Are You There, Doc? It's Me, Nat

Posted on 31 Aug 2013 @ 6:45pm by Ensign Natalie Chevalier & Lieutenant JG Delainey Carlisle
Edited on on 01 Sep 2013 @ 10:10am

2,438 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 3, Counsellor's Office
Timeline: MD01 - 2000 hours

[ON]

Nat was still finishing her meal as she approached the Counsellor's Office on Deck 3. Never one for sitting around wasting time, she tended to eat on the move, grabbing whatever was available - whatever vegetarian option was available, at least - and wolfing it down. Today was no exception, and after all the excitement on the Bridge, she'd allotted only time for a quick skip to the Mess Hall before her next appointment, her psychological evaluation.

Psych evals weren't too scary, in her experience: some officers feared them, perhaps because of the stunning high rate of family related trauma she'd noticed among the Starfleet cadre; others resented them as intrusive or unnecessary. For Nat, though, they were an opportunity to sit down and take stock of where she was. Sometimes they were even helpful? And if not, she'd had enough mandatory counselling after her occasional arrests as a disruptive teenage environmental activist to know how to bullshit her way through them.

She activated the door chime and stepped through, scooping the last of her yogurt from the pot - non-biodegradable, she noted with displeasure - and licking the spoon. "Lt. Carlisle? I'm Ensign Natalie Chevalier, Planetary Sciences, I have an appointment for 2000 hours."

Delainey came around her desk and smiled, offering her hand. "Hello. Pleased to meet you. You can call me Delainey if you like. May I call you, Natalie?"

"Of course!" She shook Delainey's hand, smiling warmly, as she made her way to sit down, glad that they'd dispensed with formalities so quickly: it was hard to feel comfortable on an evaluation with someone who insisted on pulling rank. "Although, I actually generally go by 'Nat'. But either is fine with me, Delainey."

"Nat it is then," Carlisle returned with another smile. "Before we get started, would you like anything from the replicator?"

"No, thank you. I actually just came here straight from the Mess Hall," Nat said, partly by way of explaining the yogurt pot in her other hand. She put it into the refuse recycle chute below the replicator, and then sat down on the couch, smoothing out her uniform just a little.

"I'm sure it's much easier to focus on a full stomach," Carlisle replied, sitting down. "I tell everyone I like these initial meetings to be pretty low-key. I just want to make sure you're settling in ok and give you a name and a face to come to if you ever feel you need it."

"Thank you, I appreciate that. I think I'm settling in alright so far, although it's always a bit overwhelming moving ships. I've met a few people, and I know there are a couple of other new faces in Sciences, so I shouldn't be totally alone."

Delainey nodded and smiled. "Alone is definitely not a word I would associate for anyone in science, but I know there can be more to it than sheer numbers. How comfortable are you socially in new situations?"

Nat cocked her head. She had her quirks, to be sure, but she didn't consider herself a social outcast by any stretch. "Pretty good, usually. I mean, I got kicked off my last assignment, but I think that had more to do with my recommendations on the ecological impact study than any judgement on my social skills." She flashed a wicked grin.

"I grew up in a hotel. Lots of people come and go: it's not an environment with a lot of room to be shy or anything like that," she continued. "And I actually requested a shipboard placement so I might have a bit more interpersonal contact. Some planetary scientists end up wasting their lives alone in some sad little research lab: not for me."

Knowing what she knew of the girl's record, Delainey knew she was offering a kernel of truth while skirting some concerns related to her history. Carlisle understood why she would do this, but it didn't alleviate any of her concerns. "I respect anyone who knows who they are and what they want. Your record certainly confirms you're not afraid to speak your mind and follow your convictions."

"I'm a scientist," Nat agreed quietly. "It's my job to speak my mind. And if people don't always like what well I'm saying - well, it's up to me to keep pushing until they listen." She broke out into a grin. "But don't worry, I'm not here to cause trouble. Not too much trouble, anyway."

