Tumaini Calumn

Early Life

Excerpt from the personal logs of Ensign Tumaini Calumn, Law Student:
“No one can tell me much about what I was like as a child. Some days I accept that they honestly can’t remember and there are other days when I wonder if they choose ignorance. There’s a scant few anecdotes my family tell. The same stories get trotted out at birthdays and funerals; they never change much in the telling, but the canon is contradictory. My mother remembers me as being one for solitude. I question how reliable she is as a narrator. By the time she birthed me —amid my sisters- she didn’t take much time away from her starship design work. She was home every night for a sit-down meal, but she didn’t stray much from her routine. Dahmnait remembers me as being a master of the punchline. I would do anything for a joke, the way she tells it. But mostly, she tells of how I would steal focus from her. If I concentrate very hard, father can project a feeling in my head, and that feeling is what I was like when I was very young.

“I don’t remember any of the facts from my childhood. I can’t say I remember the experience of what it felt like to be a child.”

Excerpt from the counselling sessions of Tumaini Calum’s Starfleet Academy entrance exams:
“Although telepathy is the primary mode of communication for many on Betazed, the ability doesn’t develop in us until puberty. It can be a frightening and unsettling time to suddenly have thoughts and feelings intruding within your mind. You know they don’t belong to you, but you don’t know what they mean or where they came from. It’s one more change to struggle through, during all the other changes that come with adolescence.

“My telepathy developed when I was five years old. The onset of my telepathy was faster and stronger than for most of my kind. Since my perceptions and my cognition weren’t ready for telepathy, I didn’t understand what was happening. My parents didn’t recognize the symptoms. According to the intake records of the Loneel Wellness Centre, the disturbances were minor to begin with. I spoke of seeing figures in my peripheral vision. The figures were indistinct, shadowed, but they had humanoid forms. Unlike most, I interpreted my telepathic input as visual input. Evidently, this went on for months.

“From there, the symptoms presented more like hallucinations than like early-onset telepathy. I complained of strangers looking at me and judging me at all times and eventually I began seeing things that had no clear origin in external stimulus. I had no control over my telepathy, and by the time my health care providers accurately diagnosed my condition, I had lost all awareness of my physical surroundings. The telepathic inputs overwhelmed my mind and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I take it as a blessing that I have little to no memory from before I was thirteen years old.”

Excerpt from the counselling sessions of Starfleet Cadet Tumaini Calumn:
“My family immigrated to the Federation Colony on Berengaria VII in 2372. I was only released from the inpatient program at the Loneel Wellness Centre because of the efficacy of an experimental treatment regimen. The treatment not only suppresses my paracortex, it totally and utterly inhibits its operation. I have no telepathic ability at all. (In fact, my ongoing use of the medication appears to be causing permanent damage to my paracortex…) That drug was the only method to break through my catatonic state for more than a few days at a time. I don’t think my father has ever forgiven my mother for making that decision without him. I don’t know that I can totally forgive him for that.

“Together, my parents and my sisters decided to move off Betazed. I can’t remember who said what now, but the consensus was that I needed to learn verbal and written communication from peoples for whom those were their first languages. They assumed educating me among telepaths would impair my communication skills if I was mind-blind to what was being communicated through telepathy. We packed up and we left behind our homestead. The foundations of that house had been in my mother’s family for seven generations. I didn’t properly appreciate what they left behind until the Jem’Hadar came to Betazed and our family home was reduced to a crater.”

Starfleet Academy

Excerpts from the personal logs of Ensign Tumaini Calumn at the Starfleet School of Law:
“By the last two times I applied to Starfleet Academy, I had lost all hope of being accepted, but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. My delayed education and socialization weren’t winning me any academic acclaim, but I was determined to get in while Starfleet was recovering from the Dominion War. Their recruitment policies would have to be lax, I assumed, and it seemed like the only work worth doing, after the rescue of Betazed from the Dominion. I think I took the Starfleet Academy Preparatory Program five times. I volunteered thirty hours a week at the Betazoid refugee camp on Berengaria VII, while I was attending school full time. I memorized Starfleet policy manuals and its overarching legislation.

“Ultimately, I suspect the reason I was rejected by Starfleet Academy so many times was what led to my problem at the Academy. I wanted to join up with Starfleet so fiercely, but I had no desire to do anything once I was there. I gravitated towards the Operations division. There was something soothing about resource management to me, trying to bring about harmony and balance through the selection of LCARS interface menus. But something being soothing can’t drive a career.”

