IRRATIONAL
IRRATIONAL
Doppelgänger Orbit
Stardate 2359.1.1
- 2040 hours -
USS Enterprise was designed to function in deep space for years at a time without ever visiting a starbase. Its interiors were therefore intentionally spacious and forgiving, despite being intensely compartmentalized and reinforced against fire and exposure damage. In the saucer module--which contained almost the entire volume of the ship's habitation spaces--the inner hull was divided into three concentric rings, each in turn divided into sixteen independent compartments. Berths for officers and crewmen were divided up between the two habitat sections in the outer rim of the saucer module, port and starboard. At this radius from the core, each single compartment comprised a portioned slice of the saucer module, five decks high and nearly fifty meters long from the outer edge of the saucer to the innermost gauntlet of emergency bulkhead couplings. Four of these sections made up each "Town" of the habitation spaces, Blue Town to starboard, Green Town to port, and each penned in, forward by service areas (stores, laundry, galleys and equipment lockers) and rearward by recreation sections and the machining spaces of the impulse deck.
For morale purposes, Enterprise's quartermaster had arranged berthing assignments for a greater amount of diversity in different compartments, so that both "Towns" would have multiple representatives from all departments in each "neighborhood" compartment. Individual compartments were in some ways isolated from each other like New York Boroughs, and--ironically--for the same reason: turbolift stops to the midpoint of most compartments precluded the need to walk through adjacent compartments to get anywhere, unless you were just out for a stroll. The few places where crew members from different compartments actually encountered each other were the common areas they all shared: work areas concentrated in the inner sections of the saucer module, engineering spaces on the impulse deck, manufacturing and powerplant systems in the lower decks, shuttle pilots in the hangar section and department heads and administrators in the office block at the very lowest decks of the secondary hull. Both half-rings of crew-members had their own mess areas in the forward saucer straddling the bow, and each had their own recreation spaces in the aft saucer straddling the impulse deck. The logical solution to the morale problem had been to assign berths by crew assignment, so that nobody on the ship would ever have to live near someone they worked with or work with someone they lived with. The old human saying "familiarity breeds contempt" wasn't entirely logical, but in alot of cases it was an undeniable truth.
What Security Chief McCahil was finding increasingly puzzling was the few cases where contempt had been cultivated to a large degree in the complete absence of any familiarity. The number of fights between on-duty officers had more than tripled since New Years, and though on one level he knew this to be the usual holdiay-season dustup, some of the disorder was beginning to exhibit patterns now that he was beginning to see the same faces dragged into his security office over and over again, each time for totally different yet somehow totally same reasons. He'd last seen Lieutenant Onise, for example, after a fist fight with one of his supervisors in the belief that the latter was too friendly with his ex-girlfriend; similar case for Ensign Ayala, who was confined to quarters for three days for tattooing the words "chauvinist pig" on the forehead of one of her inebriated co-workers. His overall conclusion was that both of these people were a pair of maladjusted misanthropes who were probably secretly in love with each other and hated themselves for it. Having them both dragged into his office at the same time for involvement in the exact same incident was... well, interesting to say the least. "Let me get this straight," McCahil leaned over his desk towards Ayala but fixed his gaze on Onise, "You're reporting Ensign Ayala for... attempted murder? Is that it?"
"Yes, Sir, I am."
McCahil looked at him incredulous. Then he leaned towards Onise and looked at Ayala, "And your contention is that the incident you recorded in your log..."
"It was an accidental shooting, as I reported. Therefore his accusation is groundless and he should be reprimanded for making it."
McCahil raised a brow, "You don't reprimand people for having opinions, Ayala. What I'm more interested in is how the hell you managed to accidentally shoot a man in the testicles with a perfectly functional phaser rifle."
Ayala cleared her throat, struggled to maintain her facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "There was some odd behavior in the firing circuit. It had happened once before and I thought it was going to discharge so I tried to warn the Lieutenant. He didn't listen."
"Your warning was a threat!" Onise snarled at her, "You were mad just becau--"
"First of all," McCahil cut him off, "A phaser on low stun at a distance of five meters, discharged into the lower abdomen, is not a life threatening injury. Not even close. If anything it'll temporarily lower your sperm count, which isn't such a bad idea considering the duration of this tour. So your accusation is completely groundless."
