When Fixing Useless Equipment

Posted on 27 Nov 2018 @ 8:04am by Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater

1,080 words; about a 5 minute read

Pop and Fizz

The sound of it took her back, all the way to Mars. Life as a cadet had been fun, filled with new people and new experiences. Now here she was as Ensign Ullswater - unprepared, lost in space but yet undaunted by what lay ahead of her. As the individual moments were beginning to slow down life was speeding up and she was falling into the monotony that she'd always imagined she would: Starship life. You wake up and work, engage in compulsory relaxation, eat food with colleagues, work a bit more, sleep a bit more, relax a bit more; and all the while the vastness of space hurtles past unnoticed.

Pop and Fizz

The gentle sound from the test tube brought her back to the task in had for a moment. It was all part of the CSO's initiative for them all to have separate projects to be working on. At first Sofie had warmed to the idea and had been looking forward to doing field work again, to reading papers, and to writing her own hypotheses. Unfortunately though there was a slight lack of exciting lithospheres out in space. In fact there seemed to be a significant lack of anything.

She swirled around the dissolving rock and made a note of some details she had just noticed. Nothing she was doing here was groundbreaking, you could hardly even call it research but it was comforting. Even if she hadn't put her feet on the ground in a long time she had brought with her several containers full of soil and rocks that she had huddled away in a storage hold. She ran tests to confirm that it was exactly the type of rock she already knew it was.

Sure if they were on the surface of a never explored continent this would be useful stuff but here and now the only reason she did it was too keep in practice and to break up the monotony of shipboard life. Now however it was becoming monotonous in itself and when you break up monotony with but more monotony then something is going terribly wrong.

The shwoosh of the door opening almost made her jump, it was neither a pop nor a fizz and so not at all the sort of thing Sofie was expecting to hear. She turned around to see who it was that was entering her hallowed sanctum in the geology lab. It was Technician Palder, probably here to fix something or maintain it.

"Ensign Ullswater!" He bleated cheerfully walking over to one of the microscanners and opening up his tricorder which bleeped expectantly. "Hope I'm not disturbing you, just here to look at the microscanner."

"Palder, please, you call me Sofie." She kicked back in her chair and swivelled in his direction in order to watch him work. "Something wrong with it?"

He grunted an affirmative as he took of the back panel, checking his tricorder intermittently. Whatever species Palder was, Sofie had no idea its name, there was an overwhelming suggestion of sheep in his appearance. A large flat nose and outstretched ears made him look almost comical and it didn't help that he also looked like a teenager even if he was only one year younger than Sofie. He looked adorable in the same way that a sheep does, and just as vulnerable.

"Ah," he exclaimed as his tricorder's intermittent bleeping changed its tone. "I believe I've found the issue." He looked out from behind it towards Sofie, grinning "And the solution is soon to follow."

Sofie smiled back lightly at his remark and found herself wondering how satisfying it was to spend your life fixing bits of equipment for bored young ensigns. Presumably he had more of a life outside the lab than she did. "I don't really use that thing anyway," she said "Or at least I haven't had opportunity to yet." She started idly spinning in her chair "Once we find ourselves with an actual reason to look at some rocks though I am sure it will be useful."

Palder nodded knowingly "Yeah, it came up on the automated scans. That's pretty much my job right now, fixing things that get picked up by the automated scans which turn out to not even be in use anyway." He stuck his head back behind the scanner and continued to rummage about inside it "I suppose that's what you get being a technician on a science ship though - so much specialist equipment that doesn't see daily use."

Maybe he did feel the same way as her. Maybe she wasn't the victim of some great conspiracy of nature. Sofie stopped spinning in her chair and looked straight at the figure half engulfed in scanner. "Do you have any plans for after duty?" She asked in a straight and to the point way.

"I'm sorry," he responded chattily from inside his work "I'm going on a date with Crewman Holst this evening. Did you have anything planned?"

"No, its just I've got nothing to do." Sofie sighed "You and Holst getting pretty serious then?" She remembered now having seen the two of them chatting a few times in the last week. She smiled, they seemed like a good match.

There was a moment of silence before Palder straitened up and put the panel back in place. "I really hope so." He said and then placed his hand triumphantly on top of the scanner. "This should be fine now, that is if we ever need to use it."

Sofie nodded silently. She felt a bit sad knowing he was about to leave off on other business. Its awfully lonely in space.

Something changed on his face, maybe he could see what she was thinking, maybe it was written all over her expression. She wanted to hide under a layer of constructed contentment, in the warm blanket of the background of the lives of others. Part of her fought back though, maybe that was what the sheep looking technician could see, part of her just wanted someone to talk to, someone who wasn't just talking to her for work reasons.

"While I'm here though," Palder gave a warm smile "I could always check up the other geology equipment."

A real genuine smile waltzed on Sofie's face. She felt relief, or maybe happiness. She felt something.

Ensign Sofie Ullswater
Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

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