Symphony

Posted on 30 Jan 2013 @ 1:14am by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Crewman Athlen

4,814 words; about a 24 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 6, Multi-purpose Labs
Timeline: MD02: 2200

[ON]

"Damn it," Lilou pressed her fingers against her eyes and sighed, sitting back from the table. The shimmering calm that Liyar had induced only hours before had gone completely now and she could physically feel the difference. Muscles tensing, headache simmering, every sound from the corridors making her twitch. As she just had, and soldered the bloody wire to the wrong bloody tap. "Damn it," she said again for good measure and tapped the heated prong against the tap to free the wire.

Setting the solder to the side, she snapped her wrist a couple of times, popping her knuckles, then lowered her goggles again and leaned back in to correct the tiny circuit. There. That should do it.

She could have stayed with Lamar for the night. Maybe she should have. But feeling that perfect fearlessness ebbing away had made her nervous and she hadn't wanted to devolve right in front of him. Not after she'd managed to be normal for once, for him. That memory should keep, under glass, unmarred. So she'd slipped away and used the last edges of calm to go back to work on the little project she'd been working on since she'd spoken with Liyar the day before. Before she'd known she'd actually owe him anything. She'd started it out of curiosity, working on it to clear her head while in the last stretch of the final work on Lieutenant Panne's shuttle. Now, the shuttle was finished and where it belonged and she needed to do something. Four hours of unadulterated peace. Four, out of seventeen thousand, five hundred and thirty nine point seven. She needed to do a great deal more than simply this.

She capped the circuit and ran the connection to the music source. It was quiet music, three harps in concert. Forty minutes ago, she'd found it lovely. Now, the soft gentle sounds were like screaming children in her ears. Strident and common. Still, the light filled and lifted, a projection of wavelengths, colors changing according to the electrical signals. She muted the sound and watched the light play. Not so bad, just to watch.

"Nyegh!" a noise came through the door. Athlen was half-way through the space, as if he couldn't decide whether to enter or to turn tail and leave. "Nyagh!" he repeated again, clapping his hands over his ears.

Lilou jerked bodily at the first sound, then - heart-pounding - pressed her palms against her knees and focused on the fact that it was Athlen. She didn't know him well, but he wasn't intimidating. Didn't seem to be, anyway. He could probably break her in half. Anyone could. Still... she focused on his hands over his ears and tilted her head to the side. She could barely even hear the sound... oh. She touched one of the myriad level knobs on her little hand-built contraption and watched him curiously.

"What is tha -" Then, she turned and changed something - maybe she hadn't heard all his nyahing and nyeghing and whinging, or maybe she just didn't care, but - "Hey, that's better," the Rigelian commented, features relaxing as the shrieking discordant telepathic white noise disintegrated into something far lovelier, more peaceful. "Liyar gave you one of his things?" the sociologist asked curiously, watching the vibrations of light and sound work in concert. He set down a box of old dusty books on the spare metal desk near the door.

"One of his... no." She bit her lip. "He didn't." She'd gone into the lab's recording database and pulled the design from its memory, then started tinkering, redesigning, rebuilding, changing it. She could never leave anything alone. He'd said he hadn't been able to hear non-psionic music fully, she remembered that. The curiosity had turned to compulsion in the last two hours. Granted, she couldn't hear any of it. She wasn't a telepath. But she could feel shifts in herself, similar but less to how it had felt when Liyar had spoken directly into her mind, so she figured it was working somewhat. She hadn't had a means of testing. Her eyes widened slightly as she considered the Rigelian. She couldn't hear it, but he could. Her lips curved into a small, intent moue and she flicked a switch.

"I can leave - if you like. I mean, you - AGH! -" he ground out as the music shifted again, shaking his head like a wet dog trying to get something out of his ear. "That is not a happy noise! Not a happy noise!" he yelped, although to any regularly psi-null person, it wouldn't sound like anything more than a few harps. The passive-empathic Rigelian on the otherhand looked a little ready to fall over.

Lilou flicked the switch off again and made a note as he relaxed again.

The music sounded normal. Even pleasant. Please, please, let it stay pleasant. "Okay," Athlen breathed, blinking, "Ow. This one looks a little different. You are experimenting with psionic - ow - yes, that is better - stuff, too?"

"Now I am." She pointed to a chair. "Sit." She grabbed her PADD and transferred controls to the touchscreen, deftly manipulating waves, then transmitting the new alterations based on her notes to the machine. "Try this."

