I'm Not Trill (Part 2)

Posted on 22 Mar 2013 @ 8:21pm by Lieutenant Kiri Cho & Raifi Zaren

3,586 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo Deck 6 - Multi Purpose Lab, Deck 2 - Messhall
Timeline: MD03: 1100

[Continued]

"It was picked up on long-range scans by the C'hec Nour sensor array and they have been scanning it ever since then, it has actually been producing light for just over twenty seven thousand years already. It is only going to be reaching us in a few days though," Were people really interested in that sort of thing?

"Right," Zaren murmured, nodding, "but what does that mean? A star twenty-seven thousand light years away. I mean - yes, it's thrilling to think about, but what are the implications?"

"When you look at the sky from most planets in the Federation, there will be a new light in the night sky," It didn't really mean anything for anyone being so far away, "But we have a slightly better understanding of star formation now."

"How so?"

"Some of the radiation that is produced when it blows the cloud away, how the star affects gravity as well as knowing a little more about what makes different types of stars form as they interact with anti-matter," Kiri really wasn't expecting this level of inquiry.

"And that helps us here - how?"

"It most likely won't," Kiri wasn't sure why he was asking that given that she had never tried to even remotely give that impression.

Zaren watched her for a full half-beat. "Telepathic?" he inquired.

"Yes, like a Guardian?" Surely he would know far more about it than her, the girl who couldn't even remotely speak their language.

He quirked a brow. "So you know about the Guardians."

"A little bit," She didn't even really know how much she did know, it can't be that much really.

"What do you know?"

"That some are telepathic, they look after the symbionts in caves and carry out rituals for things," That was the extent of her knowledge and it did seem rather small. Making sure to leave out any of the more political things she had heard.

"They carry out rituals for the symbionts. And for us." Zaren smiled, "How do you know about the Guardians and not about the planet?"

"I started to read about them when I found out I might have those skills, I want to develop them."

"For what purpose?"

"So that I could be more useful and develop myself," Kiri wasn't really sure how else to answer that.

"You're fun," he decided aloud. "I like you. Don't know a thing about us, but you're telepathic so you're looking into Guardianship. Well done you. I can put you in touch with some of the Guardian guides if you're interested in pursuing that. You'd need to leave Starfleet, of course, but the intellectual and spiritual rewards of working in the Caves Ma'kala are bewildering."

"I don't want to leave Starfleet," Kiri looked rather bewildered, she'd already had a deep think about this. She didn't do everything she had just to give it up when something else came along. At least on this she thought had made up her mind, "I do want to learn more though."

"That's the tricky part, right there. Not that I care - you know - but I'm young yet. There's elder souls than I who believe that the secrets of the Guardians should belong only to them and those they train. I figure they probably have good reason to think that. Know what I mean? Sanctity of the homeworld must be protected at all costs, right? Well. You will. Actually... no, Terrans have a pretty ingrained sense of preservation about their planet, too, don't they?"

"Planetary preservation and protection of endangered cultures doesn't stop them from being leant about or adapted." Kiri didn't really know it was something she might not be able to do. Biting her lip she asked, "Are there telepaths that are not Guardians?"

"I'd imagine so?" Raifi munched idly from his plate. "The only Trill I've met with telepathic tendencies were Guardians - I guess it's pretty rare, like being capable of hosting a symbiont - but free will exists. It's entirely possible there are those who elect not to. Although... I bet it's pretty rare. I mean, we all rely on the knowledge of the symbionts. Maybe the one universal theme for our people is wanting to be part of the support network for them."

It wasn't universal for her, something else she didn't fit in with. Realising that she hadn't even started her Hulatang soup, taking the spoon she stirred it slightly. Looking rather uncertain she blinked, "I see," This world was more restrictive than she thought. It seemed as if it might be as oppressive as she'd been warned.

"Yap," he nommed away, pleased that she'd said she understood. She didn't really look like she did. But why would she say she did if she didn't? "Hey, so - about this whole ship thing - what's it like being a science officer? I mean, what's the experience like for you?"

"It's my job and what I am," Kiri looked up as she drew up her spoon, the spices tickling her nose.

"Yeah, I mean - what is that, though. What do you do? What's the experience?"

