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Companion Chronicles [Jumpchain/Multicross SI] [Currently visiting: INTERMISSION]

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I really have to remember to take the setting into better concideration in future. Thank you for reminding me of that.

It did seem jarring to begin with but as I got into a more 'Star Trek' sort of mood, helped and hindered by reading Inspired Voyage, it got far mor natural. Or perhaps that was happening on it's own.
 
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It didn't do much for me but I don't have any Star Trek blinders/nostalgia.

For me, it felt more of "Cass has 0 self-esteem and, bad choices aside, keeps self-flagellating beyond any vague semblance of reason". Whatever passes as reconciliation with Alicia doesn't do anything for me and read to me as her pulling a Karma Houdini.
 
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Chapter 58: "Night on the Town"
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    • Chapter 58: "Night on the Town"​

    Over summer break, I took a shuttle back to Risa and seriously contemplated getting drunk for the first time in my life. In the end, though, forty-odd years sober was a hell of a streak to break, and I settled for some of the best massages in the quadrant.

    It was while I was there that curiosity finally got the better of me: I broke my informal 'rule' about (ab)using connections from the 'chain to ask Max if the video from my Psych Test had been faked. The answer was 'no'… or rather, that Management had faked it while writing me into the world. There was no reason for them to actually put me there retrocausatively when doctoring historical records accomplished the same thing. My mental health records from my alleged stay on the Federation hospital ship Shangri-La—which Management had also written—indicated that I would have 'issues' dealing with the video, which is why my Psych Test took the form it did.

    I guess they got me good.

    Since I'd started asking questions, I went ahead and asked what the test had been looking for. It turned out that all I'd needed was to do something rather than freezing up, and I had; it was running after the proctors asking about the video that had tanked my score. Whoops.

    ———X==X==X———​

    Here's a random fun fact I learned that fall: Starfleet Academy always puts people of the same species together when assigning roommates for the simple reason that, even accounting for different planets of origin, members of the same species spend less time fighting over the thermostat. Now, they could pair people by thousands of other metrics, like personalities, interests, majors, preferred climate, morning/evening person, etc etc… but if anything, they seemed to try to pair the least compatible people possible. The crowning example was Alicia and I, of course, but my second-year roommate continued the trend.

    Daisy Holloway was a San Francisco native, and pretty much the opposite of Alicia or myself in every way: extroverted, outgoing, friendly, and pathologically hyperactive. If Alicia had reminded me of Taylor, Daisy reminded me of Victoria—the Victoria who wasn't so obsessed with our perceived feud that she lost twenty IQ points in my presence, anyway. Getting used to her was a hell of an adjustment. I say this with fondness, but she was exhausting, and we did not mesh well. That isn't to say we couldn't get along—we went through our joint exercises with aplomb—but we simply had nothing in common, and went our separate ways outside of the prescribed cooperative portions of the Academy.

    Alicia and I didn't talk for a while after our ill-fated Practical, but since we were both now friends with Ebav and Shiss, some degree of contact was inevitable. When it finally happened, we realized that we… were cool. Our problems were settled, at least between us; we'd said our piece and come to an understanding, and by the time the end of the year rolled around we would be actual friends.

    I even got Alicia to attend one of the open support group sessions, which she described as 'emotionally exhausting' and 'unpleasant'. She later thanked me for dragging her to it, though, so I think it helped at least a little.

    Through me, Alicia, Shiss, and Ebav joined Daryl and Greg's social circle, which subsequently underwent mitosis from the number of friends-of-friends pouring in from the Practicals. Our new sub-group consisted of myself, Ebav, Shiss, Alicia, Daryl, Kark, and a Vulcan named Ja'al.

    Beyond that, I didn't have much time to spend with friends, because I had loaded up on courses for a double major in Starship Design and Energy Field Manipulation. I wasn't sure how much of what I was learning would be useful in the future because I got the feeling the laws of physics were just plain different in this 'verse. On the other hand, there were probably perks that ensured that tech you designed would work in other worlds, and if I ever got one, I'd have a nice, strong base to work with.

    The first half of my second year saw me taking Intermediate Warp Field Theory, Subspace Communications, Plasma Conduit Design, and Industrial Replicator Pathfinding. With the help of a little side tutoring from Max (who was currently playing hide and seek with Vash across the surface of Risa, but always made time to pop into the Warehouse and deploy M A X I M U M _ E D U C A T I O N on anyone who cared to attend, which usually meant Tess and I), I came in near or at the top of every class I took. It really was beginning to feel like cheating, but it wasn't like I was gaming the exams or anything; I just had access to things that made me that good.

    Industrial Replicator Pathfinding was my personal favorite class that semester, because it combined mechanical engineering, algorithm design, and a CNC shop class. For every item a replicator could possibly produce, it needed a specific set of instructions that would properly arrange the atoms involved into molecules in the proper ratio and position, called a make-pattern. All the actual chemistry took place in the matter-stream between the matter reservoir and the expulsion nozzle, but you still had to account for that in your program (larger molecules took more time to assemble), and then manipulate the extrusion fields to position the molecules in the right place to the right tolerances with extremely precise timing. Hence, 'pathfinding': the art of moving a single molecule from an expulsion nozzle to the target point with force fields so fine and delicate a buzzing gnat would smash them apart with its wings.

    Normally, this could all be done by a program—somewhere between a hardware driver and a compiler—that could take in a blueprint and output a ready-to-run make-pattern directly to the replicator. Sometimes, those compiler-drivers wouldn't produce the right result, and you had to do it manually. Thus, the class.

    Given that they'd been working on the things for decades, the cases where an up-to-date replicator driver wouldn't produce a satisfactory result were few and far between. For most civilian and shipboard replicators, I'd be hard-pressed to find a 'recipe' that compiled to something worse than 99.8% of the optimal possible make-pattern. Which was why the class was called Industrial Replicator Pathfinding; the applications that needed this sort of expertise were extremely specific, extremely specialized make-patterns. To me, 'Industrial' brought to mind either very large or very high-throughput machines, but what it actually meant was 'very tight tolerances'. Some warp-drive components required precision measured in single picometers, which is why engineering teams can't just print everything they need on-board when something breaks. For the record, one picometer is finer than a single atom, which is completely absurd.

    As for that chemistry I mentioned, Replicator Matter-Stream Dynamics was an entirely separate two-semester upper-level course! Tea was the canonical example of an extremely complicated problem that looked far simpler than it was; just to get the water for the solution, the replicator had to handle the energy release of combining hydrogen and oxygen during the trip from the feedstock to the 'business end' of the replicator, then set the molecule in place with the proper kinetic energy to achieve the desired temperature. Making the organic compounds that make the drink Tea was a hundred times harder, because unlike water, hydrocarbons came in many different flavors.

    That pun wasn't my fault. It was literally in the textbook!

    I wasn't that interested in replicators, to be honest, and it wasn't part of my majors; I mostly took the class as an excuse to play with the gold standard of sci-fi 3D printers. My desk accumulated a truly abominable collection of 'hand-replicated' iron knickknacks, and if that sounds oxymoronic, keep in mind that I was working with replicators that had effectively no firmware whatsoever. The class was all about how to program a replicator for a task that standard drivers wouldn't compile an optimal tool-path for, so I was directly programming a set of instructions into the machine rather than relying on drivers to create an object from a 3D model. The closest twenty-first century analogy I could think of would be creating vector graphics by writing XML line by line, but with a lot more math.

    Sometimes, the resulting set of points was less dense than it needed to be, and I ended up with a pile of finely ground powder instead of a paperweight. It was a learning experience.

    Thankfully, the only 'incident' this year was Daryl breaking his ankle playing parrises squares by tripping over the ramp like an idiot, and 'modern' medicine had him back on his feet in a few days. His recovery didn't stop us from giving him shit about it for months, of course.

    We had two practicals that year, one at the end of each semester, but they were fairly routine. For Daisy and I, the first involved tranqing and tagging elephant-sized parrots on a low-gravity world near Bajor, and the second was an archaeological expedition to a long-since-deorbited United-Earth-Starfleet listening post only a few lightyears away from Sol. Aside from Daisy nearly losing a hand to a not-quite-unconscious bird, the missions went off without a hitch.

    ———X==X==X———​

    My third year sent me down the rabbit hole of college-level ethics. Ethics 106 was a required course covering the Prime Directive in its first half and general leadership ethics in the second. I also took (but eventually dropped) an elective on ethics theory, and sat in on a series of lectures about famous ethical dilemmas people had faced in the last two-hundred years and what actions they had ultimately taken.

    Actually studying ethics gave me a lot to think about. For example, one of the things that hadn't come up in my argument with Max about his handling of my world was the fact that it was my world. He may feel that it's inappropriate for him to 'interfere', but what about me, if I went home? I'd grown up there, and more importantly, I'd be staying there. Would I have the 'right' to reshape things as I saw fit?

    The Prime Directive said 'no' because letting me go home with powers was every bit as much a 'contamination' of 21st-century Earth as if Max had gotten his hands dirty himself… but the Prime Directive was a reaction against the 'duty to help'. In the words of the professor's opening lecture, the Prime Directive was an anti-ethic, a principle that steadied us against the inclination to do 'morally correct things' like stamping out slavery on pre-FTL worlds. I had been surprised a required course would be so critical of the Prime Directive, but I could guess why the Academy presented that way. Downplaying the flaws in the philosophy might make people more likely to balk when faced with the hard truth in the field: Starfleet followed the Prime Directive not because it was good, but because it safeguarded us from becoming certain forms of evil.

    It was, in a word, consequentialist.

    The other topics didn't say much of anything on the matter of my return home: the ethics theory class was quick to throw up its proverbial hands and declare questions unanswerable, the closest precedents among the historical dilemmas were all about whether or not to permit someone in my position to go home rather than worrying about what they'd do when they got there, and the leadership ethics portion assumed I was already in charge anyway.

    In other news, I switched one of my majors from the more general Energy Field Manipulation to Warp Field Theory, had to put up with a yet another poorly matched roommate, and learned to play 3D chess… badly.

    Junior year also added another 'incident' to my time at the Academy, which—if anyone asks—I was not present for.

    ———X==X==X———​

    Daryl barged into the common room one evening while I was working on a paper about why the Constitution-class had managed to stay in service for over a century. (The short answer was that any ship that could survive Kirk and Scotty was obviously built to last.) "Hey, Casserole," he said. "What do you say to putting the PADD down and having some fun?"

    "If you are hitting on me, I'm not interested," I deadpanned, not taking my eyes off my work.

    "Hah! Only in your dreams, Ronnie. See, Shiss found this great little Andorian pub up in the city. Real hole-in-the-wall sort of place, with 'authentic' Andorian snacks and booze, or so he says. What-say you be the 'designated driver'?"

    I finally set the PADD down and looked up at where he was slouching against the doorframe. "There are at least three things wrong with that idea. First: we aren't driving because none of us own personal vehicles. Second, you don't need a designated driver if you're having synthehol–"

    "If I wanted synthehol, I'd replicate it myself," he interrupted me. "We're gonna get drunk."

    "Third," I continued, "if you are getting drunk, I want no part of it."

    "Those last two 'things' are mutually exclusive," he said.

    "So?"

    "Soooo while one or the other might be wrong, they can't both be wrong, thus invalidating your claim that there are three things wrong with my idea!" Daryl said triumphantly. "That means you're going."

    "No, it doesn't."

    "You're going to regret not coming."

    "I'm going to regret coming more."

    "So you're coming?"

    I rolled my eyes. "Why do you want me to come? I'm just going to complain the whole time."

    "The role of 'designated driver' survived self-driving cars for a reason," Daryl said, adopting a lecturing pose with his elbow on his hand and his finger in the air. "You gotta have the sober friend who knows all the embarrassing shit you did you can't remember. It's part of the tradition."

    "The tradition of college bar crawls?"

    "It's not a crawl if it's just one pub," he corrected me. "Come on, Ron. When's the last time you went into the city?"

    "Two months ago, when Mike dragged me to that pulse darkshift concert."

    "Precisely! You'd never go anywhere if it wasn't for us!" Daryl stopped, then narrowed his eyes. "Wait, didn't Mike take you to see Only Against Dawn?"

    "Yeah?" I asked. "Why?"

    "They're dark post-core, not pulse darkshift!"

    I rolled my eyes.

    "Anyway," he said, "you should totally come with us tonight, since you apparently can't tell the difference between good music and total trash."

    "Go bother Alicia instead."

    "She's working on a paper." When I made a face, he continued, "Hers is due tonight; I bet whatever you're working on isn't due for another month."

    "Only a week and a half," I said.

    "Close enough, you weirdo. Come on, Cass, we've got seven people already and the skycar fits eight. What do you say?"

    On one hand, I really didn't like dealing with drunk people or drinking culture in general. On the other, I was sick of reading about the Constitution and what happened tonight might be something I could lord over Daryl for months.

    I saved my work and stood up, which was all Daryl needed to start celebrating his 'victory' with a flamboyant fist-pump. "All right," I said. "I assume we're leaving now?"

    "Thirty minutes," he said. "Wear something warm!"

    ———X==X==X———​

    I dragged my feet a little getting ready, so I was the last one to meet Daryl, Shiss, and their friends in the square between the Darrow, McCoy, and Armstrong dorms, sturdy winter coat slung over one arm. The other five were three human men I'd never met, an Andorian woman, and—to my surprise—Tess. Everyone was wearing casual clothes, which made this the first time I'd ever seen Shiss in anything but a Starfleet uniform.

    Daryl was the first to notice my approach, unsurprisingly, and immediately began waving his arms over his head like he needed rescue. "Cass! I was worried you were gonna skip out on us!"

    "Oh, hello, Cass!" Tess said.

    "I'm here, I'm here," I grumbled. "Hi, Tess."

    "You two know each other?" Daryl asked.

    I nodded. "We met on the shuttle ride down–"

    "In the waiting area for the shuttle, actually," Tess corrected me. "I offered her a fried spider leg–"

    "From the bar near the terminal? Those are great," the tallest of the strangers chimed in, to general agreement.

    Daryl cleared his throat. "We're leaving in five, so let's get the introductions outta the way. Guys, this is Cass."

    "Hi," I said.

    "Cass, this is Wong, my roommate." Wong waved. "Short-stuff next to him is Harry; this was all his idea, so you know who to blame if it's a terrible time."

    "Sup," Harry said, not disputing the point at all.

    "I thought this was Shiss's idea," I said.

    "I picked the place," Shiss told me.

    "You know Tess, apparently, and Shiss, of course," Daryl continued. "The lovely lady next to our blue friend is Othrethiass, his paramour du jour–"

    "Call me Rethi," Rethi interrupted.

    "Call her Rethi," Daryl repeated. "Last but not least is Hasan, Harry's roommate." Hasan nodded politely. "Right, that's everyone. Let's go!"

    ———X==X==X———​

    The pub was named the Crack in the Ice and was, indeed, a hole in the wall—or rather, the floor, since it was a basement space. It was clearly going for some sort of 'frozen cave' aesthetic; the floor was dirt, the walls rock, the booths around the tables made to look like packed snow, and the air so cold there were real icicles hanging off the exposed metal pipes snaking beneath the unpainted wood ceiling. I ball-parked the temperature at around fifteen below zero; 'wear something warm' had been good advice, and I quickly pulled my jacket on over my already-rather-warm turtleneck.

    "So how does this work?" I asked.

    Daryl gave me a look. "Have you seriously not been to a bar before?"

    "Not an Andorian one."

    "It's Andorian booze, but it's still in San Francisco," Rethi said. "Order at the bar and grab a table."

    "Come on," Harry urged us. He'd come in last, and was now impatiently waiting for the rest of us to move forward, so we did.

    The bartender was, unsurprisingly, an Andorian; when he saw us approach, he reached under the counter for a PADD and held it at the ready. "Welcome to the Crack in the Ice. Can I get your IDs?" Daryl submitted his thumbprint to the proffered PADD, which the bartender then held up to compare Daryl's face with the image on the screen. "Great. Next?" Wong and Tess followed suit, and then it was my turn.

    "Just ice-water for me," I said.

    "Okay, that's nice. ID?"

    "Do you seriously need my ID for ice-water?"

    The bartender glowered at me. "Unless you literally want me to fill a glass with ice and water, yes."

    "That is what I want?" I said uncertainly. "What else would I mean?"

    Shiss laughed. "One part vodka to two parts Shrithillan sweet gin," he rattled off, "mixed with svassa juice—tastes a bit like a sour apple, but sort of pepperminty—and a dash of bitters served over a frozen sugar-pepper." By the time he finished describing the cocktail, the rest of the group was laughing as well, Rethi hardest of all, and even the bartender was struggling to keep a straight face.

    I facepalmed. "I would like water, in a glass, with ice cubes." The bartender handed me water, in a glass, with ice cubes, and I went and found us a table before I could embarrass myself any further—apparently, ordering actual ice water in an Andorian bar simply wasn't done.

    The place was pretty quiet, so I grabbed the closest booth and watched the others order drinks. Tess and Wong got beers. Rethi got a large carafe of wine. Hasan had straight liquor, and Daryl and Harry got cocktails. I made a mental note to keep a close eye on Harry's drink; it was perfectly clear until the last ingredient went in.

    With glasses in hand, the group filled the circular booth around the little wooden table—turns out the bench was actually made of packed snow—and the drinking started.

    ———X==X==X———​

    The night started well, with eight cadets shooting the breeze around a small wooden table, but after an hour or so I was no longer having fun. At least I wasn't the only person not on their way to black-out drunk: Tess was still nursing her second beer, and Harry either had the alcohol tolerance of a blue whale or had been subtly ordering his drinks virgin, because he was stone cold sober despite slamming back ten different cocktails in quick succession.

    As for the rest of the table: Shiss and Hasan were merely drunk, Rethi and Daryl were sloshed, and Wong was absolutely hammered. I mostly tuned out the drunken chatter and focused on the rest of the room. The pub had been empty when we'd come in, but as the night continued it began to fill up. Most of the clientele were Klingons, oddly enough, though there were a bunch of humans as well. To my surprise, I'd only seen one other Andorian since we got here, and she'd already left.

    "You doing okay, Cass?" Tess asked as I watched a group of dozen more Klingons trudge down the steps and swarm up to the bar.

    I pulled my attention back to the group, where Wong had just finished some barely-coherent story that had the rest of the table roaring with laughter, Daryl going so far as to start pounding the table. "I'm pretty sure 'dying of embarrassment' is purely metaphorical," I replied, "so I should pull through."

