USS Malinche NCC-38997-A

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<< Mission 24: NanoProbes Killed Outpost Beta 12 >>

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<< USS Malinche, Saoirse Quinn's Quarters, Day 12, 0544 Hours >>

Elle stood in silence. She stared at her electric keyboard in the corner. She hadn't played since her second night on duty. Then she looked at her bed, which she'd already made, in perfectionist fashion. Hospital Corners, the term was. Everything was in order. Well ahead of time. She'd awoken with a start, ahead of her alarm. Again. Elle cleared her throat, and closed her eyes.

"Resume: Saoirse Quinn, personal log... supplemental. Computer, how long until we reach Outpost Beta 12?"

Suddenly the alarm rang on her chronometer. Still standing, Elle opened her eyes and sighed.

"Never mind. Okay, we have a little over eight hours until we arrive at the Outpost. Shift won't start for another hour or so. So, okay, I know what you're thinking, Computer. Why would I do this? Why, dictate a personal log? Someone that has enough trouble with words, taking time to put words to databank, right? And it's not like I fancy myself a Captain or anything, narrating my adventures, as they happen."

[Negative. No active inquiry into current status of Ensign Quinn was made.]

Elle sighed, "Sorry, thinking loud. Reminder to self: deactivate computer interface's increased responsiveness prompt. Computer, deactivate increased — never mind. Later, later."

"Okay. Dear Reader, like they used to write. Dear Hypothetical Reader. Why would I start this? Have started this. Keep it up, like I'm doing now. Just to mark the occasion? We're approaching contested space. I have a new lease on life. Sort of. That's also what they used to say. New lease on career anyway. For me, I mean. Not that that's what they used to say at all."

"In any case, that's not why. So, like I was saying. I mean, thinking. To be honest, I wish I could just put it out there, like I see it in my head, you know? Not in words, but in... nebulous concepts. Vague visuals. Music maybe, but not in notation or a score, more like knowing only the outline of a song — or or how improvisation will go, ahead of time."

"Yikes, okay. Stay on target — stay on target." Elle said to herself, quoting a classic film she and Cade had bonded over.

"Computer, in one week's time, if he ever shows his face again that is, please remind me to convince Cade — I mean, Mr. Kinkaid to watch some late-20th-century Earth cinema with me. Okay?"

[Affirmative. Reminder set.]

"Thank you. So... the people on Outpost Beta 12 are gone. No one knows why yet. I want to find them. For just... human reasons, of course. In Human history, there were the disappeared. And the 'desaparecidos' — and people disappeared not only literally, but figuratively too of course."

Elle allowed her mind to flit briefly to her father.... "Pa was long gone, even before he died. In any case, I hope we prevent further tragedy — though hopefully this won't necessarily have been that. And that this mission won't be for naught. And it's not that it's always tragic. Or that people are never found. It's not that it never works out. Really maybe I'm just being selfish now. I probably am."

"Am I afraid of disappearing without people knowing why. Yikes, not at all, I think. Going without having made my mark? Maybe? Is that just Pa and Ma talking? Don't disappoint, Saoirse Eleanor. Haha. Computer, they never said that. Not in so many words anyway...."

"Anyway. I can't believe people used to live only seventy some-odd years. I hope to make it to one eleven at least. Is it that I can't have wasted my time then... their time? My time here. I don't think I have — I mean, I know I haven't and that I won't. But I want... I don't know. Do I want people to know? Not people per se, and not quote-unquote 'history' either. It's not for posterity, not per se. That sounds haughty. I just... want to know, whatever it is. I guess that's it what it really is. I don't want to disappear, but I wouldn't mind that in and of itself, though please no tragic circumstances, haha. I want to know things... know it, whatever it is or may be. And I want people to know I went looking. And that I always went looking. For answers... or new questions."

"End entry to personal log."

Elle shook her head and laughed to herself, "Wow, Elle, what the Hell are you talking about? Talk about cliché, yikes."

Then Elle remembered Nabokov, once (and perhaps still) one of her favorite authors, and how he'd poetically put it. And she realized how she should've started things, how she had wanted to start this log, what it meant and what it would mean from now on:

"Speak, Memory."


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OFF: This is a BackPost. Although not in a "Personal Log" format, this post felt most appropriate here.

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<< Malinche Crew Lounge | Day 11 | 21:22 hours >>

Elle eyed the vacant table directly to her right, right in front of the makeshift stage. She stared at the sign she'd written in obsessively-neat block print. She found the idea both clever and cute: a hand-written note that read "Reserved", on a bit of folded cardboard. And so, as with most things that stirred something genuine in her, Elle dove in immediately, despite the worry it might cause her... despite the worry this particular prop was already causing her.

The first few days aboard the Malinche had been stressful to say the least, "emotionally harrowing" would have been hyperbole, but perhaps not from Elle's perspective. Yet during the long days spent in warp to Outpost Beta 12, she'd finally found time to acclimate herself and... "to nest", her mother would have said.

