Promises And Prisons

Posted on Jan 10, 2016 @ 4:33pm by Commander Jacob Crichton
Edited on on Jan 10, 2016 @ 4:33pm

Mission: Promethean

= Promises And Prisons =

(cont’d from “Seeing Double”)



Imagine you are Jake Crichton.

Your life begins more fortunately than many others. You’re born to a loving family, and taught a sustainable trade. You have the intelligence to make the most of your circumstances. You get along, more or less, with your parents, your brother, and the other members of your crew.

Life is a humble mining ship, on the outskirts of settled space. Life is working with your hands, and your head. Life is malfunctioning isolinear chips and loose coolant seals. Life is hyperspanners and phase compensators. Life is hard, but happy.

Then things change.

=[/\]=

LOCATION: USS PHOENIX
SCENE: Main Engineering

STARDATE: [2.16] 0110.1230

Jake Crichton stood before the master systems display, staring up at the holo-image of the Annabelle’s Lament. The brief sensor image they’d retrieved when the ship had dropped its shields was all they had to work with; Jake and Ensign John Maynell had been pouring over all the sensors data from the fleet looking for any additional images of the Lament, but so far they’d found none.

“Their approach must have been flawless,” said Jake. “No warp trace, no ion emissions, not even any sensor ghosts.”

“They knew what they were doing,” said Maynell. “If not for their ship getting irradiated when they dropped their shields, they could have come and gone and we’d never have known.”

“Metaphasic shielding,” Jake said, shaking his head. “It’s a risky maneuver. You get the oscillation frequency off by even a few points, you’d wind up microwaving your whole crew. Whoever these people are, they’re either very good or they’re eight shades of crazy. Probably both.”

“All this for medical records?” Maynell asked, turning from the display to look at him. “Why would anyone try something this dangerous for something so… well, worthless?”

“Best hypothesis is that they aren’t worthless,” Jake said. “They must have some value we don’t see. The captain has Dr. Foster coming up with a short list of possible uses, but from what I’ve heard, it’s shaping up to be a *really* short list.”

Jake deactivated the display, just as Lt. Cindy Rochemonte and Chaucer approached. Jake and Maynell each greeted them with a nod.

“Good news, Jake,” Cindy said. “Chaucer and I have found a way to compensate for the signal degradation we’d detected in the radiation trail. We’ve got a solid lock on their signal again. If they change course, we’ll know it.”

“Good,” Jake said.

“It was Chaucer’s idea,” Cindy said, turning to smile at the monolithic Gorn beside her. Chaucer did not react to this full share of the credit at first, but when Jake smiled at him, Chaucer gave a single, slow nod in response.

[[Help,]] Chaucer’s Vox said, his yellow eyes sliding over to look at Cindy. Jake took the gesture to mean that Chaucer was crediting Cindy for her own contribution.

“Nice work, both of you,” Jake said. “Whoever these thieves are, they’re not going to slip the net again.”

=[/\]=



Change comes in the form of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. Change comes with the death of your parents, and the enslavement of you and your brother. Change comes when your brother starves to death in the workcamps.

Your talents are recognized by your captors, and you’re given special treatment. You are given more rations, even as your brother becomes a walking skeleton. You try to feed him, and when you are caught, he is punished and you are made to watch. Eventually, he succumbs, and you are alone.

So you keep your head down. You work. You keep your eyes and ears open. Eventually, you escape. You escape because you are smarter than your captors. You escape because you know what you are good at, and you make the most of your gifts. Most of all, you escape because you’ve learned the only thing you can count on in this galaxy is yourself, and because you no longer care what happens to anyone else.

You organize a team of prisoners, those with skills that you can use. You exploit a weakness in the camp’s security and escape the detainment area. Then you sell out your compatriots. Security comes to round them up, and you use the distraction to escape. About the time they’re all being summarily executed, you are stealing a ship and making your escape.

Freedom tastes far too good to lose sleep over how you got it.

=[/\]=

LOCATION: USS PHOENIX

SCENE: Crichton’s Quarters



“A few more *weeks*?” Dahlia said, her eyes wide with disbelief.

“At most,” Jake said quickly. “It’s just a short detour, to track down-”

“But you said we’d be back to Earth soon!” Dahlia continued, apparently not appreciating the great pains Jake had taken to sound reasonable as he broke this news to his children. “You *promised*!”

“You promised,” Ben echoed quietly, his eyes on the floor. It broke Jake’s heart to see his son looking that way: not just disappointed, but disappointed in *him*.