    "You might have more fun if you took the stick out of your ass and let your hair down," Rethi slurred.

    "I'll pass."

    "At least have some synthehol," Shiss said. "All the fun, none of the drunkenness."

    "The drunkenness is the fun, though," Daryl countered.

    "Ah, but she's gotta be careful," Rethi warned us. "My Zh'e'a always warned me to never mix alcohol and electronics!" She and Wong cackled while everyone else exchanged awkward glances, surprised at the 'joke'.

    "Why is it you don't drink?" Hasan asked in an attempt to salvage the conversation after the off-color comment.

    "Lots of reasons. I don't see any appeal in deliberately clouding my judgment–"

    "Spoken like a true computer," Rethi said, far too loudly.

    Tess and I exchanged a look. Shiss flushed deep blue and hunched over in his seat like he wanted to disappear.

    "Damn, you are a mean drunk, Rethi," Daryl declared, punctuating the statement by waving his drink at her face.

    "It's not mean," she yelled. "I'm just telling it like it is. I got nothin' against the Borg. They're fine people, but they're all a little odd, you know."

    "There's nothing wrong with not drinking," Harry said, increasing my suspicion that he wasn't drinking either.

    Rethi and Wong kept laughing, but at least the rest of the table were properly unhappy on my behalf. From the look on her face, Tess was only keeping quiet because she didn't want to start snapping at people, while Hasan had a hand over his face in exasperation or embarrassment. I was tempted to follow his example; in vino veritas, so the saying went, and it seemed Rethi had kept her attitude to herself until now. Instead, I held my tongue and focused on the ice I was swirling around in the bottom of the glass, trying to decide whether I was more offended or embarrassed by the whole thing.

    'Offended' was winning.

    "Rethi, please," Shiss whined.

    "Ah, come on, I don't mean anything by it," she screeched. "They gotta be a little odd with all that sticking out'a 'er face. I wake up to that in the mirror e'ery mornin', I'd go odd too."

    It was at that point that he made the call to abort the mission. "Right, that's enough. See you guys back at the Academy, we had fun, bye!" Shiss called quickly as he dragged Rethi out the door with her eighth glass of wine still in one hand.

    With their departure came a moment of blessed silence at our table. "Oh my god, that was embarrassing," Hasan groaned. "Who invited her?"

    "Daryl," Harry said immediately.

    "She's Shiss's date!" Daryl protested. "I wasn't gonna uninvite her. 'Sides, I didn't know she was a NABB."

    "What manners conceal, spirits reveal," I misquoted grumpily. NABB was an abbreviation for "Not A Bigot, BUT"—a category that was distressingly common among Starfleet cadets. People like Alicia had their views and problems out in the open where they could be addressed, but NABBs tended to just coast along without fuss until something offensive or discriminatory popped out of their mouths without warning.

    Hasan sighed. "I hope Shiss doesn't start making excuses for her."

    "You guys are taking this too seriously," Wong said. "It's all in good fun."

    "Not you, too," Daryl snapped. "This isn't a joke, man."

    "It's all jokes, man. Just jokes."

    "It's a joke that means laughing at someone," Tess said with a scowl.

    "How do you think she feels?" Daryl asked. He tried to point at me, but ended up gesturing towards a spot slightly to my left, between Tess and I.

    Wong's eyes went wide at the realization that I hadn't stopped existing at some point. "Ah, c'mon," he mumbled. "It's all just for fun. We're still friends."

    Are we? I thought, but kept my attitude to myself; there was no need to bring the mood down any further.

    Hasan tried to engage Daryl in a conversation about the comparative religion course they'd shared the previous semester, but it was obvious their hearts weren't in it. Harry wandered up to the bar to strike up a conversation with one of the patrons there. Wong was pretending not to exist, and Tess and I had nothing to say.

    ———X==X==X———​

    "Maybe we should just go," I said after a minute of excruciating awkwardness.

    "Yeah," Tess said dourly.

    "Or I can go–"

    "No, Rethi killed the mood. Might as well… uh oh."

    I followed her gaze to the bar, where two Klingons were currently looming over Harry, who had a proper shit-eating-grin on his face. Each of the two men had at least twelve inches and a hundred pounds on our friend. Worse, several of the others I'd been watching earlier seemed to be joining in, arguing with both the first two Klingons and Harry himself.

    "What the hell is he doing?" I asked.

    "Something incredibly stupid," Tess said, answering the rhetorical question with aplomb.

    "He's going to get his ass kicked."

    "Yeah, time to go," Hasan said. He nudged Wong into motion as Tess, Daryl, and I filed out the other side of the booth. We made it about two steps before the brawl started.

    Someone must have said some sort of 'fightin' words', because Harry spun on his heel and hit the largest of the lot in the face so hard that the guy physically left the ground on his way to the floor. You could hear a pin drop in the silence that followed, so the thud of Klingon hitting dirt was very audible.

    Then all hell broke loose.

    The tightly coiled group exploded as people began pushing, shoving, and punching, spilling out across the limited floorspace. Daryl chose the stupid option and went in to 'rescue' Harry, while Hasan and Wong favored the better part of valor and hid under our table. Tess and I shared a glance, then grabbed the next table along and flipped it onto its side as missiles began to fly. The table fit nicely between the ends of the snow-sculpted bench, forming an impromptu furniture bunker that offered more peace of mind than actual safety.

    At least we got a better view of the battlefield peeking over the table than we'd have gotten hiding under it. It was total chaos; I wasn't sure if there were sides to the melee, because everyone seemed to be punching everyone else. The only thing that was clear was that Harry was winning. As I watched, he caught a wild haymaker and judo-flipped the Klingon in question across the room, bowling over two more, then dodged and weaved around three guys who tried to gang up on him. Seconds later, he'd dropped them all with a few well-placed hits to the head or chest.

    Tess answered my incredulous glance with a mouthed, "Hoss".

    Oh. If I'd recognized him, I would have made some excuse to bow out and asked Tess about the inevitable bar fight the next day.

    A flying shot-glass interrupted that train of thought and sent Tess and I ducking behind our shield. "Why did we go drinking with Hoss?" I grumbled over the cacophony.

    "He promised he'd behave!"

    "And you believed him?"

    She ignored the question. "Think we can make it to the door?"

    "Do you want to wade through that?" I asked, waving my arm at the room.

    "Is waiting it out really better?"

    "Sure looks that way to me!" As if to contradict my statement, something large and heavy hit our shield hard enough to crack the wood. "What was that?"

    I went low this time, looking through a gap below the table at the Klingon lying in front of it. "Guess I should have asked, 'Who was that?'" I said.

    Tess sighed and shook her head at my non-reaction.

    After only a minute or two—though it seemed much longer—the fight petered out. We poked our heads over the top of our barricade to see Harry leaning against the bar, ignoring the murderous glare of the bartender. Everyone else was either sitting on the floor groaning in pain or poking their heads out of hiding like I was. Daryl was going to need medical attention for the cuts on his face, and I counted at least four broken noses among the Klingons, but Harry's only damage was a split lip and a shirt that was likely unsalvageable.

    One of the Klingons struggled to his feat, holding his ribs with one hand, and said something to Harry in Klingon—I didn't catch the actual words. Whatever Harry said in response had the man laughing, and pretty soon the other Klingons were as well—even the ones who hadn't made it off the floor. The speaker clapped Harry on the back before drawing him into a hug, and then he was being passed around from person to person for handshakes and high-fives like he'd just won a game of Velocity.

    Tess had only one thing to say about the scene. "Men."

    "I'd never do something like that," Hasan protested from the next booth over. "And half the Klingons are women!"

    "Women can be men when they want to be," Tess replied flatly.

    ———X==X==X———​

    Hoss had a grand time, but everyone paid the price. The bartender reported our entire party to the Academy, which got seven cadets hauled in front of a discipline committee and read the riot act.

    Seven cadets. I hadn't given my ID, so there was no record of my involvement, and I got off scot-free—not that anyone but Hoss deserved blame in the first place, in my opinion. Starfleet disagreed: according to the Academy policy on acceptable behavior, we were all responsible for the conduct of ourselves and our peers. It didn't seem fair, but I had to admit the rule created the right incentives, and so everyone got punished for the bar fight equally.

    Everyone, that is, except me; in fact, I only learned people had been punished at all when Daryl started complaining about it to me a couple days later. The whole experience left me with the contradictory feelings that I hadn't done anything wrong and managed to get away with it.

    Our third year added another practical exercise to the middle of each semester, and I was very glad that the doubling pattern didn't continue for the fourth year. Senior year meant both my majors were entering 'end-game', and I barely had time to socialize even with twenty-three hours of wakefulness a day.

    With the blessing of Professors Miller and O'Brian—the heads of the Physics and Engineering Departments, respectively—I cheated a little by writing one double-length thesis on optimizing new ship designs for transwarp capabilities, which I submitted for both my Warp Field Theory and Ship Design majors. It probably wasn't less work—it might even have been more work—but it did mean that I didn't have to switch mental gears between two different thesis topics at the drop of a hat.

    ———X==X==X———​
     
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    • AN: I really would have liked to write some proper college slice-of-life this jump.

    I couldn't.

    It's not an exaggeration when Cass mentions having PTSD from her first college experience. I'm doing a lot better, but this is still about as far into the college experience as I'm willing to dip, mentally. Alas.

    Instead, you get a whole lot of author!Cass having fun making things up and droning on about self-indulgent technobabble, followed by a bar fight.
     
    Tempestuous said:
    AN: I really would have liked to write some proper college slice-of-life this jump.

    I couldn't.

    It's not an exaggeration when Cass mentions having PTSD from her first college experience. I'm doing a lot better, but this is still about as far into the college experience as I'm willing to dip, mentally. Alas.

    Instead, you get a whole lot of author!Cass having fun making things up and droning on about self-indulgent technobabble, followed by a bar fight.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Well, at least the graduation ceremony will go without a hitch and her first ship will be a nice, ordinary and undramatic posting, right? Absolutely no captured captains shouting "Lock onto my com-badge and fire all weapons!", no sir!

    I'm just getting some STO flashbacks from all this. I know this was planned to be a vacation of sorts, but does everyone really trust Management enough to take that for granted? I've forgotten which era this is, but I know just about every time period has some sort of existential threat lurking in the wings.
     
    Tranquil Zebra said:
    I've forgotten which era this is, but I know just about every time period has some sort of existential threat lurking in the wings.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all happen within twenty years of each other, so when Max and crew came by the first time they fixed basically all three of them. Q stopped them from getting a perfect run, so some of the major events still happened, but there's nothing building up to cause new problems they haven't already solved.
     
    Chapter 59: "Commencement"
  • Threadmarks
    • AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, Mizu, and Misty Raven-chan.

    Chapter 59: "Commencement"​

    "Congratulations!" Max said as I made my way through the crowd of cadets. He hugged me, then passed me to Garrus—currently human—for another hug, and then onto Diane, and Homura, and Tess, and Zero, and Ace. No sooner had I finished that hug than Alicia grabbed me from behind and dragged me off for photos with her family.

    We posed in front of the large faux-Greco-Roman administrative building for what felt like a hundred pictures. Twenty-fourth century cameras still made the old shutter 'click' sound when they took a picture; the sound effect had managed to persist for hundreds of years after the last mechanical camera found its way to a museum. Then again, several of the programs we'd used over the course of our years at the Academy had a symbol for 'save work' that was clearly descended from the old floppy disk, so it wasn't the only technocultural relic around.

    "Did I just see you hug a Vice Admiral?" Alicia asked, once her adoptive parents had finished filling several terabytes of storage with photos of us in full graduation regalia. "What's the story there, sir?"

    "I met him on Risa after freshman year." Ah, technical truths, my bread and butter. "And he's retired. And don't call me sir!"

    "You best get used to it, ensign. We're commissioned officers, now!"

    "But we're the same rank!"

    "Right now, sure," she said, "but with grades like yours, you'll probably be a Jay-El-Tee before the end of the year."

    "No one gets promoted that fast."

    Alicia ignored my protest. "Back to what I was saying," she continued, "that wasn't a 'hey, person whose name I know' hug, that was a 'family' hug. Are you related?"

    "Sometimes family is who you meet," I said, then gave her a squeeze, since we still had our arms looped over each other's shoulders from our photo shoot.

    "I suppose so. I'm gonna miss you guys." Alicia glanced around at the celebration, then pulled away with a sigh. "Well, plenty more people to congratulate. Let's not keep them waiting, sir."

    I didn't bother protesting the honorific. "I'll write!" I promised.

    "You'd better!"

    I took a meandering route rather than heading straight back to Max, making my way through the people I recognized, exchanging handshakes and hugs. "Ensign Rhodes, sir," Daryl said as he shook my hand. "So good to see you again after all this time."

    "It's been three hours."

    "And yet somehow you're moving up through the ranks already." He saluted me smartly, and after a moment, Shiss followed suit.

    "At ease," I said, leaning into a joke I was sure to hear again. "Why is everyone singling me out with the saluting crap?"

    "Because you mastered the 'disapproving senior officer' look in your first year."

    "Are you saying I have resting bitch face?"

    Daryl shook his head. "Nah, it's not the face, it's the mood: that special blend of sternness and exasperation." That was the Wards' fault, without question. "Yeah, that's it exactly," he added, because I was certainly feeling it now.

    "Excited to get your postings?"

    "Damn straight," Daryl said. "What are you hoping for? Big ship or small ship?"

    "Small ship," I said without hesitation. "More personal, easier to get to know people, and more chances to step outside your specialty."

    "More opportunities for career advancement, as well," Daryl said.

    "Are there?"

    "It's easy to get lost in the background on a Galaxy-class. Hard to stand out when there are a hundred other people doing the same job across all shifts."

    "There are some advantages, too," Shiss said. "Larger ships have more prestige to them. When your name comes up for promotion, having a captain like Riker or Courvoisier on your service record is a real career booster."

    "Still an uphill battle," Daryl argued.

    I shrugged. "All the same to me. I'm not that interested in advancement."

    "No dreams of running your own ship someday?"

    I almost said 'no' immediately; even being second in command last Jump had been more responsibility than I liked. Then again, not all ships were Galaxy-sized. I could see myself running a twenty person survey ship someday… but in the end, the answer didn't matter. It was a long way from Ensign to Captain, and there was no way I could rise that high in the remaining six years of our visit.

    "Maybe someday," I hedged, "but for now I just want to do my job well. What kind of ship do you want? Big or small?"

    "Big," Shiss said immediately. "More people, more stories, more amenities, and more interesting missions. I mean, meeting strange new people is the whole reason I decided to take classes on Earth, rather than Andoria."

    I nodded politely, having heard that story four or five times already. "What about you?" I asked Daryl.

    "Small," he said. "Unlike Miss Genius here, I'm going to have to work for my promotions."

    "Maybe I'll make Captain after all now, that you're not holding me back, Daryldactle," I said with a smirk. "Goodness knows I've carried you long enough."

    "Maybe I'll make Captain without you overshadowing me all the time, Casshole," he shot back, punctuated with a playful elbow to my ribs. "This dinosaur is ready to leave the nest!"

    "You two are impossible," Shiss said, though he was smiling, too.

    I gave him a hefty pat on the back. "Seriously, though, glad I caught you two. You know where Ebav is?"

    "About twenty meters that way," Shiss said without hesitation. "Did you hear he wants to go back to Yarilia?"

    "What? Why?"

    "Science."

    I looked to Daryl for a better explanation, but he just shrugged. "I'll ask him, then," I said.

    We said our goodbyes, and I headed off in the direction Shiss had indicated. Ebav wasn't hard to spot; Andoria had its own Academy, so Andorians made up a pretty small percentage of the Earth Academy's students. Most of those were Europa natives… like my target. "Ebav!" I shouted. "Ebav! Over here!"

    "Ensign Rhodes, sir!" he called back, becoming the fifth or sixth person to salute me in the last half an hour.

    "Not you too," I groaned. "What's this I hear about you going back to Planet Hurricane?"

    "It's not every day life hands you an unexplored area of science on a silver platter," Ebav said eagerly. "I joined Starfleet because I grew up on stories of Ashathiass Ch'ichithrik." When I failed to react appropriately, he added, "He was the Andorian explorer and scientist. We talk about him the way you talk about Newton, or the turtle guy–"

    "'Turtle guy'?"

    "Yeah. Uh, biologist sailor guy?"

    "Darwin?" I guessed, still confused by the mention of turtles. Galapagos turtles, maybe?

    "There you go. Anyway, Ch'ichithrik is probably best known as the first Andorian to fully descend Bosath'ryl Crevasse, about five hundred years before we got to space. The things he found down there completely changed our understanding of the fossil record."

    "How's that?"

    "Bosath'ryl is a perfect cross-section of millions of years of strata that was only 'revealed' recently, geologically speaking—it split open about twenty thousand years ago. Ch'ichithrik was able to use that cross-section as a control to show that the 'richest' fossil deposits were actually due to thermal upthrusts mixing samples together that should have been separated by millions of years—this was long before the advent of radioisotope dating—which directly led to our discovery of evolution."

    Ebav grew more animated as he dove into retelling of one of his favorite stories. "Now, the reason no one had gotten even halfway down before was because except the parts that were actually exposed to daylight, the entire fissure was terra incognita. Err, did the translator get that right?" I nodded. "Great. So: Bosath'ryl is close to half a kilometer wide at the top, which sounds impressive until you realize how insignificant that is compared to the depth of the place. Before long, the entire place is pitch black, and electric lighting was still in its infancy; even the strongest hand-lamp couldn't show you more than a dozen meters ahead of you. It wasn't like you could just replicate a rope long enough to go all the way down without having to stop and re-anchor yourself, ether, and he'd need to sleep and eat, as well.

    "So Ch'ichithrik had to do a blind descent—no map, no guide, no knowledge of where there would be outcroppings to camp on or bare rock to anchor a wall-tent, nothing—and that meant he had to invent the techniques to make it possible at all. And since his peers considered him crazy, he did his first descent solo, as well!" Ebav paused for breath, then cleared his throat awkwardly when he realized he'd gotten carried away. "The point is: I dream of being the first person to discover something," he continued. "Then we got stranded on a planet with a weather phenomenon that had never been seen before. That's opportunity knocking."

    "No one went back to study it since?" I asked.

    "How long do you think it takes to organize a study like that? I've spent the last three years pushing paperwork around trying to get a mission approved. At this rate, it's going to be another year or two before I get to go back, and it'll be probes only unless I'm willing to wait another decade for the risk assessment paperwork to go through."

    "Do you really want to go back down there?"

