LoAmi

With a little help from Cmdr. Alces, Arphazad's quarters were quickly arranged to accomodate guests. Buffet tables were set up with culinary delights from all over the galaxy. Arphazad wasn't sure whether this was his zhian'tara or an underhanded attempt to convert his quarters into a restaurant. But, Alces seemed to know what he was doing, so he just went with the flow. The doorbell rang. Arphazad answered, "it's open." Erko, a Vulcan chief from the lower decks of engineering arrived, looking as stiff as he always did. In the absence of an unjoined Trill guardian to channel the hosts' memories, the Vulcan telepath was recruited. Erko faced Arphazad. "I have studied the Trill rite of passage, and I believe that I can perform adequately." "I'm sure you'll do fine," Arphazad said, "and help yourself to anything on the tables." Erko looked around. He came to participate in a Trill ritual, not to eat. The doorbell rang again. This time, Lt. Joshua T. Asimov walked in. The young human was curious about this ritual, and he was anxious to help his commanding officer and friend. "J.T., have a seat," said Arphazad, "and help yourself..." :: points around the room at the full tables :: "... there's plenty to go around." J.T. sampled the platters then sat down, ready to begin. "What will happen to ... me, during this thing?" he said, a bit nervously. Erko responded "According to the Trill texts, you will still be concious of yourself. You should be able to regain control at any time." Reassured, J.T. signalled to begin. Arphazad sat across from him. Erko put one hand on Arphazad's stomach and the other over J.T.'s face. He began: "Your mind to my mind, your thoughts to my thoughts," and then switched into ancient Trill. After a few moments, Erko removed his hands. "Who are you?" He spoke to J.T. "Nemrod, Lt. Nemrod Lo'Ami." J.T./Nemrod looked around. "This must be your zhian'tara. Already? I didn't think it was time yet." Erko scanned both with a tricorder, and verified the transfer. He slowly made his way out of the room, leaving J.T/Nemrod alone with Arphazad. Arphazad sat a few moments in silence, unsure of what to do. J.T./Nemrod began talking. "I remember you. You were that runt tagging along with the Ambassador on the Reliant. That was right before a plasma explosion ended my career plans." "Yes, I remember you too. I was the only Trill onboard, so they implanted Lo'Ami into me. So, tell me about yourself, before you... died." Arphazad had found the most awkward way of phrasing that, but it didn't matter. It didn't take much to get Nemrod talking, or eating. J.T./Nemrod walked around the room, sampling the goodies. "It's been a while since I last ate. My compliments to the chef. About me. Hmmm. Where to start?" "The beginning." "The beginning? Well, basically, I was planet-bound until I was joined. It was dull. That's why I joined Starfleet. I wanted some adventure. Believe it or not, I started out in security. The Academy changed my mind. OK, it was the Academy and N'elsin." "Nelson?" "No, not Nelson, N' el-seyn. She got that all the time, y'know being a girl with a name that sounded like 'Nelson.' She was an engineer, and I wasn't a half-bad tinkerer, so I worked my way through Engineering 201 with one eye on the datapad and the other on her. I never had any thoughts of going back into security again." "All this for a girl?" "Not just any girl. She was the one who could make an Admiral stand at attention; she was independent, smart, funny, the most beautiful girl in San Francisco. And she was mine... well, in the limited sense that one could possess her - I would have done anything for her." J.T./Nemrod smiled. "Did you marry her?" "Well, no. The Academy and all the Starfleet duty mumbo jumbo got to me. Slowly, my time was eaten away by engineering exams, drills, competitions. I made myself the best engineer I could be, and tried to get the best assignment I could get. Meanwhile, I had forgotten how to be the best person I could be. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. Well, I got the assignment on Reliant. Only a bit more time, and I would have made chief engineer. But, in the end, all I had were my engines. I had thought of contacting her by subspace, but I just never got around to it before... you know. Truth is, I probably never would have." Arphazad was about to say something, but, J.T./Nemrod continued. "If there's one bit of life-advice that I can give you, it's this." Arphazad listened intently, during J.T./Nemrod's dramatic pause. "Don't let your career pre-empt your life." Arphazad fell silent, doing some self-examination. Their time was almost up. J.T./Nemrod kept talking: "Oh, and, all that stuff that you science people pull about 'not being engineers' - you must know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you do it all the time, you all do." "Yes?" "It's bull. At least for you." After Erko assisted in Nemrod's return to Lo'Ami, Arphazad began feeling his presence again. He was now two, equipped with everything gained during the life of Nemrod. Soon, he would be whole again. ... Lt. (jg) Joshua T. Asimov Astrophysics and Astrometrics Specialist Science Department USS Arcadia NCC-1742-E and his writer:

When you say "not had any activity," does that mean "none at all since signing on" or "none in the last six months?" If the latter, what happens to all the posts? Just curious.

