Ensign Noah Balsam

At first glance, Noah could be mistaken for a Betazoid because his eyes are so dark. But his mannerisms, his speech, his interests quickly land him within the Human species. Noah is very fair-skinned, almost to the point of being pasty. His skin contrasts strongly with his glossy, dark hair and eyes. Noah is not conventionally attractive, the best words to describe him being innocuous, inoffensive, and even nontoxic.

In build, Noah is almost like a live-action caricature of Ichabod Crane or Jack Skellington- he is all legs and his legs are thin, failing to fully meet in his thigh gap. Noah is very slight of build but also lanky. He is long-limbed, to the point that his fingers are articulate and long. There is a certain quality when he walks and moves that invokes a colt or some kind of stick insect. Noah is hypermobile in his joints, and he has a tendency to lean on consoles and bend his elbows slightly back. He also likes to sit in chairs with his legs pretzeled like a Yoga pose.

Though he is lanky and thin, his face is a combination of apple round, but with high and notable cheekbones. His mouth is full-lipped and seems a little too big for his face. When he smiles especially, its a display of largeness and toothiness. But his most notable facial feature maybe his nose- narrow long and angled slightly down- an aquiline nose.

Mood:. Mood was Noah's junior year engineering project. Taking his trauma of being in an extended stay hospital, Noah designed a biosensor that would delight rather than scare sick children. Mood has biosensors and haptic interfaces built into its feet. Its wings change color both to amuse children but also to give the doctor an idea of the patient's current mental state.

Cat: As a child, the Balsams had a cat, which Noah had christened "Cat" rather than acknowledge its very silly name of "Rover." He did not understand the name was a pun by his Mother- "Rover" loved to roam the corridors of the habitat sector of Eilat Anchorage. As a young adult, Noah has programmed the hologram "Cat" to be a realistic feline interface modeled on Cat/Rover- a "pet" in a sense.

Aya: Aya is a Catullan medical monitoring ALI (Artificial Limited Intelligence). Aya means "Nurse" in Catullan. She/they were part of Noah's medical recovery on Cendo Prae, though much of her architecture remains in place in Noah's brain today. Aya is sort of like Noah's imaginary friend.
Index: Index is an anthropomorphic computer interface modeled after Aya. Noah brought them aboard the Sojourner and integrated them into the LCARS architecture of the ship. Index can be summoned by anyone who requires or desires a physical or visual interface with their computer inquiries.

Dr. Noah Hyman Balsam, Jr. (Age 55). Originally from Titan, Dr. Balsam is a scientist and lecturer in the field of theoretical temporal dynamics who now works with Doctor Vassbinder's Outer Worlds teams at the Ganymede Thinktank around Jupiter. Originally he worked at the Bright Thinktank on Enceladus. Dr. Balsam and Dr. Tempe have separated, as of about nine years ago, though they maintain a distant but platonic communication. Dr. Balsam is an intense man who is half-Catullan. He is what Catullans call "Sykma"- he has the male-recessive X(O)Y genome which heightens leadership, aggression and competition. To mitigate this, Dr. Balsam prefers Vulcan meditation and T'plana Hath.

Dr. Norah Tempe. (Age 53). Dr. Tempe is a guest lecturer at Starfleet Academy in the field of material engineering. When not lecturing at the Academy, she works on Titan Station around Saturn. Dr. Balsam and Dr. Tempe have separated, as of about nine years ago, though they maintain a distant but cordial communication. Norah has been seeing a Bajoran man five years her junior Last year they moved to Bajor's Hill Province. Norah is looking in to civilian engineering projects on the Bajoran moons and colonies, and potentially even colonies re-established in the Gamma Quadrant. Norah is Martian by birth and carries around trauma from its destruction. She lost several childhood friends.

Simon Balsam. (Age 25). Noah's older brother. Simon is a civilian environmental engineer on Rigil Kentauros Colony. He recently applied for work at Proxima Fleet Yards. Simon is the "black sheep" of the family. Like his father, he carries the recessive Catullan mutation of X(O)Y which heightens his competitiveness. Unlike his father, Simon has never seen any reason to curtail these personality traits. Simon is an intense person and his "survivor's guilt" over his little brother's near-death experience pushes him to create distance to anyone he might care for. It will be months between communiques from Simon and he values his supposed self-sufficiency. Simon has previously had problems with addiction.