Onise sighed, "Yes, Sir, but..."
"But the accidental discharge story..." McCahil shook his head, "I'm having trouble buying this, Ensign."
"Respectfully, Sir, I'm not selling it. It's just a fact."
"Then how do you explain the operation log from the targeting monocle that suggests the phaser discharged intentionally?"
"The unit malfunctioned, Sir. I can't explain why it wouldn't reflect that fact. In any case, I had determined by myself that the malfunction was in the fire control circuit, which I have already replaced with a spare."
"How convenient."
"You can check that with the maintenance division, Sir."
"I intend to. Either way, consider yourself on report." Leaning towards her, but turning back to Onise, McCahil asked, "And what's h story?"
"My story about what, Sir?"
"Do you have any theories about why one of your shipmates might desire to intentionally shoot you in the gonads?"
"Simple malice, Chief."
"That's one theory... but see, most of the time when someone is pissed off enough to take a phaser to you, they'll just shoot you in the back and then claim ignorance. This is called "fragging." It usually happens to an officer with a big mouth and a small mind, which based on your record is you in a nutshell. But see, I'm curious right now as to what exactly would prompt one of your fellow officers to specifically shoot you in the nuts."
Onise cleared his throat and struggled to maintain his facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "I didn't want to say anything, Lieutenant, but... well, during the away mission, and even before that, Ensign Ayala's behavior has been incredibly erratic."
"Really?"
Onise nodded, "I um... well, the Ensign has made a number of advances... sexual advances, Lieutenant."
Ayala looked at him sideways, as if he was claiming to be in contact with the Virgin Mary.
McCahil's expression was little different. "Really?"
"I believe Ensign Ayala was angry with me for rejecting those advan--"
"You know what, forget I asked. You two... I don't know what the hell is going on with you and I really don't care. You need to pull your heads out of your asses and focus on your damn jobs. Is that understood?"
"Yes Sir," they both said.
"Now," McCahil turned his attention to his desktop computer and pulled up their personnel files, "Lieutenant Onise, you're berthed in 312, port side. Ayala you're in 304, starboard side. Obviously, there's no reason you should run into each other while off duty, so take steps to keep it that way. I'm also changing your duty roster so you'll never have to work with each other again either. And let me make this clear: if you can't find it in your combined willpower to get along with each other, you do us all a favor and avoid any further contact for the duration of your tour. Is this understood?"
"Yes, Sir," they both said in unison.
"Good. Now get the hell out of my office. Ayala, you go first. Onise, stay for a minute, I need you to drop of a requisition form to the machinists."
Ensign Ayala did go first, not sure if McCahil was going to talk privately with Onise, and not really caring. She walked out of his office and down the pristine, shiny white corridors of the administrative section to the nearest turbolift, conveniently parked at the stop just for her. Four seconds later, the lift opened to an identical but light blue colored corridor--color coded for her residential section--which, in turn, lead into the vast open space of the Blue Town, Compartment 304.
No other starship in the fleet had accommodations like this, and Enterprise probably wouldn't survive without it. Like the others in Blue Town, Compartment 304 was a large open atrium, three decks high, with faux skylights built into the ceiling and a set of strategically placed circulation fans hidden in the bulkheads, all for a fairly convincing sensation of being outdoors. This single compartment had nearly a hundred eight cabins--one per individual crewman--serviced by elegant but inconspicuous walkways and interconnecting sky bridges. At the ground level--in the open space between hatches for quarters and the raised patios before their entrances, was a trapezoidal court yard the size (but not quite the shape) of a little league baseball field. It actually reminded Ayala of one of Earth's indoor shopping malls, though considerably less cluttered, and much more livable. Between the eight compartments of Blue and Green Towns, a similar section further inboard for the senior officers provided Enterprise could comfortably house up to a thousand people, perhaps as long as a decade, before anyone on board even noticed the relative close quarters to which they were confined.