Wow, I can be voted off STSF! I'm flattered! I think I'm making it up in the world...

I haven't noticed anyone making a big fuss over 5,000+ posts and 200+ members! Someone had to do it...

"Normal" programming? what forum have you been posting on? ;) "Normal", renormalized for STSF.

(ok, so I missed GromVik's post earlier, but it didn't mention 200 members...)

And yet there isn't a single uninsured Canadian citizen... Uh oh! politics!

Arphazad Lo'Ami sat alone in his quarters, back on Arcadia. The ship had arrived moments after the crew escaped the crashed Blue Note. Most of the action now would be in the hands of the Marines, whose job it would be to free the slaves remaining on the planet below and overrun the remaining pirates. Lo'Ami temporarily left the science department in the hands of his capable assistants. He was only to be disturbed should an emergency situation arise. He was just now beginning to comprehend the jumble of feelings that had been nagging him since he woke up in the Blue Note's sickbay. First, there was the all-encompassing emptiness. It was a loneliness of a kind he had not felt for years; because, the past few years he had never really been alone. Second, there was the fear. It was not a fear for his life; he was now safely aboard Arcadia. It more resembled a fear of failure. Fear that he would be unable to fulfill his duties as Arcadia's chief science officer. Fear that he would be unable to live up to the expectations of his father, the model Starfleet officer and ambassador. He looked down at his uniform and at the two pips on his collar. It would not be long before this lack of confidence showed, before he would be shown to be a disgrace to the symbols he wore. He felt an urge to go back to the slow life of the academic, huddled for hours in a laboratory on a quiet planet on the quiet side of the galaxy. But, that life was no longer his. It has been said that if a Trill were too weak to control a symbiont, the symbiont would take complete control of him and override the host's personality. Arphazad had never been selected as a host. The fact of Lo'Ami's presence inside him was a pure accident of time and space. He knew that had he gone through the trials, he would likely have failed. Human ethics place great value on the independence of the individual. Despite the burden of philosophy, Arphazad Lo'Ami wished for nothing more than to be reconnected with the true source of his strength before his peers realized the truth. "There must be some way...," he thought.

It is a little known fact of physics that the rotational frequency of washers and dryers corresponds to two of the quantum frequencies of all matter in the universe. The centrifugal motion causes a rupture in the local manifold of the space-time continuum. Conicidentally, socks are near optimum energy density to initiate a tunnelling phenomenon through the rupture. There are multiple theories about where they go. Some say, they travel through space, others through time. The truth will remain a mystery until someone actually finds that they have more socks than they started out with, an event calculated to occur one time in twice the age of the universe. So much for experimental science providing answers. As a side note, underwear is known to be close to a the second, weaker resonance, and so, it disappears with a lesser frequency than socks. How's that for an explanation?

