Pitch Perfect

Posted on 03 Jun 2015 @ 7:59pm by Naima Mirwazi & Ensign K'os Beaumont

2,008 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 08 - NIMBUS
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 6, Main Engineering (Upper Level)
Timeline: MD -02, 2300

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To any observer, Naima must have looked absolutely insane standing on the upper level of main engineering, near to the warp core, swaying in time to music that literally only she could hear; wearing a civilian uniform and a giant pair of goggles in a sea of highly-qualified officers and enlisted personnel probably didn't help matters either. She hummed along with the tune and tapped her feet to the rhythm, eventually breaking out into a full dance that was one part elegant, one part spasmodic. As the display carried on she broke out into song, snapping her fingers. "Doooo doobie doo. Mm-hmm, deedle dee dee-dee-dee-deeee..."

K'os was on the upper level as well, handing out duty assignments for the Alpha shift. This was his favourite time of his day when he got to interact with the folks on Gamma shift before they headed off duty. He caught sight of Naima dancing and humming nearby. He'd met her a few days before and he was starting to really like the little conversations in between shifts. He didn't always understand her fully; she had a way of speaking that K'os was sometimes slow to follow. This was the first time he'd seen her dancing though.

He tucked his data PADD under his arm, as he folded his hands behind his back. He was always an image of professionalism while on duty -- still friendly of course -- but professional. It allowed him to focus on his work while remaining calm enough not to let his emotions distract him. "Miss Mirwazi? I'm sorry to interrupt, that's a very lovely song." He said warmly. His face was passive, but friendly. He had his emotions running fine on simmer at this point and nothing seemed too stimulating in the environment that he needed to keep a tight grip on anything.

Naima turned at the sound of a voice cutting into the music and tilted her head to the side, like she was suddenly listening to another, dissonant song that didn't quite mesh. She recognized him for who he was: Petty Officer 3rd Class K'os Beaumont. The sensory data being fed into her ocular implants was the same, right down to the little subcutaneous deformity marking the dimples in his cheeks that always made her want to reach out and touch his face and tell him to smile. But the half-smirk on her face made it seem like she was observing him for the very first time. He always had that cool blue thread in engineering but sometimes it danced and jerked and got pushed out of place, too, like strings on a cello that were being pulled too hard and threatened to lose control of themselves. With K'os you never knew what you'd hear even if you always knew what you'd see.

"'Very lovely song'?" she mimicked. "You can't hear it, boy-o, you're not a People. You're a people-people. Or... Maybe you can hear it." She seemed doubly-amused by the thought, snatched him up by the hand, and dragged him forcefully to the railing that overlooked the warp core and the rest of engineering. She waited impatiently for a moment, shifting from one foot to the other, before nudging into him. "Well? Do you? D'you hear it, or are you deafblind to it?" She lowered her voice to a whisper, though something about the clarity of her tone made the question seem very pointed. "Do you feel it in your way down deep?"

Without the chaotic flow of emotions running freely in his mind, his analytical side was wired in pretty tight -- though intellectually he was sharp enough to piece together what she may have been talking about. His over-sensitive ears heard many things happening all at once and while he could admit there was a certain rhythm to it at times, he failed to hear music from it. "I hear a lot of things. The hum of the warpcore. The sound of that panel being removed over there to the left. The 'swish' of the doors each time people come and go. The voices moving about their workstations. Is that what you're listening to?"

A long silence lingered in the air, like after you'd given the wrong answer and you were being given the opportunity to try again. Eventually, Naima's face softened into a smile and she reached up to cup his cheek in her hand; coming from such a communal society it was a common enough gesture that she didn't feel uncomfortable with it, and she chose to ignore any implications or hangups imposed by the more conservative cultural mores that seemed to pervade Starfleet. It gave their encounter the feeling of a deeply intimate moment between two people that didn't even know one another well.

When she spoke, her speech was free of slang, almost like she had shed something and revealed her true self, heightening the feeling of intimacy; somehow it even made her seem like the older of the pair. He didn't hear the Jazz but somehow she liked him more for trying. "Yeah, that's what I hear, boy-o."

K'os allowed a smirk of satisfaction to cross his lips. After all, what harm could a few feelings of pride and accomplishment be? When it came to non-telepaths, K'os didn't have a comfort zone and he was a naturally touchy person himself so he allowed her hand to rest against his cheek as if it were a natural gesture.

And then the moment was gone, just like that, just as frenetic and unpredictable as she seemed to be. She dropped her hand, grinned, and made a half-turn on a backset foot, a move that seemed to have no purpose other than for the sake of movement itself. She turned her head slightly to look over her shoulder at him when she spoke; it was completely unnecessary for her but she found it put people on edge when you spoke to them without looking at them. "So, whatcha got for me, hmmmm?"

