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"Would you teach me about feelings?" Sam asks, sitting down across from Ocam in the cafeteria.
"Hmmphf?" Ocam asks, through a mouthful of food. Sam smiles. She can tell from his affect that he's trying to ask what she means, so she explains.
"I would like to learn more about how organics experience feelings," she clarifies. "I mean, I know how photonics experience them, from the inside at least—I'm not an expert—but organics have a whole set of chemical processes connected to their emotions, and I'd like to learn more. And I thought a Betazoid would be the perfect person to ask!"
Ocam, having swallowed his food, shrugs. "Well, I could try to help, I guess. But really you should talk to my sister—she has more inborn empathic ability than any Betazoid in a century."
"Right, that makes sense." She pauses, biting her lip, anticipating and enjoying the sensation of pressure that it feeds into her holomatrix. "So, you don't want to talk to me about it?"
She's not sure why she asked Ocam and not his sister, except that maybe he seemed more approachable. He was eating by himself, so she thought he might like company. But it's always possible that he wouldn't want her company, in particular.
"No, no, I—it's not that I don't, it's that—I guess most people don't ask me to explain stuff."
"Oh. So you don't think you could help?"
"I could help!" He looks confused for a moment, then shakes his head. "I could definitely help. I'm great with feelings."
Sam considers again, then asks the hardest question. "And do you want to? Talk to me about them?"
Ocam looks strangely shy, or at least Sam thinks he looks shy. She still needs to learn about organic emotion, after all. "Yeah. Sure. I'd be—I'd be happy to."
"Good! Then I don't have to ask your sister, since I already asked you."
Ocam nods. "What do you want to know?"
*
What Sam wants to know is how all organics experience emotional sensations, and how those are tied to physical processes and physical sensations, and how the emotional experiences are different for different organics (Vulcans, Khionians, Humans, Betazoids, Klingons, and so on, with some anticipated bias to the species Sam has already met and befriended), and how organic emotions are different from photonic emotions, and all sorts of other things, but pretty quickly she figures out that Ocam can't help her with all of that. Not least of all because the way Betazoids think about feelings is really different from how other organics think about feelings.
"Betazoids can speak telepathically, but that doesn't always transfer emotion over from one person to another, if they don't want it to. That's different from sensing emotion, which is sort of like a . . . like a carpet?"
"A carpet," Sam repeats, doubtful.
"Not a carpet. But like a . . . big . . . curtain? Like, imagine a person draped all over in multiple pieces of fabric. That's what it's like. And every piece of fabric is a feeling, and it might be a present feeling or a past feeling or a habitual feeling, and it might be bigger or smaller, or brighter or duller, in different colors and textures, but there are always lots of them. It can be really confusing when you're a kid."
"It's really confusing to me. Right now." Sam complains. "I'm imagining everyone just carrying all their dirty laundry around."
"It's sort of like that!" Ocam agrees, cheerfully. "But like, if the laundry was actually your childhood trauma, and your anxiety about that project you have due next week, and your crush on your classmate, and everything else."
"Sounds . . . messy," Sam says, doubtfully.
"Yeah! And like—okay, so also, it's not like you just have your feelings? Other people's feelings tend to brush off on you, too, especially if you're close to them. So you might have a little of Caleb's feelings, or Genesis' feelings, if they've been around you."
"I might?" Sam goes wide-eyed. "You can sense me?"
"No, sorry. Bad example." He looks flustered. "On Betazed, we don't have any—I don't know any photonic beings, back home. But I don't want to be prejudiced."
"I have feelings," Sam says. "They're just not the same kind."
"I know," Ocam says, smiling. "If you didn't have feelings, you wouldn't be so fun to hang out with."
Sam smiles, feeling pleased by the compliment, and another feeling too, a new one: feeling pleased that she likes hanging out with Ocam while Ocam likes hanging out with her.
"You're fun to hang out with, too," she says, to make Ocam smile. She finds that she likes doing that. "But, why can't you sense my feelings when we hang out?"
"Psilosynine—that's the Betazoid neurotransmitter involved in telepathy—it responds to chemical agents in other beings' physical chemistry. So it only helps with organic emotions. And not all of them, actually. People say ferengi are really hard to sense, for example, because their blood chemistry is so different."
"Does that . . . make it weird?" Sam asks, a little afraid of the answer. "To be around me? Because I'm not carrying all of my laundry and Caleb's laundry and Genesis' laundry all the time?"
"I mean, it's a little weird," Ocam agrees, shrugging. "But it's kinda fun, too. I never know what you're gonna say next."
"Oh," Sam says. "Well, I kind of like that."
"And you don't know what I'm gonna say next, either," Ocam adds. "So that's pretty cool, too. Growing up on a planet of empaths, you never get away with anything."
"What did you try to get away with?" she asks, and then listens intently while he tells a story about his childhood pets, some kind of small fluffy rodents, and how he wanted to set them free, and how his dad always knew and stopped him from releasing them into the back garden. It's not really related to her research, but she finds she just likes hearing about it.
"I would want to free them, too," she says. "Why didn't your dad let you?"
"They would've been eaten by vejon," he laughs. "Those are like, big hunting birds we have on Betazed. My dad couldn't get that through to me, though, so I kept trying. In the dead of night, when he was distracted. But he always caught me."