The feeling of disorientation was like none Arphazad Lo'Ami had ever felt in.... he had no idea how long. The past was gone, only the present consumed him. He was in a blurry looking room. No, that was his vision. He heard voices, nondescript voices screaming at each other. Slowly, feelings began to return to the remainder of his body. At this point, he realized two things. The first was that the force of gravity was oddly absent. The second was that he was pinned to a biobed anyway in restraints. As his vision cleared, a picture of his surroundings came into being. There was a Starfleet officer there... who? Ensign... Hawkins, yes, Reese Hawkins of ... the department of... engineering. Lo'Ami remembered him as if he were the last person he saw before .... before something. "It will come back to me," he thought, dazed. He was being called by the ensign. He answered, in a low, broken voice. Hawkins seemed to be attempting an apology. Lo'Ami might figure out why later. There seemed to be more important things than the near, or was it distant?, past to be of concern. After being removed from the restraints, Lo'Ami floated around the room for a while, bumping into walls and desks while attempting to gain balance and a sense of the situation. Getting used to zero-G was tough enough. Accomodating to zero-G with amnesia and a post-surgical hangover was an even greater challenge. By now, Lo'Ami's muscular coordination, vision, and wits had cleared up enough to let his Starfleet training come into play. Yes, he was a Starfleet officer. In fact, the room was filled with them. Ensign Hawkins, and another - more disoriented - engineer whose name he couldn't quite place were in the room, as well as the ship's helmsman strapped down to a biobed. There were also two more people there whom he couldn't recognize at all. They weren't Starfleet either. One, the man, was floating in an unconcious looking pose. The second, a woman, was pinned down to the opposite wall, blood spurting out into the zero-G room; she was likely dead. Both wore uniforms that looked vaguely like medical attire. The surroundings vaguely resembled a sickbay - but not the sickbay on Arcadia. Meanwhile, Hawkins was plotting an escape from... wherever this was, mouthing off his plan at what seemed like lightning pace to the reorienting Lieutenant. It was at this point that Lo'Ami realized that he was the ranking officer in the room. Despite his condition, he tried to assess the situation as a commander would. He determined their assets - four officers, one who seemed to be in good condition, two disoriented, and one unconcious - nowhere near enough power to successfully enact Hawkins' plan to go face to face with an enemy of unknown potential who had taken them to this place. They had, however, a secured sickbay. Lo'Ami surmised that they could gather as much information as possible without leaving the room and without attracting undue attention from the ships' crew. Perhaps they could use the ships' computers to locate either Arcadia or others' in Arcadia's crew... or, at least they could know their enemy's strengths and weaknesses before an attack. Lo'Ami set Hawkins and the second engineer, his name now being recalled as Jaruq, to the computers in sickbay. As Lo'Ami reoriented, he couldn't help but feel that something nondescript was missing. It was something he had known and gotten used to, that was now gone. He did not yet know what it was. All he knew was that he had somehow to lead his men out of this trap, despite the new emptiness that was inside of him.

Help! Help! They've killed Randy and replaced him with a male model!

Looks like *someone* is having New Ensign Syndrome. I'll be sure to inform your chief medical officer, who will quickly treat you with the only known remedy (short of a newer ensign). Although I cannot divulge the actual treatment, it does begin with a brighter, redder shirt.

Ah, no, not another one.... :o Happy Birthday, Gromvik

I wouldn't be in such a hurry to ban more words -- recall the law of unintended consequences: captain> security, ***ign the amb***ador to quarters, and be sure to check for ****y traps. or officer> the *** ** ready to write. Anyway, while I can understand their desire to block out derogatory words, it wouldn't be right if we couldn't have a linguistically correct discussion of anatomy, would it?

Happy Birthday, Fred!

Wishful thinking? (alternatively: What's wrong with you people?)

Ah, yes, and for those of you who think (or used to think) I'm a woman (Garnoopy!), let it be known that you're the reason that Lo'Ami became my last name. Anyway, the correct pronunciation is: Arf-AH-zad Lo-AH-me (emphasis is placed on the capitalized syllables) It is *not* like Low-me. And, I am *not* a woman. So, guys, stop asking me out... (j/k) :o

The last thing I'd want is the Paramount chatrooms to have an automatic kick based on vulgarity. Think of all the punts that would happen because somebody wrote: "drink a cocktail" = "drink a ****tail" "the ship is hit" = "the ship i* ***" "the enemy blows up" = "the enemy ***** up" "at its breaking point" = "a* *** breaking point" "it's a bit charged up" = "it's a *** **arged up" These rooms are good examples of how stupid a badly programmed computer can be.

There seems to be this idea among Trek fans that Vulcans are predisposed to being logical, as if it were something genetic. From my understanding of Trek history, though, it seems that Vulcans, if they are predisposed to any behavior, would be predisposed towards being just as instinctually guided as anyone else - if not more so (Pon Far, for example, the only part of their instinct left that they can't repress). It is the *learned* Vulcan mental discipline that makes them so logical and suppressive of emotions. That means that someone who is fully Vulcan or half Vulcan (etc., if those genes are passed on and expressed) and never had any of the Vulcan training should more resemble a primal emotional Vulcan (or a Romulan) than a 23rd or 24th century logical one. Comments?

Happy Birthday, Cmdr. Ayers!