Athlen sat. "Liyar has created monsters, little tiny monsters, in my br-A-IN," he winced, jerking one side of his face down hard as Peers kept poking and prodding the fereikek-thing. He shook his shaggy-blond head again. "What is this for, exactly?" he asked, twitching as she adjusted another level, but it was a far less pronounced twitch, at least. "Or who? You are, if you do not mind my saying so, not very telepathically inclined. Are you?" It didn't seem like it. The music was phasing in and out. Every few bars it would blend into something harmonious and resonant, until little points fell off or it took a steep turn downhill.

"Not at all," she agreed, making another note. "I can sort of feel when something's being transmitted on an electrical level, but I can't actually hear it." She squinted at the corner of the ceiling for a moment, calculating wavelength versus impulse versus noted response, then input the calculations into the equation on her screen and rolled her fingers through the settings until the variables matched the math. "Lieutenant Liyar mentioned yesterday that he was not able to enjoy non-psionic music because it lacked a psionic component. So." She activated the new algorithm.

"Ah," Athlen nodded in understanding. "Though, if you are attempting to add a measurable psionic component to this music, then that would mean that you have to add it to every song that you need translated, right?" Athlen looked down in his hands and pulled up the database codes for the matching temporal lobe and mesiofrontal cortex algorithms. They were a complicated piece of work, most of which he couldn't understand. "And you are operating off of a Vulcan brain, or Liyar's brain? People from Miran have a slightly elongated secondary ferasa column, that's this one here," he showed the PADD over and then laid it on the table, shrugging. He wasn't sure if she already had that information, but it was in his nature to try and be helpful, even if - OW. "It's kind of like the paracortex in Betazoids," he attempted to explain through the drumming, pounding sensation building behind his eyes. "Instead of the auditory nerve leading right into the karifal lobe, it reroutes through the ferasa. Most Vulcans don't have and/or rely on that, or if they do, it's a genetic quirk. Except for Liyar's people," the sociologist said.

Lilou paused the transmission and set her PADD aside to study his. "I'm not a biologist," she told him, tugging her ear as she studied the data, "or a xenobiologist, but from everything I've been reading, it seems to me that sound is vibration and psionic impressions are electrical impulses. If I can find the right algorithm, it should work on any sound wave, for any brain. The way dimensions can be added through the polarization of images. Not perfect, maybe, but it's a start. Then, once I figure out the base algorithm, I should be able to sort out how to specify the equations to the specific wavelengths of different instruments. Voices would be harder, but the main object is to add a psionic component, not to create a direct translation." She double tapped his screen anyway and forwarded it to herself for further inspection. "Do you usually study the anatomical differences of your acquaintances?"

Athlen grinned. "Only when I want to have a productive conversation with them," he quipped easily. "I'm more or less a go-between for Liyar and the rest of the crew," he explained. "What you're seeing now is the fact that I'm becoming less relevant," he acknowledged. "My job, is to help people who have trouble integrating, as a result of xenocultural differences," he elaborated. "Though at this point, that is less a necessity, and more of a formality, which is a good thing, I suppose," he thought out loud. "In the beginning, that wasn't the case. Plus, I found the whole thing terribly interesting. What you're saying, though, sounds pretty reasonable. Do you usually spend hours in a lab transposing music for yours?"

Lilou tapped the tip of her noise. "Point taken."

Athlen quirked his lip downward a bit as he studied his PADD again. There was a section circled in green, and he tapped it up. Random numbers. They trailed off and turned into repeating Terran translations of the Golden Ratio along with a pattern that looked distinctly like a neuron twisted into a seashell before disappearing out of the notes entirely. "Myelin sheath," he read the Modern Golic characters with a puzzled expression. "Well, it was a myelin sheath, before it turned into a squiggle..." Athlen rolled his eyes. "I'm not anything," he clarified, "So most of this makes zero sense to me. But these are the personal notes he gave me to translate, if you can find some use out of them. They're a little... um... well." He smiled ruefully and held it out.

"Huh," Lilou trapped the tip of her tongue between her lips and ripped the data, sending it to her own PADD, then scurried back to the table to cross-reference and quantify.

"If you can find any use of it, and I'll help however I can. Whatever you've just did definitely shut it down thou--- nevermind!"

She glanced up from her calculations and flipped a switch. "I'm sorry; I had set it to loop." She bit her lip and bent back over her PADD, then double tapped it and sent all her equations to the wall board so she could deal with them more easily and grabbed a stylus. "You're definitely something," she said, as numbers streamed and she set about ordering, re-ordering, and re-assembling her equations to incorporate the new data. "What about people who have trouble integrating for other reasons? Not xeno-cultural?"

