By Lt. (jg) Rada Dengar
80609.2220
After Gains and Losses
--=Main Engineering; USS Serendipity=--
80609.2220
After Gains and Losses
--=Main Engineering; USS Serendipity=--
Rada had found his way to Main Engineering although he wasn’t sure how. Crewman Halliday intercepted him and gave him a report on what had gone on here in his absence. Rada thought he heard mention of a potential core breach but he wasn’t really listening as his mind was on other things.
-=Office of the Chief Engineer, USS Serendipity=-
He found his way to the door of his office which he almost walked into, forgetting that he had locked it before leaving. After an embarrassing pause his mind caught up with his body and he ordered it to open. Looking around the room he noted how in the short time he had been occupying it the office had started to take on a bit of a Rada Dengar feel. He reminded himself that he’d have to do something to fix that in the morning.
Decoration was conspicuously absent and his desk was in just enough disarray that he could still get work done. He sat down at the desk and ordered the computer to make a list of all of the tasks which had accumulated in his absence. He rubbed his eyes hoping that he was seeing double, alas not. He groaned as he began to read. He then groaned again after realising that he’d read the same sentence four times now.
This was no good; his mind was still very much on Stra II. Those children he had seen were so full of life, so natural, like children everywhere should be and yet they seemed to have been destined to become something else. Some already had those damn wires implanted and others were just about to have it done to them. With time they would have become more dependent on them to the point where they were no longer capable of functioning without them. They would have gotten to the stage of all of those people out on the streets, willing to kill or die for the warming glow of a flickering computer screen. That was not life. These people had been force fed information and artificial stimulation until there was nothing real left except for a shell of the child they had once been, indeed Rada had met many of these shells on that planet, inflated by their technology they had looked almost real but without it they began to shrink into nothingness.
He headed to the replicator to see if he could order something to focus his mind. The computer gave him the usual list of countless irrelevant suggestions and when he told it to pick something it happily spat out some nutritionally sound, tasteless concoction the ingredients of which Rada wouldn’t even hazard to guess.
What really made this worse was that for every parent on Stra II it had been seen as being in the best interests of the child to be hooked into the technological grid. What kind of life could a child lead without being able to access the information that everyone else could? How would they cope if they lacked the understanding of the virtual world that their parents now lived in? How could they be prepared to compete if they were fully grown before they even learnt to play the game? In a world that was ever changing, how could they keep up if they were considered at a time to be too young to adapt? These had been the questions they had asked themselves and the questions which Rada asked himself now. Rada had always believed in analysing every possibility before reaching any decision and so he just didn’t see how he could ever have reached one in this case, there were just too many possibilities to ever know if he was right.
He made his way back to the desk and sat down. He considered that perhaps his eyes were tired and requested an audio readout. The result was unfortunately much the same.
His mind shifted now to Mim whose fate was still unsure. Mim’s builder had obviously never intended for any of this to happen, no one with hands gentle enough to craft one as kind as Mim would ever wish for someone to live the life Mim had. Whilst one so happy to serve as Mim may have found no reason to object to their slavery, it was still despicable what had happened. Mim had gotten to a point where he couldn’t even remember who had built him. His creator and the years of his formation, those things which would be echoed in everything he did in life were simply gone. Without them it was possible that he could never truly understand who he was. Rada could relate to that, there were days when he honestly thought that he didn’t really know who his father had been, the strongest of his memories were just a few fleeting images from the days before he left and they were images of a man who swore that he was changed by the war, that he was not the man who fathered him. He’d thought that he might harm them and decided that this life was better for his child, how could Rada ever make that choice?
He ordered the computer to cancel the readout. He sighed as he put the concoction down and made a note to remove it from the replicators’ memory banks.
“Computer, begin recording,” he ordered.
There was no avoiding it. It was time he sent a message to Wren. He may not always make the right choices but this one he was sure about. Tam needed a father; he couldn’t grow up never knowing who he was. It was time they told him the truth so that as terrified as he was of getting it wrong, Rada could be that father.
Lt. (jg) Rada Dengar
Chief Engineer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Chief Engineer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012