    He laughed. "Not even slightly, but it would be nice to have the option if we found a reason."

    "Fair enough. You see Kark yet?"

    "Nope. Send him my way if you see him, would you?"

    "Sure thing. Good luck out there, Eeb."

    "Same to you, Ronnie." We shook hands and parted ways.

    Kark was, unsurprisingly, comparing scars with a group of other Klingons that were probably his family; I exchanged congratulations and sent him to Ebav as instructed. He 'sir'd' me as well—either everyone I knew had agreed to do that as a joke, or they'd all independently decided it would be funny. I wasn't sure which possibility I found more obnoxious.

    That was pretty much everyone I'd intended to seek out, so I headed back towards where I'd left Max and fell victim to Daisy and her massive cluster of overly enthusiastic acquaintances. By the time I disentangled myself, only Max, Garrus, and Diane were still waiting for me, standing in the shade of a tree on the path to the shuttle pad.

    "I did it," I said with a smile, fingering the pip on my collar. "You're speaking to Ensign Cassandra Rhodes. Thanks to you." I'd completed my double major, as well, which would probably have been impossible without the mental wellness upgrade and a whole lot of Extreme Teaching on Max's part.

    "Aw, shucks," Max said, grinning widely.

    Gary poked him in the arm. "Give 'er her gift," he said.

    "Oh, right! We got you this." Max handed me a cardboard box that he hadn't been holding a second ago, and I held it against my chest with one arm while I opened it with the other. Inside, cocooned in bubble-wrap, was a large mahogany plaque with an ornate brass plate screwed to the front on which three words were clearly engraved between the UFP and Starfleet logos.

    AVOID THE NARRATIVE.​

    "Really encouraging guys," I said, the words dripping with sarcasm. "Thanks a ton."

    "It'll be fine," Max said. "You're a yellow shirt."

    "I like it, honest. It's a nice gift. Just the right level of obnoxiousness." I put the plaque back in the box for safekeeping and tucked it under my arm.

    "It's not the only gift we got you," Gary said with a grin.

    "Oh?"

    "It's a surprise," Diane said. "Tomorrow, bright and early. We're going on a trip."

    "Ooooh." I grinned. "I can't wait."

    "Until then, we might as well head back to the Warehouse," Max said. "I wanted to show you something there, as well."

    "Another surprise?"

    "Sort of? One of the goodies I picked up a while ago means that we get a version of the fandom wiki for any universe we enter, except that it's for the timeline we create, rather than canon. I thought you'd get a kick out of that."

    I raised an eyebrow. "Anything specific?"

    "You!" he said happily. "Congratulations, Cass; you're a background character in a hypothetical Star Trek series."

    "Normally we only get the 'update' at the end of the Jump," Gary added, "but I guess since this jump is technically over, our changes show up immediately."

    "Okay, I'm curious," I admitted. "Let's see what the wiki has to say."

    ———X==X==X———​

    Reading the summary on the wiki article was amusing.

    Reading the production notes and trivia was… less so, and produced quite a bit of swearing. I wasn't sure how much control Management had over the universe or the wiki we had of it, but it seemed my Psych Test had not been 'the extent of their hazing'.

    Thus did my time as a Borg Starfleet Cadet come to an end much the same way it had begun: with me screaming into a pillow.

    ———X==X==X———​

    Graduation had started at nine in the morning and ended around noon, so by the time I'd finished my ill-advised reading it was well past lunchtime. I 'ordered' a pizza—which is to say I went over to one of the buffet's Schroedinger's Trays while desiring a pizza and removed the lid to reveal exactly what I wanted—then decided to be social.

    "Hey, Tess. Mind if I join you?"

    "Not at all. I was just talking to myself."

    "In a manner of speaking," Dragon added, her voice coming from nowhere.

    "Cool." I sat down across from Tess and her grilled sandwich. A quick nibble of my pizza confirmed that the temperature was perfect, as always. "What's the topic?"

    "Being human, obviously," Tess said.

    I nodded. "Well, you've got three and a half years under your belt, now. What's the verdict?"

    She laughed. "It's awesome."

    "I apparently lost the coin flip," Dragon added wryly.

    "At least you don't have to sleep," Tess told her.

    "You don't like sleeping?" I asked.

    "I don't mind falling asleep," she explained. "Waking up isn't as bad as I heard, either. What I don't like is being asleep. More than a third of the day is just 'gone', and the consequences for ignoring it are… unpleasant."

    I grinned. "So, sleep: not a favorite. What do you like about being human?"

    "Socializing is probably my favorite part," she said. "It's so much nicer being in physical space with people. Even the suits I used to use didn't give the same feeling."

    "Talking to capes in costume is always a bit impersonal," I agreed. "Masks really get in the way."

    "What about the sensations?" Dragon asked.

    "Oh, yes, sensations, definitely. We had sensors, but there's something fundamentally different about feeling something that you can't describe—like colors to the blind." She laughed. "That's a very appropriate analogy, actually. You know, I never realized how literal the term 'gut feeling' was."

    "What do you mean?" I asked.

    "I mean… temperature isn't a number, it's something you sense in a general way. Vague, but in a certain direction. Does that make any sense?"

    My mouth was full of pizza, so I just nodded.

    "And then there's sound," Tess continued. "I could detect sound, but I was analyzing audio waves, not hearing."

    "And taste, of course," Dragon added.

    "And taste!" Tess agreed. "But I've waxed poetic about flavors enough."

    "For days," Dragon said dryly.

    "It wasn't that long."

    "Not in one sitting, but if I were to sum the time you've spent–"

    "Anyway," Tess said sharply, "Those are the highlights. On the whole, though, being human is surprisingly mundane. The first day, all I could think about was, 'I'm human!', but by the end of the first week, it was just who I was."

    "You don't have days where you wake up and think, 'Oh yeah, I'm human! This is great!'?" I asked.

    "I do, actually," she admitted. "I expect that will go away soon enough."

    "It didn't for me."

    "Sorry?" Dragon asked.

    "Being a woman," I explained. "I guess that never came up, did it?" The question drew a raised eyebrow from Tess—and probably Dragon. "I'm transgender, or at least I was. I was born male, back on my original world, and grew up with a sort of permanent malaise I only identified as gender dysphoria in my late twenties."

    "I never knew."

    "Like I said, it never came up." I shrugged. "Anyway, I was extremely happy to finally have the body I wanted instead of the one nature gave me, and the moments of realization that things are good haven't stopped. Well, except for last Jump, but that was a bit of a special case."

    "How so?" she asked.

    "It was the first time I got memories to go with my new identity, and they hit me really hard because I took drawbacks that made it more severe. I was a very different person in Bet—maybe less so towards the end, but early on? Definitely."

    "So having memories of growing up as a girl stopped those 'euphoric moments'?" Dragon asked.

    "No, they didn't stop. I didn't have them as Kasey, but now that I'm more… myself, they still crop up from time to time."

    "I suppose we'll see," Tess said. "It's an odd parallel. It never occurred to me that there would be a… well, 'parallel' is the only term I can think of, to be honest."

    "Not that odd," Dragon argued. "It's about dissatisfaction with one's physical self."

    "Not just the physical," I said. "People treated you differently when they knew you weren't biological, right?"

    "Well, yes, but by the time that became common knowledge, we were different."

    "But we did miss being treated like a normal person," Tess said. "Still, that makes the parallel true, not 'less odd'."

    "Then what makes it odd in the first place?" I asked.

    She stopped and thought about that. "The symbolism," she said. "Is it a coincidence that so many fictional AI decide they want to be human women?"

    "Well, a lot of media is written by lonely men," Dragon said.

    "That's hardly a satisfying explanation."

    "Maybe it's for the same reason that transphobes focus so hard on trans women while ignoring trans men," I suggested.

    "What reason is that?" Dragon asked.

    "I'm not sure. There does seem to be a pattern, though, right?" I thought about it for a moment. "Maybe misogynists think that women are bad and being a man is so awesome, they literally can't comprehend someone choosing to be otherwise? Or that if a man can become a woman, there's nothing stopping others from treating them the way they treat cis women?"

    "Maybe," she agreed. "Or perhaps bigots believe that if they are 'fooled' into being attracted to a transwoman—whom their transphobia defines as a man—then they have been 'made gay'—which their homophobia defines as 'unacceptable'."

    "What about us?" Tess asked.

    "If you start with the assumption that computers are genderless, attraction towards one would be some form of queerness," Dragon said. "Someone who values their 'straightness' might be just as disturbed to learn the woman they're lusting after is genderless as they are to learn she's male."

    "You mean someone they label as genderless or male," I said.

    "Yes, that's what I meant. I was speaking from the point of view of the intolerant male."

    Tess hummed. "That would explain why so many gynoids end up violently disassembled by the end of the work."

    "A metaphor for 'gay panic'?" I asked.

    "More of a parallel than anything else," Dragon said. "The dismemberment is used to further highlight their inhumanity or 'falsehood' by exposing the machinery behind the facade."

    "Western tradition has this 'undercurrent of fear' that femininity is sinister and beguiling," Tess added. "It's why tropes like 'evil is sexy' or the 'femme fatal' exist."

    "It goes all the way back to Pandora," Dragon agreed. "The 'first woman' in Greek creation myth was created specifically to enthrall a man and lead him to ruin. If femininity is 'sinister and beguiling' on its own, then anything 'artificially' feminine is clearly a trap."

    "That is an extremely unfortunate choice of words," I said.

    "Oh, dear. Yes, it was."

    Tess decided that little blunder was a good reason to change the topic. "Cass, did Max promise you a 'surprise' too?"

    My mouth was full, so I busied myself wiping pizza crumbs off my hands while I chewed. "Yeah. Apparently I'm going on a trip tomorrow. You too?"

    "Us too," Dragon said. "I'm not sure exactly how I'm 'going' anywhere, but Max said it was for both of us."

    "Huh. Any idea where or why?"

    "None. Max was careful not to do anything where I could hear."

    "I know Dinah has her own surprise as well," Tess said.

    "Huh," I repeated.

    A minute passed in silence as Tess and I focused on our food.

    "Speaking of symbolism, though," I said rather abruptly, "apparently my entire Academy experience here was just a metaphor for me being trans… or maybe not being trans."

    "What do you mean, not being trans?" Dragon asked. "You said you were born male and transitioned, right?"

    "I was, in my world… well, actually, I wouldn't claim to 'have transitioned'. I'd barely begun. But the point I was making is that Kasey Hudson and Cassandra Rhodes are cis women."

    "Are they?" she asked.

    "Aren't they?"

    Dragon left the rhetorical question alone.

    "What's the metaphor, then?" Tess asked.

    "Right, the metaphor. Remember the mess I made during freshman year, on the Practical?"

    She laughed. "How could we forget?"

    "How indeed. Well, I made the mistake of looking up that 'adventure' on some out-of-universe wiki Max has, and apparently the entire thing was 'written' as a schlocky morality play about trans rights and discrimination, with ex-Borg Drones standing in for transgender people and Alicia as the antagonist." I reached up and felt the implant over my eye without conscious thought. "It's actually scary how apt the metaphor is. The more I think about it, the deeper I go, and the idea that events just sort of lined up that way strains credibility."

    "Is the article 'real'?" Dragon asked. "Sorry, that's not the right word to use. What I mean is, were your adventures actually another work of fiction, or did you just see a hypothetical article that might have been written in a universe where your adventure was a work of fiction?"

    "Max made it sound like the former, but there's honestly no way to tell." I sighed. "Maybe it doesn't matter. But back to the metaphor… the Borg are a minority group. They suffer mistreatment, discrimination, and prejudice… even when it's subtle, it's always there. Not to mention the trauma of having gone through assimilation, the body horror… all of that.

    "When we chose who we were going to be, I decided to be… this. It didn't really mean anything to me. I'd seen the last decade of Star Trek play out in broad strokes, but I didn't internalize what it would be like for people who… you know. It makes me feel bad for treating it as something cool when it's a source of intense suffering to real survivors. 'Bad' isn't a strong enough term; it made me feel like a… even 'asshole' isn't a strong enough word. It's insensitive, voyeuristic, maybe even violent. I don't have the shared experience that defines the group I put myself in, and I feel like I shouldn't be in their… 'spaces', for lack of a better word.

    "The point I'm trying to make is that once I read that whole metaphor-symbolism thing, I realized that I can say much the same thing about being transgender. I've lived for years as a woman—a cis woman—and it's making me question my… my privilege, I guess. Kasey Hudson doesn't have a place in trans spaces any more than Cassandra Rhodes belongs with the other ex-Borg."

    "That's a pretty strict interpretation," Tess said. "Regardless of Kasey's history, you still deserve a place there if you want one. You do have that 'shared experience', don't you?"

    "I had it," I said, "but then my problems were magically solved in the most blatant-wish-fulfillment way possible. How much do I have in common with people who had to suffer through a long, painful, difficult process to get something that still isn't as good as what I was handed for free?"

    "You still know how it feels to start the journey, even if you didn't need to finish it."

    I didn't feel like arguing the point, so I just shrugged in response.

    "Does that upset you?" Dragon asked. "Not… 'belonging', I mean."

    "I wouldn't say it upsets me, but it's definitely making me question my perspective." I paused for thought. "I do feel a little bad for getting 'lucky' when I know a lot of people back home who deserve a miracle like this just as much as I do."

    "Maybe you'll be able to help when you go back," Tess said.

    "Maybe," I agreed blandly. She'd meant well, but the thought wasn't a good one; I didn't want to go back, and suggestions like that made me feel like I had a responsibility to do it anyway. Tess must have picked up on my mood; she turned her attention squarely at her meal rather than trying to continue the conversation.

    We'd just about finished eating when Zero interrupted the silence with a call of, "Hey, girls," from behind me. I twisted around to say 'Hi' with Tess and Dragon, then raised my eye at the tray she was holding. It was laden with food: burgers, pizza, vegetables, rice, and an entire roast chicken were just the things I could see at the top of the pile. "Mind if we sit down?" she asked, pointing a thumb over her shoulder at Darkness, who had a tray that was somehow even more full.

    "Not at all," was the unanimous response, so Darkness walked around to sit down next to Tess while Zero slid into the seat beside me and immediately began stuffing her mouth.

    "So," Zero said through a mouthful of food, somehow perfectly understandable and not spraying rice everywhere, "what were we talking about?" Does she have a perk specifically for speaking with her mouth full or something?

    Tess looked to me to answer, so I explained, "I was talking about how being a liberated Borg was an out-of-universe metaphor for trans people. Honestly, I'm shocked I didn't realize after I visited that support group. The people there were dealing with body-image issues, body-status issues, having to hide, anxiety around being 'clocked', discrimination, fear-mongering… once it was pointed out, I couldn't stop seeing the similarities everywhere."

    "Always iffy doing a 'lifestyle acceptance' aesop with something actually dangerous," Zero said skeptically. "Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, whatever… what kind of message does it send if your metaphor for queer people are actual monsters?"

    "Liberated Borg, I said."

    She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know you're not contagious or anything, but all drones were dangerous at some point, right? Like, what about the people who have to deal with killing people while they were still mind-controlled? That's not a trans thing I've ever heard of."

    "Okay, so it's not perfect," I huffed. "Actually, even that has a parallel, in a way. It's less extreme, but I did grow up a card-carrying member of the patriarchy, with all the social violence that implies. Like… as someone who came up as a pre-transition lesbian, I have a really complicated relationship with the female body and the male gaze. When I see an attractive woman–"

    "Just say 'hot'. It's what you're thinking anyway."

    "When I see a hot chick," I said defiantly, "am I ogling her as a person-socially-conditioned-as-a-male lusting after her, as a lesbian lusting after her, or as a transwoman who wants to be her?"

    She gave me a patronizing look. "That isn't unique to trans women, hon. Every les or bi woman has the same thoughts when a hottie walks by. 'Damn, do I want to tap that or be that?' And, yeah, we have to deal with the fact that sometimes the same presentations that fetishize us also appeal to us. It's part of the lifestyle."

    "I certainly haven't noticed any such gaze from you," Darkness added. "Have you been looking at me when I wasn't paying attention? Have I really missed such a violent assault on myyyaaaaaaaaaahh!" she yelped as she abruptly tipped backwards in her chair. Throwing up her hands to steady herself only succeeded in sending the bowl of noodle soup she'd been slurping from high into the air, where it traced a graceful arc before slamming straight down on her upturned face.

    "Wasn't me," Zero said in the least convincing manner possible. "Anyway, I get where you're going with this. Don't let yourself fall back into that gender-essentialism shit; women are sexual creatures, too. Well, unless we're ace, obviously." She stuffed more food into her mouth, then asked, "Say, Tess, did you ever work out a way to share memories with Dragon?"

    "We've figured it out," Tess said.

    "Nice. What's the trick?"

    Darkness still hadn't moved after taking the dish to the face. Are we all just going to ignore that? The answer seemed to be yes.

    "Alt forms," Dragon said.

    "She can turn back into a computer-based lifeform?"

    "Yeah," Dragon agreed. "I was talking to Management–"

    "The specifics aren't important," Tess interrupted.

    "Oho?" Zero asked. "Details, come on."

    "That's it. End of story."

    "As I was saying," Dragon continued, "I argued that if everyone has the ability to revert to their 'original' form, then Tess should have an alt form that would be compatible with my systems."

    "Dragon," Tess warned.

    "So they did… something, and when Tess went and tried out the new alt form–"

    "Don't do this to me!"

    "–she turned into a Tamagotchi!"

    "Draaagooon, noooo!" Tess wailed, hiding her face in her hands. "Why would you tell them? You'll have to remember this!"

    "And you'll remember how funny it was from my point of view," Dragon said.

    Zero stopped laughing just long enough to turn to me and ask, "Does that make the prank funny to both sides?"

    ———X==X==X———​
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • AN: I sorta regret pointing the symbolism out 'early' rather than waiting and hitting you all with it right alongside Cass, but I am not a patient woman.

    As Zero notes, it's always risky, message-wise, to try a 'lifestyle acceptance' aesop with something like Vampires/Werewolves/Zombies—i.e., beings who are actually dangerous. I hope I've threaded the needle here by making it clear that the people we saw in the self-help group are normal people. I explicitly had the narration note that most of the disconnected Borg didn't have any sort of super-[species] abilities. They're just people whose lives were made different—okay, I'll be frank, made worse—by a common experience.

