The Ghost of the Enterprise

If the body is only the temporary earthly vessel of the eternal soul, it stands to reason that ghosts are the souls, or at least the fragments of souls, left behind during the separation of soul and body. These immaterial fragments, then, presumably can infuse into the material objects around them, leading to haunted houses and possessed items. Physical objects imbued with spiritual resonance.

These were the thoughts that filled the captain’s mind as he stared up at the clouds drifting through the blue skies of Veridian III.

And if a dying soul could leave a piece of it behind, scraps of spirit to seep into the things surrounding it, a living soul must also be able to leave pieces of itself behind. Man had long said things like, “I left a piece of me behind when I left home” or “She took a piece of my heart with her” or “A piece of me died that day.” So why couldn’t the pieces of our aggregate joys and sorrows also become a part of the places we work and live and love and die? Why can’t our experiences also instill into our cherished possessions these pieces of ourselves we shed little by little every day?

A starship, then, must be full of fragments of spiritual essence, especially one as great as the Enterprise. So many lives born and lost in its halls, so many worlds discovered. It had been full of so much life, so many powerful transformative experiences, great and terrible, each leaving a sliver of spirit behind to permeate the walls and circuits of the faithful vessel. With so many fragments of the countless souls to walk its halls, it seemed inevitable that the pieces would, upon sufficient concentration, knit themselves together, giving the ship a patchwork soul of its own.

When she came hurtling through the atmosphere those years ago, crashing into the unforgiving ground, was she merely destroyed, or did she die? And if she did die, might she have left her own fragment of spiritual essence in her wake to infuse into the planet of Veridian III? Might she have a ghost?

“Where are you now?” the captain wondered as the clouds drifted by. “Do you sleep in the ground where you fell, or do you fly still among the starry skies?”


- Originally mailed to H.L. in Mississippi