Introspection - Heroes Part 1: The Engineers

I’ve been taking stock of my life, as I am on the cusp of literally packing up (once again) to completely move to… somewhere… I have no idea exactly where I will be landing. And in an effort to kind of sidestep having to think about what is in store for me one month from now, I decided to be a bit introspective. Plus, the depression makes me need to look inside of myself. So here’s a bit of a peek under the hood.

There are a number of characters from the different literature that I find that I absolutely love. These are characters to whom I can relate on some level, for any number of reasons, and I find that I appreciate them for how they are written or portrayed. There’s really a breakdown to the characters that I call my heroes.

Let’s start with the Leaders:

• Optimus Prime (Transformers)
  
• Ultra Magnus (Transformers)
  
• Rodimus Prime (Transformers)
  
• Qui-Gon Jinn (Star Wars)
  
• Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)
  
• Tim Drake/Robin/Red Robin (DC Comics)
  
• Richard Grayson/Robin/Nightwing (DC Comics)
  
• Steve Rogers/Captain America (Marvel Comics)
  

Then I have my engineers:

• Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds)
  
• Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (Star Trek)
  
• Geordi LaForge (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
  
• Miles O’Brien (Star Trek: The Next Generation/Deep Space Nine)
  
• B’elanna Torres (Star Trek: Voyager)
  

Then there’s the artificices:

• Kaine Parker/Scarlet Spider (Marvel Comics)
  
• Conner Kent/Superboy (DC Comics)
  
• Laura Kinney/X-23 (Marvel Comics)
  
• Roxas (Kingdom Hearts)
  

And my last group are redemptive heroes:

• Zero (Megaman X)
  
• Wolverine (Marvel Comics)
  
• Gwen Stacey/Spider-Gwen/Ghost-Spider (Marvel Comics)
  
• Kain Highwind (Final Fantasy IV)
  
• Setzer Gabbiani (Final Fantasy VI)
  
• Locke Cole (Final Fantasy VI)
  
• Auron (Final Fantasy X)
  
• Himura Kenshin/Hitokiri Battousai (Rurouni Kenshin)
  

That’s quite a list, and there are a number of varying characters on it. That is also not to say that my list is delimited to these characters, as there are even more that I definitely love, plus I left off some of the more popular/obvious ones, such as Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, et cetera. I like them well enough, don’t get me wrong — in fact, Spider-Man and Batman each make up a good chunk (relatively speaking) of my collection of graphic novels — but my appreciation for them is pretty straightforward: they are good men who are trying to do good things, to help people, and to make it so that others do not have to suffer in the same way that they did as youths.

See, the leaders are fairly obvious; show me a kid who doesn’t admire the strong leaders who kick ass and take names.

No, please! I mean, really, I have yet to meet a kid who doesn’t like the leaders. I’ll wait. No? Nothing? OK, cool. But we’re gonna come back to them later.

I love me some engineers. The captains might lead, but the chief engineers both leader and fix stuff. And they are damn good at it. They are creative and they inspire me. Watch Scotty brandish a phaser and help save the day, and then he heads back to his wee bairns on the Enterprise and he beams with pride [see what I did there? Hehe...] at the warp drive engines that are his. One of my absolute favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Relics”, in which the Enterprise-D finds Scotty on a crashed transport. Geordi is every bit the engineer that Scotty was in his day, and he sometimes gets in the zone when he is working. There is a scene in the episode where the two chiefs are sharing “war stories” (kinda like my “Tales of an IT Professional” posts) and laughing and having a great time. That’s the brotherhood of the Tech.

Miles O’Brien has the gift of joining busted Cardassian systems with Federation gear, tossing in some Bajoran equipment in the mix — because why would a techie ever have a simple life? Nope, can’t have that. The guy manages to flip between three different operating systems (like going from Windows to macOS to Linux), integrate hardware that was never designed to work in tandem, and keep the whole damn place from falling apart. He’s a veteran, a non-commissioned officer, and yet he has rank over the officers that are under his command. Why? Because he is freakin’ brilliant as anything and has experience. I ofttimes feel like the grizzled veteran, especially in Miles’s early days on DS9, when nothing was bloody working and every time that he fixed something, either something else broke or an artificial virus infects the populace of the station or the Cardassians came back and shot things up.

Now let’s talk about B’elanna Torres. She’s hot-headed. Half-Klingon, half-human. She’s brilliant, and used to fixing broken stuff with little to no time or resources. She finds herself having to improvise and adjust and adapt at every single turn, to repair a ship that is not meant for long-term deep space exploration but is 75,000 light years from home. There is no reason why that ship should have survived for 7 bloody years out in the middle of territory that the Federation has never seen. Thanks to B’elanna, Voyager made it through all sorts of harrowing situations and scenarios that would make lesser engineers cry. She stands toe-to-toe with her contemporaries — the formally-trained officer Geordi LaForge and the veteran NCO Miles O’Brien — and I have no doubt that Scotty, as the techie godfather, would be impressed with her work.

There’s a certain amount of pride taken in one’s work, especially when dealing with techie stuff.

And although she is not a chief engineer of a starship, she has a GUI that is mind-blowing according to one of her colleagues (S03E09) and I know that she uses Linux with GNOME Desktop Environment. She manages data tables and scours databases like nothing. Her fingers dance across the keyboard, nimble and agile, and she has a heart that bleeds for her team and loves unconditionally. She’s pretty awesome, and I have no doubt that if she was in Starfleet that she would be making the most of her assignment and building some wicked cool system that would rock the sector.

I don’t mean to gloss over the characters, really, but I just wanted to focus on the fact that they build and make things and make things work. They do some awesome stuff, and sometimes with little-to-no resources or time, and then they are labeled as “miracle workers”. That’s no small title, nothing at which one can easily sneeze.

And let me tell ya, it feels pretty damn good when someone can say that about me.

I love building things. I really do. I love the satisfaction of assembling, of creating, of making something that is meant to be good, helpful, useful, and even unnecessary at times. But hooking up an entertainment system, wiring up a good network and setting the WiFi properly, making sure that everything is working the way that it should — yeah, you bet your ass that I sit back and I look like Scotty here:

I have a project lined up for when I am next around some good power tools. Dad and I will be working on constructing a box for a motherboard. I have acquired several laptops over the years, some of which are beaters with broken screens. The hardware is viable enough, and I decided that they would take less space if they were stripped down to the boards and placed in a box. And since Dad can build basically anything out of wood... So we are going to test this out, and if it works the way that I want it to work, then I will expand from there for the next one. I have every intention of posting about this project as well. I'm just excited to do some work with Dad and maybe gain some benefits from it in other ways as well. Even a failed project is not a failure, strictly speaking; at least we can say that we tried, and we could say that we had fun doing it.

Next time — The Leaders!