For the past year or whatever I’ve had better things to write, but something I’ve *wanted* to write is a way to canonize “Star Trek: Discovery,” to fit it in with actual Star Trek. As is abundantly obvious, STD simply doesn’t fit in the canonical Star Trek universe. There are too many differences, from the designs of ships, to the design of species, to the history and lore, to technologies that simply don’t fit and wouldn’t exist. Without handwaving away such things as the Klingorks or the mushroom drive, how can you possibly conclude that STD is in any way canonical? I’ve got it worked out, but I don’t currently have a good way to turn it into a standard narrative story. One of my interests here – because of course it is – is to produce ship designs that actually fit into the TOS design ethic.
Here’s my basic outline of how STD fits into the TOS universe:
Michael Burnham is a crewman on the USS Shenzhou, under Captain Georgiou, about a decade before the adventures of the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk. But here she’s an Ensign, and the ship is “canon design.” It would have the same basic layout as shown on STD, including the underside-bridge, but the components would fit in with the TOS era. It would look like something that Franz Joseph or FASA would have come up with.
She goes down to the desert planet that STD started on. As on the show, she fires a phaser blast down a dry well in order to crack the well open and allow the locals to access the water. Here’s where things start to diverge. The bottom of the well is damp and musty; when the phaser strikes and break through into the high pressure water below, a blast of damp air is shot up the well. Burnham takes the blast of wet air to the face. Nothing major, just enough to knock her over. But in that cloud of damp air are the spores of a local cave-fungus. She breathes in a snortful of them, and they promptly begin to do their thing. They invade her system, but are un-noticed during transport back to the ship.
Soon, the fungal spores invade her brain and she falls into a coma-like stupor, but her brain goes into overdrive and she begins to fantasize in a Walter Mitty like fashion. Her boring life gets transformed into one where her parents were Special Science Types until they were killed by Klingons; instead of having an undistinguished adolescence, she was raised on Vulcan by the ambassador, who in reality she once saw at the Academy and was impressed by (but who never noticed her). Instead of just squeaking by on the entrance exams, she was a Very Special Candidate for Starfleet, and instead of barely being noticed by her Captain, she was beloved… not just by the Captain, but everyone.
The ships doctors try to cure her of the mushroom infection, but only manage to suppress them and bring her around. She has suffered brain damage; the spores have bonded to the neurons in her brain and are slowly beginning to supplant them, forming their own network of mycelial synapses. She goes bugnuts and under the LSD-like influence of the shrooms, steals a shuttle and causes an incident with a nearby Klingon garbage scow. It’s a minor incident, easily and quickly patched over, but she thinks she’s started a war with the Klingons. The crew of the Shenzhou realize that she’s beyond their aid, so they contact the nearby science vessel USS Discovery to come and pick her up. On the way to drop her off at the Tantalus V mental institute, she slips further into delusion, taking in the scraps of information she has picked up about the USS Discovery and its crew and fully filling in back stories that make no sense. Thus all the constant talk she hears about “she’s being driven by spores” and “a mycelial network,” words she hears only partially and in passing while fading in and out of consciousness, are applied not to herself but the ship. By the time she is dropped off at Tantalus V, her brain has been fully dominated by the fungal network; she’s dreamed *years* of fantasies in the weeks the Discovery takes to transport her.
Something-something handwave something about Dr. Simon van Gelder at the Tantalus V facility using an early version of the neural neutralizer (“Dagger of the Mind”) to stabilize her now quite corrupted brain; psycho-tricorders (only mentioned once, I believe, in “Wolf in the Fold”) are used to read her mind and get her story from her. Her long, rambling fantasies where she is time and again the most important person in the universe and everyone loves her are recorded for academic purposes; decades later a Ferengi named Quark acquires the complete set of archival recordings and translates them into a series of holodeck programs. They become rampagingly popular across the Federation; the stories of increasingly bizarre aliens and technologies and histories begin the new fictional “sporepunk” genre, alternate histories of Federation worlds or historical characters that go basically off the rails due to the introduction of spore-based technologies. Klingons file official protests – and unofficial threats – over the slanderous way they are presented, but it’s far too late to complain to Burnham, who died long ago, one of the few sad crazy people who could not be helped by modern medical technology. The stories are of some concern to certain quiet departments of Starfleet and the Federation… how could she know about the Terran Empire? She dreamed up the holodeck and atmosphere-holding force fields decades before they were installed in Starfleet vessels. Section 31 is, perhaps oddly, *not* concerned about what she dreamed up about them. They conclude that she must have heard some rumor about them, as doubtless many Starfleet officers have, but by imagining them being a vast, well-known and fully out in the open organization, this actually gives the real Section 31 cover. After the “sporepunk holodramas” go public, any future mention or rumor of Section 31 can now be safely laughed off as having been inspired by those silly stories.
So the ships of STD exist, the configurations are there, but everything is crazy big, everything is too sharp and edgy and shiny with lens flares in an abundance explainable only by way of an optical cortex being attacked and sparking.