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When Spock is sixteen, the children at his school are sent to Tarsus IV to help with the relief efforts. It is a show
of solidarity within the Federation and an attempt to teach appreciation of life to the privileged youth of Vulcan.
When their transport lands, his group is led to a hospital and taken into a large room. The humans
in the beds stare at them with empty eyes. Their guide quietly explains that these are the survivors who can not be saved,
those whose bodies are failing them. Their assignment is to comfort these people in their final moments.
The boy Spock is assigned to is blond and a few years younger than he is. His pale skin is stretched taut over knobby bones
and is an unhealthy color. There is a strange odor coming off of him; it is not exactly bad, but it very wrong. He seems
dead already. Spock looks at his skinny knees tenting the sheet, and finds it curious that this boy survived for so long, only to
die in the end. He wonders if help had gotten here a day or a few hours earlier, would this brittle boy have survived.
Spock sits in the stiff chair beside his bed and observes him. His eyes are closed and his breathing is steady, if weak. The IV
in his arm is feeding him painkillers. He is not receiving fluids or nutrients, as there is no reason at this point.
Some of the other patients are conscious and speaking quietly to his classmates, but this boy is motionless.
Spock stares at this frail creature and wonders what he would have done if he had survived, if he would have been important
or have a great impact on the galaxy. He wonders where the boy's family is, and if they will miss him very much. Spock
wishes he were somewhere else. T'Pring is in another group, he knows. She is bringing food and water to the ones that will
live. He wishes he were with her in the land of the living, instead of this strange halfway point.
Spock sits for two hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-three seconds, waiting for the boy to awaken. He watches his
eyelids, translucent and crisscrossed with veins, but there is no movement behind them. Spock presses his fingertips to
the boy's bony wrist. The skin is cool for a human, but still warm compared to his own. He does not probe into the mind
thrumming beneath his fingertips, but the usual thoughts and emotions so readily projected by humans are absent. All that
remains is an impression, a flair on the retina after staring into a bright light.
He rests his forehead against the edge of the bed, feeling the pulse of blood under his fingertips. He counts
the beats, so much slower than his own, slower even than his mother's. He knows that music and sounds with a
fast rhythm are soothing to Vulcans, but he finds this slower tempo to be much more relaxing. The difference
comes with the environment the fetus grows in, he knows. The gentle thump of his mother's heart surrounded him and
protected him as he grew, while the quicker murmur of a Vulcan pulse enveloped his peers.
He wakes up 37 minutes and 10 seconds later, the skin beneath his fingertips still, the colorless skin beginning
to cool.