He's Dead, Jim: Ballad of a Redshirt

There was a significant gap, or so I grew up believing, between our ages, my brother and me.  It kept growing, the older we got, seeming less when we were younger, more, later.  When he successfully enrolled in the fleet, I was still in high school, and he was already aboard the flagship as I continued my education at Coon Prep, counting down the days to graduation.  And he just kept stealing all the attention, up to and including the day we were informed of his death.

     My name’s Donny Silo.  It seems crass, even to me, still living down a relic of an imagined rivalry, to continue thinking of it that way, given what happened, and my attempts to make sense of it.  I continued chasing him, right into the fleet, doggedly pursuing the same path, never failing to mention my ambition to serve aboard the flagship, always hearing all about my big brother, never feeling worthy, never having found out anything about his actual service, until the day I was given the assignment.  Well, both of them, including the red shirt.

     Red shirt, as in security.  Engineers and communications also wore red shirts, while command wore yellow, and the sciences blue.  My red shirt could’ve come up with any number of duties, but mostly it was waiting around to be needed, waiting and listening.  Everyone talked about my brother.  Not the captain, not the doctor, and certainly not the alien (I don’t mean to sound xenophobic or anything, but aboard that ship, while I was there, anyway, everyone else was human, and it was just the one alien, and the way I heard it, even he was half-human, though you wouldn’t know it by how he behaved), not the holy trinity of elites aboard…But everyone else?  They loved my brother.  He was a legend.

     He was also, as I believe I’ve already stated, quite dead. 

     All the security officers volunteered for missions aboard this ship.  They were eager, I guess, to share time with the trinity, desperate to prove they were worthy to be there, too, just as brave, or maybe even more brave, than even the captain, who didn’t need to expose himself to so much danger, so much unknown, to the mysteries of space, and all the variables of civilization we were meant to explore, along with the stars, and yet kept doing so, every chance he got.

     A lot of security personnel chased this dream to their deaths, my brother among them.  There was a legend that the doctor had grown so inured to this constant stream of death he merely stated the fact and they all moved on, until the mission was completed, enemy conquered, friend made, the fleet once again made safe for the future of humanity (and everyone else).

     The rest of the crew wasn’t so resilient, I guess.  They came up with all manner of explanations, and there were memorials to all the fallen, and my brother was prominent among them.  This time it wasn’t just me; in the mess hall even when I wasn’t there they talked about him, and I’d hear about it in the corridors, in the lifts, in the sickbay, the armory…everywhere.  No, the big three didn’t think much about him, but everyone else did. 

     And it had nothing at all to do with how he died, or his willingness to volunteer, although he’d racked up an impressive forty-seven missions in his time, including the last one. 

     No, he treated everyone with respect, with dignity, he took others under his wing, even when his mood was dark, which apparently had been often, or so it seemed, and he was difficult to be around…He never stopped taking the job seriously, though, and when he was gone, they all knew because suddenly there was so much more work to do…A hole to fill, a void.

     Tough shoes.  I wasn’t up for it, and nobody expected me to, either, but they were happy to see me, because I was his brother, and for a little while it was easier to forget what they’d lost.

     The longer I stuck around, the more I saw past the illusion, found my real brother, the one I’d never allowed myself to meet, the one they never talked about.  Most of his missions were grunt work, no danger at all.  He’d merely showed up.  He was easy to take for granted, until he wasn’t there anymore.  They didn’t miss him; they missed him taking up the slack.  Well, honestly, that ended up how I viewed it, anyway.

     It didn’t seem so glamourous anymore, this flagship.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I applaud the heroics of the captain, and his best friends, I see what they contribute, what they mean to the fleet, to everyone, to all the people who will probably never even hear of him, even though to those who work under him, he’s inescapable.  Ask anyone in my hometown, they’ll remember my brother as well as anyone who ever met him, but the captain?  Not a chance. 

     Which is how I’m going to try and start thinking about it.  In the end, you have the friends you make, but you will always have your family.

     I started putting my name up for missions.  I’d avoided it, afraid I’d meet the same fate, how my brother died, all those faces up on the wall, the ones the officers in the other colors never even think about, or so it seems.

     The alien, when I boarded the shuttle, asked me some questions about the mission, nothing personal (although even with his friends he never seemed overly involved, except to acknowledge the implied intimacy, the only thing he shared with the doctor, the name they used to refer to the captain, which no one else did), and I checked my equipment, just to look busy, and when we landed on the surface of the planet for this assignment, I headed out immediately on my own, which I thought of as taking initiative, but was really what all the red shirts do. 

     And I walked around, took scans, secured perimeters…and that was it.  I never saw the big trio, until it was time to head back, and I listened to their banter, and that was it.

     At the debrief, they never so much as called on me, and I was a bit player, and I wondered, for the first time, if that was how my brother felt, which I had never before considered.

     Actually, it was kind of comforting.

     Then I waited to do it all over again.  I didn’t plan on putting my name up for the next one, or maybe I would simply be assigned, and anyway, it didn’t matter.  I headed to sickbay for the obligatory post-mission physical.  The doctor was there, and while he didn’t take charge of my examination, he nodded in my general direction, and when it was over, stopped by and asked why I looked so familiar, and I muttered my brother’s name, and he paused a moment, dropped his head, and then looked me in the eye.  He didn’t have to say anything.

     In that moment I found peace.