    Really, once the idea occurred to me, I couldn't stop finding more and more parallels to cram into the text. Body image issues, possible loss of reproductive function, the idea of 'cracked' drones needing to repress their (literal) self-identity or be destroyed, the way the people have completed their transformation live in fear that people will notice, the scaremongering that there's some wicked 'Trans Agenda' where trans people want to spread their 'deviancy' to others (see dogwhistles like 'rapid onset dysphoria' or derogatory terms like 'trans-trender'), the Collective itself as a metaphor for Society's enforcement of toxic gender archetypes that harm everyone, cis and trans and men and women alike… I put the words, "We're all victims," into one speaker's mouth very deliberately.

    I'm setting out to deliver 'original flavor' in the various works, and Star Trek aesops are not delicate things. Maybe the Star Trek 'verse just has a form of narrative causality that predisposes events towards 'schlocky morality plays'? Regardless, Cass only missed it because she wasn't looking for literary symbolism in her day-to-day life.

    As a fictional character, she should really look out for that stuff.

    Speaking of Literary Symbolism, though, as much as I'd love to take credit for the meat of Cass's conversation with Dragon and Tess, much of it is drawn from a brilliant thesis paper by Margot Carlson on the transmisogyny inherent in the common portrayals of female androids in film. After reading it, I just knew I had to work elements of that into the friendship between Cass and Tess.

    Unfortunately, the paper isn't available online—I got my copy from a friend—but I reached out to Miss Carlson to discuss her work, and I have her permission to share her contact information so people can ask her for a copy of their own. If you're interested in reading eighty-or-so pages of dense, hard-hitting, and insightful trans-and-queer-focused film criticism, drop me a DM.
     
    Bonus Chapter: Memory Jumper
  • Threadmarks
    • Bonus Chapter: Memory Jumper​


    https://memory-jumper.fandom.com/wiki/Perfect_Storm_(episode)​


    in: ACA episodes
    Perfect Storm (episode)

    Shiss and Ebav have their first Practical Exercise, but personal conflicts between their teammates lead the mission to the brink of disaster.
    Contents [show]
    1 Summary

    1.1 Teaser
    1.2 Act One
    1.3 Act Two
    1.4 Act Three
    1.5 Act Four
    1.6 Act Five
    ​
    2 Memorable quotes
    3 Background information
    4 Links and references

    Summary ✏Edit
    Teaser ✏Edit

    Aboard an unidentified Starfleet vessel, several crewmen are attempting to barricade the door to engineering from the inside. The door blows open to reveal a Borg drone. Despite the efforts of the crew, the Borg drone quickly overpowers them, killing or assimilating all crew members in engineering. The Borg drone pauses to survey the engineering deck, then leaves, indifferent to the bodies left behind. The camera cuts to a dimly-lit room, and a silhouetted Cadet wakes with a start in her bed. She orders the computer to raise the lights, revealing several implants on her face indicating she is a former Borg Drone. Her roommate is already awake, looking at a PADD, and looks at her with disgust before leaving the hyperventilating cadet alone in the room.

    Act One ✏Edit

    In the mess hall, Cadets Shiss and Ebav discuss the upcoming Practical Exercise, a short mission in which three pairs of Cadets are grouped together to perform a simple task. The two discuss the grading system, and Ebav expresses some concern over their partners; he worries that they will be stuck with people whose performance will affect the entire group's grade. Meanwhile, at another table the liberated Borg from the Teaser is eating with a group of friends. They are also discussing the upcoming Practical Exercises, but the former Borg, Cadet Cassandra Rhodes, is concerned about her ability to work with her partner. The camera then returns to the Andorian pair, who speculate on their possible assignments and partners. Their discussion is interrupted by an announcement that the Practical Exercise assignments have been posted.

    In another room, the other cadet visible in the Teaser, Cadet Alicia Merrill, is shown looking at an image of her family on a viewscreen in her quarters. She flips through several images, including obituaries indicating that both her parents died in separate battles with the Borg. She receives the same public announcement notification, and picks up her PADD. She then heads to the transporter room and beams up to Earth Spacedock immediately, where she reports to the USS Tehran for duty.

    On Earth, Rhodes attends a group meeting for former Borg drones, where they discuss the issues with adjusting to normal life, and their own feelings about their pasts. She asks for advice on dealing with people hostile to former drones, but is unsatisfied with the response.

    Act Two ✏Edit

    Now onboard the Tehran, Shiss heads to the briefing room, where he encounters Rhodes waiting outside the door. Once Ebav arrives, the three enter to a frosty reception from Acting Captain Merrill. Ebav and Shiss discuss the planet and their mission, but Merrill makes no attempt to include Rhodes in the discussion at all, and Rhodes herself remains silent. Once the briefing ends, Rhodes requests to borrow Ebav's PADD, which he refuses; he informs her that she needs to work out the issue with her crewmate herself, before it affects the mission.

    Back in their quarters, Shiss and Ebav bemoan their situation. After a brief argument, they conclude that they will have to address the problem, and they split up to seek out the two humans. Shiss cannot find Rhodes; she is not in her quarters, nor any of the common areas open to the cadets. The computer states that her current location is 'unavailable', so he goes to report his failure to Ebav. He finds the other cadet futilely pounding on Merrill's door, demanding that she answer. His tantrum is interrupted by Merrill herself, who notes that, had he bothered to query the ship's computer, he would know that she left her room ten minutes ago. Ebav warns her that her behavior will result in the group failing the exercise, but Merrill is unmoved. She insists that the three of them are perfectly capable of handling the mission, and orders them to leave when they attempt to follow her into her quarters.

    Ebav heads to the Tehran's counselor, Lt. Miras. Ebav explains the problem, and Miras suggests that the team dynamics are part of the exercise. As such, he declines to offer specific advice, only telling Ebav that even if they complete their mission, they will fail the exercise if they do not do so as a team. Ebav leaves, and Miras contacts Rear Admiral Aldern at the academy. Miras questions the team assignment, prompting Aldern to confirm that teamwork is the point of the test. He points out that the mission itself largely consists of "waiting for a machine to beep," and that any one of the cadets could have done the job alone if they had provided them with a modern sensor suite instead of the antique Type-11.

    Elsewhere, Ebav finds Shiss drinking in the lounge, and the two complain about the stubbornness of their captain and the absence of their engineer. Discouraged, but not ready to give up, Shiss heads back to Merrill's room, only to meet a badly disheveled Rhodes on the way there. She explains that she's spent the last three days without sleep trying to complete the tasks Merrill assigned her, and gives him a copy of the report. Shiss confronts Merrill in her room, demanding to know what Rhodes was doing; Merrill states that she had 'Twelve' inspect every item on their equipment list because 'it' demanded something to do. When Shiss accuses her of abusing her position, Merrill repeats her claim that Rhodes isn't necessary for the mission, despite Shiss's reminder that the exercise grade includes their ability to cooperate. Shiss demands to know what the problem is; Merrill refuses to speak of it, and threatens to call security if Shiss does not leave.

    Act Three ✏Edit

    After a short shuttle ride, the three arrive in a light downpour. Merrill demands that Rhodes begin unloading the equipment. Ebav notes that the equipment is far too heavy for one person to move, only for Rhodes to do just that, managing to unload the entire weather station on her own, albeit with great effort. She is then forced to carry the load up a steep hill; when Shiss attempts to aid her, Merrill orders him to carry the transceiver rather than attempt to lighten his crewmate's load. Ebav and Merrill get into a shouting match that ends with Merrill pulling rank and reminding him that he is being evaluated for his ability to follow orders, to which he reminds Merrill that she is being graded on her ability to give orders. Merrill then admits that she expected Rhodes to ask for help, prompting further rebuke from Ebav. Meanwhile, Shiss and Rhodes set up the equipment at the top of the hill, and Rhodes explains that Merrill's parents died to the Borg, and that the other Cadet can't see her as anything other than a monster.

    Merrill instructs Shiss and Rhodes to monitor the equipment during the storm, forcing them to make frequent trips up the hill while the others take shelter in the tents. Neither complain, but Ebav continues to glare at Merrill each time one of the other cadets leaves. Once the two are alone, he again rebukes Merrill, who dismisses his complaints and refers to Rhodes as a 'machine' that will do what it is told. Ebav is visibly disgusted and storms out to the shuttle, where he begins drafting a letter to the Academy complaining of Merrill's conduct. Meanwhile, Shiss and Rhodes cooperate to solve a problem with the transceiver and learn that the severity of the storm is caused by a unique interaction between the planet's atmosphere and subspace.

    Now that the storm has passed, Merrill orders the crew to pack up the equipment and prepare to return to the Tehran. Shiss comments that the calm is temporary and the storm will start again soon. Rhodes, meanwhile, notes that one of the shuttle's impulse thrusters have been damaged at some point during their descent, and should be repaired. Merrill demands to know if the damage is critical, and Rhodes admits that it is unlikely to affect the shuttle for the short flight necessary to reach the Tehran. Merrill instructs her to note it in the maintenance log, and they take off.

    During the ascent, a bolt of lightning strikes the shuttlecraft, causing the impulse engines to fail. Ebav attempts to keep the shuttle steady while Rhodes works to stabilize the engine, but both impulse engines are now physically damaged and cannot lift the shuttle, and diverting more power to the engines causes an explosion. After a brief argument over the limited crash seats, the two Andorians are strapped in, leaving the humans to brace as best they can. Ebav sends the shuttle into a listing glide, praying that he is able to find another island, lest they drown in the choppy sea. They barely make it, and the shuttle crashes through the trees, spilling equipment over the rocky jungle before coming to a rest on its side.

    Act Four ✏Edit

    Back on the Tehran, one of the bridge officers notes that the cadets have stopped transmitting weather data, but the shuttle hasn't returned. The Captain suggests it could be due to the cadets having trouble with their equipment, and orders that the Tehran keep its sensors pointed at the planet, to see if they can pick the signal back up. He notes that the shuttle won't be late for another few days.

    Meanwhile, the cadets are in rough shape, lacking food and medical supplies. Shiss is confident that this is part of the exercise, a deliberately simulated emergency that they are being graded on, but the other cadets disagree. Merrill decides that they'll follow the trail left by their crash back across the island, looking for the gear and supplies that spilled out of the shuttle. However, another storm hits and forces them to take cover under a rock, where they review their dire food supplies. Once the storm passes, the cadets resume their hike, but struggle to follow the trail: due to the shuttle's tumbling during the crash, there are long breaks in the trail. Fearing that they've strayed off the path, Shiss climbs a tree to spot the next patch of destroyed jungle, but on the way down, he falls and breaks his leg. He apologizes for his mistake and states that the test needs to be canceled, as he needs urgent medical attention. No help arrives, and the cadets are forced to accept that this isn't a test. They are on their own.

    The cadets continue onward and attempt to treat Shiss' injuries. However, Shiss' condition worsens over the next day, leading to a fight between Ebav and Merrill over their next action. Ebav insists that finding a way to signal for help is even more urgent than ever due to Shiss' injury, while Merrill replies that they won't be able to carry him, and that they need to find shelter before another storm like the one they came to measure hits. The fight escalates to shouting, and the group splits. Ebav carries Shiss, while Rhodes trails after Merrill.

    Ebav continues to search for the transmitter, talking to Shiss as he does. Despite his Andorian constitution, he suffers from the storms, particularly the high winds. He finds several fragments of the shuttle, but they are useless; torn hull panels and damaged supplies. He is able to create a crude splint for Shiss' leg from bits of tent, but Shiss is fading in and out of consciousness and doesn't respond. Meanwhile, the two humans reach a cave system, where they settle in to wait for another lull in the storm.

    Shiss has a lucid moment and begins to talk, blaming himself for the current state of the mission, which Ebav denies. The conversation is intercut with a similar conversation between Merrill and Rhodes, with each of the four cadets attempting to take the blame for the crash and subsequent problems. Shiss blames himself for his injury, for not taking the danger seriously, and for not warning Ebav to avoid the heavier storms on the flight up. Merrill blames herself for ignoring Rhodes' warnings and driving a wedge into their group. Ebav blames his piloting for the crash, noting that he'd flown a standard flight pattern rather than having the computer compensate for the storm, and states that his temper resulted in the group being divided. Rhodes blames herself for not refusing to ignore the engine problem, and for the disastrous results of her attempted fix in mid-flight. The conversations end when Shiss drifts back into delirium and Rhodes and Merrill go to sleep.

    Act Five ✏Edit

    Ebav continues his search, and eventually beats the odds and finds the transmitter, but it is too badly damaged to function, and he cannot repair it. He despairs that even though he's found the one thing they needed most, it's useless without the other cadets. Ebav removes the splint from Shiss' leg and uses the scrap of tent as a flag, hoping that the others will come look for them after the storm. He considers going out to try and find the others, but is unwilling to leave Shiss alone and can't carry his friend the entire way back to the mountain. As he sits down, he notes that his only hope is that the other cadets decide to look for him.

    Back in the cave, Rhodes and Merrill wake up in the early dawn light. Merrill describes her past, and the fact that she was on-board the Sacramento during its destruction, surviving in an isolated portion of the ship until she was rescued. The cadets discuss the Psych Tests they experienced during the Academy admission exams. Merrill believes her psych test was flawed, because she knew what to expect: given her past, the only scenario the Psych Test would generate would be one involving the Borg. Rhodes states that she almost failed her psych test, because while she was able to handle the situation, her solution did not display the skills the test was designed to measure. Her test involved facing her fear of having harmed others as a Borg, and was designed to test whether her fear of harming others would cripple her ability to act when her own life was on the line. The conversation begins to heal the rift between the two cadets, and they resolve to search for their crewmates once the storm abates.

    Ebav is talking to Shiss when he hears shouting, and he runs off to find Rhodes and Merrill, who have followed his trail through the jungle. Rhodes attempts to build a working transmitter out of the parts, but several components are too badly damaged. Ebav leads Merrill to a chunk of debris he found earlier, which turns out to be the Type-11 sensor station. She is able to identify and salvage the necessary components and returns them to Rhodes, who successfully builds the transmitter. She isn't confident that the signal will be understood as a distress beacon, so Merrill reaches over and begins transmitting a Morse SOS call using the main power switch.

    On board the Tehran, the sensor officer reports that they are getting a subspace signal from the planet, but it's just noise. The signal begins cutting in and out, and the bridge crew recognizes it as an SOS. The captain orders a shuttle to launch immediately, then has the Tehran modulate their own return signal ping to send the SOS code back to the transmitter. Merrill breaks into hysterical laughter when the signal light repeats her message, hugging the other cadets in relief.

    In the Tehran's sickbay, the four cadets are treated for their injuries. In separate debriefings, each cadet attempts to take responsibility for the crash, citing the reasons they mentioned earlier in the episode. Shiss claims that Ebav will support his guilt, Ebav claims Rhodes will support his guilt, Rhodes claims Merrill will support her guilt, and Merrill claims that all three of the others will support her guilt. Aldern concludes his viewing of the interviews by stating to another Academy official that while each cadet bears a portion of the blame for the crash, no single error would have created such a result. He states that only the 'perfect storm' of coincidences and bad luck endangered the cadets, and that regardless of their personal feelings, they performed admirably under the circumstances. The episode ends with a voice-over of his conclusion over a shot of the cadets disembarking a shuttle at the Academy together, their grudges forgiven.


    Memorable quotes ✏Edit
    "Just because it's not in a simulator doesn't make it a real mission."
    "I think you'll find that 'not simulated' is the exact definition of 'real'."

    - Ebav and Shiss, discussing the upcoming exercise​


    "We'll be working with a Borg!"
    "So?"
    "What do you mean, 'so?' Aren't you at all interested in what they're like?"
    "Probably like anyone else. Maybe a bit less rowdy… or more rowdy."

    - Shiss and Ebav​


    "Welcome, Cadet Ch… Chazal… Chazhay-olir… Chazhay—"
    "Cadet Shiss is fine, ma'am."

    - Merrill and Shiss, upon first meeting​


    "I am your commanding officer for this exercise!"
    "No, you're not! You can't be a commanding officer if you don't give me any commands!"

    - Merrill and Rhodes, after Rhodes confronts her acting captain.​


    "Your attitude is going to ruin all of our evaluations!"
    "The three of us are perfectly capable of completing the mission without it, and our grades will reflect that."

    - Ebav and Merrill, on Rhodes​


    "Maybe the point of the exercise isn't about the mission, but the people on it."
    "What?"
    "Teamwork. You're not being tested on your ability to work a weather station, Cadet. You're being tested on your ability to work as a team with people you don't like."
    "I'm not the one with the problem! It's the two humans. They can't stand each other! Am I going to be judged for their stupidity?"
    "On a ship, the entire crew succeeds or fails together."

    - Miras and Ebav, after Ebav confronts Merrill​


    "The mission is an excuse. Their only task is to deliver a machine to a planet and wait for it to beep. If we'd given them a modern system instead of a Type 11, any one of them could do it on their own. The exercise is about teamwork. Starfleet officers need to be able to work together, no matter their personal feelings."
    "They're at each other's throats enough that I got a visit from one of them already. You'll likely have a letter of censure from each of them complaining about someone's behavior."
    "A single letter would be a black mark on all of them. If they can't put aside their differences long enough to watch rain fall, they have no place on the bridge. On a ship—"
    "The entire crew succeeds or fails together, I know."

    - Aldern and Miras, discussing the team​


    "If our engineer thinks hiding from her captain is acceptable Starfleet behavior, this mission is already over."

    -Ebav, on Rhodes' absence​


    "You're working her like a machine!"
    "It is a machine!"

    - Shiss and Merrill, on the latter's treatment of Rhodes​


    "I don't understand why she listens to you at all."
    "It does what it's told, Cadet. That's how they work."

    -Ebav and Merrill, while Rhodes struggles with the weather station​


    "What's the problem between you and the Captain?"
    "It's personal."
    "Obviously. There's nothing professional about the way you two act at all."

    - Shiss and Rhodes, on her feud with Merrill​


    "I have no memories prior to my disconnection."
    "Well… you seem very well adjusted."

    -Rhodes and Shiss, while setting up the equipment​


    "I wish to lodge a formal complaint against Acting Captain Merrill for her behavior during this exercise…"

    - Ebav, composing a letter of complaint against Merrill​


    "We're only in the eye of the storm."
    "Does that matter?"
    "For the flight? It shouldn't. I just want to leave before we get soaked again."

    -Shiss and Ebav, while packing the shuttle​


    "Captain, why have me inspect the shuttle at all if you're not going to listen to me? It will take an hour to fix, at most."
    "I am listening to you. You found an issue. It is not a serious problem and it will not affect our flight. Log it for maintenance and prepare for departure, Twelve."