"I assist the department head, I run the Beta shift, I work on any projects that need help. It is different every day," They had already one over this she felt, Kiri didn't know what he was really looking for.

Was it so simple as that? Item, item, item? No reason scampering along her spine, driving her forward through the universe? Just event to event? "Okay. What's the plan for the system investigation? You guys go down to planets, right? And look about with probes and sensors? What are you looking for?"

"Whatever there might be, things that are new, things that aren't. How they came to be there and why, every planet is different. Do you know what they found on Rojar so far?" If he didn't then Kiri felt she shouldn't really tell him.

"Possibly- Trija's been handing us PADDs for the last two days. I haven't read through all of them yet. Want to give me a run-down?"

"I don't think I should," Kiri shifted in her seat and slid the spoon into her mouth. If there was any risk of saying something she shouldn't, better to say nothing at all.

"Why's that?"

"I haven't been told what I am allowed to talk to you about, you need to make a formal request if you want an interview," It was hard to say no but easier with orders to fall back on.

"I'm not interviewing, kid," he grinned. "I'm talking. Do you see me taking notes?"

"Do you need to?" Kiri didn't need to take notes all that often and when she didn't it wasn't on matters as simple as what people said. Compared to the changing dynamics of temporal physics around a blackhole, it was simple.

"If I'm going to quote someone, yeah," he laughed, as though that were the most obvious thing in the world. It was, to him. How could be possibly use mere memories to communicate to his audience? Memories were changeable, transient things. Facts needed to be captured, like insects in amber, preserved exactly as they were for those he shared them with.

Facts didn't change, they were just interpreted differently. Kiri took a breath, "I can't really talk about work," What exactly did that leave her?

"I wasn't-" He sighed, watching her concerned little face. So young and untried. What did she have to be so nervous about? She should have been in the flush of youth, humming on the verge of her own possibilities, recognizing and adoring her own reflection as it was mirrored in the world around her. "I make you uncomfortable," he observed, lifting his brows. "That wasn't my intention. I'll leave you be."

"Oh, no, it's okay!" Kiri was rather shocked at how abrupt this seemed to be. She didn't want him to leave, she had lots of questions about Trill, to learn more. People always seemed to leave her in the middle of meals, it was disconcerting.

"Is it?" He sat back down, accepting her at her word with a shrug and a smile. "You throw a lot of mixed social signals, you know."

"I do? Sorry," Kiri looked confused at that but it made sense. If he was used to how Trill react then she couldn't be very clear. She also didn't have a vast experience of social interaction, she was also weird, "I didn't mean to."

"It's probably because you have mixed feelings about this. I mean, the distrust of the majority of the crew to us network folks is palpable. Makes me wonder who wronged all of you before. But you've got something extra going on. Not sure what." The journalist idly twisted his ring around his little finger, regarding her with a half-smile.

"I've only met one journalist before, I my orders were not to discuss anything relating to the mission without authorisation," Kiri didn't know about everyone else on the ship and that being quiet was safer than giving it all away. Still she didn't really know what the worry was, it was just a survey mission after all.

Now that made a great deal of sense. What on earth was it with this culture of people blindly following the instructions of others? Without questioning, thinking for themselves. He imagined it would be stifling, but though most of them seemed very stressed, they stayed. "Who was the one you've met before?"

"My friends mother," Kiri had only met her a few times, the thing she remembered most was the blue hair, "She mostly worked in the Sol system, but in other places too sometimes."

"Bad experience?" he wondered aloud.

"No, it was fine," Dealing with telepaths wasn't never something Kiri had been keen on but the woman was loud. Well not loud but she had felt she was rather boisterous.

"Trustworthy?"

"I don't know, I assume so," Kiri hadn't treated her friends mother in a way that meant she needed to consider it a matter of trust. She was just someone who Kiri was aware of and had been in the same house as a few times.

"So you've had no negative experiences with journalists. And you've apparently had very little interaction with Trill. What is it about me that makes you uncomfortable?"

That she was uncomfortable with all strangers? Twisting her fingers together, "I, don't, you don't make me more uncomfortable than most people, I just. I don't know what to say."

"About what?"

