Dammit, how does this thing work?

Oh, I get it. Nice. Stardate... Stardate monday evening, after the big kaboom.

Okay, so where's the delete key? No? Bugger. Well, guess I'll have to think before I write. Let's see here....

There we go. Ignore the above; this is me now. Well, not that it wasn't me before, but I mean that was me speaking and now this is me - no, forget it. Man, this would be a great time to have a delete key. Um, I'm writing this because I've been meaning to for a while, and I have nothing else to do (cap'n's snoozing) and I want to leave something behind besides saprophytic fungi. So... onward!

Log for 12/18/04:

Dear Space-Diary,

It's nearly Christmas and I'm floating in space, stuck in a tiny shuttle with the captain and watching the scrap that was once the Freedom E expand into space. I'm sure everyone else is getting deeply philosophical and introspective right about now; all I can say is, son of a bitch. Ironbottom, that is.

But I'm getting waaay ahead of myself. You, dear diary (and/or the malicious system-hacking voyeurs that may be reading this), will be privy to the reflections of the one and only Melvin Organa Orlan, former helm officer of the former USS Freedom. Not a lot to say about me: I'm from 21st century Earth, but not the Star Trek Earth - wait, that means nothing to you. Okay, I'm from a place where the 'real world' (that kills me every time) is just mediocre serial TV sci-fi. Due to some sciency stuff that I'm neither capable of or much interested in understanding, I got to join the crew when they were sucked through a wormhole. I know it sounds stupid, but sometimes truth is dumber than fiction. Anyway, I was a pretty useless person back home, but here I know all sorts of stuff on account of being a fan of the shows. Including some things I could get in real trouble for knowing, but you won't tell anyone, right? Because you're an inanimate object. Yeah, you heard me: I own you.

So, life on the Freedom. Let me tell you, as a kid I idolized Starfleet and especially the Enterprises - hell, even in this universe, who didn't? So to say that I was happy about joining, well, that's like a bit like saying that the citizens of Earth were pleasantly surprised when they weren't annihallated by the Borg. But, turns out that life in the great spacefaring utopia CAN suck. The crew of the Freedom - we're the armpit of the universe, and it's amazing we're still alive. No thanks to this Ironbottom fellow I mentioned earlier: he is - or, more appropriately, was - the admiral, sector commander, grand fuhrer, and general uber-poobah of this part of space, and he hated us all. Well, probably not me. Well actually, yeah, probably lately, seeing as I tried to blow his ship up and escape the scene, but I had a very good reason for that! Anyway, he's not important, because he got borged. Saw it with my own eyes - nasty, those nanites, but after what he put us through I think maybe he deserved it. Guy was a bigger ass than I am.

But so I'm off-topic again. Yeah, anyway, turns out that the Freedom was the most dysfunctional, pathetic, and generally ill-concieved mission this side of Tarn Vedra, and we got zero support from the Fed because good 'ole ferrousass loathed us with a passion. My big dream turned out to be a sham, so maybe you can figure why I've gotten somewhat disillusioned with the Federation and protagonism in general. Maybe I can talk the guys into going mercenary? It's not like we'd be stealing federation property - we'd actually need to have a ship for that. Of course, all this conjecture sort of hinges on us not dieing out here, on reentry into the conveniently placed M-class planet (Weren't we just in deep space? How'd we miss it - hell, how'd we miss its star? Talk about crappy sensors: we'd have better luck looking out the windows...), or on the surface immediately afterwards. Scenarios which, taken together, sound a lot more plausible than us living to see a courtmartial.

But hey, this is my first entry, and I don't want to veer too far from the original cheery fatalism, so let take a minute for those brave few souls who I will in all likelyhood soon be proud to call coffin-mates. They're mostly good guys, gals, and, uh, things, and on the off chance we survive you'll wanna know who I'm talking about later.

Okay, first off, Ensign Kura. I just want to say right off the bat: what does he do? No one knows. He's supposed to be our intelligence officer, which I think is mighty funny - can anyone imagine the Freedom in a war zone? He does comms too, but I never see him working that post. Oh well - don't get me wrong, he's a great guy, we just don't cross paths too often. Point of interest - guy is a funky half-tiger thing. I heard he was a changeling, but I don't see him getting involved in any hilarious shapeshifting hijinxs, so either that's just a nasty rumor or he is one unimaginative blob of goo.

