The sterile glow of the medbay lights hummed faintly overhead, diffused into a softer warmth within the sealed quarantine section. The walls were smooth, white, and sound-dampened, a space designed to isolate contagious patients from the larger crew. But for weeks now, it had served a different purpose. It was here that Doctor Thalen conducted Aelira's private developmental assessments — a sanctuary of study and trust, where truth could be safely recorded away from curious eyes.
The Andorian physician sat at his desk, stylus in hand, the slate of thick paper stacked neatly at his side. Each page was marked with a meticulous hand, far more detail than he would ever commit to the official logs. The real record lay here — honest, unfiltered, intended only for himself, the captain, and Aelira's parents.
The door hissed open. Elara entered first, guiding her daughter with a gentle hand. The girl's hair — still fine, still too light to decide between her father's human brown or her mother's blue-black — was neatly brushed, though already starting to slip free from its tie. Her steps were eager, a touch clumsy, her little hands opening and closing as she spotted the familiar doctor.
"Good morning, Aelira," Thalen said, lowering his voice to the calm cadence he reserved for her. "Shall we see how you've been growing?"
"Growing!" she chirped, her small voice piping with delight. She padded into the room, reaching up to climb onto the examination bed without waiting for help. Elara allowed herself the faintest smile as she followed, her gaze never leaving her daughter.
Thalen took his seat opposite, adjusting his notes. At just over two years old, Aelira should have been stringing words into simple sentences, mimicking speech she heard from her parents or caretakers. Instead, her vocabulary had blossomed startlingly fast after a late start. Now, she spoke in full sentences, her words often startling in clarity — though limited by the narrow pool of terms she'd absorbed.
"Tell me, Aelira," Thalen began. "What did you do this morning?"
She tilted her head, brow furrowing, a flash of concentration too mature for her age. "Mama made porridge. I didn't like the seeds in it. Papa ate mine."
Her father gave a quiet cough of embarrassment, but Thalen only nodded, writing the words down. The cadence was still halting, the vocabulary limited, but the structure was far beyond expectation.
Next came motor skills. Thalen slid a simple set of blocks across the table. Aelira reached for them eagerly, her fingers curling with purpose. She stacked three, then four, then carefully adjusted the fifth to balance the tower. When it toppled, she laughed instead of crying, already reaching to rebuild.
The doctor watched closely, noting not only the dexterity but the patience. Children her age often displayed frustration at repeated failure. Aelira seemed to embrace it as though she already understood practice as progress.
"Very good," Thalen said softly, scribbling again. "Try again. Higher this time."
Elara shifted in her chair, her hand resting protectively on her knee. She said nothing, but her eyes carried the weight of quiet pride.
The session continued — fine motor skills, comprehension, memory tests. Each time, Aelira performed at or above expected levels, sometimes astonishingly so. She named colors unprompted, pointing first at the crimson stripe on Thalen's sleeve, then at her mother's sapphire earring.
"Violet," she added suddenly, pointing at the faint strip of trim along the wall. Her parents exchanged a glance — the color was subtle, nearly lost to the lighting.
Thalen didn't miss it. His antennae angled forward as he wrote the word down, underlined twice.
There were contradictions, of course. Her physical coordination remained average, as expected. Her jump was clumsy, her grip sometimes too loose, her run uneven. Knowledge and comprehension bloomed rapidly; practice and physicality lagged behind.
And then came the subtler test.
Thalen placed three simple cards before her — each marked with a symbol she had not seen before. A circle, a triangle, a square. He asked her to repeat the shapes after him, and she did. Then he asked her to close her eyes.
When she opened them, he shuffled the cards. "Show me the circle."
Aelira's hand hovered. For a moment, her expression shifted — something in her eyes distant, too still, as though she were listening to something not present in the room. She tapped the correct card without hesitation.
He tested again. And again. Each time, she seemed to pause before responding, the pause longer than expected.
Thalen's notes grew sharper, more deliberate. Not random guessing. Deliberate delay. Observable listening behavior.
Finally, he folded his hands, watching her. "Aelira. Who are you listening to?"
She blinked, tilting her head. "My friend," she said simply.
Her parents stiffened. Elara leaned forward, opening her mouth, but Thalen gently raised a hand to stop her.
"Your friend," he repeated, keeping his tone mild. "What is your friend's name?"
Aelira frowned, tiny shoulders hunching in thought. "No name. Just friend." She smiled, proud of the answer, then clapped her hands at her own success.