Athlen tilted his head in a shrug. "That would depend on the reason," he allowed. "Though most of the time people who have issues with integrating that do not result from cultural differences, do as a result of psychological health issues, which would need to be handled by a counselor," he said. "The line can be tricky. I have dealt with people who walk on it frequently," he admitted, but without any accusation. "But I try and maintain a boundary. That is, I'm not qualified to be a counselor, so I do not try and act in that way, even though it sometimes appears as if I do," Athlen said while she re-ordered and re-did. It was a fuzzy, wishy-washy answer and he knew it, but he was unsure how to accurately describe it.

"Counselors aren't translators," Lilou said with a small quirk of her lips. "And they don't wander around with us explaining why we are the way we are to people who don't understand us. In my limited experience, they seem to basically sit there and make me translate me to them, so that they can think about that. It's not an immediate solution." She glanced back at him, "I guess what I'm saying - and here I go translating myself again - is it's nice. That he has you. I hope he realizes that."

"Yes, I guess that is very accurate," Athlen agreed with a wince as she tweaked and twisted her fingers around the mathematical patterns. "As for Liyar, well, he is a Vulcan," the Rigelian rose his hands palms-up in an easily casual way. "So he will never admit it, but I think that in some way, there is acknowledgment there, yes. I get the impression that you wish that someone could do the same thing for you," Athlen said. "Translate, explain your behavior in ways that make sense to other people." It wasn't a professional question, so much as it was simply part of his nature as a Rigelian to comment honestly on his observations.

"That is, in fact, exactly what I wish. But no one can." She shrugged, frowning at the data. "Any way, I thank you for your effort, for all the rest of us."

Athlen smiled, which then abruptly turned into a jerk. With another adjustment he relaxed and gazed at the colorful streaks of light dancing through the room. "I think you have found something," he said, halfway between interested and slightly disconcerted. There were still adjustments to be made. He knew he wasn't half as psi-sensitive as Liyar or Mialin would be, but at least to his own ears, it sounded closer to something clear.

"Not quite," she murmured, considering the possibilities, then made a minor change in the variables. She couldn't hear it, no, but the math looked far more symmetrical. "Does it- I guess 'sound' isn't the right word..."

"A little, there's some kind of distortion going on," Athlen tried to encapsulate it into words. His friend was always better at that, which was ironic, really, given the circumstances. "Like you have the right set of frequencies but they are out of phase? Not by much, but it's there," he tried as best he could.

Out of phase. She took a few steps back and sank to her heels in the middle of the floor, hugging her knees, and absorbing the board like an owl on a limb looking for mice. For a while, she wasn't sure how long, she just sat there, muttering to herself as she read. The natural phase between sin and cosin... the golden mean he was so fond of... She bit her lip. Two thirds sin times three t minus a half sin four t plus two fifths sin five t... add infinitum, component frequencies... the relative amplitudes didn't matter, so long as the brain had the right... She'd been so concerned with the transmutation of the individual audible waves, but what she needed was a more dynamic approach involving the vibrations of the entire sound. Three dimensions, a realm of sound rather than a single instrumental concern. Broad strokes versus details. "The energy produced by the whole vibration, rather than the original electrical impulse, the effect rather than the cause, resulting from the acoustic pressure times the particle velocity over a surface-" She almost tripped, springing from the floor to scribble on the wall board with her stylus, then swept her hand over the sequences, knocking whole equations out of the series and replacing them with small notes on sound power levels and energy densities. "Details- it's about converting the sound into useable energy, not trying to translate the music. The music is inherent in the wave sequence." She double tapped the board and the light in the room shifted. The holographic representation stopped looking smooth and calm. It was starlight, tiny specks in space, flickering like fireflies, firing off in what seemed like an entirely random way until the pattern began to emerge through repetition, then shifted, emerged, shifted again according to the flow of the song. "Bloody harps," she muttered and grabbed her PADD. The lovely water songs were replaced with the heavy bass and drums of Rigelian punk and the specks in the air quaked as though being shook.

Athlen smiled. That had sort of been what he had tried to communicate at first, not necessarily as intelligently, but it sounded like she was starting to focus on the more gestalt whole. The Rigelian music forced the curious smile into a grin. "Fond of Hirayaed?" he asked mostly amused, and as she made her adjustments, it sounded clear as a bell. At least, to him. "This is good. Whatever you've done, I think this is very close," he offered.

She glanced over her shoulder as she crossed back to the table, "I'm fond of songs that mean something. Even if I have to read the translations. I can hear the intent in the voice and the chord, without knowing the language at all. All that frustration and heart. Who wouldn't be fond of Hirayaed?" She pushed her goggles down, opened the containment unit for her little gadget, and switched two wires to reroute the circuit. "There."