    - Merrill and Rhodes, before taking off for the Tehran​


    "Miss Rhodes, your panel should be able to access the orbital survey!"
    "What panel?"

    -Shiss and Rhodes, after her control panel in the shuttle explodes​


    "They wouldn't make it that bad. I mean, this is a test, right? Part of the exercise? We're not stranded here. This is just an extra step. A surprise survival course. We're not going to starve to death or anything."

    - Shiss, after the crash​


    "I failed the test. We can't keep going now; I need urgent medical attention."
    "We need to keep going. We can't just stop."
    "We have to. Cancel the test! I need antiseptics and dermal regeneration before infection sets in."

    - Shiss and Ebav, after Shiss' fall​


    "You have your orders, Cadet!"
    "Then this is a mutiny!"

    - Merrill and Ebav​


    "I once got caught in a blizzard while climbing glaciers on a family vacation to Andoria. Did I ever tell you that story? It was a lot worse than this. Well, it was a bit worse. Well, it was at least this bad. (Long pause) It was almost this bad. God, this wind is awful!"

    - Ebav monologuing while carrying Shiss​


    "I'm not sure fixing is the right term for this project, but I think I can build a new transmitter with the parts."

    - Rhodes, on the broken transmitter​


    Background information ✏Edit
    Production history ✏Edit
    • Revised final draft script: 17 September 2015
    • Premiere airdate: 4 May 2016
    Story and production ✏Edit
    • The episode was written by Mathew Greer and Carl Mossley based on a submitted script by Steven Ersbin. According to Greer, the original draft focused more on the experience of the Borg character in general: "It wasn't a bad script. I'd even say it was a good script. But it wasn't a new script. A former drone adjusting to normal life… it was too much of what we'd already seen with Seven of Nine in Voyager. I wanted to turn the lens around and look at normal life adjusting to the Borg." (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy) He credits Mossley with the insight on finding a metaphor for the Borg experience. Mossley recalls, "It's pretty easy to see where the idea came from, considering what was in the news at the time, and the more I thought about it, the more parallels I found. […] When I pitched the idea to Greer, his immediate reaction was, 'Will [CBS] let us do that?' I didn't know, but I wanted to try." (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary)
    • An early draft of the script described Yarilia V as a desert planet wracked by sandstorms, with shooting to take place in the desert north of Los Angeles. However, producer Christian Niles feared that an episode with the cast trapped in a continuous sandstorm would be "visually dull to the point [that] we may as well just have the actors reading their lines from offscreen," and Greer rewrote the episode to use a more exotic jungle planet. (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary) The script set on the desert world involved the group being separated by chance in the sandstorm, rather than an injury leading to a breakdown of teamwork. (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel)
    • According to Niles, this was the single most expensive episode of the entire season, (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy) although he later amended that the episode merely had the highest special effects budget of the season. (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel) Special effects coordinator Sebastian Dodd commented, "We spent so much time at the Academy, the chance to build an alien planet entirely in greenscreen was too exciting to pass up. We may have gotten carried away, but the results were worth it. […] My only regret is that we blew the budget before we got to show any wildlife." (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary)
    • The makeup team had to use a different type of body paint for the Andorians during the away mission. The normal body paint, while mostly waterproof, did not hold up to the amount of water being poured on the actors. The yellowish filter on the exterior scenes hides the slight change in skin color. (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy)
    • Bruce Pollard points to this episode as a warning sign for how many times he would be taking his shirt off on camera over the season, joking, "I should have seen the writing on the wall when they had me shirtless in the final scene. They didn't give me a new shirt over the three day trip back to Earth! Did we not have a single spare uniform onboard?" (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary)
    • Greer and Mossley's early drafts had significantly different character dynamics, with Merrill being supportive, Shiss indifferent, and Ebav hostile. According to Greer, Roger Gram suggested that the leads should encounter a long-ongoing feud from the outside, rather than forming a short, quickly-resolved conflict, prompting a shift in roles. "Roger said, wouldn't it be more interesting to have our characters encounter this ongoing problem, rather than creating and resolving a conflict in the same episode? And he was right." Shiss went from indifferent to supportive, Ebav from hostile to indifferent, and Merrill from supportive to hostile. (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary) When asked about his input in a later interview, Gram stated, "To be honest, I wasn't really thinking in terms of 'story structure.' I was mostly worried about my part. The first script they showed me had Ebav being, to be very blunt, an asshole. He suddenly turned into a massive bigot without any explanation whatsoever. I hated it immediately." (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy)
    • Sarah Busurn was originally cast as Cassandra Rhodes, but was instead offered the role of Alicia Merrill because Jacquelin Tabbert already had a make-up and prosthetics set for her implants. Busurn was disappointed with the change but accepted the new role; director Thomas Poole gave her free reign with the character, and a large number of Merrill's lines towards Rhodes were suggested by the actress or ad-libbed entirely. (Entertainment Weekly August 2017 issue)
    • Mossley claimed that he wanted to bring Rhodes back in Season Four as one of the lead characters, in the same way Ebav had appeared in a few episodes of Season Two before being given a season of his own, but CBS refused. "I loved the character. The fans loved the character. But [CBS] felt we'd pulled a fast one on them tackling these issues, and were determined not to let it happen again. We brought her back a few times, but we never got to really 'feature' her." (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel)
    Continuity ✏Edit
    • Tabbert had previously served as an uncredited extra in several episodes in previous seasons, most notably in the Season Two episode "Night on the Town", where she plays an unnamed Borg cadet accompanying Cordeaux and Shiss to the Crack in the Ice Pub during their third year. The fact that her character is sitting with Cordeaux early in the episode implies that she may be the common acquaintance mentioned in "Friends and Strangers" who introduced Shiss and Cordeaux.
    • The Class 2 Shuttle is the same craft mentioned by Tom Paris in VOY:"Drone", in which he states, "they used to shoehorn half a dozen cadets into one of these things for weeks at a time." Several times, the cadets comment on the fact that there are normally six cadets in a shuttle, rather than four.
    • In the Season Two episode "Track and Field", Ebav comments to Cordeaux that he's "seen worse" after Cordeaux breaks his ankle. That injury takes place during their second year, months after the events of "Perfect Storm".
    • Shiss still has visible scarring on his back in "Once More With Feeling", "Black Mark", and "Alumni", but the scars are not present by the events of "Commencement". The latter may be an error, as it was filmed more than a year later.
    • The Psych Exam Rhodes and Merrill discuss in the cave is a version of the same exam given to Wesley Crusher in TNG:"Coming of Age".
    • Both Rhodes and Merrill appear in the background of "Commencement", where they can be seen celebrating together in one of the crowd shots, suggesting that their relationship remained friendly after their rescue.
    Reception ✏Edit
    • Poole stated that he was proud of the episode, saying, "We could have gone farther, but I think the message came through loud and clear." (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy) Mossley was less pleased, complaining that the studio insisted several of the most blatant parallels—including a line about sterility—be removed: "I said what I wanted to say, but not as bluntly as I wanted to say it." (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel)
    • Gram was pleased with the episode overall but critical of his own performance, stating, "I think the episode came out well, but it wasn't anything I did. So much of the away mission was entirely greenscreened, it was hard to get into the spirit of things. I'd never filmed that way before, so I didn't realize how distracting it would be. […] The worst part was getting several gallons of water poured on me every take. I would have been really pissed if the final product had sucked after all that!" (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary)
    • Pollard was less happy. "It's a decent episode, I guess, but it's not one of my favorites from either side. It felt like I was back to being a side-character, and that made me worry about what the rest of the season would be like. Nothing against Jackie, working with her was great, but at the time I was glad she didn't get more screen time." (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel)
    • In her interview, Tabbert said, "I was thrilled to have a leading role so suddenly. It was a great episode, because it was good television and still managed to make a point, but I'm not sure I did the character justice. Maybe Sarah [Busurn] could have played the character better, […] more true to the message, the parallels the episode was trying to draw. I don't think I managed to play her the way she ought to have been played." (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Cast Interviews) When later asked about her experience, she said, "I had a blast getting to really play a character, rather than just hanging around in the background. The fan reaction was extremely flattering, as well! It's a shame we didn't get to see more of Cassandra, but leaving the audience wanting more is better than wearing out your welcome." (The Yearbook: Behind the Scenes of Star Trek Academy)
    • Busurn had mixed feelings on the episode. She was happy with the message but echoed Mossley's displeasure with the changes the studio insisted on, claiming, "CBS either didn't get the message, or actively disagreed with it." She was also critical of the episode itself. "There's a lot I love about it, but that doesn't mean I love everything. I didn't like having Merrill turn around and accept [Rhodes] overnight. It was a feel-good moment that really weakened the episode." (Entertainment Weekly August 2017 issue) On a personal level, her role as the antagonist garnered a lot of negative attention; Busurn is transgender herself (although she did not publicly come out until 2017) and playing the aggressor in a transgender-themed episode while not an open member of the community attracted backlash from both fans and friends. (Entertainment Weekly August 2017 issue) Alicia Merrill was scheduled to reappear in a minor speaking role in "Opportunity", but Busurn left the show for two months following the release of "Perfect Storm"; her next appearance was as a Vulcan extra in "Odds and Ends", and she did not reprise the role of Merrill until "Random Walk". (Entertainment Weekly August 2017 issue)
    • Fan reception was positive, with noted fan site SFDebris claiming that the episode "proves that the old Trek formula could still deliver new lessons." [1] In the 2018 'Series Retrospective', fans voted "Perfect Storm" the best episode of the third season, and the 4th best Academy episode overall (behind "The Code", "A Feather In The Dark", and "What Was Will Be", in that order). (Star Trek Academy: Series Retrospective) However, critical reception was far harsher. Forbes wrote that "following the patterns of the old Trek shows meant making all the same mistakes" and that "changing the races involved wasn't enough to make the lesson of tolerance feel new." [2] The New York Times went further, stating that "the supposed leads were sidelined in their own season for yet more human characters" and calling the plot "overwrought, cliche, and predictable." [3]
    Trivia ✏Edit
    • This is the only Season Three episode in which neither Ja'al nor T'san appear.
    • Rhodes' Borg designation, Six of Twelve, is a reference to Battlestar Galactica (2003). (Comicon 2019 Star Trek Panel)
    • During one cut, the Master Control Panel seen during the briefing gives the name of the Class 2 shuttle the cadets crash as the Watney rather than the name on the hull (Magellan). The former is a reference to the novel The Martian by Andy Weir, in which the American astronaut Mark Watney becomes stranded on Mars.
    • A deleted scene would have revealed that Rhodes took her surname because she was originally rescued by the USS Rhode Island. (Star Trek Academy DVD Set — Episode Commentary)
    • The 'Type-11 Maritime' system may be a reference to the film Ocean's Eleven.
    Links and references ✏Edit
    Starring ✏Edit
    • Roger Gram as Cadet Ebav Ch'othelness
    • Bruce Pollard as Cadet Shiss Ch'azhaolrihr
    Also starring ✏Edit
    • Andrew Lorry as Cadet Daryl Cordeaux
    • Evan Daniels as Cadet Micheal Forrest
    • Drew Linder as Cadet Kark
    Special appearance by ✏Edit
    • Wil Wheaton as Lt. Cmdr. Miras
    Guest stars ✏Edit
    • Sarah Busurn as Cadet Alicia Merrill
    • Jacquelin Tabbert as Cadet Cassandra Rhodes
    Co-star ✏Edit
    • Norman Durres as Rear Admiral George Aldern
    Uncredited co-stars ✏Edit
    • Jeffery Lin as starship captain
    • Anna Martinez as startship comm officer
    • Unknown performers as
      • Vulcan
      • Four cadets
      • Three bridge officers
      • Three crewmen
    External links ✏Edit
    • "Perfect Storm" at StarTrek.com, the official Star Trek website
    • "Perfect Storm" at Memory Companion, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
    • "Perfect Storm" at Wikipedia
    Previous Episode:
    "Hijinks"​
    Star Trek: Academy
    Season 3​
    Next Episode:
    "Opportunity"​

    AN: For comparison.

    Click Here to jump back to where Cass encounters this article.
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • Personally, I felt the best quote from the storm episode was Rhodes telling her how she acted with stiff indifference or professionalism not to act as a robot but as the only way to act since she wouldn't engage her. That moment when it was the bigot projecting even her behavior and having to confront it felt like a turning point. I was going through the memorable quotes and felt like that one was missing.
     
    I'm having to bend my mind slightly here. This is close to Homestuck levels of meta without suffering from abstract canon relevance shenanigans.

    The production details were spot-on and showed an incredible authorial ability to view events through a specific lens.

    The subject of different gender-construct perspectives during the previous chapter honestly made me zone out even though the dialogue was rich. It just doesn't track unless you can completely transition between lives - it's as relatable as species dysphoria.
     
    I'll be honest, the metaphor passed me by at 10.000 feet and mach 3 in the actual chapters. Well done, literary recontextualization is always cool.

    Is this the last chapter before a ending epilogue/start of next jump or is there going to be a actual chapter of captning a ship?
     
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    Tempestuous said:
    Zero said in the least convincing manner possible.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Kinda surprised to see Zero being so supportive. Then again, we don't know much about her character --other than she's pansexual (I think?) and blunt, arguably to the point of cruelty.

    Tempestuous said:
    Maybe the Star Trek 'verse just has a form of narrative causality that predisposes events towards 'schlocky morality plays'?
    Click to expand...
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    I mean, between Management and the Q, who knows?
     
    Cyguy7 said:
    Personally, I felt the best quote from the storm episode was Rhodes telling her how she acted with stiff indifference or professionalism not to act as a robot but as the only way to act since she wouldn't engage her. That moment when it was the bigot projecting even her behavior and having to confront it felt like a turning point. I was going through the memorable quotes and felt like that one was missing.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I think I missed that one because I was focused on showing scenes Cass wasn't present for, with a few she was present for sprinkled in to show roughly when in the episode they happened.

    If I edit it in, does that make you a Memory-Jumper contributor?

    SCO said:
    I'll be honest, the metaphor passed me by at 10.000 feet and mach 3 in the actual chapters. Well done, literary recontextualization is always cool.

    Is this the last chapter before a ending epilogue/start of next jump or is there going to be a actual chapter of captning a ship?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    There are still 6 years left to go, starting with the "Surprise" Cass was promised. That said, she never gets to actually captain a ship; as her narration notes, she's not going to rise that high in six years. The average Ensign->Junior Lieutenant promotion time is 3 years (according to the wiki, anyway) and it only slows down after that.

    RandomOTP said:
    Kinda surprised to see Zero being so supportive. Then again, we don't know much about her character --other than she's pansexual (I think?) and blunt, arguably to the point of cruelty.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Zero may be an unrepentant murder-hobo, but she sees the 'chain as her 'Party' and cares about their well-being and happiness. From her conversation with Cass over pool, she's shown as an ethical hedonist—though maybe "ethical" is the wrong term because, well, murder-hobo.

    She's also a troll who loves messing with people, of course. Her jokes aren't intended to be mean, but she has a mean sense of humor, so sometimes they come off that way.
     
    Chapter 60: "Portraits"
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 60: "Portraits"​

    I was dying to ask where we were going, but I could appreciate a good surprise, so I held my tongue while Diane set the autopilot and let the shuttle take us up. Even after nearly four years, space travel hadn't lost its sense of wonder. I stayed glued to the main screen as the sky turned from blue to black as we climbed eastward into orbit, and then—to my surprise—back to blue. We were descending again, heading down towards Europe.

    "I was sort of expecting something a little more exotic," I admitted.

    "Sometimes, the most surprising things are right under our feet," she replied.

    "Fair enough. Where are we heading? England?"

    "France, actually."

    "Cool." Universal translators didn't only work on alien languages, so I wouldn't have a problem with the language barrier at all. "Paris?"

    "No," she said, grinning in anticipation of whatever surprise she had prepared. "Somewhere a little more rural."

    I stopped interrogating her in favor of watching the continent pass below us out the main viewscreen, the ground growing closer and closer as our ballistic trajectory carried us in. Not that it felt ballistic, thanks to the artificial gravity in the shuttle, but I'd studied surface-to-surface flight patterns and knew exactly the shape of the arc we'd taken. 'Rural' was an apt description, it turned out, as we came in over a massive farm of some sort—a vineyard, in fact, which looked oddly like the ones in Northern California for all that it was on the other side of the world three-and-a-bit centuries into the future. Vineyards were vineyards, it seemed.

    Diane turned the shuttle off, then opened the hatch and stepped out into the early afternoon sunlight. No sooner had I climbed out myself than the door of the farmhouse we'd landed near opened to reveal…

    Oh. That was the surprise.

    "Diana!" Patrick Stewart—I mean, sorry, Jean-Luc God Damn Picard—cried out as he moved to hug Diane. "It's been too long!" The two embraced, followed by Picard placing a couple of friendly kisses on her cheeks. "You look wonderful. Have you gotten younger?"

    "Jean-Luc, you old flatterer!" Diane scolded him. "The peace and quiet's smoothed your wrinkles out as well! Oh, where are my manners? Jean-Luc, this is Cassandra. Cassandra, Jean-Luc Picard."

    "Ah, Admiral Rimmer's new protege!" Picard said, smiling at me. "I have heard wonderful things about you, Ensign!" He ignored my awkwardly outstretched hand in favor of hugging me, then ushered Diana and a very badly frazzled Ensign Cassandra Rhodes into his parlor and onto some plain but very comfortable chairs. Diana and Picard were chatting about…

    Oh fuck me. I'd been misspelling her name in my head. It wasn't 'Diana', it was Deanna. As in Deanna freaking Troi.

    I noticed that both Picard and Deanna were looking at me expectantly. "I'm sorry," I said awkwardly, "what was that?" My brain hadn't locked up this hard from meeting someone since my very first day on the 'chain.

    "Are you well?" Picard asked.

    "I'm fine, sir. It's just…" God, I was turning bright red. "It's an honor to meet you, sir."

    A brief frown crossed his features before being swept away by a wry grin. "None of that, now. I'm retired; you outrank me at the moment. So, would you care for some tea? Coffee?"

    On the one hand, I really wasn't fond of either. On the other hand, I was being offered tea by Jean-Luc Picard.

    "Cassandra prefers water with her hero worship," Deanna said, throwing me under the bus completely.