Delainey smiled. "That's what fascinates me and makes me curious. Your record suggests you're not one to take no for answer or to accept any opinion but your own, and yet you've chosen to enter Starfleet, where you'll be expected to follow orders, whether you agree with them or not. How do you suppose you'll handle that?"

Nat considered this. "I've followed orders before. Just because I'm an environmentalist, doesn't mean I'm an anarchist or anything: I recognise the need for structure in an organization." She adjusted herself on the couch. "I think it's probably the same for everyone, isn't it? Starfleet has whole volumes of rules and stuff about what to do when you disagree with an order. My reasons for doing so aren't as important as the fact that I'd still try to act professionally."

She shrugged, and added with a smile, "And if I really don't like the orders, then, I guess I'll just have to go cool off in the arboretum afterwards."

Delainey smiled at that and appreciated Nat was thinking of how she was going to cope. It was a sign of healthy insight and judgement, though Carlisle was still feeling the other woman out. "Will you tell me a bit more about how you've dealt with that situation before? Perhaps an incident in which you vehemently disagreed with an order because it went against your principles, and how you handled it?"

Nat was cagey at first. "Well, I'm not sure about - hmm, let me see - maybe if I just..." But, eventually, she settled on the most obvious example. "When I was posted on Kuthus IV, the environmental impact study we undertook clearly showed that the mining operations were causing the local water sources to become polluted. It was having effects on wildlife, the broader ecosystem, even the colonists."

As she became more animated, her hand movements became more extravagant, a rhythm track to the melody of her words. "I wanted to submit the report, but my Starfleet Science supervisor thought it would be too politically controversial, and wanted to sit on it. He ordered me to bury the report."

She bit her lip. "Of course, that's not a perfect example. Because I, um, actually did submit the report. And then the entire Federation advisory team got kicked off the planet. And, uh, it was pretty much a huge diplomatic disorder." She chewed on her lip thoughtfully. "But, maybe it was a...learning experience? Like, next time I'll know what to not do?"

"You strike me as too smart a person not to have known what the fall-out was going to be," Delainey offered candidly, making it obvious she was not buying the suggested upside. "Don't misunderstand me, I admire your conviction, but don't you think if you're going to do something like that, the very least you could do is not pretend it wasn't deliberate?"

This was turning into more of a confrontation than Nat had anticipated; normally counsellors just booked her through after a couple of minutes of inane questioning and a relieved nod that at least they wouldn't have to add to their holoaddiction file today. "Ok..."" she began. "So, it was deliberate. But it was the right thing to do. Isn't that something, at least? I think history shows that it's a bigger problem when people blindly follow orders, than for a few people to exercise a little free thought at times," she challenged, trying to stop her tone becoming adversarial, but increasingly ill at ease with this whole process.

"Do you suppose there's a happy medium between blindly following orders and exercising the degree of free thought that gets you in more trouble than what you were in before you started?" Delainey's tone wasn't confrontational or even mildly disapproving. She was genuinely curious and mildly concerned. Nat didn't deny she was more than willing to defy orders if they clashed with what she felt was right, and though she was quick to assure Carlisle she could handle following orders she didn't agree with, she had yet to provide an instance in which she'd done so.

"I'm not concerned about how much 'trouble' I get into." Nat scowled. "Trouble is something of an occupational hazard for an environmental protestor. I will do my best to avoid making trouble for other people, yes. Even if that means swallowing an objection or just toning down my rhetoric. But I'd like to think I would never hold back from expressing my full thoughts just because I was concerned about a disciplinary mark on my record, not making Lieutenant, even a brief trip to the Brig."

