Uhura kept the record.
It became, over the first year, the thing she did instead of sleeping. She had a padd she did not carry with her and did not leave lying about. She had encrypted it twice, with two systems, and memorized both keys and written neither down.
There were, by the summer of 2268, some three thousand entries.
She knew what that was. She had done the count once, late, and looked at it, and understood that a person does not produce three thousand of anything in a year without it having become a compulsion, and she had decided she did not care. Some of the entries were long. Most were not. They were the kind that only accumulate when a person has decided to catch everything and does not permit herself to judge what matters, because that judgment is precisely the thing she no longer trusts.
He could not spell "necessary." Ever. He spelled it four different ways in one report, and Mr. Spock corrected all four, and he wrote "STET" in the margin, in capitals, and Mr. Spock did not know what to do about it.
When he was thinking, he touched the arm of the chair. Two fingers. Left hand. He did not know he did it.
He hated formal dinners and went to all of them.
He read poetry and was embarrassed about it. He kept a copy of Paradise Lost with a broken spine, and there were notes in the margins, and the notes were arguments.
He was frightened of being ordinary. I am putting this here because I do not think anybody else noticed, and because it explains almost everything about him, and because if I do not write it down it will go.
* * *
She showed it to McCoy once.
He read for a long time, standing, at the end of a shift, in the corridor outside her quarters, and did not say anything, and when he had finished he handed the padd back and stood there for a moment.
"How many?"
"Three thousand."
"How many can you still see?"
She did not answer.
"Nyota."
"Nine hundred," she said. "Maybe. Some of them I can only read. I can read the words, and I know I wrote them, and I know they are true, and there is nothing behind them anymore."
McCoy nodded slowly. "That's how it goes. That's exactly how it goes with the dead ones, and I want you to know that, because you're going to think there's something wrong with you and there isn't. That's just what a person is. You keep the sentence and you lose the voice."
"I don't want to lose the voice."
"No," said McCoy. "You don't."
He put his hand briefly on her shoulder and went off down the corridor.
And Nyota Uhura went into her quarters and sat down and opened the next entry and wrote:
Doctor McCoy says you keep the sentence and lose the voice.
I am recording this because I do not want to lose Doctor McCoy either.