JAG

Excerpts from the personal logs of LT (JG) Tumaini Calumn, Deputy Staff Judge Advocate:
“I thought practicing law would be the answer. Studying Starfleet regulations had been my gateway into imagining what a career in Starfleet would be like. I suspected I could find more truth in the regulations than in the newsmedia or holonovels. I drifted as a cadet. I retain information easily, which meant I performed well on standardized tests, but I was afraid of every career path available to me. Each division in Starfleet appeared amorphous and dizzying as a kaleidoscope. Medicine is a science, and yet every humanoid body responds differently to the same treatment. In Engineering, the stellar officers are the ones who can tell you about the health of their starship by sense of sound and vibration, regardless of what the computer diagnostics tell them. In Security, you can’t prove your worth until your defences have been, at least partially, breached. And Command… by the Great Fire, Command seems to be all about making judgement calls based on equal parts knowledge and instinct.

“Serving as a Judge Advocate, my performance reviews would suggest I will make Lieutenant ahead of my promotion schedule if I keep doing what I’m doing. In the quiet of my office is where I thrive. Leave me to analyze the evidence and the legislation, and I can build a defence, or prosecution, that will make you weep. Attending a hearing is becoming a formality, an exercise is waiting out the clock. I must say I’m thankful for the opportunity it has given me to travel, to participate in hearings on dozens of starships, to meet officers from all over the Federation.

“But it’s leaving me cold. My satisfaction is only coming from my own cleverness, from winning over others. The thing I loved about the work —the objective, after-the-fact assessment— is what’s holding me back. I feel as if I’m not growing? As a person?”

Excerpts from the counselling sessions of Lieutenant Junior Grade Tumaini Calum, Diplomatic Security Officer:
“I suppose I met Cristobal at a critical hinge in my career. I wasn’t taking my legal briefs home with me anymore. I didn’t have the self-awareness to know why my motivations were shifting… In retrospect, I must have been subconsciously looking for new meanings and motivations. Cristobal filled me with what I needed at that time. His heritage is Betazoid and he soothed my home-sickness. If we both concentrated very hard, we could just about hear one another thinking. And he was warm. Everything about him is warm. His smile, his kind-concern, and his body was always running hot.

“I suppose it only makes a kind of logical sense that I committed myself to him too quickly. I dated on and off on Berengaria and at the Academy, but not many people reached me the way Cristobal did. I had the heart of a teenager still. Love was a strange new world to me, and I had no choice but to go boldly where I had never gone before. I asked Cristobal to marry me. …To this day, I don’t know why he agreed.

Diplomatic Security

Excerpts from the counselling sessions of Lieutenant Tumaini Calum, Consular Affairs Officer:
“I wouldn’t say it was the reason I quit JAG, but the death of my sister changed my perspective. The event crystallized the doubts and uncertainty I was feeling. I think the loss of Damhnait —the loss of that whole freighter crew in the border skirmish— changed my perspective in ways it hadn’t been changed since I lost my telepathy. Like the invasion of Betazed, protective impulses arose from within me. Studying the law coldly, after-the-fact, didn’t feel important anymore. At least, not as important as implementing the law. Walking the talk.

“I thought it was enough to be part of the overall organization of Starfleet, felt like the precise service I was offering didn’t matter. Her death forced me to think about what I want to achieve. Cristobal didn’t cope well with my changing priorities, nor with the grief that preceded it. My work as a Judge Advocate wasn’t the only thing being de-prioritized in my life, and Cristobal did not care for losing that top shelf. …I think I’ve only seen him a handful of time since I transferred away from Starbase 247. The last time was at our divorce hearing.

“I feel like I should hate the monsters who killed my sister. My parents do. My sisters do. It’s natural, isn’t it? At oh-three-hundred-hours in the morning, if I can’t sleep, I fear that lack of hate is another symptom of a closed-off part of me. You know? Maybe if my childhood development hadn’t been delayed, or if I’d played more with my sister, I could feel hate for her murderers? My doctors told me she visited me frequently at the centre; more often than Lakka did. And then in the light of day, I like to think that lack of hate is proof. It’s proof I have compassion within me. Compassion to share — even for them.”

Redacted entry from the personal logs of Lieutenant (JG) Tumaini Calumn, Diplomatic Security Officer:
“For the first one minute and forty-seven seconds of my consciousness this morning, I had no memory of ending Obadiah Mokk’s life. It took several hours –maybe a day?– before anyone would even tell me his name. Now, I’ll never forget it. Obadiah Mokk. The Bolian whose life I ended. It was a test-flight of the runabout Baldr. It was in my first days aboard Starbase 310. A torpedo fired by my hand struck and immolated his work bee. We don’t know why his work bee was in the live-fire area. Now… now we’ll never know.

“And sometimes I wonder if the only way the forgetting and the memory will let go of me is if I am stripped of my Starfleet commission. If they take my title, and take my rank, and my uniform. Maybe that would be right? Maybe that would be best? But that wasn’t the findings of the Judge Advocate General. I was cleared of all wrong-doing, and allowed to continue my career in the diplomatic service.”

USS Ascension

After serving the USS Olympic’s academic conference team and security team, Lieutenant Calum was assigned to the USS Ascension as Chief Security Officer.