Eve

Authored by Sharon Miller

Character Biography

Timeline

• Inception date - 2325
• Death of Dr. Malcolm Weaver - 2332
• Eve leaves Osira VI - 2382
• Eve graduates from Starfleet Academy - 2385
• Rogue synthetics attack Mars and Utopia Planitia shipyards, leading to a ban on synthetic lifeforms - 2387
• Current year - 2395

Background

It was raining again. It had been doing that a lot recently, water droplets hammering against the windows of her small dwelling. That meant she wouldn’t be able to go out again. Eve let out a sigh. She hated being trapped inside, all alone. Her emotion chip triggered the usual feeling of loneliness and isolation that had been flooding through her circuits almost constantly since Malcolm had gone. She didn’t have the necessary programming to fully comprehend what the feeling meant, but she knew that it was like an emptiness, as if someone had removed a portion of her inner mechanisms and left in their place a gaping hole. One that made her feel…bad.

It had been this way for so long that she was surprised she could recall any other way of being, but still the memories refused to be wiped from her cortical circuitry. She could still recall his face, as clear as if he were standing next to her. Malcolm, her creator, her partner, her one and only friend.

He’d made a promise that, before his end came, he’d deactivate her, but the illness had left him incapable of caring for himself and he’d needed her right up to his last breath. In his final moments he had attempted to access her primary circuit, but the blindness and the semi-paralysis in his hands had made the task impossible. “I’m so sorry,” had been his last words to her before the life had finally left his body.

She had wished for an end to her suffering every single day of the fifty years that had passed since, but just as her programming had restricted her from doing harm to another sentient being, it had also prevented her from doing the kindness of terminating her own existence. And so she had remained, all alone, the only sentient being on the entire planet, to live out her days in endless and unendurable solitude, no purpose now that she did not have a master to serve, no reason to exist save for her own torture.

===

“Commander, I’m reading a lifeform inside.”
“Dr Weaver? Surely he must be dead by now.”
“I’m not sure, Sir, but…it doesn’t appear to register as human.”

The men in black and coloured jumpsuits burst through the door of her dwelling, some kind of strange, metallic object in their hands. She recalled instinctively that Malcolm had possessed a similar-looking object, locked away in his desk drawer. “For protection,” he had told her once. She hurried now to retrieve it, bursting in on the men with the object gripped tightly in her hand, her finger instinctively depressing the trigger as a bright beam of light shot out of the end, almost causing her to drop the weapon in surprise, just managing to hold on to it and direct the beam into the chest of the nearest intruder.

A second beam of light struck her own chest and she stumbled backwards in alarm, before she was set upon by the two remaining standing, arms reaching out on both sides to restrain her and drag her, screaming and kicking, outside into the open, to be engulfed by a strange, shimmering light. For a terrifying fraction of a second it felt as if time had stood still and the universe ceased to exist, before she was overcome by an unfamiliar tingling sensation and slowly, a room appeared before her eyes.

===

“I don’t understand what you are saying,” Eve insisted, her voice taking on the quality of someone afraid.
“You are an android,” the man in front of her repeated.
“What is an…and-roid?”
The man exchanged a glance with another to his left, who simply shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe she doesn’t know.”
Buttons were pressed on a console and seconds later an image appeared on a screen in front of her.
“Malcolm!” she called out.
“You know this man?”
She nodded.
“Doctor Malcolm Weaver, brilliant engineer, created a new breed of androids to work as service models on starships and in private dwellings. Was exiled to live on an abandoned planet in the Osira system when several of his androids attempted to take over a starship, seemingly ordered by him to do so,” the man intoned.

Eve had no reaction to this information. It meant nothing to her. She had been born on Osira 6 and knew Malcolm only as a father, a teacher, a lover and a friend.

The men began to talk amongst themselves in quiet whispers. “What shall we do with her?” seemed to be the most repeated phrase.

===

Eve had remained on the USS Explorer for several months while they made their way back to Earth and in that time had displayed exceptional skills in engineering and the sciences. So much so that, upon their return to Starfleet Headquarters, Captain Nicholas had ‘pulled some strings’ as he called it, and managed to secure her a place at Starfleet Academy.
There she had gone on to become one of their brightest students, although the realisation that there was a whole universe, full of other sentient lifeforms, away from Osira 6, was one that she wondered if she’d ever manage to fully come to terms with. Her friends, as they called themselves, said she was shy and naive. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but they said it with such a regularity that she presumed it must be true.

===

The separation from her friends at the Academy had re-awakened in her that feeling of loneliness that, for a while, she had believed to be gone. It had taken her so long to find the few people she could relate to…or more specifically, could relate to her. And now, she had been handed her first assignment on a starship a million miles from where they were heading. Sitting in the small passenger shuttle as she made the journey over she found herself wondering if she had the strength to form friendships anew once more. She wished, as she did every day, that Malcolm was here with her.