Deep Space Night Shift

Mundane Daily Details About Living On Deep Space Nine Station

[deepspacenightshift]

my replicator is broken

[bluebeetletedkord]

[deepspacenightshift]

People disagree about what is the heart of DS9 Station. 

Some say Ops, where the senior staff keep the station operational and safe, where the computer hums through the night.

Others say Quark’s—and not just the Ferengis who work there. The bustling atmosphere there is a microcosm of the station’s social aspect, and the excellent meals make the station feel more like home.

Some say the shrine—the Bajoran temple on the Promenade—is the heart of DS9. People take their deepest hopes and fears there, seek wisdom, pray for themselves and their family and DS9 itself. And what is more exemplary of DS9 Station, stopping-house of liminality and travel, than the Orb of Prophecy and Change?

[deepspacenightshift]

@time-schwime​ VALID

[deepspacenightshift]

The night shift is sad to announce that, given the coming of the war with the Dominion, this blog is on indefinite hiatus.

The war, although it’s not official yet, is taking the energy of everyone on the station. The night shift is worked to our limit, preparing, training, checking and honing the information and communication systems, shields, backup generators, and weapons, checking the shuttlecrafts and the Defiant, reinforcing the hulls and the fusion reactor and the warp cores, trying to calm spats that break out because of the tension. People are leaving the station, and we do not grudge them their movement. There is still joy here, and hope. We have shared that with others through this blog as long as we were able. But now the night shift cannot keep this up and maintain our health and sanity.

We are so very glad that our reports of life on DS9 have brought a little wonder or interest to those on Bajor, Federation and Klingon planets, Ferenginar, and starships of all kinds. We hope that we find a way to continue this again.

[deepspacenightshift]

Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax, the Trill science officer, brings joy to Deep Space Nine.

It’s hard to explain her effect. It’s not just that her smile and laugh are infectious— and she does smile and laugh a lot. Even when she’s sulking, there’s a tinge of humor to it, exaggeration, like she’s already thinking of the good story this will make. Her attitude is infectious. Just seeing her uniform or her spots will make DS9 residents suddenly remember a joke they heard or a bit of harmless gossip they wanted to share.

[deepspacenightshift]

A Human poet called Aaron Chaya came to Deep Space Nine and recited one of his poems on the Promenade.

I could only stay for part of it; I got called to help Ensign Thorek rewire the new ventral cell in Docking Bay 1. But I caught part of the poem, the phrase “deeply creatures”, and looked it up later.

“I always loved the window edge’s curve,

blocking the vastness of space from my view.

But space there is beyond it, and superhuman silences,

so very deep here in my brain I pretend

to be a star, bright and burning, and I set up my light

against the void, comparing them, and

I drown in the enormity of it, so very deep here in 

my heart I pretend to be a planet,

a water planet with eels and deeply creatures,

and an atmosphere pungent 

with the sea creatures’ breath, but my thought

dissipates in the atmosphere,

and sweet it is to shipwreck on this sea.”

[deepspacenightshift]

Humans eat ridiculously quickly.

Most species just arrange some fruit in a bowl or whip up a cake or make a loose salad of bugs, then take the time to really enjoy their meals. Humans are the exact opposite. When not using replicators, they take their sweet time to prepare food. They add flourishes and extra ingredients even to recipes they have memorized, agonize over how hot to set their cooking materials, make lots of sides, and use a plethora of containers, utensils, and measuring devices, but they devour the products of that labor in about 0.3 minutes.

They may become impatient with others when eating together. If you take a Human to eat on the Promenade, be careful to engage them in conversation so they don’t become bored while you finish your meal.

[deepspacenightshift]

Living on Deep Space Nine means not seeing your on-world or spacefaring friends and relatives grow and change.

You leave for a week, a month, a year at a time, and you come back and there are new stories, someone is married, there’s wrinkles around your father’s eyes, your sister’s room is spattered with unfamiliar pillows, the mountain moba trees blossomed while you were away, salam grass spread to the west pasture, the old pet died, there’s a replicator in the kitchen now, the temple has a new Vedek and they finished the series on Horran’s prophecies, your old prayer group is going through Zocal’s third, a mature confidence has usurped the anxiety in your cousin, her stride longer than you remember, the rock arrangement you made as a child finally succumbed to the wind, and when did it happen? When did it all happen?

[deepspacenightshift]

The most popular genre of holo-novel on Deep Space Nine right now is Space Pirate Romance, perhaps owing to the fact that Quark’s Bar got a bunch of Space Pirate holo-novels for cheap recently.

“Space Pirates” is a catchall term for pirates that prey on spacefaring vessels, usually involving scrappy renegade crews of Romulans, Ferengis, and Humans, with spicier things like Betazoids and ex-Borg thrown in for good measure.

You are either captured by Space Pirates or you start as one, although there’s a subgenre called “Space Prisoner” where you are some kind of official that captures or is put in charge of a (possibly reformed) Space Pirate or crew. Interestingly, you don’t actually have to do a romance plot to enjoy Space Pirate Romance holo-novels; they feature plenty of action and twists and pure chaotic fun without adding romance.

One of the popular tropes of Space Pirate Romance is “the universal translator is broken”, allowing the unusual experience of trying to communicate with the crew while only hearing their speech as unintelligible murmuring, roaring, chittering, and clicking.