The Rigelian nodded. "Yes, at least for myself, it sounds very accurate." Of course, without the presence of the musicians themselves, for a telepath, any rendition of music produced a degree of sterility. But this, for him, was as close to the experience as he'd remembered from back home.

She glanced back at him, searching his face, although she wasn't sure what she was looking for exactly. It wasn't as though she understood most facial expressions when she saw them, or if she did, she was never sure if they actually meant what she thought they did. Still, she studied him, then ducked her head, "Sorry I hurt your ears. Or..." she frowned thoughtfully, "your brain."

"Both," Athlen smiled. "And don't worry about it. I bet this will be really useful to any crewmember who's psi-native. Or even someone like the Cairn," he postulated with a small glimmer of enthusiasm. He'd studied the Cairn pretty extensively as well, as his colleague had somewhat similar tendencies, which weren't explained even by looking at a culture like the Betazoids. Betazoids didn't usually have trouble with direct interactions, but V'tosh mirisu and the Cairn both exhibited a similar discrepancy in senses that interested him. Even as a Rigelian he knew a little of it, but generally had little trouble, at least to the same extent. "This might even be capable of modification for verbal interactions. Imagine what we could do if we transposed this with the UT?" and now he was thinking more like a sociologist, and realized he was getting a little off-track with a wry smile, sliding off of the stool.

"You mean..." she said slowly, "superimpose psionics over the translator?" She bit her lip in attempt to hide the grin that was forming. "You think that's possible?"

"Well, think about it," Athlen said half to-himself, pulling out his PADD again and running through the various pages stored on it until he came up with the one with the various EFT-II and function scores he'd gotten off of Liyar nearly three weeks ago. "Look at this. The second one is a Betazoid, the third one is a Cairn. The first one is Liyar and this, someone called Harathe, from Ikai'kahr in Miran. Harathe is about seven now, this was taken for a basic schooling test they give over there. The Betazoid one and Harathe match up pretty conclusively. I mean, the empathy scores and you know, recognition tests are off for what you'd expect of a Vulcan but the readings are almost identical when you're looking at the linguistic and auditory perception centers. And then you have Liyar, who is an adult, and with I'm guessing maturity, his evolved to look more like this." He shifted the patterns over and transposed the Cairn diagram onto it. "What I can't determine is why their language either has psionic elements, or verbal elements. It's almost always one or the other, or there's very specific rituals or aspects of a culture devoted to one or the other, like Rigel V. For some reason they've kept the psionic aspect and evolved a verbal aspect. Which must be taught as they get older, otherwise Harathe would look like Liyar completely. Betazoids evolved into a purely verbal language, while the Cairn kept a moderately psionic language with no verbal components... language and music are very different, neurologically. We have linguistic centers and auditory centers separately, we use the temporal lobe and the -" he pointed at another highlighted version of a Terran brain he popped up on the screen. "Anyway, but they're essentially almost the same thing. I mean, we use them in similar ways. Music is an attempt to communicate something, just like a drawing is a representation as well, an interpretation of art -" Athlen shrugged, realizing he was free associating again. "Anyway," he rolled his eyes to himself, "Sorry. Anyway, a telepath, what they basically do is read intent. Like, you mean something, and then they interpret that meaning directly. There's no need, although there usually is regardless, for art or music or expressive talents, because a telepath bypasses the reasons why we as sentient beings feel this is necessary. So I guess that is just a result of curiosity, creativity, adaptability, whatever it is, so we still do it nonetheless. Write poetry, talk to eachother, sing songs, draw pictures, even the Cairn do it. Well, except the poetry." He grinned. "But it's all about communication. So a verbal pattern has two components, a phoneme which is the spoken sound and the inflection, tonality, what turns a word into singing, where that difference actually lies. But if we could determine that with precision, we could potentially create a UT capable of a more full translation for people like the Cairn, who now have voiceboxes, but still struggle with syntax and morphology and the more nuanced levels of verbal language."

Drawing was an interpretation of art? Lilou wondered, looking at him a little sideways. She didn't think about art really... at all. But she was pretty sure that drawing was art, not an interpretation of it. Music made more sense. And, well, anything imagined had a myriad of subjective interpretations, didn't it? That was one of her major problems; a single word in Federation Standard had an infinite number of meanings depending on a person's individual perspective. But what he said about telepathy, about reading the intent. Spirits, if that were possible... how easy life would be. And if they could figure out how to translate from psi-communication to verbal communication... the opposite should be true as well. "We need a... neurologist. Xenobiologist. And I need to take apart a translator."