The courtyard was the center of social life for each compartment, and Blue Town's courtyard contained a green faux-grass field lined with metal picnic tables and a large empty platform where some kind of statue was probably supposed to have been mounted before Enterprise left space dock. Presently, that statue was occupied by a mechanical pitching machine firing sixteen-inch softballs at a spot in the courtyad that had been emptied of tables by Ensign Meaney and Lieutenant Badjarule, the latter holding a wooden baseball bat and crouched in a stance, a mangled officer's field manual doubling as home plate. A few others sitting off to the side were half watching the game and half chatting amongst themselves, Ensign Meaney being in the midst of it all along with Ensign Riley and Lieutenant Sulu. Crewman Torens and Ensign Doyle were there too, but not engaging the others in conversation; actually, they had both squeezed into a single chair in one corner of the table where they were both intensely and lovingly admiring each other's eyes.
The pitching machine fired off another salvo, Badjarule swung and blasted the softball at an angle towards the far uppermost corner of the room. There it passed through a region of almost null-gravity (out of range of the grav-plates in the walkways and the main deck) before bouncing off a structural column and beginning a chaotic, pinball-like ricochet around the compartment. Perhaps a dozen officers standing on walkways and bridges in this open space tracked the ball's progression, ready to reach out and grab it if it should come within range; some of these officers were playing in the game, knowing that whoever caught the ball before it hit the deck would get the next turn at bat, while others were just passively involved, trying not to get hit.
Ayala wasn't in the mood for ball games today. She found an empty seat at the table with the others and quietly dropped into it. A conversation was under way, currently dominated by Ensign Meaney, in the middle of explaining, "It's a fact of sentient life forms. Everyone has this one pet peeve that drives them totally insane. Just the mention of the subject makes them crazy. At least one, but everyone does. It's like a ticklish spot of everyone's psyche."
Crewman Torens looked dubious, but not actively so. Just bored with Meaney's usual nonsense and eager to talk about something else. "If you say so..."
"I'll prove it. See, I happen to know Lieutenant Sulu's pet peeve is the idea of having a food slot on the bridge."
Sulu looked at him angrily, "Don't you start that again."
IRRATIONAL
Doppelgänger Orbit
Stardate 2359.1.1
- 2040 hours -
USS Enterprise was designed to function in deep space for years at a time without ever visiting a starbase. Its interiors were therefore intentionally spacious and forgiving, despite being intensely compartmentalized and reinforced against fire and exposure damage. In the saucer module--which contained almost the entire volume of the ship's habitation spaces--the inner hull was divided into three concentric rings, each in turn divided into sixteen independent compartments. Berths for officers and crewmen were divided up between the two habitat sections in the outer rim of the saucer module, port and starboard. At this radius from the core, each single compartment comprised a portioned slice of the saucer module, five decks high and nearly fifty meters long from the outer edge of the saucer to the innermost gauntlet of emergency bulkhead couplings. Four of these sections made up each "Town" of the habitation spaces, Blue Town to starboard, Green Town to port, and each penned in, forward by service areas (stores, laundry, galleys and equipment lockers) and rearward by recreation sections and the machining spaces of the impulse deck.
For morale purposes, Enterprise's quartermaster had arranged berthing assignments for a greater amount of diversity in different compartments, so that both "Towns" would have multiple representatives from all departments in each "neighborhood" compartment. Individual compartments were in some ways isolated from each other like New York Boroughs, and--ironically--for the same reason: turbolift stops to the midpoint of most compartments precluded the need to walk through adjacent compartments to get anywhere, unless you were just out for a stroll. The few places where crew members from different compartments actually encountered each other were the common areas they all shared: work areas concentrated in the inner sections of the saucer module, engineering spaces on the impulse deck, manufacturing and powerplant systems in the lower decks, shuttle pilots in the hangar section and department heads and administrators in the office block at the very lowest decks of the secondary hull. Both half-rings of crew-members had their own mess areas in the forward saucer straddling the bow, and each had their own recreation spaces in the aft saucer straddling the impulse deck. The logical solution to the morale problem had been to assign berths by crew assignment, so that nobody on the ship would ever have to live near someone they worked with or work with someone they lived with. The old human saying "familiarity breeds contempt" wasn't entirely logical, but in alot of cases it was an undeniable truth.
