All The Light We Cannot See (Part III)
Posted on Sat Sep 4th, 2021 @ 5:06pm by Lieutenant Jai
2,111 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
What Lies Ahead, Between, and Behind
Location: USS Vesta
Timeline: 2392
Tags: jai
There were no flowers.
The buildings of a once expansive monastic temple were broken and damaged. Some by fire, others by the many centuries of exposure to elements. On Earth, the same spot was a world heritage site. Restoration and landscaping maintained a beauty and splendor as once were behold in the spiritual houses of his ancestors.
Norbulingka, as with its counterpart on Earth, had been the residence of the Dalai Lama. Who, also as on Earth, had fled the invasion of Tibet in 1950. As a result, he'd never met the Dalai Lama of his world. He'd always imagined that he would have liked to. The Dalai Lama had been an adult when the virus had struck their world. Jai had been the only reincarnated guru still a child. And as a consequence of the fact that no Only had been born since the 1950s, the wheel of reincarnation had been stopped. Making Jai the last of his kind.
"Om mani padme hum."
Like sands through an hourglass, the bead passed through his thumb and forefinger. Soon replaced by another, and the cycle continued. Seated in front of a crumbling, marble statue of the Buddha, the boy sat lotus-style with prayer beads in hand, meditating on thoughts that refused to be silent. Trying to find peace when all he felt was conflict. Understanding, when all he had was doubt. He'd only been partially trained as a guru, and not completed formal theological education as a Buddhist. So he had no idea what he was supposed to be, or how he was supposed to live, or even what any of this was all about. It had been intimidating to him in the 20th Century. It still was, in the 24th, though he'd long ago stopped trying to be a great teacher and settled, instead, for becoming a great student.
When he got confused on issues of faith, when he questioned whether or not he was a good Buddhist, Jai tended to answer with the belief that he ought to try and be a good person. And the karmic balance of the universe could make its own judgments as to the rest.
The question he hadn't faced was simply that. Was he a good person?
Two men were dead, because of the choices he had made. One of action, the other of inaction, but in both cases what he'd done or not done had been a conscious decision on his part. Should he have chosen the unconscious man over the conscious? Had that been a bias that had swayed his judgment?
If he could go back, and do it all again, would it have been different? Could it have been different?
Or did he merely just wish that it might have been?
"Om mani padme hum."
It was a simple prayer. One of the easiest, rote meditations. Truthfully, Jai didn't know a lot of the Buddhist prayers. He'd read about them, but the ones he'd memorized were the simple prayers like taught to a child. Easy to learn, easy to repeat... hard to know what it meant. Did it mean anything?
Why was he here?
What had it all been for?
He didn't know who Jay Prakas Gyatso was. The men whose task it had been to mentor and prepare him had died, leaving behind only the memories of what stories of his former lives they'd chosen to share with him. And those that he could remember, which was not all. And not all well.
He didn't know what a good Buddhist was, in his century or the present. And that seemed like it was more the right question.
Would he find an answer? As one of his teachers might have told him, some questions have no answers. The pursuit of the question becomes the only answer of any importance.
Was there a road he could take to find his way back to himself? The boy had come to a crossroads. He didn't know what he was trying to do. Was he a good Buddhist? A good Starfleet officer? Could those two ever be reconciled to one another?
A good doctor? A good monk? Did the science in his head have to conflict with the faith in his heart?
When he'd been a child, people had told him what he would be. What he would do. What he would learn. Who he would lead. The prayers he would say. There had been no choices. No doubt, other than his fear he could never live up to the expectations of his people. Now he had no people. Their expectations went with them to the grave. And, yet, Jai was not free. He felt more a prisoner now than he had when he'd been taken by the monks. It was like some great weight hung around his soul, burdening him down. Pulling him further and further from the light.
[ "Bridge to Doctor Jai." ]
The boy kept his eyes closed at the intrusion into the holy space. Letting go of the prayer beads for a moment, the child reached up to tap the silvery badge on his chest. "Jai here," he responded simply.
[ "We've picked up a distress call from a civilian transport. They say that it's a medical emergency. We contacted Sickbay, but Doctor Sorenson is currently in surgery." ]
"Understood," the boy uttered simply, as his sad, brown eyes opened. Setting the prayer beads aside, he rose up from his seated meditation.
"Computer, arch."
A section of the temple ruins vanished, revealing a doorway recessed into a computer alcove. The statue of Buddha disappeared from view, as the room returned to a dark, empty space criss-crossed in yellow lines.
==================================
The SS Sun Wukong was an interstellar transport out of the Bolian System. It was one of the old Oberth-class explorer that had been decommissioned by Starfleet and re-purposed as a civilian cruise liner. It specialized in cruises designed around viewing stellar nurseries, offering travelers exotic vacations to visually stunning nebulae across the Alpha Quadrant. A mostly automated warp drive had a plethora of redundant safety features built into it, but restricted travel to Warp Six. For a non-Starfleet vessel though, that wasn’t terrible.
