Boredom what next

Posted on Mon Jul 13th, 2026 @ 8:17am by Lieutenant JG Dan Murphy

355 words; about a 2 minute read

This interminable wait for the *Liberty’s* primary buffer containment recalibration is eroding what remains of my sanity. Six days of staring at maintenance schematics and listening to the rhythmic, soul-crushing hum of a space station’s life support systems has left me agitated. I’ve catalogued every historical anomaly in the surrounding sector—a trivial pursuit, really—and I find myself pacing the bulkhead with the restlessness of a caged Targ. My bones ache with the phantom weight of a dozen healed fractures, a physical testament to a career spent doing things the "hard way," and my mind is currently occupied with a burgeoning, perhaps ill-advised, desire to walk onto the bridge and explain to the Captain exactly why his current fleet-maneuver protocols are statistically inferior to the 22nd-century strategies used by the Andorian Imperial Guard. It is an itch under my skin, a compulsion to correct his tactical rigidity before it gets us all killed in a skirmish that hasn't even happened yet.

I know the risks—I’ve seen the inside of a courtroom enough times to know when a line is being approached—but restraint has never been my strongest suit when incompetence is permitted to flourish. I could rewrite the ship's entire standby-alert matrix in four hours, integrating a tactical flow that would make the *Intrepid*-class look like a shuttlecraft by comparison, but the protocol dictates I wait. Damned bureaucracy. If I don’t find a holodeck program that simulates a high-stakes flight simulation or a particularly gruelling game of Parrises Squares soon, I am liable to do something spectacularly stupid, like re-routing the station’s deflector array just to see if I can improve their scanner resolution. "Strive for excellence," they say at the Academy; they simply never mention that excellence is often rewarded with a demotion and a reprimand. I suppose I should brew some tea—Earl Grey, of course—and try to remember that not every tactical crisis requires a revolutionary, career-ending solution. But God help me, the Captain is wrong about the formation, and I have half a mind to tell him so by dinner.

 

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