Natalie's response was troubling to Delainey. A person who didn't have some instinct for self-preservation, even just for her career, was more likely to think she had nothing to lose in making decisions. "Knowing when to express your thoughts and when to keep them to yourself can be the difference between life and death, and peace and war in Starfleet. I'm less concerned about whether you can withstand any individual consequences you may face, and more concerned with whether you're able to think through situations and consider, to the degree you have access to information, how your actions may affect the big picture. You're not always going to have all the pieces of the puzzle the Captain or XO does, for example. What you may think is simply sticking to your principles could result in the next diplomatic nightmare. Can you describe a time when you were able to swallow an objection and tone down your rhetoric?"

Nat slumped. What she'd hoped would be a perfectly routine evaluation was turning into a humiliating lecture, the Counsellor treating her as though she were some errant schoolgirl. And the questions kept rolling on, more and more intrusive prying into her history. "I don't know," she said wearily, sighing heavily. "I suppose, on Regulus III. I was at their Science Academy as an exchange student. We had a lot of project work to get done in the lab, and there was a time limit on our data collection for our research to get published."

She shifted forward. "I was concerned. That our data tables were excluding too many unfavourable outcomes, that we weren't sticking to the design parameters carefully enough, that our chi-squared, ugh, well, the technical details don't matter. But basically: that - that we were cutting corners. In order to get published on time. But in the end...yeah, I swallowed my objection. And the research was published."

"What led you to make the decision to keep quiet?"

Nat considered that. It was a decision she hadn't thought about for some time: ever since leaving Regulus, she'd put the academic track behind her and concentrated more on the fieldwork path. Or maybe it was just trying to put aside that her motives had been less altruistic and ethically minded than she might now like to admit.

"I was very young, by far the most junior member of the team. I'd never been published anywhere serious before, and I'd enjoyed working with them. So I suppose it was a mixture of worrying that I wouldn't really be taken seriously and it would just cause more problems for me - and going along with it because I wanted to get published just as badly as they did."

It was an honest answer and Delainey appreciated it, but it only demonstrated Natalie's capacity for restraint was based on her own interests. Everyone was selfish at one time or another, but it left the jury out on whether the young woman could show restraint when it wasn't in her best interest or her first instinct. "We're all guilty of self-interest at one time or another."

"Yes, I suppose so. Doesn't really make me feel any better about it, though." Nat shrugged: it was easier to feel guilt after the event, the paper safely published and her name down in hard print as a co-author. At the time, she'd had very little compunction about the whole affair: how easy it had been to swallow her objections was what really galled her.

"Is it possible that guilt is the reason you've always spoken your mind ever since?"

"I don't know. Maybe?" Nat shrugged. "You're the counsellor. Does it matter?"

"What do you think?" Delainey asked. She got the impression Nat was holding back.

Nat leaned forward in her chair. "I don't think that 'guilt' over a decision I made a couple of years ago significantly impairs my ability to perform my duties now, no. It's not even as though the research turned out to be flawed: it was simply a question of methodology and research ethics, and it doesn't have any bearing on what I'm doing now."

"Practically speaking, I agree," Delainey acknowledged, "but I also think speaking your mind, damn the consequences, has become a big part of how you define yourself. Remembering a time when you weren't true to that image could lead you to overcompensate for it, and that has the real potential to get in your way if you aren't careful."

Carlisle waited a few beats and added, "I admire your convictions and see no reason not to clear you. I appreciate your candor and hope we can perhaps chat again sometime."

Nat nodded, a little relieved that the interview was finally concluded. "Of course. Feel free to drop by the Arboretum if you want to find me: I'm usually there, and I'm trying to make everyone feel welcome there. Thank you very much, Doctor, you've been very thorough!"

Delainey smiled, stood, and walked with Natalie to the door. She doubted very much Natalie appreciated the session but Carlisle could see she'd given the Ensign food for thought, which was what was expected from a counselor. "I'd love to come by the Arboretum. A counselor can never have too much quiet time. Take care, Natalie."

[OFF]

Lt. Delainey Carlisle, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Chief Counselor/Doctor
USS Galileo

Ensign Natalie Chevalier
Ecologist
USS Galileo

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