The emergency call hadn’t included many details. But, Federation records indicated that the Sun Wukong had a stop at Pacifica before departing en route to Bajor. When the medical emergency had gone out, the vessel had been in vacant space -- the interstellar medium that formed vast swaths of nothing between solar systems. The Vesta was the closest Federation vessel for responding.
Even moving at speeds beyond comprehension, the cruise liner’s locale was remote enough that it was an hour before the ship was alongside the Sun Wukong. Jai found two others waiting in the transporter room when he arrived -- a security officer and a paramedic. The trio gathered on the transport pad, and Jai mentally prepared himself for the rather strange means by which people seemed to prefer to travel in the modern age.
Travel via the marvel of technology that was the transporter was a fundamental aspect of life in the Federation, in particular the Starfleet, that would drive an otherwise rational human being insane if they stopped to think about the process. A moment, or moments, where your continued existence was interrupted. Sensory deprivation did nothing to describe the complete lack of consciousness for all but a second at either end of the transport, nor did you occupy conceivable notion of space aside from a staggering series of one's and zero's that the computer tabulated as a means by which you were disassembled and reassembled. That idea, in and of itself, was more than a little maddening.
Of course, being that it did what it did, the transporter was the single most checked, verified, and rigorously tested piece of equipment on any starship. It had multiple fail-safes and was built with what would be an otherwise inordinate number of redundancies on each component piece. The fact remained, however, that no one trusted the very fibers of their being to the nacelles or the navigational deflector, so even for it being the safest piece of equipment on the ship, it said a little something about the faith the Federation put in technology that everyone readily jumped at having their atoms scrambled as a means of getting from Point A to Point B.
As a dizzying sensation sparked a return to consciousness, Jai 'awoke' to the fading blue shimmer of the transport beam and a quickly subsiding feeling akin of 'pins and needles' over his whole body. The giddy impression of weightlessness was replaced by the familiar environment of normal gravity, and the boy found himself standing in unfamiliar surroundings that were rather impressively appointed. The Sun Wukong's decorator could have given the interior designers of the Galaxy-class a few pointers.
And standing in wait was a tall, older, Bolian man that the young Only recognized from the recordings of the initial distress call. The man summarily sized up both the other members of his team and in quick succession, the boy was aware that the Bolian captain was staring at him. Had he the opportunity, Jai would have bet five credits what the first words out of the captain's mouth were going to be.
"Aren't you a little short to be in Starfleet?"
...and Jai would have won the bet.
The sharp intake of air and loud clearing of the throat cut through the air. An imposing shadow passed over the boy, as the security officer stepped forward. "I’m Lieutenant Degan,” the man began, gesturing toward the EMT and then down to the boy beside him. "Petty Officer Velez-Villa, and this little one is Doctor Jai of Earth Two."
The Bolian had stopped listening sometime after the word ‘doctor.’
"Doctor? Great maker," the Bolian said, stepping past both the petty officer and the lieutenant to take the Only by the arm and start dragging the man through the hallways of the ship, babbling the whole way as he set out. "We're on our way to Bajor. It's a return trip actually, we started out there on a package tour of the nebulae in the..."
"Let's skip to the issue if we can," the boy noted, gently interrupting the man. A fleeting glance behind him provided assurance that the other two members of the away team had fallen into step behind them.
"Right. One of the passengers, a little girl with a Bajoran family, fell ill at dinner the other night," the Bolian supplied, taking the group around a corner and into a botanical courtyard that featured, of all things, an actual fountain with recirculating water. On a starship. Or a cruise ship. Whatever this thing was. Jai just shook his head as the group continued. "We thought at first it was just space sickness, but it's been getting worse."
"You said 'at dinner,'" Jai noted as they walked. "Any other complaints on board?"
"No. I mean, we considered food poisoning but she didn't have the hasperat, which could be undercooked in parts, she had the Terran wedge salad," the captain replied, before remarking "It was fairly popular and no one else has complained."
"Replicated or natural?" the Only asked, his mind already trying to map out the variables.
"Replicated of course," the captain supplied, pausing just outside the door to a crew cabin. "We use Folgor and Trigule's mark-seventeen catering replicators. They were just recertified last year."
The boy gave a nod, then looked back at the other two. “Take a look at the replicators. It could be a chemical string out of alignment,” the Only stated. It was a long shot. But it was worth an investigation.
"This is their cabin," the Bolian offered. "I can show these officers to the catering center."
The boy gave a nod to the captain, then to the other members of the away team. Then he turned to face the doorway. Adjusting the medical kit that he carried, he took a breath.
He hated house calls.
The door popped open, as a pair of haggard-looking Bajorans appeared. "The hell?" the man uttered, as they looked down to see the Only standing there.
Jai held up his hands. "I understand I'm not who or what you were expecting," the boy began calmly. "My name is Lieutenant Jai of the USS Vesta and a doctor."
The couple exchanged a look between them, before looking back down at the boy.
to be continued...
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