    Picard tutted. "You've certainly sharpened your tongue," he said as he busied himself in the small kitchenette. A teapot, two teacups, and a glass of water went onto a tray, which itself went onto the table between us. I grabbed the glass and drank deeply to regain some semblance of equilibrium while Picard poured tea for himself and Deanna; the moment he put the teapot back on the tray, he had to get up to refill the glass I'd already drained. "Pace yourself, miss," he chided me as he handed me the refilled glass.

    "Sorry… I mean, thanks," I said, then laughed self-consciously. "Deanna didn't warn me."

    "People need to be warned of me, now?" he joked.

    "I mean, I might have been a little less… dazed."

    "Please, relax," Picard said with a gentle smile. "You're my guest."

    Relax. Easier said than done. "You said Ace—I mean, Admiral Rimmer—mentioned me?"

    "Yes. I hear you had quite the adventure during your first end-of-year exercise."

    "Yeah…" I couldn't help but squirm slightly under his scrutiny. "You heard about that?"

    "I did. There was quite a bit of finger-pointing at the Academy over who approved the mission for a cadet crew."

    It hadn't occurred to me that our little disaster would have fallout. "Really? I had no idea."

    "The missions are supposed to be real, useful scientific endeavors, rather than make-work," Deanna explained between sips of tea, "but they're also supposed to be safe."

    I shrugged. "We got hit by an unknown unknown. If Starfleet had known about the atmosphere-subspace interaction, there wouldn't have been anything useful to do down there."

    "That may be true, but the storm blocked the shuttle's telemetry and cut off contact, which is completely unacceptable. You should never have been in a position where you couldn't call for help."

    "And policies will change," Picard concluded. "So, what did you think of the Academy overall?"

    "Most of it was great," I said. "I would probably look back on it more fondly if I hadn't made the mistake of reading about my experiences from a third-person perspective."

    "I think I know the feeling," he said. "I've had to read half a dozen of my own biographies—they always want a forward or preface—and it's always strange to see someone else's interpretation of your life."

    "That it is," I agreed. "Although, uh, I heard Max tried to give you a recruitment pitch."

    "He did. I turned him down; it didn't sit right with me. I don't think…" he paused, then decided to switch tracks. "I take it he offered you a similar pitch?"

    "Yeah, he did."

    Picard nodded slowly. "I won't tell you not to go," he said, "but I would advise you to think very carefully about what you hope to gain."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Forgive me for assuming, but… I can't help but think that you want a life where you never had to suffer what the Borg have done to you."

    My decision to follow Max hadn't been anything like that… but if I took the 'metaphor' literally, it was exactly like that. I'd gotten the thing I wanted most my very first Jump, when I'd finally been 'Cassandra' the way I wanted to be—and in the context of 'Star Trek Academy', getting your implants removed was the equivalent of transitioning.

    "That's… not quite the case," I said. "I signed up in another world entirely."

    He gave me a curious look. "You arrived back in '63?"

    "No, I arrived in '83." The conversation I'd had with Tess the day before hit me again, and I slumped in my seat. "I made a rather… impulsive choice of how to arrive, as well."

    Picard raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment as I squirmed under his scrutiny.

    "Well," I continued, trying to get back on track, "the reason I asked about that at all is that Max showed me an article about the shuttle-crash incident 'as shown on TV', and as weird as it is to see someone else write about what you've done, it's a lot weirder when they're on the other side of the fourth wall. I keep coming back to the way small details have… what's the opposite of a consequence?"

    "A coincidence?" he suggested. "Or maybe an origin, if you're talking about cause and effect."

    "That's the one. Details have origins—the world is still bound by causality, which means a picture on a shelf needs an entire story to explain why, where, and when it was taken, and so on with everything else that might find its way onto the set. The thing that keeps getting to me is the idea that things that were life-altering for me came from tiny, throw-in-it decisions, or even mistakes. My life could have been entirely different if the timeline didn't need to maintain causality with an error in production."

    "You're saying that what you experienced is someone's fault."

    "I wouldn't have phrased it like that… but maybe I am."

    "Maybe 'fault' isn't the right word," Picard said. "The idea is that events were shaped not by their own logic, but by the logic of another universe."

    I nodded.

    "It's a scary thought. If events are bound to follow a script, how much control do we have over our own lives? Over our decisions?" He paused to take a sip of tea before he continued, "I don't believe that we're following a script—that we're puppets to some other world's plan. Events play out as they do, and by chance, in another universe at another time, a work of fiction just so happens to share those events—and that coincidence is what brings us into contact in the first place."

    "Because in an infinite number of universes, overlaps between one world's fiction and another's history are inevitable," Deanna added.

    "I wasn't even really thinking about the 'free will' thing," I admitted. "I take it as a given that I'm the one making my choices because the alternative isn't useful."

    "Free will is something even men of science must sometimes take as a matter of faith," Picard agreed. "And, yes, the alternative means downplaying or ignoring our ability to choose, and our responsibility for those choices. It's not only 'not useful', it can be downright harmful."

    "Exactly," I agreed. "That said, it's the things that aren't 'choices' that stand out to me—or rather, that chance and happenstance were choices made by someone else in a higher layer of reality." I sighed. "And then there's the symbolism."

    "Such as?"

    "I don't want to take all day with this, so I'll just say I found myself at the center of a morality play and leave it at that."

    "I've suffered through a few of those in my time," he said, amusement clear in his voice. "I don't think it's a sign of some sort of… guiding script. It's easy to draw parallels with the benefit of hindsight. As for 'taking all day', you're my guest; take as much or as little time as you need."

    "Hindsight," I repeated. "You know, it's funny that you warned me against signing up just to have my implants dealt with, because in a way, that's what I did. See, in the 'show' describing that mission, the ex-Borg drones were used as a metaphor for… you know, it just occurred to me that the term has probably changed a dozen times over the last few hundred years. Um, anyway, the former Borg drones was used as a metaphor for transgender people… or whatever the polite term is now. I am—or was—transgender; my first life, I was born with a male body and given a male name, and it took years before I realized that that wasn't right.

    "I don't know what the technology is like now, but back home… well, there were a lot of things that could be done, but none of them were quick or easy. Some of them were painful, and some of them weren't always successful. But by signing on… I can honestly say that the best thing I've gotten from this whole adventure is a body I'm comfortable in, and I got it without any of the uncertainty, effort, or pain."

    Picard took a long sip of tea while he thought. "Well, it's not my place to tell you not to make the most of opportunity," he said, "but I would urge caution."

    "I get it," I said. "There is a sort of… I guess I'd describe it as transhumanism—the idea of improving yourself beyond the limits of what should be possible—and… I'm okay with that. I know how easily it can go wrong, and I won't discard my humanity carelessly, but… I'm not going to cling to something just because that's how it's always been."

    "It's a dangerous road to walk," he warned me. "What happens to a person if you cut away their imperfections? Their flaws?"

    "You get a healthier, happier person?"

    "I'm not talking about illnesses or injuries," he clarified, "of the body or the mind. I'm talking about things like… mistakes, temptations, even vices. 'To err is human.' If you remove the possibility of errors, what is left?"

    "A Mary-Sue," I said matter-of-factly, causing Deanna to spray tea out her nose. Picard took in the scene with raised eyebrows, but declined to question it, while I hid a laugh behind my hand.

    I waited for Deanna to stop coughing and clean up her spilled tea before I continued, thinking out loud. "Less… flippantly, I think I understand what you're getting at. It was only after reading the article that I realized that being given a new body meant that I no longer 'belong' in the group of 'transwomen' as it was defined 'back home'. I'm no longer part of that experience. Emotionally, that realization made me feel like I'd lost something… but logically, I can't really say what that thing would be. Yes, there was a sense of community, I guess… but that community exists because the rest of the world is awful, and those communities can be just as exclusionary and toxic as anywhere else.

    "I don't speak for everyone, but personally, being trans was not a good experience. I'll admit there are reasons to be glad that I had it: it showed me who my real friends were, opened some minds in my family, and gave me perspective I'd been lacking. Maybe the world would be a kinder place if more people had that kind of perspective. That doesn't mean I'd ever choose to live my whole life like that if I was given a choice."

    Picard rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "That may not be the best example," he said. "After all, modern medicine can do nearly the same thing for… what's the term, Deanna?"

    "Formally, 'post-natal gender determination'," Deanna said. "Informally, 'gender self-selection'. There isn't really a 'group identity' the way 'trans' is for you, Cassandra."

    He turned back to me with a sheepish smile. "It's covered in school health classes so kids know they have options—at least it was where I grew up—but I haven't thought of the topic for decades. Regardless, proper medical care and the lack of social stigma means that no one on most Federation planets would have that sort of 'hostile experience'… which may be why there isn't a 'group identity' the way there was for you."

    "Sounds like a real utopia," I mused. "So the sense of loss I felt would be…"

    "The loss of community, as you said," Picard said. "Hardships bring people together, and that's a powerful thing, but that's not a reason to keep them around for their own sake. Everyone should be able to live a full and fulfilling life in a body free of pain, mental or physical. It would be extremely patronizing to tell someone they should be grateful for a condition that prevents them from living the way they want to live."

    I nodded thoughtfully. "Going back a bit in the discussion, I think the issue comes down to the definition of flaws and imperfections," I concluded. "Diversity isn't a flaw, whether its race, species, temperament, taste… but then you get to things like or 'laziness' or 'poor attention span', which were seen as character flaws but are now recognized as symptoms of some mental illnesses. When is 'shyness' a trait, and when is it a symptom of anxiety or trauma? Personally, I'm an introvert who prefers small gatherings to large crowds, but I was also 'shy' due to severe social anxiety, which would be a 'mental illness' deserving of treatment.

    "Going past that, into what it means to be oneself… yes, I'll agree, that's a scary and dangerous place to go, and not one I plan to explore."

    "Perhaps that is for the best," Picard agreed neutrally. When no one continued the conversation, he stood up and excused himself to the kitchen, making use of the natural break to prepare more refreshments—another pot of tea, some pastries, and a cheese plate—which we dug into in silence while I stewed in my thoughts.

    Apotheosis was the word on my mind—'elevation to divine status'. Usually, the word was used in the sense of making someone an object of worship, like old Egyptian Pharaohs… but when the supernatural was involved, it could be very literal. I'd yelled at Max about 'handing out godlike power' because even a single perk could be enough for someone in my home timeline to change the course of history. On the other hand, Federation tech was good enough that it could probably give a 21st-century human godlike power, too. On the third hand, Max had a lot more than 'a single perk'.

    I certainly wasn't anywhere close to 'godlike'… yet. Was that really the inevitable fate of anyone who jumped long enough? And if so… did I mind?

    If I grew slowly, learned to use the power well—I'd already taken a harsh crash course in what not to do—then I wasn't really opposed to the idea. I'd already accepted the transhumanism inherent in the power-ups; this was just a question of how high I would go. It wasn't like I had to go all the way to 'divine status', anyway; I would always have the choice to stop while I was ahead, or even give up abilities I gained. The greatest danger would be to lose what it meant to be me… but that's what friends were for. I could trust them to notice if I started down a bad road.

    Once we'd had our snacks, Picard raised a new subject. "You've mentioned your home a few times. What was your world like?"

    "It was the early 21st century, I guess," I said with a shrug. "A little different from yours on the specifics, since the timeline diverged somewhere in the naughts… or maybe the 1980's… but the broad strokes are the same. I was born about a decade before the turn of the millennium, and joined the 'adventure' around age thirty."

    "The dawn of the information age," Picard said. "Quite the time to be alive."

    I snorted. "Too late to explore the Earth, too early to explore the stars." I didn't bother with the rest of the quote; it was a stupid joke anyway.

    "That's a rather pessimistic way of looking at it," he said, to which I simply shrugged. "You are exploring the stars now, aren't you?"

    "Yeah." The reminder had me grinning. "Yeah, I am. I'm so, so lucky to be here."

    Picard grinned back, amused by my enthusiasm. "If you don't mind the question: is this on 'the other side of the fourth wall' for you?"

    "If you mean, 'Did I see the same media Max did before I joined?', then yes, I did."

    "I see," he said. "When Deanna first asked if she could bring you, I thought you were…" He paused, trying to find a polite way to phrase it.

    "You thought I was 'local'," I said, "not an outsider."

    "I wouldn't put it like that."

    I shrugged again. "It is what it is. I've got an outsiders perspective… and an outsider's knowledge." I looked away self-consciously as I continued, "Having that 'outsider's knowledge' is a bit thorny, sometimes, especially when I meet someone I watched, or read about, or however I learned their story. It can be… intrusive."

    "Well, you don't have to worry about me," Picard said. "I'm sure enough has been written about my life that you're not far off a 'local's' view. It comes with being a public figure."

    "So you're used to having 'fans' visit?"

    "Not 'visit', per se," he said, chuckling softly, "but I've had a long time to get used to people knowing who I am. I do my best to be worthy of being looked up to."

    "Yeah…" I stopped, then remembered what Sarah had said and continued, "'Looked up to' is pretty good way to phrase it. There were a lot of different shows—different crews featured, different ships, sometimes in very different eras—but I always had a huge amount of… of respect and admiration for you, in particular. You were a hero to me as a kid, even if it was in a fictional context."

    How embarrassing; both my eyes had inexplicably caught a speck of dirt at the same time.

    "It's humbling to hear that," Picard said, giving me another smile. "I'm glad that I was able to do that for you even across universes, Miss Rhodes."

    "Rolins," I said. "If you want to use my… my 'real' name. Cassandra Rolins."

    "Well, I'm delighted to meet you, Miss Rolins," he said easily, causing me to pay an undue amount of attention to another pastry in the vain hope of hiding how giddy hearing that made me. "I wonder what I'd find if I searched your name in the old media archives."

    If Star Trek was 'made' in Max's home universe, it probably included their media, too, at least until whenever the first major divergence happened. "Try animated television around 2009," I told him, "and please, don't tell anyone about what you find."

    ———X==X==X———​

    "Did you have fun?" Deanna asked as the shuttlecraft headed back into the sky several hours later.

    "That was amazing. I thought I might have been growing jaded about meeting people, but…" I laughed and shook my head. "It's good to know I haven't. You have no idea how special that was for me."

    "I think I have a fairly good idea, actually," she said. "Max is a bit of a gossip."

    "Oh. Well, thanks for not mentioning that in front of him."

    "I wouldn't embarrass you like that," she lied.

    "Sure." I realized my eyes were wet again, and wiped the corners as surreptitiously as I could. "Hah. I'm glad I kept it together as well as I did. I can't thank you enough for setting this up. Today was awesome. The only thing that could have made it better would be one of his famous off-the-cuff speeches."

    Deanna chuckled. "Perhaps that's for the best. They're often closer to rants; Jean-Luc only really gets going when something gets him good and mad."

    "I guess he's generally lecturing someone when he goes off, isn't he?"

    "Just so. He really gave Max a piece of his mind, you know."

    That surprised me. "For what?"

    "For the invitation."

    "Oh." I frowned slightly. "Does he know you went along?"

    "He does; he gave me a similar warning at the time. He may not agree, but he respects my decision."

    "I see."

    When I didn't say more, Deanna looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "What?" I asked.

    "Are you going to ask?"

    "About the warning?"

    "About what I wanted from the 'chain," she said patiently.

    "Oh. If you want to share…"

    Deanna crossed her arms in mock annoyance. "Well, with that attitude, I'm not going to."

    I snorted and rolled my eyes.

    Beyond the windscreen, the sky finished fading from blue to black. I checked the estimated time left before we reached ESD, then asked, "Did you know I've been misspelling your name in my head for fifteen years?"

    "I did, actually."

    "Tch. Psychics," I said with feigned scorn, which had Deanna rolling her eyes at me. Turnabout was fair play. "Say, if it's not still a secret, where did everyone else go?"

    "Dragon and Tess are visiting Data, and Ace took Dinah to bother Spock."

    Her word choice had me chuckling. "Spock doesn't like visitors?"

    "He tolerates them well enough, and he owes Ace a favor, so I'm sure he'll put up with it admirably."

    "I hope Dinah doesn't take it personally." Assuming her excitement—or whatever her Vulcan experience was—left any room for self-consciousness in the first place. "What about everyone else?"

    "You three all had someone meaningful to meet. Most of the others don't," Deanna said. "For example, Hoss just wants this jump to be over. He declined his commission; knowing him, he'll probably spend the rest of the jump bar crawling around San Francisco with the Klingon ambassadorial staff."

    "Why?"

    "Because Starfleet doesn't meet his standards of a 'real navy'."

    That didn't surprise me. "Too peaceful?" I guessed.

    "More like 'too few opportunities to skim inventory for a quick buck.'"

    ———X==X==X———​

    After a little under a week spent boarded on ESD—in the Starfleet section, this time—I got my posting to the USS Voyager under Captain Harry Kim.

    It wasn't that Voyager—Starfleet R&D had stripped Janeway's girl down to the rivets in an attempt to figure out what the hell her crew had done to her during their journey through the Delta Quadrant. The moment the 'Research' finished, the 'Design' part of R&D had promptly shoved the various scientific advances—gleaned from mismatched technology samples from dozens of previously uncontacted species—into the newly-developed Voyager-class long range exploration cruiser. Among its myriad advancements, the Voyager-class was the first Starfleet vessel designed with transwarp capability in mind—which, as it turned out, was the reason I'd been chosen for this position.

    Captain Kim was waiting to meet the nearly five-dozen people boarding the Voyager following her shakedown cruise, and after a welcoming speech I was too excited and nervous to properly absorb, he called me aside while everyone else found their cabins. "Glad to have you here, Ensign," he said, shaking my hand. "Professor Hansen spoke highly of you."

    "Thank you, sir. That's very kind of her."

    "I read your paper, you know. 'Transwarp-Oriented Starship Design Principles'. Quite a title."

    "You read it?" I asked.

    "I did. Couldn't make heads or tails of it, but I read it." He let out a self-deprecating laugh. "I wanted to know why Voyager needed her nacelle pylons replaced."

    They didn't.

    "They did," Kim confirmed, which let me know I'd spoken out loud. "Six meters higher and four deeper than the original configuration. The joys of captaining a prototype vessel." He smiled wistfully for a moment before refocusing on me. "When I heard that a Cadet managed to correct the best minds at R-and-D on nacelle placement, I knew I wanted you on board. Welcome to the Voyager, Ensign Rhodes."

    That was overselling my work a bit; I'd improved the theoretical models, not the design itself. Still, it was cool to know I had contributed in some way to the ship I'd be living on for the next several years.

    "I'm thrilled to be here, Captain," I said earnestly.

    ———X==X==X———​

    When it came down to the question of 'small ship or big ship', I'd gotten the best of both. The Voyager had a crew complement of only one hundred and eighteen, but as the prototype for the next generation of starships, it garnered a lot of career-building attention.