Sam laughs at the idea of the little Ocam stubbornly trying to get past his dad's scrutiny. "That's a cute story. But I'm glad the little animals didn't get eaten."
"Yeah. Me too."
*
Sam asks her other friends about emotions, and gets a lot of interesting answers, but every answer just seems to lead to more questions. And although Caleb, and Genesis, and Darem, and Jay-Den all share what they think readily enough, they eventually get tired when Sam keeps demanding more answers.
Ocam, though, doesn't seem to get tired of their emotion talk.
"I've told you a lot about how Betazoids think about emotions," he says, while they're both taking five on the bench during calica practice. "You should tell me how photonics think about it."
"Well, I don't know that many other photonics," Sam says, waving a hand in front of herself to show that she's demurring. "I mean, there are my makers, and there are the other photonics they've made, and I've met a few of them, while I was being taught. But we're all really different."
"Like how?" he takes a long sip of water; his body has been sweating from the exercise, and probably from being inside the poorly ventilated lapling costume.
"Like, you can design a photonic being with attributes, right? But you don't know how those attributes will manifest themselves emotionally."
"Huh."
They watch, for a moment, as Genesis and Darem collide on the calica field. Ouch.
"So, take The Doctor. One of the first sentient photonics in this galaxy. He was designed to be knowledgeable, skilled, and able to take control of a chaotic situation. Those are his attributes. But what his makers didn't know was that he would also be sarcastic, and kind, and arrogant, and love music, and stuff like that. Those are his emotions. You can see how they might be related to his attributes, but there's no guarantee. That's what makes us sentient beings, not just machines."
"So you can give two photonics the same programming, and get different people."
"Yes! Though we don't really do that very often, anyway. But, so, I had a teacher, a photonic, whose job was to teach me social skills. And he was given the attribute of understanding a lot about organic culture and society. But then he was kind of . . . I don't know, mean? A pessimist, maybe. He was supposed to prepare me for this mission, but he didn't think I could succeed."
"That must've been hard," Ocam says, frowning.
"Well, it's part of why I decided to become an optimist," Sam says. "To balance him out."
"That's like the laundry thing. Your emotions are influenced by others around you."
"Yeah. But I can actually go through my own emotional index and remove any influence that's causing unwanted effects."
"You can?" Ocam looks shocked.
She nods. "Sometimes, if he made me too depressed about the mission, I would remove that influence. But now it means that I can overcompensate a little, to be too optimistic."
"I don't think you're too optimistic," Ocam says. "I think you're great."
She smiles, and tries something she's seen Caleb do to Jay-Den: she rocks her body to one side a little, to bring their shoulders into collision. It makes Ocam look happier, so she thinks she did it right.
"So, do you . . . remove our influence, too?" he asks.
"Well, I'm supposed to, but."
He looks curious. "But?"
"But I . . . kind of like feeling influenced by everyone here. It's not like it was back home, where I felt like I couldn't be myself at the same time. Here, the influence is more gentle. I think that's what learning is, isn't it? It's not just knowing facts. It's learning how to feel things differently."
"Yeah. For sure," Ocam agrees. "That's why the Betazed Youth Delegation came here in the first place. We wanted to feel differently, too." Then he looks up at her, a strange expression on his face. "Do you have any influences from me?"
Sam ducks her head. "Yeah. Lots, since we've been talking so much. If I look at my files," she unfocuses her eyes and scans her directories, "I can see all kinds of colors that are influenced by your color."
"Colors?" His smile is back, like it always is when she says something he's not expecting. She sometimes tries, now, to tell him unexpected things, just to see him do it.
"Yeah. I color-code you in my files. You want to know your hex code?"
He shrugs. "Wouldn't mean much to me."
"Wanna see it?"
He lights up. "Sure!"
She reconfigures the index finger on her right hand, letting it pool and shimmer with the color she's appended to Ocam in her files. It might be described as a light cyan, like the oceans you find on some M-class planets, clear and bright and soothing. The color covers her fingertip, like she's dipped it in paint, then travels up her finger, and up over her hand, until it looks like she's wearing a cyan glove.
"That's so pretty," Ocam says. "I like it."
"Good," Sam says. "You know, I've never shown someone their color before."
"Cool," he says.
*
When the time comes to make her report on emotions to her makers, Sam has to think a lot about what to say. She's learned a lot of information, from all of her friends and teachers, from her sociology class, from her biology class; but that's not what feels important, chemical reactions and cultural taboos and the concept of emotion as a social process.
What feels important is the emotion she feels when Ocam brings her a fun line of code to play with, or when he sits next to her in class on purpose, even when there are other seats open; when they laugh together playing calica and get yelled at by Professor Reno; when they conspire to get seats together on the shuttle between San Francisco and the Athena, so that they can talk about their classes and gossip about their classmates.
"The emotion I have learned most about during my recent studies is called Having a Best Friend," she says, eventually, into the shifting glowy light that inaccurately represents her makers. "This emotion can be used as an example to learn about many physical, social, and cultural fields of study. And also it's really cool."
"Continue," Sam's makers say, warily. She can tell they're not on board yet.
That's okay. She'll convince them. She's pretty optimistic about it.