough to swallow the source of the sound.
Jim wished it would keep thickening. As terrifying as the darkness itself had been, the idea of something unknown inside of it was so much worse.
The poison, the predator, the threat, loomed closed still, its sounds of struggle continuing on. Then it came to a stop. Jim took a step backwards without even noticing he did so.
A sound of impact against metal.
The material gave way.
One millisecond of anticipatory nothing stretched impossibly long in Jim’s mind, before the impossible happened.
Light. Bright. Blinding. Present. A sight Jim had never thought he’d see again, came through. It shone into the space of the bridge, depriving Jim of his sight in a completely new and opposite way.
He could still not see when a completely new voice carried through to his scattered mind.
“Captain, the bridge is a fire hazard.” Came a Scottish accent.
“Excuse me?” The captain heard himself speak. It was the captain part of him speaking, truly, because no other corner of his mind had yet recovered from the sudden inpour of light though the space.
“Our jeffries tubes, sir. Someone screwed this one shut. If there was a fire and the turbolift was out, you’d have no way of getting out of here.”
Finally Jim managed to blink the vague silhouette of his chief engineer into view. Scotty was holding a large flashlight in one of his hands.
“Well you seem to have remedied that particular problem.” The captain replied, then, finally, the implications of Scotty’s flashlight registered and Kirk made to ask the more pressing question.
“Scotty, where’s my lights?”