battery-driven heart

Michtam was a Class M planet, characterized by a single standard suburb and a collection of half-deified Ormus-adjacent locations that, like those scattered settlements of so many planets, brought an inherent and inescapable dystopia to a world that was otherwise sedate and peaceful; not overrun with the constant unmanageable and unknowable - inherently untanglable - population that afflicted such ancient places as Terra, yet just as frightening.

Once you became a starship traveler, you looked upon the definition of any place, any settlement within the civilization, as "home" in such a different light. Sharper. Starker. Where could individuals truly find home outside of nature? Every facet of society was an armament, even as it presented itself ornament.

On Vulcan, sharpness and starkness characterized the youth of every child. Rites were brusque and arcane. Strictures were engrained and modeled. Those who shared parentage from other nations were not the exceptions to but rather the intensifications of this rule; effortful comparmentalization already swept the entirety of the population. Conformity into the massive desert bloom, that Vulcans could stand taller than the exponents of any other planet, race, and culture, was the efficiently-achieved aim.

And on Michtam, they had the Life Recycling Act: a rushed approval by the Federation to legalize, if not legitimize, the reanimation of the lost vessels of the dead. It was thought better to retain some sense of human touch than to completely give over to cyborg technology. They called it "effective utilization of human resources."

Spock called it a gross misrepresentation of the soul's sacred housing within the body and mind. If these recycled units remembered their former lives, then they were not dead, only reanimated. They were donating not just their bodies, but their lives, and no matter the societal distinction of temporary legal death...

Surely Ziggurat 8's perseverant humanity was no mere aberration.

Surely the Federation did not wish him to act such a perfect, emotionless soldier. If they did, would they not already have erased and removed his memories?

Vulcans claimed not to use their emotions; to release them only at the cycle of pon farr, a time painted in broad strokes of illogic and single-mindedness. Apparently, Vulcans did not consider emotion an aspect of many-mindedness, the balance of a complete soul and mind.

Even for calculated use. Even for efficiency. They staved away, by stern statements and sharp-cut glares. Still, Spock held gentility, in his logic. He could not divorce it. He would not.

All this to say: if a Vulcan were, however crudely, life-recycled, and if his katra survived, he would be swift and sure in purging those memories; locking them away and systematically destructing the key. He would have no choice. Did the Federation not realize the volatility of a soul that had come from beyond death, witnessing death, viewing himself as a killing machine whose heart pumps only on electrical impulses?

It must have been a comfort to them. To know that such a model soldier, who had been a model soldier in life, was not mutilated by this procedure, only enhanced. That they soon outlawed the practice, but did not restore to Ziggy his personhood, knowing that they couldn't.

Government agencies could not apply a meaningful serial number, even for the concept of social security, to a dead man. Rest could not be brought to a corpse that yet patrolled. Even Vulcans did not define death as the barrier.