Thalen made one final note. He would not push further today. The connection was real, but pressing too hard risked closing the door.
He dismissed her gently, letting her father lead her toward the waiting playroom while Elara lingered. When the girl was out of earshot, Thalen stacked his papers carefully, placing a blank sheet atop the pile to shield his words.
"She is advancing," he said in the tone of clinical certainty, though his antennae betrayed a trace of tension. "But not without… anomalies. Some of which I can explain. Some I cannot."
Elara's expression softened, but her eyes remained guarded. "As long as she is safe, Doctor."
Thalen inclined his head. "That remains my priority above all else."
And as the door sealed behind them, he allowed himself a private exhale. His stylus hovered over the final line of the page before he committed it:
Her gifts advance. The contradictions remain. The presence of the unseen 'friend' cannot be dismissed.
He underlined the last word three times.
---
The sealed room smelled faintly of antiseptic and citrus—clean enough to calm a parent, neutral enough for a clinician. The hum of the ship was a distant bass under the soundproofing. Prell had a cup of warming tea on the counter and a small stack of the private sheets he favored; the top page bore last week's underlined line: presence of the unseen 'friend' cannot be dismissed. He'd drawn a margin for follow-up and left it ready.
Aelira burst in with the restrained energy of a child who had learned the subtle art of asking for permission without needing it. She darted straight to the examination bed and arranged her legs the way she liked, chin propped on her knees.
"Good morning, little star," Prell said, soft. He watched the way she watched the room: not casually, but as if cataloguing features for later stories. Her filaments lifted a little — a twitch of curiosity. She was faster to speak these days; sentence structure had become more reliable.
Elara and Anthony hovered just inside the threshold, the practiced posture of parents who could be brusque with bureaucracy but were always gentle with their child. Prell inclined his antennae toward them in greeting; his clinical distance remained, but his warmth for the family was real.
"We'll do the standard set," he said aloud, ticking items through. "Speech, memory, associative reasoning, motor checks. I want a short play assessment at the end."
Aelira nodded solemnly, then flashed a grin at her parents. "I tell the stars hello after?" she asked.
"You always do," Elara replied. Her voice carried more relief than she intended. "We like your hellos."
Prell set up the small recorder—one discrete channel for official transfer should it be needed—then turned the main instruments to the private capture mode: hardware mirroring to the sealed paper log and a local, encrypted buffer he alone could unlock. He would summarize to the captain per their agreement; his detailed notes would stay under the captain's key.
The examinations flowed. Vocabulary tests produced neat sentences: Aelira described a picture of a market with surprising detail — the vendor's rhythm, the smell of spiced fruit, the barter cadence. Memory probes where he read a short list then asked for recall showed retention well beyond her chronological peers. Her associative reasoning—matching a function to a symbol—was particularly advanced: she connected a picture of a bridge with concepts of "across" and "help," and explained the idea with a two-clause sentence that was almost elegant.
Motor skills remained average: her jump was a lopsided thing; the balance beam (a child's foam strip) produced wobble and a laugh on recovery. He logged that precisely. Cognitive speed and conceptual abstraction were outpacing the fine motor system—an important diagnostic disparity that suggested rapid cortical patterning rather than parallel somatosensory accelerants.
He documented everything on paper, neat runs of ink: date, time, ambient conditions, tests performed, scores, subjective notes. In the margin he scribbled, associative abstraction advanced. Motor plateau intact. He underlined abstraction.
For the experimental task—one Prell had devised to probe resonant listening—he placed a small speaker in the corner and played a low-frequency wash of harmonics designed to be non-invasive yet subtly resonant in a band the child had previously reacted to. He explained gently to Elara and Anthony why: "Just to see if particular broad-spectrum fields alter her attention profile. Nothing invasive."
Aelira sat, palms folded, as if she understood. When the sound began—barely a trace—the child's eyes shifted to the viewport. Her filaments rose, a slow, deliberate unfurl like a curtain being drawn.
Prell documented the change: filament dilation; visual fixation; respiratory settling. He watched her chest slow. Her pupils—small though they were—dilated fractionally in a way that merged attentional focus and recognition.
It happened then: the pitch of her hum changed. It was a soft, internal vibration, a playful noise in ordinary circumstance. Under the wash it grew layered, as if she had found a counterpoint. The harmonics in the room, he could see on his instrument, sharpened in correlation.
