An Analysis by Andromeda
By: X
X0832001@yahoo.com
Rated G
Summary: Andromeda explains her view of the crew
"I am the ship; Andromeda Ascendant. I am always watching and learning. I monitor only for security purposes of course. But I know a lot more than they realize. You'd be surprised how often people forget to engage privacy mode.
Even our little mystery, the gold Trance isn't always private. Did you know her pupils dilate 2.8mm when she sees a certain tow headed engineer? I think we all know what that means.
Some things I see are more secret. Did you know Harper prays every night? He gets down on his knees, among the bits and pieces of machine parts and begs to let this last. He prays for protection for Dylan, Beka, Trance, even Tyr and me. He prays that he won't have to burry any more friends. His quarters are on a deck 2 below everyone else's. I had assigned them to him because it was closer to the engine room and machine shops. Also he seemed very untrustworthy and I wanted to be able to isolate him. What do you expect? I'm always ready for an attack; I am a warship after all. I'm glad I did because his other secret is he has quite a set of lungs. When he wakes up screaming from nightmares, I'm not sure soundproof walls can muffle that sound.
Beka sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, desperate for Flash. She gets halfway to the door and sees the picture of the crew she has strategically positioned there to remind herself of what she'll be throwing away. So far, she's gone back to her bed every time.
Some secrets I'd rather not know. Tyr sings old Earth opera in the shower. It is disturbing to see a naked Neitzchien singing about his love, Yolanda, and how he will die right now if she is not on the boat. Something about "what color is the sail?" It is very disturbing.
I watch my crew very carefully. The mere mortals that walk my halls now show me things I hadn't noticed about my last crew. There were so many to worry about then. Now there are only 5. So I watch them more closely.
Scars are funny things. I like to look at them. I am a warship and they are battle damage. They are little marks left on your body by things that have happened to you. They are souvenirs of lapses in judgment, past fights, or bad luck. Almost everyone on this crew has them. Trance doesn't appear to scar, not that I am surprised. Some scars are minor; Dylan has a thin, dark line bisecting the tip of his right index finger. The Commonwealth was such a fastidious organization when it came to record keeping that this distinguishing mark was noted and explained. Dylan was a clumsy Boy Scout, cut his finger with a pocketknife when he was 10. One lapse in judgment and now he carries that mark forever. Beka grew up a tom boy and has the faint trace of a scrape just under her knee, a burn across 3 fingers that has faded to barely detectable, to prove that. My own avatar has a seam in her fake flesh where Harper melted her back together after the Maggog had pined her to the wall. Tyr has been in fights. Some appear to have been slightly more successful than others. The back of his neck is scared. Hidden behind that mountain of hair is a patch of paler skin, the remembrance of a burn most likely. Pencil line thin is the line of Trance's incision that saved his life. 4 inches long, just to the right of his navel, she pulled out the wriggling larvae one by one. Harper has the most battle damage. Dulled with time are the skinny white lines that score his back between the shoulder blades, gifts of the Neitzchiens back on Earth I think. More vivid are the tracks made by Maggog claws. They stretch their thick pink lines around his ribs to the midline. They'll gray in time though.
It's what scars do. They fade and when you look at them you remember how you got them. When I look at my crew's scars I remember how fragile they are. The little beings that dwell within my walls get hurt. Every time Harper changes his shirt, which I would like to add should be more often because stains bother me. No one in the High Guard left stains on their uniforms, completely unacceptable. Harper in his single mindedness will leave all sorts of things marring his shirt. But, I shall regress back to the topic at hand, when Harper changes his shirt and I can see the claw marks, I remember how close we came to loosing him, and Tyr, and Dylan and my avatar. All could have died; we did use a Nova bomb after all. It would have been quite a loss. This thought terrifies my avatar.
She is becoming more and more human everyday. After the disobedience during the zombie incident I cut off Harper's hot water for 3 days. Why did he make her? I / we, don't need a human body. Sometimes it is handy, I will admit that, but the more human she becomes the more flawed she becomes. I do not like flaws. Her emotions are swallowing her up, clouding her judgment. That worries me.
I do like the crew despite its flaws. In the beginning I didn't trust them. They had tried to take control of me if you recall. I accept them now, but stand by what I said to Dylan though. We shouldn't like them so much. We should have stayed detached; it would have made us stronger. Us verse them, like when we first came to in this time. We watched them, divided and concerned. Then we made the mistake of integrating the criminals into our crew. Now we risk life and limb for them, worry about them. Another flaw"