<USS Avalon> Saving Time

Josh sighed as he closed the door between himself and the future a second time. 
The last time, he promised himself. The longer he listened to them the weaker 
his resolve would become, and none of them could afford that. 
 
Didn't he want to go back to Annabelle? Didn't he want to see JD born? Be there 
as he grew up? 
 
Of course he did! 
 
They didn't understand at all! More than anything he wanted to return to 
Annabelle....to hold her...to listen to her laughter...to watch her sleep...to 
just be with her...
 
But it didn't happen that way.The memories of Mac's children...of his own 
son...the very circumstances of JD's birth are a result of that... 
 
To return would be to invalidate every memory they had. To irrevocably alter 
all of their lives. To negate their current existence. To endanger both his 
wife and his son's existence. 
 
It had been a tenuous pregnancy for Annabelle according to JD's medical 
records. JD had very nearly been lost several times before his painfully 
difficult delivery. Only the intervention of modern medicine as it would be 
fifteen years from now prevented both of their deaths during childbirth.
 
He couldn't do that.  He couldn't alter the timeline no matter how badly he 
wanted to.
 
He couldn't risk them both. 
 
Besides, the point of the mission was to minimize the contamination of their 
future by influences from their past and vice versa. He remembered all the 
applicable analogies. The pebble in the stream. The butterfly wings...the large 
and unconscionable impact one small event could have on the rest of the 
world....
 
He could go home. He could hold his wife. Be there for his son, assuming both 
survived. Watch him grow and the future be damned.  He had that opportunity 
before him. They'd literally begged him to do just that, to risk lives and 
destroy their timeline for such selfishness...
 
They had families of their own...husbands...children....lives that didn't and 
never had included him. What right had he to change that?
 
Never had he felt so alone. 
 
His son now believed he didn't want to be there. Maybe it was better to let him 
go on believing that...certainly it would be easier...but he couldn't. He 
finished his uplink into their core systems, backdooring his way through the 
old holosystem in the so-called "low-tech" quarters, using his chip to get in 
past their encryptions, only mildly suprised it still worked,  examining the 
information in their databanks carefully and downloading all pertinent 
information to his shuttle databanks before making his "modifications", leaving 
the message for JD to find and heading out. He set up a simultaneous site to 
site to his shuttle, remote powerup of the shuttle itself and override of the 
bay doors. According to the ships own information, he had less than seventy 
seconds to disappear. 
 
He worked quickly, daring to breathe only when it was done. Cloak modifications 
were as simple as frequency settings, which he now had in his systems, and 
neither the Avalon nor the Banshee could see or scan him. He couldn't block 
their communications with what little power would be left, but he could hide 
their reception well enough so that they'd only find him that way if he 
responded, which he had no intention of doing. The drain on his little 
shuttle's power would be tremendous, he know, but then he didn't suppose he'd 
need to worry about that for long. As far as he could tell, he'd simply ceased 
to exist following this mission. 
 
The only way survival would have been a serious problem was if he actually 
intended to.


                
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