Puzzle Pieces
The leaves of her bonzai plants are beginning to droop and show signs of wilt, showing dark spots that contrast with the gray-green leaves and red root stems. Trance clips the damaged spots away with a pair of pruning clippers and waters them, but it is not enough to stay the damage. Trance knows that it is not due to any defect in the plant itself or from neglect of her care and attention to the plant.
Whether or not her friends aboard the Andromeda are aware of it or not the plants are more than just ornamental, they are also symbolic of outside events; much like an oracle. Trance likes the comparison, but she not an oracle merely a conduit. It is like she is a clairvoyant capable of seeing multiple possible future events.
Trance is aware that Beka Valentine and Dylan Hunt are both suspect that there is much more to her than meets than eye; and that is merely a fact of her existence. As she had explained to them on several occasions, there is no such thing as a perfect possible future.
The tension among the crew is growing and it is caused by more than the radical change in her appearance. She has changed from the bubbly, positive and somewhat adolescent purple version into the more somber and reflective golden adult version, minus the tail. In some ways she misses that younger more innocent version of her nature, the way she would mourn the death of an old friend, but circumstances warranted the change. She has found that she can live with the choice that she had been forced to make.
It had been necessary to save the life of her crew, especially one life in particular, Captain Bekka Valentine. At the time the ship had been buffeted by the impersonal and random energies of a time warping vortex. Let's not forget to mention the fact that the ship had been under attack by vicious aliens.
In the back of her mind, Trance debated whether or not she should talk to Beka about how it had felt to encounter an alternate future version. What is the most worrying at her thoughts is the last cryptic parting line when a younger Trance had been fighting alongside of Beka against hostile aliens that had boarded the Andromeda Ascendant and were attempting to seize control of the ship.
In a space of nanoseconds, or the passing life of a comet traversing its elliptical way through the vacuum space. After all Trance could never could accurately judge the passing of time in that pocket dimension. Bekka, now a half-machine, and half-living flesh and blood, had said:
"I can't go into it now."
Apparently Bekka had been referring to a young child. Trance wondered, off and on as she tended to her plants, if that statement referred to a possible future that she and her friends would be better off avoiding. And if that was true, then she wondered iff her decision to switch places had been the correct one.
That was most irritating thing about knowing too much about the present. She only sees bits and pieces of what might yet come to pass.
It gave her headaches and if she had understood more about the mathematical equations that dealt with such things she might have put the question to the Andromeda's brain, the size of a good-sized planet. The ship's computer would have gone into as much or possible even more technical detail than its corresponding AI personality, Rommie.
So as matters currently stood Trance decided to tend to her plants and hope for the best.