"About anything that isn't work," It was something that she was she was still struggling to develop, unless she was asking questions. Maybe, "How, do you like the ship?"

"I don't know much about it," Zaren shrugged. "There's not much of it that I'm allowed to see and no one will really talk to me about the mission I'm here to report on, so... the people seem nice enough, nervous, untrusting - which is something new for me, even with Starfleet. I've done a lot of work on Starfleet vessels, met plenty of people who liked or disliked the Network, you know, but never so many that didn't trust me. And since I'm not one for knuckling under and getting used to things, I anticipate it'll be an interesting trip."

"I see," Kiri picked up her spoon again, "What ships have you been on before?"

"I could probably list them for you," he grinned. "But you'd fall asleep. Anyway, the numbers and names aren't the interesting parts of those stories; you can't catalogue life by names and dates. People. That's the interesting part. People and their choices. What's that?" he asked, pointing at her soup.

"Hulatang soup," Kiri stirred it slightly, "It is a meat based soup with seaweed and seasoning." Going into greater detail than that might be confusing, he didn't appear to know a huge amount about Earth. So the concepts of Kelp, Beef and Ginger might be lost on him.

"Smells good," Zaren yawned into the back of his hand and sat back a bit. "Read any good books lately?"

"I haven't read that many books lately," The only one she'd been able to give much time at all to had been a few minutes here and there for the last three days, "I've been reading Ryan Rookroost's Arc in the Kingsbane universe, a series from Earth." Maenad had seemed rather accepting of her reading habits and as an Alien, anything Kiri said to him had the same chance of sounding weird.

"What's that about?" Raifi asked curiously.

"A fantasy history," Kiri wasn't sure how to explain it, did Trill even have any similar history? "Around nine to eight hundred years ago, technology is a lot less advanced then."

"What's the story?"

"It's about a young man who becomes a squire to a knight and becomes pulled into a series of battles and ends up a knight himself," Kiri shifted slightly in her seat, "Then he starts to go on his own quests in the land to try and make the world a better place."

"Sounds like a good story," Raifi grinned. "I'll have to look it up."

"What kind of stories do you like to read," Kiri didn't know anything about Trillish literature either. If it came anything close to how varied Terran works could be, Cardassian novels she found quite dull for example.

"Oh!" he rubbed his hands together. "Let's see. Histories. Biographies. Auto-biographies. Philosophy. Psychology. Hypotheses on alternate realities and alternate histories based on small changes to the chaos theories of social structures. I just finished a treatise on the governing mechanisms behind 21st century Romulus. That was fascinating!"

"So, things based in reality, what happened in the past?" Kiri did read those sorts of things but they were normally for work. They weren't what she read when she had moments she'd devote to her own enjoyment.

"And what might have happened in the past, had single events gone differently," Zaren nodded.

"Has Romulus changed much in the last three hundred years, other than the current fracturing?" Kiri was aware of the current events at least, but how different could it be? Earth had changed quite a bit, but the political structures had shifted between different extremes of the same structure for the most part.

Current... fracturing...? he wondered, looking at her. The planet had been completely destroyed! That was the grossest understatement of the Romulan situation he'd heard to date. He stared at her for a long minute. That. That was why he tried so hard to get people to understand and see what was happening to the Romulans up close and personal. Because they were so disconnected. Detached from the events. Dissociated. Not my problem. He rubbed the back of his neck absently as he thought. "Their political structure..." he began, leashing himself to the question and not the overall scope, "is always in a state of flux. Their military structure is largely invariable, as does their sense of national identity and pride, but the means by which to govern that body have changed radically over time. Largely in reaction to the actions of Vulcan, Rhemus, and their own internal military dichotomy- 'fracturing'?" he asked, giving up on his own noble intentions. "Billions of lives were snuffed out. A planet was destroyed."

"Yes," Kiri nodded, it was just a fact, "It's very sad, but you said your work was on twenty first century structures. I was just trying to find how different that was from my frame of reference." She had spend three years with varying amounts of information about Romulan culture as she learnt their language. Yes their planet was destroyed but it wasn't the first and it almost certainly wouldn't be the last. That didn't change the culture before that and to her it didn't mean they couldn't talk about it. The topic was political science and she had tried to keep the human aspect out of it. Of course it was different after the planet was destroyed, but that was far more complex than an informal discussion could carry in her eyes.