What Security Chief McCahil was finding increasingly puzzling was the few cases where contempt had been cultivated to a large degree in the complete absence of any familiarity. The number of fights between on-duty officers had more than tripled since New Years, and though on one level he knew this to be the usual holdiay-season dustup, some of the disorder was beginning to exhibit patterns now that he was beginning to see the same faces dragged into his security office over and over again, each time for totally different yet somehow totally same reasons. He'd last seen Lieutenant Onise, for example, after a fist fight with one of his supervisors in the belief that the latter was too friendly with his ex-girlfriend; similar case for Ensign Ayala, who was confined to quarters for three days for tattooing the words "chauvinist pig" on the forehead of one of her inebriated co-workers. His overall conclusion was that both of these people were a pair of maladjusted misanthropes who were probably secretly in love with each other and hated themselves for it. Having them both dragged into his office at the same time for involvement in the exact same incident was... well, interesting to say the least. "Let me get this straight," McCahil leaned over his desk towards Ayala but fixed his gaze on Onise, "You're reporting Ensign Ayala for... attempted murder? Is that it?"
"Yes, Sir, I am."
McCahil looked at him incredulous. Then he leaned towards Onise and looked at Ayala, "And your contention is that the incident you recorded in your log..."
"It was an accidental shooting, as I reported. Therefore his accusation is groundless and he should be reprimanded for making it."
McCahil raised a brow, "You don't reprimand people for having opinions, Ayala. What I'm more interested in is how the hell you managed to accidentally shoot a man in the testicles with a perfectly functional phaser rifle."
Ayala cleared her throat, struggled to maintain her facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "There was some odd behavior in the firing circuit. It had happened once before and I thought it was going to discharge so I tried to warn the Lieutenant. He didn't listen."
"Your warning was a threat!" Onise snarled at her, "You were mad just becau--"
"First of all," McCahil cut him off, "A phaser on low stun at a distance of five meters, discharged into the lower abdomen, is not a life threatening injury. Not even close. If anything it'll temporarily lower your sperm count, which isn't such a bad idea considering the duration of this tour. So your accusation is completely groundless."
Onise sighed, "Yes, Sir, but..."
"But the accidental discharge story..." McCahil shook his head, "I'm having trouble buying this, Ensign."
"Respectfully, Sir, I'm not selling it. It's just a fact."
"Then how do you explain the operation log from the targeting monocle that suggests the phaser discharged intentionally?"
"The unit malfunctioned, Sir. I can't explain why it wouldn't reflect that fact. In any case, I had determined by myself that the malfunction was in the fire control circuit, which I have already replaced with a spare."
"How convenient."
"You can check that with the maintenance division, Sir."
"I intend to. Either way, consider yourself on report." Leaning towards her, but turning back to Onise, McCahil asked, "And what's h story?"
"My story about what, Sir?"
"Do you have any theories about why one of your shipmates might desire to intentionally shoot you in the gonads?"
"Simple malice, Chief."
"That's one theory... but see, most of the time when someone is pissed off enough to take a phaser to you, they'll just shoot you in the back and then claim ignorance. This is called "fragging." It usually happens to an officer with a big mouth and a small mind, which based on your record is you in a nutshell. But see, I'm curious right now as to what exactly would prompt one of your fellow officers to specifically shoot you in the nuts."
Onise cleared his throat and struggled to maintain his facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "I didn't want to say anything, Lieutenant, but... well, during the away mission, and even before that, Ensign Ayala's behavior has been incredibly erratic."
"Really?"
Onise nodded, "I um... well, the Ensign has made a number of advances... sexual advances, Lieutenant."
Ayala looked at him sideways, as if he was claiming to be in contact with the Virgin Mary.
McCahil's expression was little different. "Really?"
"I believe Ensign Ayala was angry with me for rejecting those advan--"
"You know what, forget I asked. You two... I don't know what the hell is going on with you and I really don't care. You need to pull your heads out of your asses and focus on your damn jobs. Is that understood?"
"Yes Sir," they both said.
