Brooding [OTA]

[dr_arik_soong]

Near the habitat area there was a tired old man, sitting on a resting bench with his face in hands and trying so hard not to be daunted after giving up on trying to find the man he wanted to have a word with

Comments

[ladysallymcgee]

"You, sir, look as though you could use a drink." The accent was very upper-class British, the manner, very 'hooker with a heart of gold'." And it came from a red-head bombshell 'of a certain age' standing regarding him with her head to one side.

[dr_arik_soong]

He looked up from his mournful thoughts, to be pleasantly distracted by that woman of a certain age. And really, there were many ages that a woman could be damnably attractive, this was one of them.

"I could, probably," he said a bit more dimly than he intended. Allowing someone to know you were upset often exposed weakness, and he'd spent the last decade around people that wanted information. He was slipping. Badly.

[ladysallymcgee]

"Well, it just so happens that I know a good bar, a couple of them in fact, but my own is my favorite."

She offered him an arm.

[dr_arik_soong]

He stood, hooking his arm in hers and deciding sulking with a pretty red-head was better than sulking in a station hallway. "You have a bar here?"

[ladysallymcgee]

"Actually I have a bordello here, but it comes with a nice bar. I am Lady Sally McGee," she said as she led him toward 'Sally's Place."

[dr_arik_soong]

"I wasn't aware that there was one." If he had, he'd certainly have tried to alleviate ten years worth of time in a cell.

[ladysallymcgee]

"Didn't you? Perhaps I need to advertise." Sally ushered him through the rather plain ante-room, into the very luxuriously appointed parlor. Someone was playing ragtime on the piano, and two of her 'artists' were dancing the 'Black Bottom'.

She led him between the chess game and the cutthroat backgammon game and to the bar, which she slid behind with practiced ease.

"What will you have, sailor?"

[dr_arik_soong]

"Something with a bite in it. Whiskey, I guess." He leaned his arms on the bar, folding them and quietly watching the people playing the backgammon game. Normally he'd be attempting to regale his successes in saving the people aboard the station, trying to impress her. Trying to impress anyone.

He didn't really feel into it.

"I don't suppose you're a parent?" he asked.

[ladysallymcgee]

"I am, I have a daughter grown and married."

Hmm, 'a bite to it', the man said-- she poured him a shot of the 10 year old Ardberg single malt.

[dr_arik_soong]

That was exactly what he wanted. Something that made him inhale sharply after the drink and lose his sense of smell.

"I didn't get to see mine grow. I wonder how they would have turned out if I'd been there. I think some would have turned out good people..." he said, staring into the bottom of the freshly emptied shot glass as if it were a crystal ball; searching for some future that didn't happen.

He needed to be more drunk. The glass was slid back to Miss Sally.

[ladysallymcgee]

Sally poured another.

"That is the Hell and Heaven of children. Even under perfectly ideal, or perfectly adverse conditions they can turn out good or bad."

[dr_arik_soong]

"Or dead..." he said, accepting the new drink, and pursing his lips tightly.

"I actually have descendants aboard the station. Two great-great-grandsons and two great-great-great-grandsons. All androids... And it still seems like somewhere I went wrong on one of them."

[ladysallymcgee]

"Or dead," agreed Sally sadly. "I try never to forget how lucky I am in Mary." Androids, interesting.

"If the androids were programmed to learn, and to have their own will, it needn't have been you that went wrong at all."

[dr_arik_soong]

"I guess a 'will' is a little more sensitive when you're making it for someone. Like a quilt or a pair of booties and here is your 'will' to go along with it. You know. And the matching morality and sense of self-worth." He took that second shot, and noted the comfortably warm feeling settling into his stomach.

[ladysallymcgee]

"Any gift, life, will, a pair of booties, once it is given, what is done with the gift depends on the recipient. Booties are usually enthusiastically gummed and drooled on as I recall, which seems odd until one remembers how flexible babies are."

[dr_arik_soong]

"Imagine... nineteen of that. Nineteen squirming little balls of drool and giggling and diapers.... I ended up having to hire an Orion nursemaid to help me. Which wouldn't have been so bad, but she would shout in Orion whenever she got upset. I might as well have solicited the maternal instincts of a Klingon... Which is a warrior race." He made a vague round gesture, remembering that not everyone was local.