Elle had even managed to sweet talk Kiaran Tyvial, the lounge manager, into letting her perform a short musical set one evening. It had been surprisingly easy. She’d only needed to improvise a few bars on the spot and that was that. She was promised a half-an-hour slot that very weekend. Elle had expected to do a bit more finagling with the woman, for even in her limited experience, men were far easier to convince.

"Because they only want one thing," Elle's mother had cautioned her, "even in Starfleet. Especially from someone as lovely as my daughter." And this Elle had heard well before she was old enough to really understand what her mother meant by it. And once Elle *was* old enough, as a result of focusing on her studies at the Academy, and the subsequent, sudden death of her father in her senior year, it also wound up being the one thing Ellie never gave. But things were different now... or rather, they could be. She had righted the ship, on her own. And now she had the freedom to make her own way and her own choices. Maybe the time was finally right. For her, for her career. For whatever else she'd already missed out on in her young life. A boyfriend maybe. But that sounded immature — a "partner" perhaps.

She and Cade has shared only a single kiss, but... but he was crazy about her, wasn’t he? And she thought a lot about him. The times they talked were amongst the only times in recent memory where Elle didn't feel as though she were being judged constantly. Cade accepted her for who she was. And they'd felt at ease with one another immediately. Or at least, Elle thought so. And so... where was he?

With a decent-sized crowd already on hand, and the start time of her scheduled performance already a quarter hour past due, Elle could delay no longer. Unlike the collegiate retro venues at which Elle had previously performed on Earth, a simple show at a starship lounge would not be delayed on account of "hipster affectation." Elle stood and was announced to polite applause. She walked up to her keyboard, and to the microphone. She couldn’t wait any longer.

“I’m Elle Quinn. Thank you. I’m from a city on Earth that fancies itself both pretentiously intellectual and humbly working-class. Sometimes it’s actually both, but most of the time, it’s only just stuck-up in both ways. Off-duty, I’m a sometime musician. Um, just how musical that some of the time is, we’ll soon see, right? Hopefully it’s enough, haha."

Elle looked to the empty table to her right. Then at the door to the lounge. She had hoped that he would have been here to hear the song she'd planned on opening with, one with the admittedly corny title of "Possibilities." She hoped he would have been here, period. For a few seconds too long, Elle stared at the untouched, hand-written “Reserved” sign.

“And so, this is a song I just wrote." In that moment, Elle felt neither clever nor cute, just... mistaken. Hurt. Naive.

By an unexpected change of plans. "This is a song called, ‘Leave of Absence.’”


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OFF: This is a Backpost: an in-character flashback-within-a-flashback during:
<<Mission 24 - Nanoprobes Killed Outpost Beta 12 | Day 12 | 1535 Hours >>

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<< Starfleet Academy lecture hall 718 | San Francisco, Earth | July 1st, 2391 >>

Digitalia. Elle had been obsessed with it, for a time. Much to the chagrin of her mother — dismay expressed most often during Elle's (interminable) lessons on mother's baby grand. Eleanor had always urged her daughter to continually reaffirm and reassert lessons learned from a fundamental "analog" background in the musical arts, versus Elle's own haphazard pursuit of — and genuine interest in — the electronic. Binary bit-by-bit composition. Postmodern performance.

Eleanor even admonished Elle on her "purchase" of a faux-vintage Korg keyboard this morning. Elle had acquired the instrument in exchange for playing gigs at dive bars in Somerville, Jamaica Plain, and East Boston. A birthday present... for herself. Of course, "Money" — and commerce, as it was presented in the history books — was long rendered a relic of the past. But Elle felt as though she had "earned" this small token from the barkeeps and proprietors that tolerated the tow-headed girl's awkward stage presence at open-mics, and her reedy voice. And Elle felt all the better because of it. Eleanor did not approve. And for the next few days, her mother would comment wistfully, and pointedly, that young Elle once had her sights set on Eleanor's old upright. Once upon a time.

Despite this tension at home, Elle could not help but laugh, as she reflected upon the terse argument she'd had with mother just this morning before class. It was a debate not unlike those on Earth pop culture had in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, debates Elle had read about many times over — and longed for, really. Nostalgia for a time she never even knew.... If only she could have had them with imagined peers. Or with some disaffected, mysterious spacer or species, on some far off planet, or some starship, or in some space station straddling the neutral zone.

Shaking her head, Elle turned her attention back to her "cultural confrontations and solutions" class, and to the projected holo-schematic of the Borg nanoprobes. The nanoprobe whose image was enlarged onscreen had latched onto a blood cell and make remaking the cell in its own image. Assimilation. The nanoprobe itself appeared somehow... retrograde, however. As much as it behaved like a predator of sorts, it appeared not unlike an old literary trope out of science fiction: a familiar foe made alien by likening it to the mechanical. Here a predatory spider or insect was made alien, dressed in the jagged trappings of an old microchip. Archaic digitalia.

In this case, however, the Borg nanoprobe was neither something for which Elle had an imagined nostalgia, nor any longing. Instead, it gave her chills....


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