Existential or Exorcism

Posted on 17 Aug 2017 @ 4:37am by Lieutenant JG Cameron & Ensign Miraj Derani
Edited on on 21 Aug 2017 @ 12:37pm

1,787 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Episode 15 - Emanation
Location: Earth - San Francisco, Apartment
Timeline: MD 16, 17:50 hours

[ON]

The lights to the small but efficient one-bedroom apartment came on as soon as Cameron had closed the door behind him. As soon as he found himself alone, Cameron pulled the zipper of his tunic halfway down so that the collar wasn't trying to strangle him anymore; it had been a longer day than he'd anticipated, particularly with the unexpected turn of events leading him to become Admiral Lirha Saalm's new aide. Opening his eyes again, Cameron surveyed his apartment. It had been hastily provisioned for him by Starfleet Personnel. Overlooking the San Francisco Bay and... more importantly, the Golden Gate bridge, Cameron had a view that many would be envious of.

"Computer, close curtains." He ordered. The home system automatically obeyed Cameron's command, drawing large beige curtains over the scene. Cameron pulled his zipper down the rest of the way before removing his jacket and setting it neatly in the closet by the door. "Computer, play music. Jazz. Gershwin."

As 'Foggy Day' by George Gershwin of the late 1930's started playing subtly in the background, Cameron heaved one last inaudible sigh.

One day down. Who knew how many more lay before him.

"Not quite the assignment I'd been expecting..." Cameron pointed out to nobody in particular.

"Batman to an admiral who's most likely abut to be drummed out of Fleet?" Aren floated in mid air, as if suspended in the deep oceans of her former homeworld, even if all the selkie swam now was the depths of his fevered imagination. She rolled, her fins rippling as if in water, until she was lying on her stomach, and looked down at him. "It's not the best sign for your future in fleet. But I guarantee the next week or so will probably be very interesting."

A single brow rose across Cameron's otherwise passive expression. "Perhaps you are right." He moved towards the couch and sat down, allowing his gaze to watch her while she floated through the room. "Although the admiral's mental state hardly represented a woman who believed that her career was near an end." He paused, sniffing the air curiously. It dawned on him a moment later that the aroma... or rather, the stench, must have come from those atrocious wing slugs she'd had him purchase from a street vendor.

Cameron rose from his seat. "I require a shower."

"I'm always right," Aren rolled lazily in the air, sculling towards the bathroom, "And top brass always think they're untouchable." Her webbed fingers flared against the invisible water she was pushing against. "And use lots of bubbles this time. Seeing you naked could kill me."

Cameron made a face that closely approximated mild annoyance as he started towards the small bathroom. "Sonic showers do not generate... bubbles, and I would prefer it to a traditional water-based shower. Perhaps you should wait outside if my nakedness would bother you."

"And shout over the whine? Its hardly civilized." Aren barrel rolled in place, sculling with her hands. "So why did you say yes to the Admiral? Being a secretary was never something you wanted to be."

Cameron had started to pull his tunic off when the question came, and he had to stop when it did. While semi-self aware that Aren was largely a fragmented projection of her psyche with little bits of his own impressions of her added in, she still managed to surprise him. After all, she was him. Logic would have assumed that she was as intimately familiar with his circumstances as he. So the question was two fold. Did she know and was pretending not to? Or did she not know, which would indicate that this particular part of his brain had sectioned itself off from the rest.

"It was not by choice." He stated, assuming... or at least pretending she didn't know. "My orders were quite clear, and did not include an option to decline." He took off his tunic and thumbed at the activator switch on the shower. A stream of force fields pulsated through the air, ready for him to enter its path.

"Are you worried?" Aren asked, taking a position near the ceiling. "I mean. Attractive Orion lady, awash with pheromones? Do you get Ponn Farr?" She dissolved into a fits of giggles at her own poor joke."

Giving Aren a look of what could only be described Vulcan sardonicism before an unwelcoming thought of such intimacy only being interrupted by an interlude of Admiral Saalm's apparent fascination with fried wing slugs.

"Very amusing, Aren." Cameron replied before he began to undress further, still eager to get the smell of those slugs off of his skin. "And what did you do today?" He asked, continuing in the imagination that she had a life outside of his own.

"I explored. I went looking for your sense of adventure, but its still AWOL. And I found Fun sitting in a corner of your frontal lobe rocking back and forward and crying." The selkie laughed at her own joke. "Self-esteem sent me out to buy him whisky. Other than that, I was dead."