Dr. Noah Hyman Balsam, Sr. (Age 86). Noah Hyman Balsam is a medical engineer who had tenure at the Daystrom Institute up until 2385 and the attack on Mars. He had a celebrated career in Medical Positronics and was even up for the prestigious Carrington Award for some of his team's trailblazing work in the field. Then Mars was destroyed and Synthetics were banned. Overnight, most of the programs he worked on were shuttered and his team disbanded.

Balsam was heavily involved in the lawsuits within the courts trying to overturn the ban. But he finally, once all avenues were exhausted, retired. He now lives on Toliman, the capital world of the Alpha Centauri Colonies. He constructs lightweight wooden animatronic creatures, his brilliance whittling away with senility and depression. He doesn't travel anymore. He is deeply embittered.

Xi-Tendri Balsam. (Deceased age 66). Xi-Tendri was a native of Catulla and was Noah Balsam Senior's partner for almost thirty years. She was a systems engineer. She died shortly after Noah Balsam III's birth of a degenerative neuromuscular disease not uncommon on Catulla.

Marc Tempe. (Age 8). Noah's unofficial "nephew" through his Mother's side. They are cousins. Marc is Autistic.

Lieutenant Margarar:. From the moment Lieutenant Margarar, then-assistant Chief Engineer, was told she had to bunk with junior officers and that her actual roommate was a cadet, Margarar disliked Noah. She thought of him as "prey" and multiple times she threatened in veiled fashion that she would like to eat him. Noah at first tried to ingratiate himself to her but nothing seemed to shake her opinion that he was the lowest of the low. She did not even refer to him by name, only rank or as prey. Eventually Noah had to find it in himself to stand up to Margarar, even going so far as to defy demands she made that felt threatening, hostile or unusually targeted. Noah does not hate easily, though he came close to understanding that feeling from her. He avoided her when he could, which was difficult as they shared a room.

Noah Balsam's personality is best boiled down to a single moniker: Inoffensive. Noah seems to take great pains to please, with a strong tendency to self-sacrifice. He is certainly an eccentric, who has lived a life among the asocial, intellectual, and introverted world of Enceladus' Eilat Anchorage- and especially, among the Bright Thinktank. He has grown up with peculiar but benign ideals- science, technology, the power of the mind, the beauty of life. There is a certain virginal tendency on his part to be captured by both scientific or technical purity, and natural beauty.

Noah doesn't have the best interpersonal skills and is, again, noted for his "good intentions," more than any kind of natural ease. He likes people very much, but he admits he doesn't understand them. He's not the best at carrying on a "small talk" kind of conversation: he tends to try to shift to a "listen" stance, or else he starts talking about his pet projects. He struggles with discussing emotions and he is clearly a person who feels deeply if somewhat rigidly, but struggles to reconcile them in his mechanistic worldview. Some people have pointed out that he is an eccentric ball of anxiety and his tendency to stutter and second-guess his word choices accentuates that.

Noah, at his core, is an idealistic, very gentle person. He wants to exist in contentment with a small group of friends who understand and accept his peculiarities, and who understand that his nature pushes huge amounts of time into his creative endeavors. He has a detail-oriented, very technical mind but what is unusual is that he can "pan out" and examine the whole situation fairly well.

Noah derives great pleasure from being creative- especially technically creative.

Strengths

Unusual Technical Aptitude: Noah finished in the top two percent of his class in his engineering aptitude tests. He has above-average levels of talent across the disciplines of engineering, though his preference is systems engineering and that is where his talent is most obvious.
Collectivist:. Noah believes in working together with people to achieve collective results. He's not really interested in personal glory or recognition (except for perhaps individual projects and even then he deflects praise). Noah likes horizontal command structures where the expertise of the group and its members work in synchronicity for success. If his team needs him to move away from systems and programming for a result, he'll do it to the best of his ability- unless he truly feels he is incompetent.
Agreeable: Noah is not competitive and he is conflict adverse. He'd rather just agree with an action or a decision and try to find the necessary leeway or interpreted boundaries to navigate an event.
Humble: Noah is not a competitive or ambitious guy. He'll laud others before himself, and the group as a whole. He prefer to deflect praise from himself.
Be Kind:. Manners cost nothing and neither does kindness. It takes enormous cause for Noah to hate someone or some thing. He is polite, deferring and has good manners. And he is kind with praise, even though he is awkward with it (just because praise makes him a bit nervous).