Prell frowned and reached for the notepad. He scribbled, RESPONSIVE HARMONIC COUPLING? and drew a line down to the time stamp.
Before he could continue, the door eased open. The captain stepped in without fanfare—Renara's presence was always quieter than her rank suggested. Her four eyes registered the instruments and Aelira immediately, then softened as they found the child.
"Sorry," she murmured. "I thought you had the hatch locked."
Prell swallowed a reflexive apology for the break in protocol, but Renara's hand rose in a measured gesture: she had been briefed enough to understand the need for privacy. She closed the door behind her.
"It's all right," she said. "I did not expect to interrupt."
The child did not notice the interruption in the way an adult would. She glanced at the captain, then back at the speaker, and her hum deepened—this time not in response to the machine but as if acknowledging another presence. Prell's instruments showed a minor spike—synchronous but distinct from the induced wash.
Renara moved closer on instinct, and Prell watched the way she did: not with the sterile appraisal of an outsider, but with a mixture of kinship and command. She leaned on the edge of the counter, hands folded, and watched Aelira as a parent might watch a favorite trainee.
Prell recorded the moment: UNPLANNED WITNESS: Captain present. He also noted, clinically, that the captain's presence seemed to modulate Aelira's response—slightly attenuating the spike, as if the child's attention had a social gating component.
Renara's voice was soft when she asked, "What are we seeing?"
Prell set his pen down for a heartbeat and spoke plainly: "A coupling. Aelira's hum is entraining to the stimulus, but there is an additional, non-machine synchronous element altering the signature. It's not purely environmental."
Renara's brow knotted. "You think something else is answering?"
Prell chose his words carefully. "I note correlation, not causation. There is activity beyond the induced harmonics. It is intermittent, it is selective, and—so far—non-pathological."
She absorbed that. "And safe?"
"For now," Prell said. He felt the weight of it in the bones—the duty to protect and the obligation to report. It was a balance he kept in his ledger. "I will keep you apprised."
Renara nodded, as if that settled something she could not name. She lingered a moment longer, then excused herself. The door sealed with the soft exhale of the ship.
After the door clicked, Prell exhaled, too, then leaned over his pad and wrote with care:
Observed harmonic entrainment in presence of low-frequency wash. Non-machine synchronous element detected concurrently—amplitude variable. Presence of senior command modifies response profile. No acute physiologic stress. Recommend continued studies; increase sampling during social presence and conjunction windows.
He underlined conjunction windows twice.
He sealed the page into the paper log and slid it into the inner drawer where only the captain's key and his own could open. Then he sat back and watched Aelira fold her hands and hum herself out of the test like a child dissolving a song.
In the quiet that followed, Prell allowed himself a private worry. He had volunteered to be the guardian clinician, and the mantle grew heavier with each week. The instruments provided numbers; numbers did not make moral decisions. Only people did.
He pressed a thumb to the inked margin where the word presence had been scrawled the first week. He added one small line underneath it: presence—persists. Human governance complicates but does not nullify. He folded the page closed and prepared for the next week.
The third week felt heavier from the moment it began. Prell was already at his desk in the sealed quarantine chamber of the med bay when Elara arrived with Aelira in her arms. The child's filaments flickered with playful violet and pale green, an alternating rhythm that matched the little nonsense rhyme she was humming.
Anthony trailed behind them, carrying a satchel with the child's favorite puzzle tiles and a small blanket. He still tried to make the room feel less clinical, though he knew Prell's neat order was part of what made the captain and the family trust him.
"This week," Prell said, adjusting the pad of thick paper on the desk, "we'll repeat the developmental baselines and focus more deeply on her adaptive learning. I want to test her reaction to layered instructions."
Elara settled Aelira on the examination bed. "She's been building stories with her tiles. Whole stories," she said softly, pride lacing her voice.
"Stories," Aelira repeated, grinning. She began humming again, then looked at Prell with exaggerated seriousness. "Ready."
---
The first portion of the assessment went as expected. Memory recall remained sharp; Aelira not only listed the series of colors Prell had shown her but also reordered them into "rainbow." Associative reasoning expanded—when asked what a bridge was for, she didn't just say "across" as she had the previous week, but, "to go across safely, or for friends to meet in the middle." Prell raised an antenna at that phrasing, recording it word for word on his paper log.