Lt. Holley. Doggie! What more can I say? Wierd last name for a wierd new old addition to the crew. She works under Cmdr t'Resan, and was the de facto head of the science lab because Lera was mostly too busy pining after the cap'n to have spent any time in there. I call her doggie because she was one when I met her (she got hit by the entirely-too-derivative-of-ranma 'junk' water), and because she's the lab tech she is also of course my new scapegoat for anything junk water related. Dunno what creeps me out about her - I think it's the contentment. No sane person could ever have been content on the Freedom.

Lt. Tadasi. Definitely goes in the 'thing' category. The tiburons are kinda like the frogs from Jurassic Park: they can go from man to woman on cue. But he's an interesting guy-gal, and more importantly, he-she's a damn good mechanic. Not crazy Demian good (no one is), but good enough that you can point and say "Make this do that!" and he-she'll make it happen. And really, that's all that important - I hate it when engineers start rambling off names of sub-particles and drive components instead of getting to work. That's why Scotty was the man and Be'lana was a pushover.

Speaking of the man, let's talk about, Lt. Ennien, the good doctor. And thank god he is the doctor - much as I love her, best for everybody that Lynx is no longer in a position where lives are on the line. Doc's a fox, probably made by some ferengi company looking to entertain Brit hunters sick of the Fed's smug morality. Good thing we got him instead, though - guy's a shining beacon of competence and psychological health in this crew, not that's exactly high praise. He's wheelchair-bound, but in an FDR sort of way, so you don't really notice it. Good guy; the one person around here that consistently makes sense. 'Cept for me, obviously - I'm awesome.

Have I mentioned how much it sucks to be the only junior grade lieutenant at the poker table? They can always call my bluffs! But I digress.

The last of the lieutenants I know (Droolin doesn't count - he's meat waiting to happen) is Tarra Nebendi, the security chief, and of course with her you have to also mention Lt. Cmdr K'Lynxyl Nebendi, the counselor: they're our feline vanguard, the biploar twins. Tarra is not to be confused with her sis, who is totally batshit crazy - Tarra is only slightly crazy. Personally, I think it's a joke that K (pronounced 'kay' - short for K'lynxyl, or alternately, 'kitty-kat') is counselor. She's like the entire Diagnostic Manual of Psychological Disorders rolled into one person! Tarra, on the other hand, is a terrifying chief of security: she could disembowl you with a flick of the wrist. My advice: don't screw with either one of them, or their kids, or Lott, who is their replacement-male (don't ask). Me, I mess with them as a hobby. I call them 'kitties' (I swear it's not a racist thing - that would be me calling K a ratcat, which I have done once and will never, EVER do again); I leave dishes of fresh cream and catnip in the jeffries tubes; I sing the meow mix song while in the lift. That last is my favorite, because neither gets it. God, I love those two - dunno what I'd do without them, especially because they're always faithfully on hand when some local yahoo is about to stomp me underfoot.

Next would be Cmdr. t'Resan, the XO and science officer. I know what you're thinking: female Spock, right? Wrong. Lera t'Resan is a Romulan sex machine with one goal: to wed and bed the captain. You'd think that we'd find some solace together, what with us both being outsiders, but it turns out that I'm not much interested in getting into the captain's pants, so we really don't have any common ground. I can honestly say that aside from ordering the computer to run some analyses I have never seen her do any sort of work associated with her post, although given her dogged, single-minded approach to wooing her love I suppose she'd probably be good at her job if she wanted to be. Personally, I just wish the Cap'n would shag her senseless, buy her a ring, and get it all over with - then maybe we'd actually have a first officer.

I guess that leaves the Captain. You can call him Lee, you call him Payne - heck, this is my diary and no one's ever gonna read it, so you can call him Jerry Falwell if you like. The captain is very much the classic inaction hero. At first I thought this was going to be terrible, because I'm a very impatient, darn-the-torpedoes, burn/rape/pillage kind of guy - it's the Nordic blood in my veins - but then I realized that he was just a heavy delegator. And when I say heavy delegator, what I really mean is that he hands down his orders and then the crew ignores them and does whatever it wants. I know, I know, it sounds disorganized, but somehow it works: we're not dead yet anyway, although we'll see how long that lasts. Plus, I enjoyed the freedom (ha, ha) of being able to dismiss my superiors out of hand, because I quickly became the guy at the front of the bridge with his hands on the controls.

Listen to me, rambling on about the Freedom like it was still there. It is kinda sad, I guess. It was a bit like home. I stayed and tried to save it literally until the last minute - I was ripping out power relays from the walls while mothers were busy throwing their babies into escape pods. Dunno why - that worthless piece of scrap made the Soyuz capsule look like the Defiant.

Anyway, that's enough. I'm sure we've got plenty of dillemas ahead, and I need to rest; after all, I'm useless enough when I'm wide awake and focused.

-MO