    Of course, that didn't mean I simply skipped right to importance; my first two years of service were very much a 'lower deck' experience. Following our departure from Sol, Captain Kim ordered a transwarp course to the Korrian Thicket, an uncharted region of densely-packed stars near the Galactic Core on the far side of the Beta Quadrant. I'd been brought onto the Voyager for my work on transwarp technology, but there wasn't much for me to actually do in that regard beyond confirm that the equations I'd derived for transwarp energy thresholds as a function of a vessel's quantum drag coefficient were within measurement error. Voyager's transwarp capabilities were also still highly experimental, and thus rarely used. Still, the initial trip was a resounding success; a journey that would have taken four weeks under normal cruising conditions passed in the span of an hour, and was 11.8% more efficient than the previous test thanks to the nacelle repositioning.

    In the interest of giving me something relevant-to-my-major to do, Commander Kelley suggested I try my hand at designing the first transwarp-capable shuttle in my free time, a project I wholeheartedly enjoyed. After fourteen months of on-and-off work, I finally had a design: it was an awkward-looking thing with three different-sized nacelles stacked behind the cabin within a rather Alcubierre-esque ring, but theoretical models suggested it should be able to cross the galaxy in weeks with only a standard shuttle-grade warp core for power.

    I showed the 'finished' prototype to Kelley, who immediately pointed out several errors that would have left the shuttle about as space-ready as a brick. The failsafe systems I'd laboriously included would have prevented any 'disasters', but the shuttle wouldn't have gone anywhere. After fixing those, we sent the design off to Starfleet R&D, who promptly changed the nacelles to a traditional paired configuration because it was easier to up-size the warp core to power a less efficient nacelle configuration than manufacture and service three different nacelles that couldn't share parts. The paired nacelles also decreased the footprint of the shuttle significantly, since they could be laid against the sides of the hull like an old Type-15 rather than trailing out behind it.

    The 'debugged' version was dubbed the Yeager-class, after the first pilot to fly a supersonic aircraft, and the NX-S-2101 Yeager entered formal testing a few months later. It promptly exploded during unmanned testing for reasons that were, to my great relief, not our fault; R&D's changes to the nacelle design required a large, more powerful warp core, and they hadn't souped up the transwarp coils enough to deal with the increased power. The first power-on test blew bits of shuttle a hundred meters down the testing range.

    The failsafe that would have detected the issue and aborted the sequence had been among those removed as 'unnecessary and over-engineered', which I learned when we received a written apology from the engineer in question three days after the accident.

    To add insult to injury, the larger, heavier transwarp coils in the next version greatly altered the transwarp entry profile, and someone hadn't checked their work when calculating the necessary structural integrity field augmentation, resulting in a number that was far, far too low. As such, the thankfully-unmanned test of the transwarp drive had ended when the force of the 'threshold shock'—which I'd had the honor of naming in my paper, since everyone had been perfectly happy referring to it as the 'energy surge from crossing the transwarp threshold' until then—tore the prototype apart in spectacular fashion. The failsafe for that had also been removed, which surprised me more than it should have. This was the R&D agency that apparently saw no problem with making control panels out of impact-sensitive explosives.

    It was at that point that they sent the two-nacelle configuration back to Kelley and I to do properly—with some unexpected help from Captain Kim, who was able to point out a few pitfalls that had befallen the Delta Flyer project, and Professor Hansen, who didn't have time to contribute personally but did forward me a paper on transwarp coils that demonstrated several oddball coil patterns that were nearly as effective as the ring my initial design had used for them.

    The final hull design borrowed a lot from the still-in-development Yellowstone class's rather bullish appearance, with traces of the old Alcubierre ring in the chevron-shaped brackets that connected the nacelles to the hull at two points rather than the traditional one—and in doing so, contained the transwarp coils in a 'mirrored arrowhead' shape I'd gotten from the paper Hansen had shown me. It took four more revisions before the shuttle flew, but it only exploded once—and that was a manufacturing error, thank-you-very-much.

    ———X==X==X———​

    I wasn't only a transwarp engineer, of course, and we ran into more than enough challenges to keep the entire engineering crew busy. Maybe there was something in the water, because everyone around me seemed incapable of using anything but the coolest toys to solve a problem, no matter how bad an idea that was. The most memorable example happened only a week into our surveying assignment, when one of the petty officers in engineering was stumped trying to poke holes for wiring in a thin polymer panel without the heat of the plasma torch warping it. I replicated him a damned power drill and sent him on his way.

    Then again, maybe I wasn't immune to the problem either; when I mentioned the encounter to Alicia during our next correspondence, she asked why I didn't simply replicate a new panel with the necessary holes. The best answer I could give was, "I was asked to poke holes in a panel, not create a panel with holes," which amused her greatly.

    "The lesson," she told me, "is that if someone needs help, ask them what their goal is, not what step they're on."

    I was able to put that theory into practice about three months into my tour of duty, when Commander Kelley, the chief engineer, rounded up the engineering crew and asked us to figure out a way to successfully (and safely) beam matter through twelve meters of kelbonite, a type of mineral that interfered with transporters severely. While everyone else focused on trying to stabilize the signal or compensate for the beam scattering, I proposed a specialized drilling drone. The parallels weren't lost on me.

    Over the course of what I can only describe as a 'six-hour engineering jam session', we designed the drone, attached a pattern enhancer, transmitter, and spool of data cable, and finally loaded the entire thing into a photon torpedo casing and scanned the thing for replication. Result: one transport pattern enhancer—physically wired to a transmitter on the other side of twelve meters of rock—per 'torpedo' fired. I have no idea what needed transporting, but I suspected that—in typical Star Trek fashion—it was the bridge crew.

    Of course, it wouldn't be Star Trek without having to throw random technobabble at bizarre problems. I worked closely with Kelley to 'stabilize our shields against mesophonic radiation' while exploring a nebula—as an aside, the view of a nebula only a few hundred thousand kilometers outside my quarters window was gorgeous—and less than a month later, assisted CPO Velm with the task of modifying a tricorder to 'detect and identify multiphasic spacial disturbances'. I didn't get an explanation for those, either; not knowing why any given thing needed doing was probably the most irritating thing about being a lowly ensign, though I'm sure the crewmen had it worse.

    On the other hand, sometimes the problems were obvious. The weirdest incident happened slightly more than a year after I came aboard, when Voyager spent two days in a time loop… almost twenty times. After the first dozen loops, the captain came down to engineering and told us he needed a way to "modulate a subspace signal from our deflector dish to penetrate the interference of a type-4 quantum singularity." Working in a temporal anomaly that removed everything but your memory of the last thirty-nine hours meant a lot of time wasted getting back to where you left off the previous reset; it took us five loops to design the modifications and another two to refine the plans into something that could be replicated and installed within a single loop, but we got it done. I never did learn how or why that solved it.

    I did learn that temporal anomalies were a common enough problem to have official Starfleet policies dedicated to them: in this case, the time we spent looping would count for our official length-of-service metrics. In other words, I now had more than a month's seniority on everyone I graduated with, and they had another excuse to salute me, which they used mercilessly. Joy.

    The upside of the incident was that it let me flex my hacking muscles with an old friend: the humble replicator. We'd needed every bit of production capacity possible to get the modifications done in a single loop, so I hacked the various 'civilian' replicators to produce electronic components in blatant disregard for their actual capabilities. Lieutenant Juvack had, with typical Vulcan stubbornness, insisted such modifications were impossible… right up until I fabricated a tricorder in the mess hall's beverage dispenser.

    It still came in a glass.

    ———X==X==X———​
     
  • Threadmarks
    • AN: I sort of shot myself in the foot with the Wiki Article last week. Everyone was so busy talking about it that no one bothered speculating on the 'surprise'!

    Picard is hard to write.

    I know a few people called the Diane=Deanna thing, but here it is, finally confirmed.

    Only one more chapter left before we leave Trek!
     
    Very fun. Never let anyone tell you that rushing ahead can't be fun or useful in multicrossver stories. I'm digging that this is one of the few multicrossovers that go into a jump with a clearly defined plan for each chapter and can seamless apply warp speed to the narrative when appropriate after that is done.
     
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    So, I read the last three chapters in a row after not stopping by for a while and didn't really have time to speculate on what the surprise was. That said, I guessed it as soon she mentioned Europe, and it was exactly as awesome as I had hoped. It wasn't super long, but they had a really interesting discussion which felt very much fitting for Picard. It's a shame he didn't come along, but I'd absolutely balk at it myself, just because I can't imagine it's easy to write authentic Picard all day long. I can understand why he'd prefer to stay in the vineyard too.

    This has been a really nice jump overall. I'm consistently impressed by the overall narrative arc of this story, and I'm especially amazed at how well it's held up the transition from the first major setting it stopped in. I'm actually really interested to follow Cassandra's continuing adventures in whatever comes next.
     
    Chapter 61: "...Must End"
  • Threadmarks
    • AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, Mizu, and Misty Raven-chan.

    Chapter 61: "...Must End"​

    "What's your poison, Lieutenant?" Crewman Venters asked from behind the bar.

    "Guava juice," I replied.

    "You got it." And indeed, three seconds later I had a bright pink drink that blended right in with the synthehol cocktails.

    Between the career advantages affording by being on the Voyager at all, demonstrations of personal competence in both my primary duties and extracurricular shuttle design, and the extra month and a half spent reliving Tuesday, it wasn't that surprising that I'd made Junior Lieutenant only two (Earth-measured) years after graduation. All fifty-one members of the 'command shift' were gathered in Voyager's main mess hall to celebrate my promotion, which was a little much for a junior lieutenant, in my opinion—but it wasn't my call, so I bore my party with as much grace as I could muster. I barely got a chance to enjoy my drink while I moved from person to person, shaking hands and accepting congratulations. Then Captain Kim struck a glass with a fork, and it was time for speeches.

    The lessons in 'taking praise' I'd gotten as Kasey hadn't stuck as well as I'd have hoped—maybe because they were always talking about my alter-ego rather than me—so I felt a little awkward standing around while Kim praised my work on transwarp theory and mentioned the ship's nacelle pylons again. Kelley commended me for my work in engineering and on the shuttle project, as well as cracking a joke that he was confident I'd gotten the food replicators 'mostly back to normal' after the time-loop episode. Then it was my turn.

    I took a deep breath and stood up. "I'm honored by the promotion—and the party," I added, to polite laughter, "but I still have a long way to go. Since I know I may not get a chance to speak with everyone individually, I want to use my moment in the spotlight to thank everyone for their support. Everything I've done has been with your help; none of my achievements would have been possible had I not been placed with such a great crew."

    That went over well, of course, and everyone toasted themselves cordially. Kim pinned the new pip to my collar and shook my hand. "Congratulations, Junior Lieutenant Rhodes."

    "Thank you, Captain," I said.

    "Don't wander off just yet, Lieutenant. I believe Ensign Parker has something for you."

    "Right here, Captain," Parker said, holding up a large polymer box full of tissue paper. He turned to me and proffered it with the words, "On behalf of the engineering team, sir."

    Curious as a cat, I reached into the box and withdrew a heavy model starship posed in flight above a wooden base. Not just any starship—it was the final hull configuration of the Type-21 Yeager-class shuttle I'd helped design. "Because you keep showing us up at every opportunity," I read, baffled by the 'dedication' on the base.

    "What?" Parker asked. "Let me see that!" He dropped the now-empty box and grabbed the model, reading the plaque for himself. "What… who swapped the plate? Commander?"

    "Not me," Kelley said, quickly extracting himself from a bunch of baffled finger-pointing among the engineering staff.

    Lieutenant Juvack cleared his throat. "I believe, Ensign, that this is what humans refer to as a 'joke'," he said, holding up another brass plate.

    ———X==X==X———​

    I set the model shuttle—now bearing the proper 'Type-21 Shuttle NX-S-2108 Yeager, First Successful Transwarp Test, Stardate 66424.5' plate—down on the bar after another round of toasting, socializing, and handshaking while I got a refill of my current sugary vice. Venters must have noticed my waning energy, because he took his time with my drink, giving me a chance to breathe before diving back into the party.

    "She's a nice looking ship," Captain Kim commented from behind me.

    "Couldn't agree more, sir," I said, "but I do have some bias."

    "Well, pretty or not, she's still the first transwarp-capable shuttle in Starfleet."

    "I thought Voyager had a shuttle break the transwarp barrier years ago—thank you, Crewman Venters," I added as I finally got my glass back.

    "I wouldn't call a shuttle 'transwarp-capable' if it can't repeat the trick. As in science, so in engineering: repeatability is key. The pilot didn't feel so great, either." Kim paused, then chuckled to himself. "Ah, man, that reminds me what a mess we left the old girl's computer in."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Voyager's computer core was suffering from pretty bad data corruption by the time we made it back to Earth, and the data recovery routines were… less than perfect. The Cochrane test stood out because for some reason the test flight log was 'reconstructed' with portions from a holonovel adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau."

    I nearly spit out my drink. "It what?"

    "You heard right. A lot of the logs were messed up in one way or another, but that took the cake." Kim laughed again. "The reconstructed version is downright embarrassing to read. Tom comes out of the shuttle as some sort of lizard."

    "Wow." My reaction was appropriate for the story, but I was mostly thinking about the 'episode'; I guess even the Hollywood-logic this 'verse ran on had some limits to what it could explain away. "You said Lieutenant Paris didn't feel so great. What actually happened to him?"

    "Radiation poisoning. The dilithium we were using was more stable, but not stable enough to handle the shock of the 'transonic boom', and it decomposed, uh, energetically. Flooded the whole craft with theta radiation."

    "Was it bad?"

    "Bad enough to land him in sickbay for five days while the Doc cloned him new bone marrow."

    "Yikes. You could have just said yes." I took another, careful drink, then asked, "What's it like to look back on that whole… experience?"

    "I've been asked that a lot, over the years," Kim said. "The best answer I can give is 'it's complicated'. There are things I'm proud of, things I regret, things I loved, things I hated… I try to treat it as an adventure. You know, focus on the positive things: the discoveries, the triumphs, the sense of family. Celebrate that we survived. There were times I wasn't sure any of us would see Earth again."

    "Sounds like it would make a good holonovel," I joked.

    "I'm sure it's already made dozens," he agreed, "but I'm never going to look at them as long as I live."

    Now that was a feeling I knew well. "You have my sympathies, Captain." I raised my glass, but our toast to artistic ignorance was interrupted when Lieutenant Juvack, who had just gotten his own refill, nearly spit his new drink across the bar.

    "Crewman Venters," he demanded, "why is there a tricorder in my drink?"

    Venters and I quickly turned away to hide our laughter, but Captain Kim was obviously made of sterner stuff; he kept a straight face as he said, "Now that you've demonstrated a working knowledge of pranks, Lieutenant, I believe it is time to introduce you to the concept of the 'prank war'…"

    ———X==X==X———​

    As a Jay-El-Tee, I was now officially important enough to participate in the plot… but my promotion coincided with Voyager leaving the Korrian Thicket back into well-charted space, which dramatically decreased the frequency of interesting encounters.

    But, I thought as I set the model shuttle next to the Avoid the Narrative plaque on my desk later that evening, maybe that's for the best.

    ———X==X==X———​

    I'd prepared for another early retirement before Max pointed out that it wasn't necessary. Time didn't pass while we were away, and there was always the possibility that we'd come back later. It was uncannily similar to saving a game and putting it down for a while: no matter how long a break you took, the world would be exactly how you left it when you got back.

    That thought really didn't help the growing sense of unreality I'd come to associate with the end of a jump.

    We were still having a party, of course. Conveniently, Voyager had been due for a stay in dry-dock, so I didn't even need to ask for time off. It was almost too convenient, to the point I suspected someone had pulled strings to make things line up, but I wasn't going to complain. It did mean that I was close enough to Risa that I didn't have to take one of the new production-model Type-21 shuttles to our end-of-jump 'party', which was a little disappointing. If I was lucky, Max would loot one of the things on our way out.

    The party itself wasn't disappointing in the slightest; we had a whole beach to ourselves, with catering, live music, light shows, and fireworks. I ate, drank (non-alcoholic beverages), danced like an idiot, and generally had a great time until my introvert energy reserves ran dry and I stepped out to unwind.

    Homura had been lurking on the outskirts of the party, and nimbly intercepted me as I left. "Hello, Cass," she said, raising a glass in greeting.

    "Hello, Homura," I replied, doing the same with my soda. "How was your vacation?"

    She gave the question far more thought than it deserved. "Restless," she decided. "There isn't anything for me, here."

    "You didn't enjoy the break?"

    "I didn't need a full year off," she said simply.

    "Fair enough."

    The music was still pretty loud where we were, so I nodded my head down the beach, and we started walking, leaving the crowd behind.

    "How was your vacation?" Homura asked.

    "It wasn't much of a vacation by my standards."

    "How's that?"

    "I was in school or working a job for most of it," I said.

    "Ah."

    "Still, it was… good. Great, even; an adventure I can feel good about."

    "Dragon said you weren't happy about your Academy experience."

    "Oh." I spent a moment organizing my thoughts. "The wiki article Max showed me threw me off. I know there are ways to explain everything without deifying some nebulous hypothetical author, but the way things lined up is…" It took me a moment to find the word. "It was all too neat."

    "What do you mean?"

    "I mean it went beyond 'parallels' and into 'direct allegory'. It makes me wonder how much control Management has over the jumps."

    "You think they set you up?" she asked.

    I shrugged. "Maybe."

    We came to a stop, having decided by unspoken agreement we'd wandered far enough away. Homura pulled a beach towel out of hammerspace and laid it down on the sand, and we sat.

    "This jump really made me question… things…" I said as I stared out at the ocean. "Like, 'Why am I still jumping?' I'm already better off than I could ever have been back home."

    "Are you thinking about staying here?" she asked carefully.

    "No, I'm not. I'm thinking about why I'm not staying here, or going home."

    "You still want more adventures," she said as though it were obvious.

    "That's not it. I could stay with Starfleet, work my way up the ranks." I interlaced my fingers behind my head and leaned back to gaze at the stars overhead. Even on private beaches like this, Risa had enough light pollution that it didn't look that much different than home, constellations aside. "Even with hundreds of years of exploration, we've barely scratched the surface of the Milky Way."

    "But you don't want to stay."

    "No, I don't," I agreed. "And it's down to selfishness."

    "You want power?"

    "No. I want… life."

    "Immortality, you mean."