"The book I read. Not my work," Zaren answered, distracted by her nod. Her tone. Her words. 'Very sad' in such a dismissive way. Apathy was a curse run rampant. "You really... don't care about it, do you?"

He was journalist and she had thought, she must have gotten that wrong. The assumption he made though hurt, "I care," Kiri frowned, not liking the insinuation one bit, "There isn't anything we can do right now though is there?" It wasn't the topic was trying to talk about and she didn't really have anything to say on it. To focus on a topic like that was too depressing and she was hardly chipper this week.

"There's always something to be done so long as attention is paid," he said with a little shake of his head. "And even if there weren't a thousand ways to marginally better the situation for the refugees and relocation areas, even from this far..." He looked at the ceiling and took a breath. In ten years, will this still bother me? he asked himself. And the answer was 'yes'. "Even if that weren't the case, and there actually weren't anything you could do about it right now, it would still merit thought and consideration. A year is not such a long time in the scheme of things. It baffles me that people find the subject dull and redundant now, despite the continuing effects of the disaster. That said, my opinions are only that. I don't expect everyone to share them."

"By doing my job as well as I can, helps them in some small way. I have only met a few Romulans and don't know them very well. I don't think I'll ever go there or to New Romulus. If I wanted to help more, I'd be there, wouldn't you?" Kiri found his reasoning rather hypocritical. If it was such a drastic and important matter, one that required help from her. Wouldn't that be a better news story to cover than some new planets? "There is always suffering but focusing on it neglected so much else, "Have you seen the design for the new Concert Hall in the capital?" Her tone a little sour now.

Zaren sighed. New Romulus. Where had she gotten that misguided idea? "There is no 'new Romulus'. There's a series of undersupplied 'relocation camps' that are largely avoided and ignored. And I have been there since they started. My hope was that being on the edge of new worlds, new systems, new information, would give my readers a different perspective on the circumstances of the remains of the Romulan citizenry. A sense of potential to inspire them to do more to better this situation."

"That isn't what the Romulan broadcasts say," Kiri frowned. Her instinct was to believe state media over someone she hadn't met before had to say on a matter. They were going to be bias either way but one she felt was more truthful than the other, the state's bias tended to be easier to predict.

"Which broadcasts are those?" Zaren asked, leaning forward, interested.

"The ones broadcast on the Romulan standard subspace broadcast frequencies that the ship has been picking up since it left Earth," Kiri didn't have much time to pay attention to the media but when she was working and the sensors were filtering out communication interface it was one of the things that was picked up. A small chance to practice Rhonsu while she worked was a slight distraction but could count as training. Thinking back she listed off a few of the headlines, "Record Harvest on De'nar, Resettlement Plans Completed, Fleet Rescues Lost Colony Ship, then City Plans Drawn Up for New Romulus and some images of the designs, I thought the concert hall looked nice." She was rather confused by how much attention he was paying, wasn't this what everyone who wanted to know knew?

Zaren looked more and more perplexed by the minute. He knew for a fact that everything she was saying was untrue. So why would anyone broadcast it? It was easily researched and found false. What was the point? He knew not everyone bothered to double check information sources, but still... for the lies to do any good, they'd need... "Show me."

"Okay?" Standing up Kiri lead him towards one of the mess halls wall panels and cycled few options in the ships cache, "Here they are, the transcripts as well." The segments weren't very long and rather scarce on details. What she was looking for was the words rather than the content though.

Raifi scanned the data. Rihannsu. He wasn't a linguist and - despite having spent the entirety of the last year in constant contact with Romulans - hadn't picked up anything more than a few key phrases. He wasn't a linguist, no. But he had other skills and one of those was prodding at the back of his brain. Something was off. These weren't long enough to be news reports and something about the pattern... He shoved a data rod into the wall panel and downloaded the lot. "Thank you," he said, giving her a glad pat on the back, and ran out of the mess hall.

[OFF]

Lieutenant (JG) Kiri Cho
Assistant Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Raifi Zaren
Journalist, FNN
USS Galileo
(pNPC Lilou Peers)

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