Motor coordination still lagged. She tripped twice when stepping along the foam balance strip, then burst into laughter. "Oops! Again." Anthony chuckled quietly and steadied her, while Prell noted the disparity again: Cognitive abstraction: advanced. Motor: age-appropriate, not accelerated.
By the time he began the harmonic task—the now-familiar low wash of frequencies—Prell was already scribbling down the week's heading in his neat script.
The child grew still when the sound began, filaments lifting slowly. But this time she didn't hum. She tilted her head, listening with an intensity that made Elara tense. Then she whispered:
"Friend listening."
Prell froze, pen hovering over the paper. He hadn't prompted her; there was no stimulus requiring speech. He wrote it down exactly: verbalization: "Friend listening."
Anthony moved toward her. "Sweetheart, who's listening?"
Aelira pointed toward the ceiling. Not to the speaker, not to any one direction—but up, out. The gesture was too deliberate to ignore.
Before Prell could gather a response, the hatch hissed open. He expected the captain again, but the figure that stepped through was not Renara.
It was a man Prell had never personally spoken with, though he'd heard the name in murmured chains of command. Tall, composed, and wearing the understated insignia of Coalition High Oversight. His presence radiated authority without the usual theatricality of admirals or fleet politicians.
"Doctor Prell," he said evenly. "Commander Lawrence. Specialist Thalia." His eyes finally settled on the girl. "And this must be Aelira."
Elara instinctively shifted closer to her daughter, but the man only inclined his head respectfully.
"My name is Altren Veylan," he said. "I apologize for the intrusion."
Prell felt the name settle like a weight. Altren Veylan. A senior figure in Oversight who was whispered to have his hand in appointments across multiple fleets. The one, Prell realized in an instant of cold clarity, who had almost certainly been the reason he was placed in charge of this family's care.
Anthony recovered first, his voice firm. "We weren't expecting visitors."
Veylan nodded. "Nor was it my intention to disrupt. But I felt it necessary to witness what until now has only been data. Sometimes data is incomplete."
He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His gaze shifted to Prell's notepad, then back to Aelira, and in his eyes there was something beyond protocol: recognition.
Aelira looked at him with curiosity, not fear. Her filaments shimmered faint violet, then blue, then back to violet. She giggled softly. "He knows," she said, pointing again—not to the ceiling this time, but to Veylan himself.
Prell's pulse quickened. He underlined the words in his margin: child verbalization, directed at Veylan: "He knows."
Veylan's expression softened just slightly, enough to betray a sliver of something private. He crouched down to meet the child's eyes—not invading space, simply leveling his gaze.
"I know enough," he said quietly. "Enough to see that this should remain… carefully tended. Secrets can be dangerous. But so can too much exposure."
Elara's brow furrowed. "What are you saying?"
"That I will not interfere," Veylan answered simply. "Not beyond ensuring the doctor has every resource he requires. What I witness here today remains here. Officially, nothing unusual occurred."
Prell couldn't stop staring at him. The phrasing was precise—pragmatic, measured, exactly what an Overseer would say if they were intent on protecting rather than exploiting. Yet there was an undertone, as if Veylan had glimpsed far more than he was willing to share aloud.
Anthony crossed his arms. "And if higher command asks you for details?"
Veylan straightened, smoothing the cuff of his sleeve. "Then I will tell them what they expect to hear, not what they fear to imagine." His tone was calm, but it carried the unmistakable ring of decision.
Aelira clapped her hands suddenly, breaking the tension. "Secret safe!" she declared. Her parents looked at her, then at Veylan.
Prell quickly noted the phrase, though his hand trembled slightly.
Veylan gave the girl a long look, something bordering on reverence, then inclined his head to the family. "I'll take my leave. Continue your work, Doctor."
And just like that, he was gone. The hatch sealed behind him, leaving the room humming with layered silence.
Elara exhaled slowly. "What just happened?"
Prell placed his pen down with deliberate care. "We were given both a warning and a shield," he said. "Altren Veylan understands more than he revealed. And he has chosen—for now—to protect her."
Anthony looked from Prell to the door, then to his daughter, who was already busying herself with puzzle tiles.
"Then we have to be twice as careful," he muttered.
Prell nodded, sliding the paper log into the drawer. On the margin of the page, under the child's words, he added his own: Oversight: Altren Veylan present. Acknowledged without disclosure. Implies knowledge. Aligns protective stance with secrecy.
He closed the drawer and sealed it. The hum of the ship felt louder now, as though the Asteria itself knew another player had stepped onto the board.