“I know,” Jake said. “And I’m sorry. If I had my way, we’d be first in line on that wagon train back to Sol. But we can’t let whoever attacked us get away with what they stole. We don’t know what they want it for, but it can’t be good. And they’ve hurt people, besides.”

“Bad people,” Dahlia said, sinking into the couch with her arms folded obstinately across her chest, her lower lip poking out at perfect quivering distance.

“Not just bad people,” Jake said. “And anyway, even bad people deserve a trial. They don’t deserve what they got.”

“I don’t care,” Dahlia said, looking up at him fiercely. “You *promised*, Jake. You told us this would all be over after Elandipole. You said we’d be going home.”

“This *is* home,” Jake said, more sharply than he meant to. Dahlia met his gaze and didn’t even flinch.

“No it’s not,” she said defiantly.

“I miss mom,” Ben said, his voice quavering as though he were on the verge of tears. The sound of it deflated Jake’s irritated anger. He sighed, and his own eyes dropped to the floor, unable to hold up under the weight of Dahlia’s gaze.

“I’m sorry,” Jake said. “I miss your mother, too. I wish like hell she was here with us now. But… she’s not on Earth either. You understand that, don’t you?”

“She’ll come back,” Dahlia said, with the certainty of an 11 year old. “We have to be waiting for her when she gets there.”

“She’ll never find us out here,” Ben said. The boy was crying openly now. Jake could bear it no longer; he reached out and gathered his son up into a hug. His eyes drifted to Dahlia, hopeful that she would join them in the embrace, but Dahlia only sat on the couch, staring, her pouting lower lip aimed at him like a disruptor.

“It’s okay,” Jake said soothingly into his son’s ear. “It’s okay, Benny-Bill. I miss her too.”

“I want mom,” Ben sobbed against Jake’s neck.

“We’ll find her,” Jake said, with sudden fervor. He held his son out at arm’s length to look him in the eye. The boy’s pale blue eyes, so similar to Jake’s own, were watery with tears. “When all of this is over. When the Neo-Essentialists are gone, when Edgerton is under arrest, when it’s finally safe for us… we’ll find your mother. I swear.”

“Really?” Ben sniffed.

“I promise,” Jake said. His eyes looked at Dahlia from over Ben’s shoulder. Dahlia, it seemed, wouldn’t budge.

“You promised it would be over after Elandipole,” she said sulkily. Then without another word, she stood and left the room, leaving her brother and her stepfather behind her.

=[/\]=

Much to your chagrin, life doesn’t get any easier on the outside. Before, your captors were content to keep you fed, keep you warm, all for the sake of preserving your skills as an Engineer. You would fix the things no one else could fix, would find solutions no one else could find, and they’d pay you back with rations they’d stolen from someone else. Sure, there was the desperate wailing from the other prisoners late into the night, there were the cries of pain and the desperate prayers for help that would never come, but you could have gotten used to that, in the end.

But now, on the outside, you have to find your own food. You have to keep yourself warm. You still have your skills, and valuable skills they are to the right people, but now you’re competing with others for the same work. You manage to eke out a meager existence. You rely on booze and chems to keep your nights interesting (the nights you can remember, anyway), and on stims to perk yourself back up for the day’s labors. You learn to lie, to manipulate. You steal for food, not caring who goes hungry because of it. You even kill, never for pleasure, but for necessity. If someone is in your way, you remove them, because the alternative is death, and since the only thing left in the galaxy for you to care about is yourself, that’s an outcome you simply cannot countenance.

Eventually, you push your luck too far, and find yourself once more in chains. The bitch Daisy Davidson, a petty little pirate queen with delusions of grandeur, catches you unawares. You wake in a cell aboard her ship, the BFOV SHIV. You learn that she intends to keep you as her own pet Engineer, to fix all the problems she and the rest of her idiot crew cause themselves. You tell her exactly what you think about that idea, and she beats you into unconsciousness. When you wake up a day later, dried blood still caked around your broken nose, Davidson makes you the offer again. Once more, you refuse, and once more you are beaten, savagely, even more savagely than your worst days in the prison camps. Eventually, racked with hunger and fear, you give in.

She treats you well enough, when you obey. It’s actually not so different from your time in the prison camp. You skills make you valuable, and as long as you apply them at her direction, your life is comfortable, if not happy. That’s okay. You haven’t known happiness since your parents were killed all those years ago. But the one thing you can’t help is being yourself. When you get comfortable, you get mouthy. You underestimate how dangerous Davidson is. You talk back. You make trouble. You are openly insubordinate.

Then, one day, Davidson reminds you of the circumstances of your life aboard her ship. She does this by cutting out your left eye, while you’re awake.

You feel everything.

