The Weight of Names
Posted on Tue May 5th, 2026 @ 2:36am by Commander Mariko Tao
1,318 words; about a 7 minute read
Mission:
Episode 2 - The Sins of History
Location: Commander Tao’s Office – USS Artemis
Timeline: MD 002 - 1400 hrs
Mariko had read the first page of the report three times before she realised she was no longer absorbing the words.
Not properly.
The facts were there. Human male. Approximately twelve years of age. Recovered on Dolex III. Body transferred under stasis. Evidence crates secured. Autopsy pending.
Clean language. Necessary language.
She understood why reports were written that way. Precision mattered. Emotion had no place in the official record until it became relevant evidence. That was how systems survived contact with terrible things. They reduced them to sequence, category, timestamp.
Still, her eyes kept returning to the name.
Peter Lashley.
Not the victim. Not the body. Not the first confirmed death.
Peter.
Mariko sat back slightly, hands resting on the edge of the desk, and let herself feel the small, sharp discomfort of it.
Twelve years old was old enough to argue with tutors, old enough to pretend not to need reassurance, old enough to have opinions about food and music and which adults were worth listening to. It was not old enough for a stasis unit. It was not old enough for evidence crates.
Her jaw tightened.
She reached for the PADD again and made a small correction in the working notes she had been compiling for the command team.
Where she had written the deceased, she replaced it with Peter Lashley.
It was not much.
It mattered anyway.
Mariko set the PADD down, but the name stayed with her.
Peter Lashley.
Twelve years old.
She looked at the words for longer than she meant to, and then, with no permission asked and no warning given, her thoughts went home. Not to Anbara-sei as a planet, not to the estate or the old ceremonies or the quiet political weight of the Tao name, but to her brother’s children. Her niece and nephews. Children who existed, most days, at a distance from her life, wrapped up in family messages, formal updates, seasonal greetings and the occasional carefully selected gift sent from whatever posting she happened to be serving on.
Yusuke was nine now. Her nephew. Narihari’s eldest, already spoken of in family correspondence as if he were a future governor being gradually assembled instead of a boy who should still be allowed to run too fast, fall over, and ruin a perfectly good set of ceremonial clothes. Mariko had only seen him in person a handful of times, and each time he had seemed a little older than he should, trying too hard to stand straight while adults quietly approved of all the wrong things.
Aimi was six, her niece, and from what little Mariko had heard, wonderfully inconvenient. Curious, restless, and prone to questions during rituals that were not designed to survive questioning. Her mother had once written about Aimi’s “difficulty with stillness” as if it were a family failing. Mariko had read the message twice and smiled both times. She liked the idea of Aimi fidgeting through solemnity. Someone in that house should.
Then there was Riku, Haruki’s son, still an infant. Barely old enough to be anything but warm weight in someone’s arms, and yet already carrying an ancestral name chosen with care, hope, and all the usual family expectation. Mariko had not held him. That caught her unexpectedly. She had not held him, had not heard him cry, had not seen the tiny expressions people insisted meant something profound. He was family, and still somehow almost a stranger to her.
Her throat tightened before she could stop it.
That was the part she disliked most. Not the thought itself, but the suddenness of it. The way one dead child’s name on a report could reach through all her discipline and put Yusuke, Aimi, and Riku in the same room with her, not as heirs or family obligations or names in a lineage, but simply as children. Small, alive, breakable children.
She looked back at the PADD.
Species. Age. Location recovered. Condition on arrival.
Clean lines. Tidy words. Necessary words, perhaps, but cruel in their neatness. They made something unbearable look organised.
Mariko thought of Yusuke reduced to a sentence. Of Aimi’s bright, troublesome little mind flattened into evidence. Of Riku’s name sitting coldly in a report while Haruki and Keiko waited somewhere for news no parent should ever have to receive. The thought made her breath catch, not dramatically, not enough that anyone else would have noticed, but here alone there was no one else to notice anyway.
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers lightly against the edge of the desk until the feeling passed enough to manage.
For a while, Mariko did nothing.
Then, almost without meaning to, she opened her personal messages. The latest one from home was still there, formal as ever. Her mother’s phrasing sat neatly on the screen: household matters, family health, dates observed, obligations fulfilled. At the bottom was an attachment she had not opened when it arrived.
A photograph.
Mariko looked at it for a moment, thumb hovering just above the console, then touched the file.
The image opened quietly. Yusuke stood beside Aimi in what looked like one of the inner gardens, his posture too careful, hers blurred slightly at the edge as if she had moved at the last possible second. Haruki was there too, holding Riku against his chest, the infant bundled in pale fabric and looking deeply unimpressed by the proceedings.
Despite herself, Mariko smiled.
It was small and gone quickly, but real.
Then the smile faded, not because the photograph had hurt her, but because it had done exactly what she had hoped it would not do. It had made Peter Lashley impossible to keep at a professional distance.
Not that she had wanted distance. Not really. Distance was simply useful. It let people do the work without coming apart in the middle of it.
She closed the photograph gently and sat back, her hand lingering near the console.
For a moment, she considered writing back. Nothing elaborate. Just a note asking after the children, perhaps. Something ordinary. Something an aunt might say if she had not allowed duty and family pride to build such a careful wall between herself and home.
The message field opened.
Mariko looked at the blank space.
Then, after a long moment, she typed:
How are the children?
She stared at the words, read them twice, and almost deleted them.
Almost.
Instead, she sent the message before she could change her mind.
The message disappeared into the subspace queue.
For several seconds, Mariko simply looked at the empty field it left behind, feeling oddly foolish. It was such a small thing. Four words. Nothing intimate, not really. Nothing her mother could accuse of sentiment.
Still, it felt like she had reached across more distance than the computer would ever measure.
She drew in a slow breath and let it out through her nose, then turned back to the case file waiting on her desk. The facts had not changed. Peter Lashley was still dead. Other children were still missing. The work ahead remained exactly as grim as it had been ten minutes ago.
But something in her had shifted, if only slightly.
She did not want this boy reduced to evidence. She did not want his family spoken of only as next of kin. And she did not want the missing children treated as numbers in a pattern before they were found, one way or another.
Mariko picked up the PADD again, but this time her attention went first to the name.
Peter Lashley.
She kept it there. At the centre.
Then she began again.
A Post by:
Commander Mariko Tao
Executive Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
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