    "…yes." It really was that simple; if I stayed here as a Starfleet officer, I would have a life… and that life would end. "I don't really believe in… anything, really. I don't know if I have a 'soul'—"

    "Of course you do!" Homura interrupted, sharply enough that I sat up and turned to face her in surprise. That was more emotion out of her than I'd heard in… maybe ever.

    "Sorry," she muttered.

    "You don't need to apologize!" I said quickly. "I should apologize. I didn't mean to upset you."

    "I'm fine," she lied. "Don't be ridiculous, Cassandra. Of course you have a soul."

    "Right…" It wasn't hard to see why that had been a bad thing to say. "What I meant was, I don't know if whatever 'soul' I have is going to 'go' anywhere, or just… disappear. Maybe if I died somewhere with a known, measurable afterlife… but I'm getting off topic. The point is, I was raised an atheist, so I'd always assumed I was headed for nonexistence. But now that I'm not depressed, nonexistence sounds like a pretty bad deal."

    "Because you have an alternative," Homura said.

    "Yeah, I guess. I think I'd want to keep living even if I didn't have the option, though."

    She hummed in agreement, and I lay back down to gaze at the stars again, keeping Homura in the corner of my vision. She still seemed ill at ease.

    "This doesn't change my offer, you know," I told her.

    "Even if you haven't gotten agelessness by the time I leave?"

    "I'll make it a priority," I said playfully.

    "You don't need to do that."

    "It's not like I wouldn't take it otherwise."

    She frowned. "We're at Management's mercy on what's available, anyway."

    "Too true," I agreed. "Eager to see where we're going next?"

    The response was slow in coming. "I am… curious," Homura admitted.

    "Caution," I said. "Smart." Kicking my legs out put my feet past the end of the towel, but I didn't really care about getting sandy. "How do you choose your perks? Do you have a wishlist, or do you just judge whatever's in front of you right now without worrying about what's coming?"

    That was apparently not a good question to ask. "I have… priorities," Homura said stiffly. After an awkward moment, she stood up and said goodbye, leaving me to wonder how I'd put my foot in my mouth this time.

    ———X==X==X———​

    Zero found me lounging on the towel only a short while later. "Have fun?" she asked me between sips from a crazy-straw-adorned tropical cocktail.

    "Yeah," I said, "I did. There were some rocky parts, but overall… it was a good ten years."

    "Smooth sailing gets boring," she agreed as she sat down next to me. "It's not an adventure if you don't have anything to do."

    "I'll drink to that." And we did. Her eyes crossed slightly to follow her drink through the straw, to my amusement.

    "How was your vacation?" I asked.

    "Eh, same as last jump. Mostly just lounging around the Warehouse all year."

    "You didn't import?"

    Zero shrugged. "I don't import that often."

    "Even for a vacation?"

    "If I wanted a damn tropical vacation, I could have had a better time at the Palace. Max needed this because he has to import. No vacation, no break."

    "Ah." The Federation wasn't really Zero's 'scene', it seemed. "When do you import, then?"

    "When there's something fun to do or a cool power on offer. Pretty normal reasons, I think." She took another drink. "There are sort of two types of companions. The ones who are always eager to go, like you and your 'big sister', and the ones who coast by and only enter when there's something really interesting available. I'd say the split's about ninety-ten… or vice versa, I guess."

    "So ninety percent of the Warehouse population is just freeloading?"

    "Yuuup," she said happily. "I mean, even Akemi's freeloading in a sense. She doesn't give a fuck about Max or Management; she's just here to leech power for her own use."

    "That's pretty harsh."

    "I mean, it's true, though? Maybe 'leech' is a bit judgmental, but in a general sense, I'm right."

    "Yeah, I guess," I admitted. "I'm not so different, really; I'm just leeching lifespan instead of power."

    "So you're one of the 'living forever sounds awesome' people?"

    "You're not?"

    "Eh. Ask me in two million years."

    I rolled my eyes. "That's not the point. It's… you ever watch The Fountain?"

    "The Aronofsky film?"

    "Probably? I don't pay attention to who's in anything I watch."

    "He's the…" Zero paused, then shrugged. "Nevermind. I'm pretty sure it's what you're thinking of, and yeah, I've seen it."

    "Right. I watched it on my friend Rachel's recommendation, and… don't get me wrong, it's a great film, but there's a moment near the end where the lead character tells someone, 'Death is a disease, and there is a cure,' and the movie treats him as wrong."

    "Does it?"

    "It certainly seemed that way to me," I said. "The way the movie ends made me feel like the guy was supposed to be read as obsessed, you know, chasing a white whale against all logic and reason. The thing is, every death is a loss: a loss of memory, knowledge, perspective…"

    "Some people really ought to die, though," Zero objected.

    Right, forgot who I was talking to. "Yes, fine, maybe you have to send the worst monsters of the multiverse to the gallows, but the inevitability of death isn't doing the average person any favors, much less society as a whole. 'Ask not for whom the bell tolls', you know?

    "Anyway, the term I coined when discussing The Fountain was 'death-apologist'. It—and stories like it—promote an Aesop that death is fine and trying to fight it is fundamentally misguided."

    "Death-apologist," she repeated. "I like it. There's certainly a lot of stories like that; too many assholes in denial about their fear of dying. They want to believe they're okay with death, so they convince themselves that everyone should be okay with death. Not to mention all the Christian influences everywhere."

    "Because godly men should be happy to die and go to heaven," I said.

    "Right, and all that 'Don't immanentize the eschaton' stuff."

    That was gibberish to me. "Don't what the what?"

    "Uh… it means 'don't make Earth heavenly', basically," Zero explained.

    "Why not?"

    "I dunno. God's an asshole who won't share his toys? The phrase basically means 'don't play god', except instead of doing fun shit like transgressing against nature by creating life, you're just feeding the poor and healing the sick… which is something only God should do, apparently. Bastards."

    "Huh," I said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but: why do you know that?"

    "Nah, I get it. 'Why's this bitch a philosopher all of a sudden?'" Zero grinned at her own teasing. "I went on a theology kick shortly after I joined. Not sure why. I mean, Intoners were deified, but that was a fucking lie, so maybe I just wanted to see if everything else was fake too. Instead, I ended up a Buddhist for a century."

    I didn't hesitate. "Bullshit."

    "Damn," she cursed. "Yeah, I was just fucking with you. I wouldn't last ten minutes as a Buddhist." The last of her drink vanished with another slurp, and she set the glass aside. "Besides, Buddhism is more philosophy than religion, anyway."

    "I'm pretty sure Buddhists would disagree."

    "They should let go of their desire to correct me," Zero said smugly. "Are you scared of dying? I mean, you know, outside the whole 'respawn' thing."

    "Uh…" I stumbled slightly at the suddenness of the question. "Yeah, I am," I admitted. "I'm still scared of dying even with the 'respawn thing', but that's mostly because I haven't internalized the whole 'death isn't final' deal… but when I start railing against death and 'death-apologism', what I'm really thinking about is losing people. I think that's why The Fountain resonated with me. The guy isn't trying to live forever; he's trying to save his wife because he loves her."

    I paused as my little rant came to a close, then asked, "Why'd you ask, anyway?"

    "You brought it up," she said.

    "Fair enough. How do you feel about dying? I mean, dying for real, without a respawn."

    Zero shrugged again. "I'm a bit of an odd case. You know my story, or close enough; my mission had to end with my death, one way or another. I wasn't suicidal in the 'I don't want to be alive' sense, but the Intoners needed to die. All of us. You can be damn sure a years-long, continent-spanning murder-suicide bender gave me a pretty fucking warped view of the whole 'life and death' thing.

    "Like… I'm not scared of dying because for a long time, that was the finish line. It would mean I won. I spent so long working towards my own death that when Max Deus Ex Machina'd a better solution out of nowhere, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with myself. It was like… like reaching the edge of a map. I didn't have a path or destination. What the hell was I supposed to do now that my whole reason for living—dying? Whatever—now that that was gone?"

    "Join the 'chain and study theology?" I suggested.

    She snorted. "Apparently. I was a little skeeved out by the idea of signing up for a new kind of resurrective immortality, but I don't want to be lumped in with the 'death-apologists', either." Zero took a deep breath and blew it out in a long, drawn-out sigh. "Man, I swear, all your stories are completely steeped in Christian bullshit."

    "If Christian influence is so strong, why are so many godlike beings total dicks?"

    "Because they're not the God, probably; gotta show those pagan assholes what the competition is like. Or maybe they're just the Old Testament sort of fuckers." She laughed at her own joke. "Speaking of godlike dicks and their various misdeeds, I passed Akemi on the way here. Made it easy to find you."

    Thanks for the reminder, Zee. Homura had shuffled off after I'd been a nice, big idiot and made two faux pas back to back; first the soul thing, then dropping the word 'wishlist' into the conversation—an unfortunate term, to say the least.

    "Were you looking for me?"

    "Maybe…" she said, drawing the word out mischievously.

    I sighed. "Well, go on. Say it."

    "Say what?"

    "Another ten years of celibacy."

    Zero smirked and raised her eyebrows as high as they would go. "I said I wasn't going to pressure you, but since you bring it up: you've gone through college again, and not experimented at all?"

    "The age difference—"

    "—is an excuse," she interrupted. "Everyone's in their twenties by senior year, and you're clearly not mature enough to make dating a twenty-something weird." Ouch… I think? "Are you sure you're not ace?"

    "You were the one who said I wasn't."

    Zero huffed. "Yeah, well, I don't think you are, but you're making me wonder."

    "I don't think I am, either," I agreed, looking back out to sea. "I'm just not sure how to handle it. I don't want casual sex; I want an emotional connection. But the 'chain puts me in a place where I can't–no, where I don't know if I can get that. I don't want to start a relationship when one of us is going to have to make a life-altering change in ten-minus-N years to keep it going, and I'm not really comfortable dating someone else on the 'chain."

    "Why's that?"

    "Because I'm clearly not mature enough to make dating someone who's lived multiple lifetimes not weird," I snarked. "Seriously, though, the idea of dating someone who I know as a fictional character is… I don't know. Icky? It reminds me too much of some fairly… creepy trends."

    "It would be symmetrical, though," she pointed out. "'Sides, the reason waifus are 'icky' is because characters can't say 'no'."

    "Maybe."

    I glanced at Zero again to find her studying me. "Don't wait too long," she warned me.

    "What?"

    Her brow furrowed as she chose her words carefully. "There are some people who change a shit-load after they join, like me, and there are some people who barely change at all, like Jenn, but after three or four jumps, most people stop changing." Zero paused to give me an encouraging smile. "I'm not saying you're going to be trapped as who you are then forever—it's an observation, not a hard rule—but it's pretty damn consistent. You should think carefully about who you want to be when you 'settle in'."

    "I'll think about it," I said, trying to ignore the butterflies in my stomach. That's a hell of a decision to drop on me! "Why? I mean, why does that happen?"

    "I don't know," she said with a shrug. "Maybe after sixty-plus years of life, new experiences just start mattering less."

    I didn't respond, too busy thinking through the implications. As terrifying as change was, the idea of being stuck in personal stasis wasn't any more comfortable. It felt like I'd barely changed over the last twenty years as it was. At this point, I should be closer in age to 'Doctor Rolins' than to who I was when I joined, but I didn't feel it, and the fact that I was repeating my twenties for the third time rather than moving through middle-age could only explain so much.

    Zero was waiting for a response, so I said, "I'll think about it," again.

    "No pressure," she said unhelpfully. "I'm always around if you need help; advice, a wingman, whatever. I'm good for more than just a quick fuck… though that's still an option," she added with a wink.

    I rolled my eyes, she laughed, and we stood up to head back to the party.

    ———X==X==X———​

    "That was a good break," Ace said as we filed back into the Warehouse only a minute or two before the end of the jump would have dumped us back in our rooms.

    "That it was," Max agreed. "I really needed that."

    "We all did," Garrus agreed, surveying the crowd. The park was about as full as it got, doors all around the perimeter opening to various worlds across the Milky Way—plenty of people hadn't bothered to join the party, it turned out. We could have portalled straight to our rooms, but that would mean missing the festive air as everyone came through the park together. Max stopped to enjoy the view until the area was nearly empty, which left us nicely visible near the far end of the park.

    "That was awesome!" Dinah said as she cut across the grass to join us. Like Garrus, she was already back in her default form; Max, Ace, and I were still in our Star Trek alt-forms. "I am so glad I got to come!"

    "No nasty tricks?" I asked.

    "Well, yes, but who cares? Totally worth it!" she gushed. "I could go home right now and consider myself the luckiest girl in the world."

    "You're not going home already, are you?" Max asked as he led the group towards the town.

    "Of course not! I still want to visit Babylon Five, and Star Wars, and Honor Harrington, and Foundation, and Firefly, and maybe Dune. Oh, and Stargate!"

    "I think you missed your shot at Stargate and Honor Harrington," he said. "We did those already."

    "Aww," she whined. "Did you bring anyone from there along?"

    "Yeah, actually–"

    "What's with the suitcase?" Ace interrupted, pointing to a large, incongruous red suitcase sitting by the side of the path, apparently forgotten.

    "I don't know," Max said cautiously.

    The five of us stopped and stared at the suitcase with varying degrees of suspicion and unease.

    "Um, is this something I should be worried about?" Dinah whispered.

    "Probably," I whispered back. It appeared to be a normal suitcase; perhaps too normal, and not the sort of thing we'd leave lying around.

    Only a few seconds later, a rather egg-timer-like DING! sounded and the suitcase spilled open to disgorge a very disheveled Vash. "Damn it," she muttered as she pulled her hair out of her face, "when I asked to be smuggled in, I didn't mean as luggage!" A quick look around let her spot us, and her face lit up in delight. "Oh, fancy seeing you here, M—"

    "Avada Kedavra," Max spat.

    Vash died.

    "What the fuck!?" I yelled. "You killed her!"

    "And if I'm lucky, I did it before the jump ended and she got 'recruited'!" He pulled his phone out of hammerspace, flipped it open, and jabbed the 0 button three times. "Is this your doing?" he barked into the speakerphone.

    "No, it is not," Management said, anger leaking into their voice. "Don't worry, I'll deal with this." The suitcase and body vanished.

    "Is she going to be okay?" Dinah asked weakly, as though Max hadn't literally killed her right in front of us.

    He shrugged. "Probably."

    "Probably?"

    "I'm sure Management can bring her back if they want. It's not like they don't adopt everyone else who wanders in here!" Max rubbed a hand down his face, then let out an explosive sigh. "I specifically warned her I'd kill her if she tried something like this," he muttered.

    "She must have thought you were bluffing," Garrus said.

    "So it seems."

    I was still staring at the spot Vash's body had fallen, so I was the last to notice Q's arrival on the path in front of us. He wasn't his usual smiling self; in fact, he looked constipated, and spoke as though the words physically pained him. "I am here…" he said slowly, gritting the apology out through clenched teeth, "…to apologize… for the… inconvenience… I have caused." After a short pause, Q glanced up at the ceiling and asked, "That's good enough, right? I can go?"

    "Get out," Management snarled.

    Q nodded once, walked over to the nearest door, and quickly slipped through.

    He'd actually walked to the door and opened it with his hand, and that wasn't all. "Was he limping?" Dinah asked.

    "He was definitely limping," Ace agreed.

    "What the fuck just happened," I said, too nonplussed to make it a question.

    "I believe Q just found out the hard way that I am a guest, not the host," Max said. "Goddamn it. I warned her. I told her what would happen if she tried to sneak on board!"

    "Well, at least you won't have to deal with her for a good, long time," Garrus told him, patting him on the shoulder consolingly. The three men walked off, leaving me (and Dinah) standing next to the roughly Vash-shaped patch of trodden grass.

    "He fucking killed her," I said to no one.

    ———X==X==X———​
     
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    • AN: Fin. The chapter title is, of course, a riff on The Next Generation's series finale, which was titled "All Good Things..."

    Given that I don't seem to have attracted all that many Star Trek fans, my favorite joke from Cass's promotion party will likely go unnoticed. Ah well, I think it's funny.

    There will be another week-long break, though I'll hopefully have something to show off next Saturday that isn't a new chapter. (No, it's not another wiki article. Sorry.) Then we're into another two-chapter intermission before our second main-line Jump.
     
    ... Now that's a hell of a emotional whiplash.
    I wonder if this is going to start the arc where Cass starts noticing that the Jumpers aren't all sunshine and rainbows.
     
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    Tempestuous said:
    "Anyway, the term I coined when discussing The Fountain was 'death-apologist'. It—and stories like it—promote an Aesop that death is fine and trying to fight it is fundamentally misguided."

    "Death-apologist," she repeated. "I like it. There's certainly a lot of stories like that; too many assholes in denial about their fear of dying. They want to believe they're okay with death, so they convince themselves that everyone should be okay with death. Not to mention all the Christian influences everywhere."
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    There's a well-watched CGP Grey video that's appropriate here...



    Tempestuous said:
    "He fucking killed her," I said to no one.
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    For reminder's sake:
    Tempestuous said:
    "I don't," he said firmly. "I've got some real questionable characters, but even Maeve is predictable, to a point. I won't take someone I can't trust. The phrase 'chronic backstabbing disorder' is a pretty good start to understanding her, and not even a spot on the 'chain would keep her loyal."

    "She's that bad?"

    He shrugged. "I'm a stepping stone to her at best. Management has 'peers' of some sort, and the last thing I want to do is give her a chance to 'shop around'. I'd never sleep soundly again. Not that I had a great time with her hounding me; she caused me no end of headaches and made Sisko start asking questions about why one of his crew was acting weird, and it looks like she's going to pick up right where she left off."
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    While it does contrast with Cass's apparent character development towards having a jump motivation as well as probably butting into mostly enlightened Earth morals, it bears repeating that there are many people to whom the door to unlimited power should not be opened.
     
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    That's pretty obvious from the countless 'will to power' or even worse 'harry takes control' stories around (-|~)

    I'm guessing the story is either going to finish soon or Cassandra is going to attempt to separate from Max somehow (trying to start her own chain with a faustian agreement with management - prob wouldn't work considering past behaviour - or Q, just not talking to him, confronting and resisting the many charisma perks etc).

    I'd say it depends on if our author feels there is more mileage in the concept of jumpchain now that Cassandra knows what she wants (immortality), knows what her morals are and what commitments she already made (Homura) and if no major need for more power occurs to give her drive (like Homura). The conversation with Zero about jumper ossification seemed especially relevant here.

    And what makes for more interesting drama ofc.
     
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