=[/\]=

LOCATION: USS PHOENIX

SCENE: Turbolift

The kids were in bed. Dahlia was old enough now that Jake could trust her to keep an eye on Ben when Jake wasn’t around, and the ship’s internal security would prevent them from getting into too much trouble anyhow, but Jake didn’t like the way it felt, slipping out of his quarters like a thief stealing off into the night. He had to take his night-watch shift on the bridge, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was running away.

Dahlia was right. He *had* promised his children this would be over after Elandipole. He’d done it in good faith, of course, he had every expectation things might finally start getting back to normal. The fleet had been reunited, the Neo-Essentialist conspirators had been exposed and taken into custody. All that remained was to return to Earth and finish cleaning house. Seeing Edgerton taken away in chains would do his heart some good.

But then came the attack on the fleet, and once more Jake Crichton’s duty had pulled him away from the promise of home, of safety, of stability. Worse, it had pulled his children away, too.

He didn’t have any serious concern for their safety. They’d already gone through so much just getting to this point, and his kids had come through it all with no injuries, no lasting trauma. Rounding up a few scofflaws couldn’t be any more dangerous than their visit to LIMBO, or their trek through the Hyperion Expanse. But Jake had started to see how this life had begun to wear on Dahlia and Ben. It had been a marvelous adventure at first, but then the reality of spending every day, for weeks on end, aboard the same ship, walking the same halls, seeing the same people, began inevitably to wear them down. Jake loved the PHOENIX, as he loved every ship he had served aboard, but even he had to admit it paled in comparison to the open spaces of the Bonviva Villa back on Earth. Their home in Italy was full of love and warmth, full of Xana… the PHOENIX was a cold, silent place by comparison. Jake could be happy here, but he was starting to suspect his children could not. Not forever, anyway.

And of course, there was Xana. There was still no word from the Bolian Front. Jake only had the story that Alex Towers had told him to go on. He believed he would know if Xana had died - their bond had weakened with distance and time, as it had before, but it hadn’t disappeared altogether - but her absence in his life had grown red and raw, like a wound that just couldn’t heal. He believe in the work the PHOENIX was doing, believed in Starfleet and the Federation, but there came a point when he had to admit that letting his wife run off to a warzone while he stayed behind in (relative) safety made him feel like a shit. He knew that it’s what Xana had wanted, that she didn’t want their children to be exposed to the things she would see on the front, but in the months that had passed since she’d left, that knowledge had become cold comfort.

Jake sipped at his thermos of coffee, grateful for the bitter warmth of his drink. He couldn’t spend all night moping in front of the bridge crew, after all. The turbolift slowed to a halt, and the doors parted. Aerdan Joss stood up from the Captain’s Chair and turned to smile at him.

“Mr. Crichton,” the Andorian nodded. “You’re here to relieve me?”

“Aye sir,” Jake said. “Got my coffee, got my game face, and I’m ready to take over.”

“I stand relieved,” Jos said. He came over to where Jake was standing, near the turbolift.

“Anything I should know?” Jake asked.

“All systems nominal,” Jos said. “We’re still tracking the radiation signature. Lt. Byte believes we are closing the distance, but it’s unlikely we will overtake them before they reach their destination.”

“So just steady as she goes, then,” Jake said. “I can do that.”

“You have my every confidence,” Jos said. “Are you alright, Commander? You seem distracted.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, sir,” Jake said. “Had to break the news to my kids about this detour. They had their hearts set on seeing Earth again, and they didn’t react very well when I told them about this delay.”

“Children are resilient,” Jos said. “And changeable. They won’t hate for this, even if it seems like they do now.”

“I know,” Jake sighed. “But… they have a point. None of this has been their fault, but they’ve had to pay so much of the price for it. Leaving their home behind, losing their mother, living with the threat of Edgerton and everything else we’ve run into out here…”

“None of that is your fault either, Jake,” Jos said. “Edgerton has hurt a lot of people. More than even he knows. Your children included.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “And I want to see him pay for everything he’s done. I want to be there when they slap the cuffs on him. I want to stare at him in a courtroom, like he did to me before tossing me in that stockade. But my kids… they just want to go home, you know?”

“We’re almost there,” Jos said, placing a reassuring hand on Jake’s shoulder. “You’ll take your children home again, Jake. I promise.”

=[/\]=

The trauma of losing your eye is enough to cow you, at least for awhile. But then, something occurs to you: Davidson daren’t go any further. She still needs you, needs your skills and your knowledge. She’s hurt you more fundamentally than anyone before you ever had, even the jailors who made you watch your own brother waste away. But she can’t do any more. Take the other eye? She’d leave you blind, unable to work. Take a hand, or even some fingers? Maybe, if she was angry enough or drunk enough… but then what? How could she escalate from there?

