Poison

Posted on Fri Sep 23rd, 2022 @ 9:40am by Cadet First Class Pallas

Mission: The Goddess
Location: Ardana
Timeline: Flashback, Two Years Ago
636 words - 1.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Cadet Third Class Pallas sighed as she walked across the grounds of Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. She found a medium sized tree that was a bit off the beaten path, and therefore empty of other students. She pulled out her PADD as she leaned against the tree. She pulled up the voice journal and pressed record.

“Begin daily journal. Cadet Third Class Pallas, Starfleet Academy. My therapist suggested that I need to practice keeping a record of my thoughts and reflections. This is supposed to help me heal and deal with my trauma, so I will give it a try.

“Achel, my oldest brother, said to me, ‘Resentment is poison, but not for the person you hold the hatred… for yourself.’ I think I understand that intellectually, but it is a hard piece of advice to follow. There’s so much injustice in the galaxy… but I guess I say things that way because I don’t want to just focus on what happened to Ardana, or what happened to me. It feels selfish, but again, maybe I’m just saying that because holding onto resentment sometimes feels like the only way to hold into my past.

“Most of my course load is still all Engineering classes, but I pushed my guidance counselor to let me take a couple of extra classes over the summer and this semester. One of them is something called Intro to Xenoanthropology, which is a fancy way of saying the study of alien species. I guess the term is an old one from back when most warp capable species were still studying themselves. On a place like Earth, where it feels like they have enough cultures and different ways of living to fill a whole Quadrant, I can imagine that took up a lot of time. The introspection. Anyway, in this class we are learning about the wide variety of factors that can influence how a civilization develops on a planet: was sentient life seeded by a Precursor civilization? Did more than one sentient species develop on that planet? What were the environmental conditions of the planet and what types of non-sentient life existed on the planet? Did extraterrestrial phenomena impact the planet at key times in the development of the pre-warp civilization? How was first contact made? Etcetera.

“Something common that I found hit close to home was that the creation of artificial scarcity often coincided with the stratification of a civilization into castes. In other words, when some folks become greedy and put themselves above everyone else, and start hoarding resources or the best places to live or the ability to escape environmental dangers, well, then after a while they think that they *deserve* their unequal resources or safety. They think that the fact that they have stolen or killed or lied to get this stuff means that they *earned* it, and then they teach their kids and grandkids that they got where they are because they are *better* than the folks who don’t have this stuff. And eventually it turns into a genuine belief that they are morally or spiritually or even biologically *superior* to those who they have kept down.

“Well, my PADD recorder, that’s Ardana we are talking about in a nutshell, isn’t it?

“So I’m supposed to let go of the fact that even a century after the Great Disruption, you have the descendants of the Cloud Dwellers somehow have managed to maintain some benefits that the rest of us don’t have. I’m supposed to let go of my parents dying in the earthquake at Lejico, because the building we were in…?!”

Pallas choked on her words, and dropped the PADD on the ground. And then she dropped to the ground, fell back against the tree, and sobbed.