[greaterfrost]

Trauma is one of those things you don't just recover from, you struggle for many years to recover from if you recover at all. I read over your post several times and I recreated the imagery in my head.. so many of the pieces fit exactly as I imagined them but not all of them.

I wanted to start off by offering well-deserved applause. The short post was thought-provoking, entertaining, and inspirational. many readers expect to read something that fits a more general narrative since fiction must in many ways be more realistic than non-fiction. You approached a difficult and rarely described thought experiment identifying the psychological echoes that systemic trauma forces a survivor to endure. I enjoyed the interchange of memories as a first-person perspective and the current day as a third-person narrative with many unanswered questions but enough information to keep me in my seat.

I would have liked to have seen more information about her slavers, I assume they are meant to be nebulous but you titled the piece 'loaned.' I don't know if you are inferring she is a sleeper agent, or she is not free of his influence. Secondarily you talk about the trauma and the angst of the stress in graduating from the academy, but she is a young woman, where are the feminine second guesses, the lapses in judgment, and the yearning every young woman deals with.

I think you wrote an intriguing piece, something that has a real future at describing the character and the environment, for me I was hoping for a little more conflict, and something that gave me a reason to be concerned about this woman. she survived an ordeal and she found a way to get into Starfleet, but why am I interested in what she's going through, and what is the motivation she has for her efforts in being the best?

Fantastic work, I'd like to see much more.