She can’t kill you, not until she finds someone better, and you know that’s not likely to happen, not in the circles she travels. And so, gradually, your tongue loosens up, You become even more insubordinate. You get mouth, you talk back. She beats you, insults you, does everything she can to break you down, but in the end both of you understand she’s played her last card.

You refuse to wear an eyepatch, preferring to keep your gaping socket exposed as a constant reminder of how she overplayed her hand. Davidson hates this, but she tolerates it. She has no choice. You still do the work - it’s your ship now too, after all, and if it explodes it will take you along with it - but the fear of her is largely gone.

Then the bitch’s delusions of grandeur take hold again, and she’s telling you about her crazy scheme. She tells you there are other universes, soft places ripe for the picking. She tells you she’s heard of a way to cross over. You’re not sure if you believe what she’s said about other places, other wheres and whens with some other Jake Crichton might be, living out the life you were denied, but you go along with the plan. You don’t really have any choice. And to your surprise, Davidson is right. You cross over, and you find yourself.

You find a Jake Crichton unmarred by fate or circumstance. You find a Jake Crichton, strong and handsome and whole. Nobody killed his parents in front of him. Nobody starved out his brother while he was made to watch. Nobody held him down and cut out his eye.

You hate him. There is no choice but to hate him. You hate the very *idea* of him.

You’re the real Jake Crichton. Because if you’re not, what are you? All those things, all those horrible things you’ve seen and done, all the pain you’ve endured and caused… they’re more than just the dark reflection of another man’s life. They matter, dammit, they matter far more than whatever petty challenges this other man, this other Jake, may have endured. His life is a charmed one, full of love and laughter and, most of all, hope. And you hate him for that.

There was no hope for you. There was no Federation to give you purpose. There were no beautiful blue sluts waiting to climb into bed with you. There were no friends, no family. Back on your side of reality, there was only aimless pain, waiting eagerly for your return. You resolve to never go back.

Davidson was never smart. She picks a fight she can’t win, and her whole crew is taken into custody, you included. Life in a cell is the best you can hope for even on this side, it seems. But then the news comes down. Jake Crichton - the other Jake, that soft man with the life you’ll never have - has only gone and gotten himself into trouble. And they need someone who knows what they’re doing to go and bail him out.

You could care less what happens to him. In fact, you’d prefer it if he died slow; that, at least, would appeal to your warped sense of what’s fair. But your hate of this other Jake is not so great that it has eclipsed your own sense of self-preservation. Your Federation captors offer a reduction of your sentence if you help their precious flower. And so you help. The other Jake is smart, like you. He’s talented and educated, like you. This only makes you hate him more. But still, you help.

Later, when the other Jake comes to gawk at you in your cell, to actually *lecture* you about the choices you’ve made, you let him have it. You tell him what you think of him, of his whole damn universe. You tell him how things really are, and exactly how low he himself would stoop if he hadn’t been given every advantage in the world. He leaves, and does not come back, and once again you are imprisoned.

This prison is softer than the first one you were held in. Everything on this side of reality is softer. There are no beatings in a Federation prison. Nobody starves. They even try to *rehabilitate* you, whatever the hell that means. You play along. It makes things easier. You keep your head down. You keep your eyes and your ears open.

And then, like before, you escape.

Your life becomes much like it had been before. Even this soft reality has its hard edges, and you waste no time in finding them. You drown yourself in booze and chems. You take jobs without looking too closely at them. You don’t care who gets hurt along the way; you only care about keeping yourself warm and fed and drunk. And you vow to never be anyone’s prisoner again.

Eventually, you take a posting aboard a ship called the Annabelle’s Lament. Your new captain, Cassidy Rainner, is a real piece of work. She hits you, she calls you names, but you doubt she’ll ever go as far as Davidson did. People in this universe just can’t commit like the ones back home. So you endure. You mouth off. Sometimes you’re openly insubordinate. But you do the work, because it gets you paid.

And then, you find out he’s back. The other you, the other Jake. Seems unlikely, in a galaxy as wide as this one, but somehow you always knew it would happen. Because as long as that other Jake exists, you’re a prisoner. You’re living in his shadow, in the shadow of a life that should have been yours. You exist only as a dark reflection of him. And your hatred only grows.

You vowed you would never be a prisoner again. Perhaps the time has come for that conviction to be put to the test.

=[/\]=

Shawn Putnam

a.k.a.

Jake Crichton

Chief Engineering Officer

USS PHOENIX