Posted by Cadet Alex Winters (Doctor) in Counselor’s Office - Alex Winters’ Boarding Assessment

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Janusz Korczak (Counselor) in Counselor’s Office - Alex Winters’ Boarding Assessment

Posted by Cadet Alex Winters (Doctor) in Counselor’s Office - Alex Winters’ Boarding Assessment
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

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“Tell me about your relationship with your grandfather.”

Korczak, CNS

Alex closed her eyes for a moment, imagining her grandfather as he’d often sat in the companionable silence of their shared cottage: bent over a sheet of intricate calculations for some medicine he happened to be working on, or reclining in his high-backed chair with a book, lit only by the open fire in the hearth.

“My grandfather was a man of few words,” she said. “We spent most of our time at home reading, or working on some project in silence. For him, it was usually something pharmacological. Me, I was mostly into tinkering with machanical things, and what little electronics we had, when I was young.” She paused as it occurred to her, for what may have been the first time ever, that if Starfleet Medical had been a day or two slower in answering her queries once she got back to San Francisco, she may well have ended up an Engineer instead. She remembered the antique radio her grandfather had brought with him from Earth, and how she’d spent many a childhood hour taking it apart, carefully studying every part of its intricate innards in detail, and then putting it back together again. It had been very outdated technology on Earth even when her grandfather had been a boy. On Niol, it was literally useless. Nobody on the planet was broadcasting anything it could have picked up on, and the Elders greatly discouraged contact with passing space ships. But it had been an object of endless fascination to Alex. And in the end, it was what had gotten her off Niol, once she’d determined that what she wanted was to go back to Earth.

“It wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly,” she said. “The silence, I mean. My grandfather spoke when he had something to say, and when he did, it was usually spot on. He taught me a great many things. We would take long daily walks on the beach, almost from the time that I was old enough to stand. He would point out to me all of the plants that could have medicinal uses. He also possessed a great collection of books on a wide variety of subjects. When I was young, he would read from them to me every night. Watching over his shoulder as he did so is how I began to learn to read for myself.” Like many a four-year-old, Alex had been one of those kids requesting the exact same bedtime stories over and over again, only to inadvertently learn them by heart, and then start correcting her grandfather when he made mistakes, or skipped a few paragraphs in the interest of expedience. Unbeknownst to Alex at the time, though, the bedtime stories read to her had been rather unusual. They weren’t ‘the adventures of Flotter’, nor even the religious parables that the Elders considered an indispensable part of a good and wholesome upbringing. They could range from fragments of biographies of great men and women in history such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Zefram Cochrane and Stephen Hawking, to popular science publications by various philosophers, sociologists, geneticists and the occasional mathematician, and even a few straight-up textbooks. As a small child, Alex had mostly preferred the biographies. But when she got older, her interests shifted. The repeated readings by her grandfather from some of the more obscure texts in his collection ensured that she knew where to go looking for more things to learn.

“When I got a little older, I would go with my grandfather on his rounds, and watch in silence as he treated people’s wounds or birthed their children. Those people were grateful to us, but we weren’t … popular … exactly, with those who held the power in our village. So it was mostly just the two of us most of the time, and my grandfather was rather the contemplative type. It could be … I guess I’d call it lonely, at times. Perhaps that’s how I came to be the one who usually does most of the talking.”

She looked at the counselor, figuring she’d said enough for now, but knowing she could easily get lost going down memory lane, and talk about her grandfather for hours on end.

Cadet Alex Winters, Doctor

Korczak took a few notes as he spoke, but mostly simply sat and listened with an expression that was simultaneously emotionless and still engaged with her. No judgement, no shock, no surprise showed on his face; just simple listening and hearing what she said. When she finished, he made a few more notes and then said “Tell me more about your village. Where did you grow up?”

Korczak, CNS

Alex looked at him, considering for a moment how much she should tell him. Or perhaps, trying to gauge how much he’d be interested in hearing. In the end, she decided that it didn’t really matter. She’d tell him as much as she wanted to tell, and if what she said didn’t correspond to his expectations, he’d shown he was willing to let her know.

“Niol is … different, sir,” she said. “Especially compared to a place like San Francisco. Different compared to Earth in general, really. But San Francisco just happened to be where my family came from before Niol, and it’s where I went back to after my grandfather’s death, so that’s my point of reference.”

She settled back into the couch as she tried to determine where best to begin.

“Both of my parents were born and grew up on Niol,” she finally said. “But both my mother and hers died in childbirth, and my father and paternal grandfather succumbed to a lumberjacking accident before I was old enough to really get to know them. By the time I was three, my entire extended family consisted of me, my mother’s father and my father’s mother. And I never really got to know her either, since she and my grandfather didn’t get along.”

She sighed. She understood now, with the benefit of hindsight, why her paternal grandmother had avoided contact all those years. It wasn’t just that the sight of a little girl with her dead son’s eyes must have conjured up all sorts of painful memories. It was also that Alex’ maternal grandfather, by the time that Alex was a toddler, openly refused to live by the dictates of the Elders; in large part because of everything those dictates had cost him. Including the lives of his wife and daughter. She supposed it was understandable, for someone who didn’t want to be shunned by her entire community, to pick her battles carefully. But it had led to her life on Niol being an isolated existence, with only a wall of old books, and a wise but taciturn grandfather for company.

“It was a deeply religious community,” Alex said out loud, to the counselor. “Seventy-five years ago, the original settlers established a colony Niol because, bluntly stated, they didn’t believe in technology. Or modern medicine, for that matter. They believed that both of those things are akin to human beings playing God. And there was no way they could have escaped them if they’d stayed on Earth. My grandfather was just a ten-year-old boy when he moved to Niol with his parents, so he didn’t really have much choice in the matter. But I’ve always believed he must have objected to their way of life even then. Maybe his father did, too. I can’t help but think that’s why he brought all the books I got my education from.”

She shrugged. “I suppose it really wasn’t so bad for the kids when they first arrived. Niol was beautiful when I lived there, but it must have been positively breathtaking to my grandfather as a boy, who had come from a modern, densely populated city on Earth. Large forests to go treasure hunting and play hide and seek in, lakes and streams so clear you could see the fish, flocks of birds everywhere, wide open spaces so unimaginably vast that you could fancy yourself alone in the universe if you just ran far enough. My grandfather told me they even had a school back then which taught things beyond Scripture.”

Alex closed her eyes briefly. “Things had changed by the time I was old enough for school. My grandfather wouldn’t let me go. He said they would just brainwash me. I suppose that might sound like he was paranoid, but frankly, I believe he was right. There is a reason so many members of my family died young, and it isn’t just bad luck. It’s because the Elders refuse to accept that sometimes, even if a higher power has decided to bring misfortune to someone’s doorstep, it’s OK to prevent it from doing its worst possible damage. Both my grandmother and my mother died in childbirth, one from postpartum haemorrhage and the other from a relatively benign infection. Problems that, as I learned later, we learned how to deal with quite effectively centuries ago. It wasn’t divine intervention that killed those members of my family. It was dogma.”

She fell silent, not knowing what more to say after that. She supposed the Counselor might assume now that she was bitter towards her fellow Niolians. She wasn’t. She knew they were acting in accordance with convictions they very strongly and sincerely held. She’d just always known, from the time that her grandfather had first started reading from his book collection to her, that those convictions weren’t hers. And that she would have to leave eventually.

Cadet Alex Winters, Doctor

Korczak listened and when she finished he looked at her for a few moments. Whatever was going through his mind didn’t give a single clue on his face. When he finally spoke, it was to ask a question, not to comment. “Are you religious, Cadet?”

Korczak, CNS