Cameron stifled an audible sigh. It would be quite un-Vulcan-like no matter how difficult this day had been. But every time Cameron started to believe that she was actually there, the cold reality of her demise would come back to haunt him. As several passing responses exchanged hands in his mind, the Vulcan/Xenexian hybrid relented with a much less exaggerated sigh. "If you will excuse me." He said, preparing to shower.

Aren gave an exaggerated bow to sweep him into the shower. "By all means, your Grace." She hung around, literally, outside the shower screen though.

"Have you ever thought about going to Vulcan?" Aren asked suddenly, shouting over the sounds of the shower. Or seeming to shout. She could have screamed like a banshee for hours on end. Only he would have heard.

Feeling the wash of pulsating force fields reverberating off of his head and chest brought a certain degree of satisfaction from Cameron, as he tried to imagine the grime of those fried winged slugs being meticulously scrubbed from his body. Aren's question had caught him off guard at that very moment. The last time he'd been to Vulcan had been years ago, before he joined Starfleet.

"No." He said after a long moment. "Why would I?"

"Aren't you curious? About me? About you?" she asked, tone circumspect. "Six years? I'm obviously not just a stress reaction. But Am I me? Or am I you?"

"You are not you... at least not in the way you were," Cameron said, sounding assured, even though it had just occurred to him that even after six years they'd never had 'the talk'. Perhaps he'd been avoiding it. "You are... for lack of better terms, a conglomeration of a tiny fragment of a small mental impression I somehow extracted from you as you died," Cameron continued. "... intermixed with what I knew or may have felt regarding you."

He decided not to point out that in his research of rare instances such as this, the 'host' was often at great risk of suffering tremendous brain damage, including paranoia, schizophrenia, and other diseases. Nor did he decide to point out that the very thing he'd just described could be from his own misinformed opinion.

"So I'm not you either," she pointed out. "Aren't you concerned that a counsellor somewhere is going to spot you acting odd. Especially if you're going to be hanging round an Admiral now."

"A difficult task for any counselor, given that it is quite difficult to discern anomalies from Vulcan stoicism." Cameron pointed out, a small hint of a smile teasing the corner of his lip before disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. "And like any aide, my capacity as a member of Admiral Saalm's entourage is likely to go unnoticed. It is easy for men and women of stature to ignore someone they might regard as beneath them."

He finished his shower, pulled a towel around his waist, and exfiltrated the room to find Aren still hovering above the doorway.

"I was thinking more about the Admiral you're playing waiter too. You don't think she might notice you talking to mid air and getting the thousand yard stare?" Aren picked at the web of skin between her fingers, brushing non-existent dust from the folds.

"I should hope..." Cameron started before he recoiled at his own tone. He drew in a small breath before exhaling slowly. "That you continue to choose not to appear during duty hours." He said, wrestling with the notion that he was arguing with himself in at least some way. It should have been easy to turn 'Aren' off, but he didn't... or couldn't. "As we have agreed to from the beginning."

"I don't know if you've noticed, but flag officers rarely have duty hours. Or rather duty hours that don't run from 0001 to 2359." Aren made a show of checking to see if he was dressed before turning her back again. "I don't fancy being confined to your hippocampus for entire days at a time. Your vulcan bits are deeply scary places. Sarek didn't come along a moment too soon if you ask me."

Heaving an audible sigh, Cameron had to relent to Aren's logic. "And what would you suggest I do?" He asked. For a moment, he considered leading the question with his own interpretation of what might have happened should he reveal her existence to Starfleet. He decided against doing so, curious as to where Aren might go with the question on her own.

Aren was silent for a few moments, "Set clear boundaries? Make sure you get a break? Let me out when you're on your own, regardless of time?" she said that last with a bright hopeful tone.

Cameron contemplated this. Their arrangement had thus far been that during regular duty hours, she was absent. This suggestion ran the posed risk of more encounters, which he wasn't comfortable with. But to some degree, Cameron had granted Aren a degree of autonomy... or at least a right to exist.

She deserved this. "Very well." he accepted.

"Yay!" Aren turned a little circle in the air in victory. "I promise I won't be that annoying. And to leave you alone when your admiral shows up."

"I appreciate that." Cameron admitted.

Aren attempted to hug him. She held him close, but objectively, there was no pressure on his skin, even if it looked like she was squeezing tight. "This will be great!"

[OFF]

--

Lieutenant Cameron
Chief of Operations, USS Galileo

&

The Katra of Aren Markussen
[NPC by Derani]

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