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Tachyon

Watch Where You Step

“Watch Where You Step”

Stardate 0612.15

Lt. Cdr. Tandaris Admiran

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Every so often people stop and look at themselves from without, trying to figure out who they are. Some people spend forever searching for themselves; other people seem so confident of who they are that they spend less than a microsecond on these thoughts.

 

The Trill are no different in this regard. And being that many of them have several lifetimes, the search for the truth of their current personality is of paramount importance.

 

Tandaris did not want to be a sequel. He did not want to be “Admiran #7.” This was his fear, his nightmare, his own personal demon that had dogged him throughout his life. For Tandaris, the pressure to succeed did not come from his family, or his friends. It did not come from his commander, or from Starfleet. It came from his whole society, his entire culture, where a joined Trill was expected to do brilliant things. It was the price paid for this existence. The people who were brilliant enough to be selected for joining obviously had a glorious future in store for them.

 

Those years had been rough, as the transition from Tandaris Brinn to Tandaris Admiran asserted itself. Admiran had smoothed out his rough edges, equipped him to better deal with life. And Tandaris had brought to Admiran the latest in a line of perspectives on life. Yet no amount of knowledge could help him deal with the pressure to succeed.

 

Maybe that's why the Gamma Quadrant had seemed like such a good idea. So far away from the Alpha Quadrant, it let Tandaris worry less about how his actions affected his people. But now his life had become more complicated. He had not been expecting to become chief engineer. The Excalibur was his ship now, and she needed him.

 

Captains fall in love with their ships as a whole. Engineers fall in love with every individual nut and bolt. They talk to and caress each panel, loving the parts that make up the whole. In away, the humanoid relationship to its starship was symbiotic . . . the Excalibur depended upon them to survive, as they depended upon her to survive in turn. This was something that Tandaris could understand, and it was a relationship he hoped would make him a great chief engineer.

 

The malfunctions plaguing the ship plagued Tandaris' mind and played on his nerves. They made him doubt his own abilities—which were formidable—and his own worth—which was considerable—and question whether he was right for this job.

 

And all the while in the background, Tandaris watched himself move, and asked himself the single most important question . . . Is this who I want to be for the rest of my life?

 

There were too many questions looming in front of him that needed to be answered before he could tackle that one. Too many unresolved issues that clouded the playing field. He had to buckle down and finish these immediate tasks first, keep his doubt in check just a little longer. But he could only wait so long.

 

Each host had gone through this, but each had dealt with it in its own way. It was the crisis of being Tandaris, of trying to process the universe through such a limited window of understanding. It was a crisis to which Tandaris had only one solution, and that was why he was aboard the Excalibur.

 

The only way to understand the universe was to experience it. The only way to widen his window was to explore it. Tandaris sought out the truth the only way he knew how: one foot in front of the other, one star a time. Going forward . . .

 

. . . into a puddle of icky green goo. Next time, Tandaris made a mental note to himself, wear rubber boots.

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