The biggest draw might be the fact that ultimately, the Space Pirates are kind and good. No matter how odd-looking, how foreign, how initially cruel they seem, they always turn out to have—as Humans put it—“hearts of gold”.

[deepspacenightshift]

Someone stole a portrait of Surak from the Vulcan Embassy on Deep Space Nine yesterday.

The Vulcans lodged an official complaint and an official statement saying that they are “not angry” and wish only to be paid the exact amount of the portrait so they can replace it. The next paragraph explains that if anyone wants a portrait of Surak or other Vulcan notables, they should contact the Vulcan Embassy about it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the statement sounded almost pleased that someone would want a portrait of Surak.

[deepspacenightshift]

The night shift isn’t glamorous, but it’s a way to serve others.

Every time you come home at the end of a shift, you may be sore or grumpy, but you know that what you have done has helped people, and that is a deeply satisfying feeling. It’s not much, cleaning the spills in the Replimat, directing people to their quarters, feeding the plants in the tanks, recalibrating the ODN junctures, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s servanthood.

[deepspacenightshift]

Antidean transport ships have one and a half command sections due to their species’ long history with space travel.

Antideans know that they will be spacefarers for thousands more years, so they have contingencies for every outcome in all their vessels. This makes the ships a little blobby-looking, and they’re reportedly maze-like on the interior, but they beautifully. They have two warp cores in their warp-capable ships, their impulse power is very reliable, and each Antidean transport ship has a set of rocket thrusters for emergency use, as well as unparalleled life-support including suspension chambers for the ill or amphibious / water-dwelling species. Antidean transport ships can travel across a tenth of a quadrant before needing to stop and restock. The half-command section is for disguise, so that if a hostile enemy decides to open fire they will hopefully blow out the weak false command station. They then mask all their life signs, cut their engines, and float hoping that no one will bother scavenging them but preparing for hand-to-hand combat if they’re boarded.

An amazing species. It’s fascinating to meet so nomadic peoples aboard DS9.

[deepspacenightshift]

Deep Space Nine has something of the feeling of a soft snowstorm, a floating, liminal feeling. So few people are permanent. The wormhole opens and closes, opens and closes, ships slip by, days escape your grasp. You form more emotional attachment to the windows and the walls than to the living things passing through this small metal outpost of the wide universe.

[deepspacenightshift]

Sometimes you walk into a room and smell Cardassian. This can cause panic for some people, so be careful where you take guests.

Cardassians don’t sweat quite like completely mammalian species do, but their breath stinks. Whether this is natural or artificial, maybe for intimidation, it’s not known. Their military armor is a noxious amalgam of rubber, false leather, and metal. It’s a distinctive combination; people who lived through the Occupation of Bajor associate it with terrible things.

DS9 was scrubbed clean of Cardassian stench when Bajor claimed it, aside from the tailor shop and quarters where one still lives. However, it seems that the Cardassian smell sunk into the carpets, slunk into cluttered corners of docking bays, insinuated itself into the cracks between light fixtures and ceilings, pervaded the very metal of certain closets and access tunnels. DS9 doesn’t smell like Cardassians anymore, but when certain places are disused for long enough, that smell creeps out of its hiding places.

Smelling that unexpectedly can cause panic or overwhelm for survivors of the Occupation, so be careful where you take people. Disused rooms, enclosed corners, anywhere small with a carpet should be checked before bringing anyone in.

[deepspacenightshift]

It’s only a few days into the month of Tamhali, and already the Bajoran temple is packed.

In the Kendra, Musilla, and Lonar provinces of Bajor, there’s a mandatory two weeks off from schools and government jobs in Tamhali to give people time to relax and pray. It’s a good idea, but given that there are more months in the Bajoran calendar than provinces, it seems like they could have managed to do one month each to prevent temples from getting overrun.

Not that Vedeks or Ranjen or Prylar monks mind. For the most part, they have an extraordinary serenity, and the temples are good about making sure their servants don’t get burnt out.

[deepspacenightshift]

The Federation is never quite satisfied with its uniforms. They’ve gone through quite a few iterations historically, different colors and ornaments meaning different things every few decades. On Deep Space Nine at the moment, red uniforms indicate command, but in thirty or forty years red might indicate medical, or engineering. The shapes of the comm badges might be completely different in a hundred years, judging by how they’ve been morphing recently. Bajoran apparel doesn’t change like that, not that we have uniforms, exactly—the earrings are the closest equivalent, and even their designs change slowly, a hundred years passing before any change in meaning happens.

This evidences a greater truth. Bajoran history, up until the Occupation, tended towards slower movements than Federation history. Bajor has had its share of disasters and upheavals, but they have occurred on a much-expanded timescale. The Bajoran culture remains patient, resilient, slow to accept any new ideas, and highly conservative, unlike the impulsiveness of the leading cultures of the Federation—Human, Betazoid, and Andorian, to name a few, with Vulcan culture as a notable exception.

[deepspacenightshift]

“Knowing others makes profit; knowing yourself prevents losses.”

—Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 145

Grex, a famous Ferengi psychologist over a thousand years ago, made a lot of profit from that Rule, paving the way for many Ferengi psychologists and counselors to come. There is good documentation that Grex had a specialty gold-pressed latinum brick made to mount on the wall of his counseling office with Rule of Acquisition 145 embossed on it. A thousand years later, cheap imitations of Grex’s Brick abound in counseling offices all over the Alpha Quadrant, not all of them Ferengi.