"I think I can get you in touch with a neurologist," Athlen smiled at the memory of Liyar and Kiskath trying to communicate. "Hopefully you'll be better able to understand him than Liyar was. It's interesting. You and Kiri Cho are both Trills, and Liyar has little trouble talking to you both, but Dr. Kiskath was completely elusive to him. Must be the language. It was like watching two Aldebaran parrots on drugs." The grin morphed into a mischievous smirk. Sometimes, his job had its rewards.

Lilou, who thought almost exclusively in pictures and numbers, had a sudden image of two tipsy parrots - one with her father's face and one with Liyar's - engaging in a Very Proper debate; she laughed despite herself, snorting twice, then slapped a hand over her mouth and ducked her head, pressing her lips together until the giggles subsided. "Anyway," she said, trying to cover up the extraordinarily obvious laughter, "I'm only half."

"Ahh. And Lieutenant Cho grew up on Terra, so I suppose that makes some sense," Athlen held out the PADD. "Feel free to take a look over this if you like, they're a matter of public record so there is no confidentiality break and I've got a spare."

Lilou glanced at him. She'd stolen Liyar's plans from the lab recorder. Athlen thought she was concerned with schematic and mathematical confidentiality? "You haven't spent much time with engineers, have you?" she asked dryly and snagged the PADD.

"Um... no?" Athlen replied with a mixture of hopefulness and ruefulness.

The sociological data was bewildering to her, as were most of the brain scans; she had no point of reference for them except for 'aha, blue dots, red dots, yellow dots'. But the math... oh, the equations were elegant. Ridiculous and complicated and woven together like some kind of complicated tapestry, but elegant. She bit her lip, eyes widening as she opened the screen and tried to follow all the paths; it was a little like juggling with numbers while riding a unicycle across a two by four. Beautifully challenging and... she backed up and made a couple more adjustments to her algorithm based on the additional information.

Ears drawing back, Athlen perked his head up like a dog that had caught something in some kind of sonic whistle unconsciously. He peered over to what she was looking at and remained as bamboozled as ever by the lines and lines and lines of equations and characters. Some of them didn't even look like real characters, just thrown there unconsciously like some kind of bridge. Athlen was no slouch when it came to numbers, he worked in the science department and understood how to operate terminals and data, but compared to Lilou with her hacking and engineering and lights and sound and Liyar - with - whatever it was that he did - Athlen felt like the family goldfish. Which was alright with him, not everyone could have genius level intellect. If he could help out here and there, that was more than satisfactory for him. He relaxed again subliminally as the music evened out even more. "Never really spent a lot of time with mathematicians, either, but hopefully there will be something useful there. I think he transcribed a lot of the stuff I have there, so you might be able to understand some of it. And I'll get in touch with Kiskath and we can reserve a lab or something and play around if you like, I mean, if you're interested in that kind of thing. I've been studying this psionic language element for a while now and I think an engineer at this stage might be really useful." Plus, he liked Lilou, which was a plus. He often felt like he was being dragged along in Liyar's random whirlwindy brain, and Lilou was like yet another front, tugging him along. He didn't always get it, but it could never be boring.

"Yes," she muttered distracted, cross-checking and making yet another adjustment. "Yes, absolutely, please, I would like..." she trailed off, her eyelids actually twitching slightly as the speed with which her eyes were scanning the numbers. Almost a minute later, she picked up where she'd left off, "...to work on that. Psionic language translation. Very much. Yes." She plucked a micro-tool from her belt and twisted an almost microscopic knob in the machine.

"Alright," Athlen said, laying his hand on her shoulder slightly as if to jolt her a little to pay attention. It was rather brief as if he were used to touching people who didn't prefer it, for probably the same reasons. "I should probably go and do sleepy meditatey things," he said rather unprofessionally, "Are you all right in here or do you need any more help?"

She twitched at the sudden hand on her and flattened her hands against the table on either side of her PADD on an exhale. "Sorry?" she blinked a couple times. "Sleep-" Oh. It was late, wasn't it? Her internal clock was thoroughly malfunctioning. "I'm all right." She lifted her eyes to him sheepishly, "Thank you."

"Good luck with the rest of your experiment! I will definitely try and get things set up and contact you with the details later." Athlen gave her another smile and bowed his head forward slightly, giving her a little wave as he headed back out through the door, lifting up the box by the desk on his way out.

[OFF]

ENS Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Crewman Athlen
Sociologist, SSC
USS Galileo

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