"Now," McCahil turned his attention to his desktop computer and pulled up their personnel files, "Lieutenant Onise, you're berthed in 312, port side. Ayala you're in 304, starboard side. Obviously, there's no reason you should run into each other while off duty, so take steps to keep it that way. I'm also changing your duty roster so you'll never have to work with each other again either. And let me make this clear: if you can't find it in your combined willpower to get along with each other, you do us all a favor and avoid any further contact for the duration of your tour. Is this understood?"
"Yes, Sir," they both said in unison.
"Good. Now get the hell out of my office. Ayala, you go first. Onise, stay for a minute, I need you to drop of a requisition form to the machinists."
Ensign Ayala did go first, not sure if McCahil was going to talk privately with Onise, and not really caring. She walked out of his office and down the pristine, shiny white corridors of the administrative section to the nearest turbolift, conveniently parked at the stop just for her. Four seconds later, the lift opened to an identical but light blue colored corridor--color coded for her residential section--which, in turn, lead into the vast open space of the Blue Town, Compartment 304.
No other starship in the fleet had accommodations like this, and Enterprise probably wouldn't survive without it. Like the others in Blue Town, Compartment 304 was a large open atrium, three decks high, with faux skylights built into the ceiling and a set of strategically placed circulation fans hidden in the bulkheads, all for a fairly convincing sensation of being outdoors. This single compartment had nearly a hundred eight cabins--one per individual crewman--serviced by elegant but inconspicuous walkways and interconnecting sky bridges. At the ground level--in the open space between hatches for quarters and the raised patios before their entrances, was a trapezoidal court yard the size (but not quite the shape) of a little league baseball field. It actually reminded Ayala of one of Earth's indoor shopping malls, though considerably less cluttered, and much more livable. Between the eight compartments of Blue and Green Towns, a similar section further inboard for the senior officers provided Enterprise could comfortably house up to a thousand people, perhaps as long as a decade, before anyone on board even noticed the relative close quarters to which they were confined.
The courtyard was the center of social life for each compartment, and Blue Town's courtyard contained a green faux-grass field lined with metal picnic tables and a large empty platform where some kind of statue was probably supposed to have been mounted before Enterprise left space dock. Presently, that statue was occupied by a mechanical pitching machine firing sixteen-inch softballs at a spot in the courtyad that had been emptied of tables by Ensign Meaney and Lieutenant Badjarule, the latter holding a wooden baseball bat and crouched in a stance, a mangled officer's field manual doubling as home plate. A few others sitting off to the side were half watching the game and half chatting amongst themselves, Ensign Meaney being in the midst of it all along with Ensign Riley and Lieutenant Sulu. Crewman Torens and Ensign Doyle were there too, but not engaging the others in conversation; actually, they had both squeezed into a single chair in one corner of the table where they were both intensely and lovingly admiring each other's eyes.
The pitching machine fired off another salvo, Badjarule swung and blasted the softball at an angle towards the far uppermost corner of the room. There it passed through a region of almost null-gravity (out of range of the grav-plates in the walkways and the main deck) before bouncing off a structural column and beginning a chaotic, pinball-like ricochet around the compartment. Perhaps a dozen officers standing on walkways and bridges in this open space tracked the ball's progression, ready to reach out and grab it if it should come within range; some of these officers were playing in the game, knowing that whoever caught the ball before it hit the deck would get the next turn at bat, while others were just passively involved, trying not to get hit.
Ayala wasn't in the mood for ball games today. She found an empty seat at the table with the others and quietly dropped into it. A conversation was under way, currently dominated by Ensign Meaney, in the middle of explaining, "It's a fact of sentient life forms. Everyone has this one pet peeve that drives them totally insane. Just the mention of the subject makes them crazy. At least one, but everyone does. It's like a ticklish spot of everyone's psyche."
Crewman Torens looked dubious, but not actively so. Just bored with Meaney's usual nonsense and eager to talk about something else. "If you say so..."
"I'll prove it. See, I happen to know Lieutenant Sulu's pet peeve is the idea of having a food slot on the bridge."
Sulu looked at him angrily, "Don't you start that again."
