mikeazariah

The comm chimed as the main course was being brought. It was the second date with Dierdre and Mike cursed softly under his breath for not setting the ‘emergency filters’ on it. He glanced at the message and then toggled the comm completed off. “Sorry about that. Forgot to turn it off and junk messages pop in occasionally.”

“Junk messages? I thought most of those were taken care of, long ago. What sort of message are you getting?”

“Educational notice. The School over in Bille is having a grad ceremony and they want me to attend. I get these every few months.”

“The University of Caille? What courses were you taking?” She leaned in and he was distracted for a moment before he realized she was waiting for an answer.

“Oh the usual mix. Most pilots consider anytime they are NOT training to be time wasted.” He looked down at the comm beside his plate. “You really want me to look up what they want me for this time?” He toggled on the comm and reread the message. “Ah, seems I have bachelors in Business and in Minmatar Military coming to me this time. The second is through a distance Education course in conjunction with . . . ”

“Business AND Military?” Her eyebrows raised.

He shrugged, embarrassed. “I like shiny things. So I browse the course catalogs and take anything that grabs my attention.”

“Well then how many degrees do you have?”

“Huh, I dunno. Let me look.” He tapped the comm a few times and brought up his educational record. “Undergrad stuff . . . . not worth counting. Bachelors . . . . 4 Military so they don’t count . . . Gallente, Caldari, and Min. Seven. Seven Bachelors and by the looks of it I could probably get a Masters if I worked at it.”

“Why don’t the Military ones count?”

“They aren’t academic but practical, more along the line of being qualified to operate their equipment.”

“Seven. And you haven’t gone to accept a single one of them?.”

“Never seen the need to. They and I both keep records so we know what I have worked on.”

Dierdre sat back and looked at him for a moment. “You should go.” She said abruptly.

“What? Where? nah . . . Why?” Mike had not expected this.

“Do you have any idea how many degrees your average groundling has?” She asked with just the hint of anger.

“No, a dozen?” Mike guessed wildly.

“Between none and two, seldom more than that. Graduation, the ceremony that recognizes academic achievement is a major step in a person life. Now you may not think that it is all that great a thing but you should go and see what it means to others. If you are going to be a representative of the CSM you must be able to see things from other points of view.”

“This is about the election?” Mike blinked at this sudden turn in the conversation.

“No, it is about making you able to appreciate what you have.”

“I have to go?” suddenly Mike felt cornered.

She wouldn’t take no for an answer . . . Mike wrote of it in his Logs.

In the end, she was right. I didn’t dare refuse in the restaurant because if she raised her voice once more I was fairly sure the chef would have started throwing sharp things at me. D. is VERY well known in the station and it seems that everyone is watching to make sure I do not ‘hurt her’. So given no choice in the matter I sent the acceptance to the invitation right there at the table.

I have orbited Bille a hundred of times. I have defended artifacts of several races (and blown a few up, over the years as well.) But I have never taken part in a cultural ceremony like Graduation. The regalia was stylized over centuries but the flowing robes and the slashes of color across the arms indicating your completed schools of study. The professors all had ones that stood off the arms as holographs, with the distance indicating the advancement of the degree. The Dean of the University was almost obscured by the four bands of color orbiting him like rings of a planet.

Most of my fellow graduates were wearing robes with no color slashes whatsoever. Surrounded by families marvelling at the robes and wearing ribbons of the color that the grads would soon receive. I felt like a peacock in a crow convention. The people running the ceremony seemed to feel that my time in special forces merited an advanced degree so I trailed a small streamer of green light as I made my way to sit in the sea of night that was the graduates.

The speeches were, as tradition demands, boring and ignored.

The graduates slowly mounted the dias and received their colors from the deans of their faculties and returned, faces glowing brighter than a nova. Mike had gone to this almost resigned to enduring it but the spirit in the assembly hall filled him with . . . something. A feeling that large changes were coming and these people around him would be a part of that. But not him.

No family, he took in the atmosphere but there were no friends here to share it with. No classmates to cheer and drink a toast to. The ceremony had become a part of him, but not he of it. As the crowd began to spread to various parties, dinners, family gatherings he cued his comm to wake up the Snark, it was time to go.

But on the bridge, a small rainbow of colors hung, a reminder of this time and place.

**********

Caveat: I treat the basic certificates as undergrad work, community college tech degrees. Standards are a BSc. Improved: Masters, and Elite is, of course, a PhD

I think the price some capsuleers pay for their isolation from the rest of humanity is a steeper one than they think.

At the risk of too much philosophy . . . it is similar to the one gamers pay playing in their little pods as opposed to getting out and doing things. To that regard things like fanfest are the counterbalance.

Lessons: Your skill queue is your friend. Monitor skills and always have a few more bits and pieces ready to go, a long one on hand for the backstop of your training so you can have a computer crash and not be weeping about lost training time.