Lt. Arphazad Lo'Ami was just beginning to recover from the initial shock of the shuttle's destruction. Starfleet Academy training had tried to prepare him for cases like these, but none of the simulations approached the real feelings of loss and anger at the unknown. He had to perform his duty. Now, that duty involved the investigation of a debris field that used to be a shuttle containing his comrades. He scanned the shuttle from space and methodically recorded the locations of all the debris for a future ballistics analysis. From the looks of it, the shuttle had indeed exploded, although the explosion's source was unclear. After receiving permission from Captain Moose, the shuttle parts were beamed aboard for closer analysis and reconstruction, if necessary. There was no need to keep the Arcadia sitting at that ghastly locale. He brought three teams into the cargo bay: science, engineering, and medical. The shuttle's total mass was consistent with what it should have been, although small amounts were missing, but easily accounted for as the results of the energetics of uncontrolled matter-antimatter reactions from the shuttle's engines. The first piece of good news came from medical. No organic matter was present on the shuttle. It would be highly unlikely that it was all destroyed by leaked antimatter, so it was likely that the shuttle crew had survived. But, where had they gone? And, what had caused the explosion? Since the advent of the tricorder, science could be done in two ways. The first, preferred by most Starfleet officers, involved fishing for facts by whatever data a widescan tricorder could pick up. The second, preferred by academic scientists, involved testing a single hypothesis at a time with all the tricorder's scanning bandwidth looking for specific effects. Lo'Ami preferred the latter as well. He found that it allowed the scientist to better decompose the effect, step by step, although at the expense of a quick and dirty answer. Lo'Ami started on the hypothesis that the antimatter had somehow generated the explosion, so he calibrated his tricorder to test the theoretical predictions against the results. The engineer, Ensign Hawkins, meanwhile, had generated enough evidence pointing to a cobalt explosive having caused the initial explosion. The antimatter had been a secondary effect. The explosion had been internal and from a planted device. This was no accident. The next step was to find where the crew had gone. Lo'Ami's first thought was to scan for a characteristic residual energy signature from a transporter signal. After the amount of time the shuttle had been in space, the signal had ample time to degrade, so, finding it above the ambient energetic noise [or at least what he thought was ambient energetic noise] that pervaded the shuttle debris would require a finely-tuned tricorder. Lo'Ami tuned his tricorder for a transporter signal, and began a search. With Arcadia's systems failing, Hawkins was recalled to engineering, leaving Lo'Ami temporarily alone in the cargo bay. As he found a weak transporter residual signal, he reported the results to the Captain: "Lo'Ami to Captain Moose, the shuttle exploded from the inside. It was bombed. I've detected a transporter signat--" In the middle of the word, the tricorder's scanning beam set off some unexploded bomb residue. A loud boom was heard over the comm, and Lo'Ami was thrown across the cargo bay. Everything went dark. When he was finally brought in to sickbay, the extensive external and internal damage necessitated emergency surgery. Is this the end of the science officer? Will he ever wake up from the post-surgical coma? (To be continued...)

This post presupposes that there are genetic differences between the "logical" Vulcans and the "emotional" Vulcans. This would necessarily limit the role of individual decision making in whether they transitioned from emotional expression to repression. I wouldn't think that a few centuries is enough time for mass-scale naturally selected evolution in a people that lives for a few centuries. Would this imply that the Vulcans had an artificial selection (social? war? genocide???) going on a few centuries ago and that only the ones with some propensity for mental order survived to reproduce? I'm not saying that the Vulcan mind doesn't have a genetically encoded *capacity* for being very ordered. It also seems to have the capacity to be very disordered. I'm questioning whether the use of one over the other is genetically encoded as well. Anyway, IMHO, philosophically, it would be more satisfying for Vulcans to be making the choice to embrace logic. (although philosophy does not make something true :( ) PS - about mind melds and why all Vulcans of 23/24 century seem to be able to do them but 22 can't (since 100 yrs - 1 generation - is not enough time for evolution): (1) once the stigma was removed, Vulcans suddenly "discovered" that they could do it (2) all Vulcans of 23/24 can't, just the ones we've seen can.

I disagree. It adds an extra dimension to Spock's character (and to Vulcans in general). The idea of Vulcan logic and emotional suppression is so embedded in them by the 22nd and 23rd centuries, that they (1) deny their true natures (2) make any activity that might bring out that they have emotions into a social stigma (close to illegal). (3) blame it on something else whenever they can (in Spock's halfbreed case -- how convenient that he can invoke that all the emotions are coming from the human side!). As a side note, the Vulcans of the 22d century seem to run something more on the lines of a repressive dictatorship than a society run on the logic of its individuals. Other than "stigma" -- T'Pol keeps mentioning about the Vulcan science directorate has proven that time travel is impossible as if it's dogma, despite the (empirical/scientific) evidence for time travel in Enterprise. Is this science or politics?

oh, no, not a sequel to the last STSF movie! You would think that with the losses the production companies took on that one they'd get the hint.

Hey, Travis, you broke the boards! j/k Interesting effect.