K'os returned his control, clearing his mind. He quite easily changed frenetic gears with her and he handed her the PADD he had tucked under his arm. He spoke as if they'd been discussing work topics the whole time. "Duty assignments for the next shift. Including a couple work tickets." K'os waved a hand as if to dismiss his words. "Though I was also hoping I could get your help on a side project I'm working on for Lieutenant Jones. Do you have a moment to hear a pitch?"

"S'all I do, all day every day, pitch pitch pitch," Naima responded, moving her head around the room. Her unique form of synesthesia gave virtually every sight a corresponding sound, so in truth it really was all she did every day - listen to pitches. In turn, she pointed to the warp core, the flow regulator console and the master systems display, raising and lowering her voice as appropriated, "Looow pitch, high pitch, higher pitch." She turned her head back so she was looking him and then tilted it to the side in curiosity. "Lotsa pitches. So, what kinda pitch you got today? It'sa yellow pitch, innit?"

K'os grinned, deepening his dimples, "Oh it's just a regular 256 Hertz pitch." It took a little control to stop himself from breaking into a hearty laugh at his own nerdy joke.

Naima gave him a broad smile to show her appreciation for the joke, seeing the dimples that showed off no small amount of amusement over his own joke. "So, whatcha got?"

He handed her the PADD he had tucked under his arm. "I showed this to Lieutenant Jones the other day. It's an idea for using a Klingon's cloaking device against them." K'os' voice rose a little as he became a bit more excited. He pointed at a section on the PADD, "This is sensor data that I got from CPO Faye in Intel. I used this formula here," K'os scrolled down and showed her a set of calculations, "to extrapolate emission levels. Look here, see? Boring stuff like neutrinos, and tachyons. Things we already use now to track them, but see that? Those are antiproton emissions mixed in with other boring stuff. They radiate out in a...um..like a pattern...like that." K'os pointed at a small wall sconce after spotting it. The light that was cast under it produced a cone like shape of light that was bisected by the wall, making a sort of conical-like shape on the wall. "The idea in my mind is to use the deflector dish to hit that sweet spot with a sustained beam of protons maybe? --"

He turned his attention from the light sconce and back towards Naima, "You know what happens to antiprotons when they interact with protons long enough, right?" K'os looked back at the light being cast on the wall. "That boring stuff annihilates into faster smaller boring stuff and eventually that boring stuff is going so fast it isn't so boring anymore." He lifted his hands out and closed one eye changing the perspective of his vision till through his eyes it looked as if he could grasp at the light on the wall with his fingers. "Chain reaction." K'os whispered before releasing his fingers while making an explosion sound with his mouth.

Naima's synesthesia had given her a "different" perspective since her formative years, so she was accustomed to harnessing that creativity to try to see things the way others did. As she listened to K'os and watched him explain his analogy of the light, she used her subdermal sensor network to monitor the light source and, in her mind's eye, twisted the data according to his words. Ones and zeros bounced off one another, breaking into smaller pieces, moving about with increasing celerity.

"That's, like, brainspiration, n'ah?" Naima asked him rhetorically, finally taking the PADD to review the data. "I'll chat with the comp, if you want. I can make her sing the sweetest songs." The woman leaned closer to K'os and grinned devilishly while wiggling her eyebrows. "Maybe think up some algorithms to track emissions, n'ah? Comp can do a lot of things if you play the right notes."

"Thank you." K'os smiled, "I'm sure she sings beautifully." He said, not completely understanding but said it more out of politeness. "Again, it's probably nothing but a crazy idea anyway, but I wanted to at least try and contribute something. Anything you can come up with will help."

The way her head turned seemed to indicate she was giving him a skeptical side-eye, though the goggles across her face obscured confirmation. A sly smile creeped across her face and she rested her hand on his forearm. "Hey, boy-o, it's not crazy. Why do Feds say that? Crazy, crazy, crazy. All the time, I hear that tone. Blue tone, low tone, self... Hm. Self-doubting tone?" She leaned closer to him as green lines flared just beneath her skin, individual sensor nodes activating as she acquired and searched data about his voice, body temperature, stance, and the like. "Boy-o doubts it, or boy-o thinks them and theirs doubt it? Or nobody doubts it? Feds talk funny, K'os."

"Indeed we do." K'os' smile turned into a tight-lipped grin. If he was slightly unnerved by her so accurately seeing his doubt so openly, it wasn't apparent. "Thank you all the same."

"Hmmm," Naima said, drawing out the last end of the word in exaggerated thoughtfulness. The goggles she wore across her face continued to point directly at him, as if she were trying to discern something, and just as it seemed she was about to say something she turned away in a jostling movement and made a half-skip along the deck. "I'll find the harmony with the computer, and let you know what we compose, n'ah? N'ah."

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Ensign K'os Beaumont
Assistant Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Naima Mirwazi
Computer Systems Specialist
USS Galileo
[ PNPC - Mott ]

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