Of all the programs, subroutines and algorithms coded into Eve’s neural network, the one skill she had always desired was the ability to understand, and to reciprocate, humanoid emotions. It remained, often, a puzzle to her why certain individuals chose to react as they did to a given situation or stimulus. For example, an event that had occurred thousands of light years away and in a different quadrant, had seemingly engendered in others an epidemic of suspicion, even fear, towards all who were of a non-biological nature. Even when those synthetic individuals possessed no connection to the event at all.

Her internal dictionary identified it as ‘prejudice’ - an opinion or attitude towards an individual based not on direct experience or interaction with that individual, but rather on their perceived membership of a particular group or adherence to a particular ideology.

Eve did not know the identity of the androids who had perpetrated the attacks on Mars and Utopia Planitia. Her assistance or counsel had not been sought on the matter and she received no orders to participate in the event. In fact, when the universal declaration as to the illegality of synthetic individuals was made, Eve’s own limited technological specification saw her placed wholly outside of the targeted group. It had even been rumoured by some that the Romulan Fleet Captain, Drudoc Andone, had been instrumental in determining and maintaining Eve’s ongoing status as a legal entity.

But irrespective of these facts, the demarcation of the pre and post-event timelines, on the historical record of her existence, was marked so indelibly that she considered it a physical scar. In statistical comparison to her 70 year lifespan thus far, the 2 years (or 3.2258 percent) spent on her first, post-graduation, assignment on the USS Draco, was so brief as to be almost insignificant. And yet, for reasons she could not identify with any precision, other than that the memory itself brought her comfort, it remained the most frequently accessed record in her archival database. It was a time when Eve was still seen by her crew as a curiosity, brilliant in engineering matters, indispensable when armed with a hyperspanner and yet still endearingly innocent in matters of human socialisation. It was a time when those around her were eager to help her learn and longed to be her companion, her friend or her lover. But the curse that struck in 2387 changed everything. The post-event timeline was defined by paranoia and suspicion, by a gradual and yet almost physically painful withdrawal from her company by those who previously had wanted nothing more than to orbit her like a thousand planets around the brightest, most brilliant star.

Subsequent postings saw her assigned duties become increasingly restricted. Once a key member of any away team, now it was often claimed that to have the android participate could herald more dangers than the mission itself. Eve constantly failed to understand this almost isotropic change in opinions towards her, but even the most crushing rejections from her peers remained preferable to the complete isolation of her early years. And so she endured, faked observation failures toward the whispers and the taunts, the glances…even the openly spoken objections to her continued existence.

And then, in 2393, Eve met Drudoc Andone. It remained unspoken between them, at that time, how hard the Romulan had fought to have Eve assigned to her crew on the USS Ark Angel. And yet, the android noted multiple examples of the Fleet Captain’s protective and nurturing actions towards her. Under Andone’s tutelage, Eve once more embraced her capacity for self-learning and allowed herself to record a belief in being considered an equal member of the team. But as always, the shadow soon began to loom like an artificial singularity and, fearing that yet another group of friends would find themselves turning against her, for the second time in her Starfleet career, Eve abandoned her post and disappeared into the night, a virus wiped clean by a more efficient, and more capable, machine.

===

She possessed no abilities for prediction or prophesy and so the call to return to the Ark Angel had been wholly unexpected. A…surprise, she believed human parlance would declare it. For eighteen months, three weeks and four days she had wandered across the beta quadrant, from starship to starbase in turn, in an effort to secure further employment. But the legend of Eve, the android who remained, possessed more expediency than her small craft could obtain. And one by one, each and every door was closed upon her. Until she found herself at Starbase 243 and was offered a position appropriate to her current status - housekeeper. In a repetition of the routines she had performed for 50 years, alone on the planet Osira VI, Eve cleaned floors and surfaces, disposed of meal trays and recycled debris. In an effort to conserve internal processing power, her self-learning routines were completely shut down. If there was to be no further development of her abilities beyond clearing tables a fraction of a nanosecond faster, or sorting trash with 0.02 percent higher precision, then the android decided an intelligent appraisal of her current circumstances was simply too painful to withstand.

Then came the message from Andone. Eve scanned the text precisely three-hundred and seventy-six times before accepting it as genuine. But genuine it appeared to be, and Eve, it also appeared, was once more destined to return to her former crew on the USS Ark Angel, not as a housekeeper but as an engineer. If a machine held the capacity for tears then in that moment, Eve had a trace belief that she would have cried enough to fill a thousand oceans. As it was, she simply allowed the corners of her lips to raise two millimeters on each side and then, with more speed than she had cleared any of the tables in the starbase mess hall, packed her bag and made her way to docking bay 6.

Stepping once more onto the massive Mythology-class explorer provoked an unidentified response from the android. It felt…familiar, like…coming home. Within a nanosecond the sensation was replaced by the recurrent fears of how this current crew might once more view a synthetic being placed amongst them. Would she once again be met with suspicion and mistrust? There was, as humans curiously liked to state, only one way to find out. So with that, Eve brought online the vocal module unused for the last eighty-two days and, with volume set to an optimal level, she called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

• Eve (Eng)

OOC: Feel free to come and say hi, anyone :)