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"Go Climb A Rock"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'

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Habits could develop in the most interesting ways. They could be the result of a preference or a dislike, like eating at one place and avoiding another because of the foods they each serve. They could be based on religous values or cultural traditions. Many habits were often taught because of safety concerns, such as keeping to well-lit areas at night or a person watching around themselves in an area with vehicles. This was a habit that had developed for a far less common reason; pride and a refusal to accept that a computer, any computer, no matter how it was programmed, could force a living being capable of both logical reasoning and emotional intuition into a No-Win Scenario.

'No-Win Scenario', he wasn't even sure the test was properly named. It wasn't a 'No-Win Scenario', it was a 'The Computer Cheats' scenario. From information he had bribed and blackmailed for, he'd learned that one cadet had pushed the scenario to fifteen Klingon war cruisers at a time; which meant a total of over thirty ships, more ships of that class than the Klingons were even believed to have in their fleet. There was a difference, as far as he was concerned at the time, between a 'No-Win Scenario' where the parameters of the test were against the participants and a 'Rigged Scenario' where the computer got to change the rules to ensure it won.

A single ship against an entire Coalition to destroy a planet-killer weapon with the battleground being an area of space wracked by spatial anomalies that could only be protected against with a material lethal to a member of the crew, that was a true 'No-Win Scenario'. There should have been no way Jonathan Archer and his Enterprise could have succeeded in their mission to the Delphic Expanse in 2152... but they had. They'd won, they saved Earth, stopped a war before it could start, turned the Xindi Coalition into allies and stopped the race that was creating the Delphic Expanse from gaining a foothold in this dimension. Archer's Enterprise and its crew had beaten the 'No-Win Scenario'.

Cadet James T. Kirk intended to do the same thing. Since Archer had inspired him to beat the 'No-Win Scenario', Cadet Kirk had thought it only right to honor the now-Admiral, retired, and looked up in the history records to find what Archer had done after resolving the 'Xindi Conflict'... he had gone mountain climbing. Kirk was an Iowa farmboy, he'd grown up with flat plains broken by rivers and trees, but he'd never let it be said that he backed down from a challenge. He had gone mountain climbing and found he enjoyed it. It helped him get into the mindset of Jonathan Archer as a starship captain, a man unafraid to take risks and put himself and his ship on the line. It seemed to have been effective since it was while climbing that he had come to the realization that he wasn't fighting Klingons, he was fighting a computer. It was an epiphany. Kirk realised that the 'No-Win Scenario' wasn't the Kobayashi Maru itself, it was the idea of a 'god-like' computer controlling the situation. Instead of trying to beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario, he finally set out to beat the computer itself. A computer couldn't be beaten with phasers and torpedoes, the only way to beat a computer that was programmed to win at all costs was with programming. If the computer could bring in more ships than the Klingons had, it was only fair to even the odds by increasing the captain's reputation with the Klingons some to balance things out. In the end, he had gotten the accolade of the only cadet ever to beat the 'No-Win Scenario', a commendation for original thinking, just enough demerits that it wouldn't keep him from graduating and worst of all, a stern lecture from the instructors overseeing the test - though Kirk was still certain that he had heard one of the Admirals laughing as soon as he had left the room and the door had shut behind him.

Years later, only a couple of years previously, he had been one of those Admirals and Instructors overseeing that same test. It had made him feel old, out of place, like a part of history that the galaxy was passing by. Then his own history had caught up with him, a man Kirk would have much rather have forgotten even existed, especially for the then-Captain's own part in almost unleashing him on humanity and the rest of the galaxy again; Khan Noonien Singh. They had stopped Khan and his followers, but at the cost of so many lives; Captain Clark Terrell, Midshipman Peter Preston, the scientists on the Regula One space station, his own dear friend Spock had given his life to keep the Enterprise and its crew from dying along with Khan himself. Those had only been the immediate deaths, however, not the ones that had followed; the Grissom and its crew, the son whom Kirk had barely started to know, the Enterprise, all of them had died because of Genesis, because the Genesis Project had caused Khan to escape his exile. They had died, ultimately, because of Kirk's own actions. So many lives lost, even if three lives continued; Spock had changed the rules, just like Kirk had all those years before at the Academy, he'd changed the rules and lived, brought back to life by Genesis; George and Gracie, the last survivors of their species, saved from extinction by Spock's ability to calculate a slingshot trajectory for time travel so that they could save Earth. So many times there should have been no way to win, yet they had still managed to survive and triumph.

He wondered if Archer would have done the same. Could the other Captain have triumphed in the same way or had, in a way, the student surpassed the teacher? The thought had brought him here; Bones had insisted that the two of them and Spock go camping while Scotty put the final touches on the new ship that would bare the name and legacy of Enterprise, but it had been his idea to come here for their trip. His idea to go climbing just like he had back at the Academy. Certainly it was his idea to try it free-handed. Hundreds of feet up, nothing between him and falling but the grip of his hands and feet, no choice but to keep climbing; there was also no computer to reprogram, no warp core to restart, no sun to slingshot around, this was much more like a No Win Scenario as far as he was concerned. At over fifty years of age, there should be no way for him to successfully reach the top of El Capitan, but he was still going to try. After all, what were No Win Scenarios for but to beat?