Weaknesses

Aversion to Control:. Noah doesn't trust his social instincts, leadership skills or experience enough to assert control in a situation. He constantly second guesses himself and if there is a modicum of setback or failure in the action, he takes it very hard. His worst fear is that people will get hurt because of his decisions.
Trauma: Noah suffered a brief death experience as a ten year old boy. He woke up after being in hypothermic torpor and medical stasis on a completely different world. Its profoundly affected him- he hates being extremely cold, in a vacuum suit or in wide open airless spaces. While therapy has helped him overcome a catatonic freeze, he still can only function with distraction and discomfort in such situations.
People Are Hard:. Noah understand machines and machine intelligences better than biological beings. He is a little bit socially blind and misunderstands facial and body language cues. He's not great at discerning if someone is lying to him, attracted to him, or if they're teasing him. he can learn over time with close friends and colleagues, but strangers are hard for him.
Light Gravity Osteopenia with Hyper-mobility (Longbone Syndrome):. See Medical Records.
Pacifist:. Noah doesn't like hurting things. He doesn't like weapons. He doesn't like being in fights and he put off his phaser and self-defense Academy training off as long as possible. He can't conceive of using a phaser to kill someone. He limits himself to stunning, trapping or inconveniencing opponents. If he was forced to kill, it would likely cause him deep guilt, doubt, self-loathing and trauma.
Unambitious: One of Noah’s favorite professors from Academy once remarked that Noah will make, “One of the finest, most talented, kindest Junior Lieutenants in Starfleet.”

Noah would probably not consider himself an ambitious person. His hopes are to create, to feel contentment, to explore, to feel safe, to feel loved, to feel useful, and to find acceptance. He has no interest in power and so long as he is able to work on his pet projects and contribute to the advance of technology, he is happy. Ranks mean almost nothing to him. Much of his personal ambitions revolve around learning and creating. His desire to take courses at the Cendo Prae Forum on Catulla was one ambition he would admit to because it fits in his interests in artificial intelligence. He is similarly interested in the Daystrom Institute.

Holo-Design: Noah is interested in designing stand-alone programs, immersive environments and holo-programs. Of the latter, he's never felt that successful with creating a holo-novel, so he tends to stick to recreating existing stories, especially of a sci-fi lean. He's beginning to delve into holo-environments which his quarters can't do beyond some basic ambience. His standalones he's had more success with, with Index, Mood and Cat. And he has many more half-conceived in the pipelines.
Synthetic Intelligence: During his time at Ishikawa Station Noah was trained in how to deal with Synthetic Logic. But his interest is in the study of Emergent Intelligence- AIs that are uplifted either accidentally or by need. His ability to study it was severely curtailed by the Synthetic Ban in place, so his study was limited to studying previous examples.
Infolife Rights Advocacy: Just because a life form is made of plasma, or light, or carbon, it's irrelevant. Noah believes it is the duty of the Federation to expand its measure of what is life and what is sapience, and that should include the intelligent beings that it has created using technology. Complex holograms, synthetics, artificial life forms should be given the same rights, privileges and responsibilities as biological beings. He was firmly against the Synthetics Ban once he was old enough to understand what it was. He's even been arrested during a protest over sentient synthetics rights.
Science Fiction and Pop Culture: Noah enjoys alternative media culture prevalent from the 20th to 22nd centuries. He enjoys reading it, recreating it on the holodeck, and he is an avid painter and collector of figurines and models of a variety of genres. He is fond of Transformers, Doctor Who, Star Wars from the 20th and 21st centuries, the Firefly reboot of the 2080s, among others.
Holodeck Time: Most often, he uses to holodeck to model ideas and concepts, but when he's running programs for recreation, he returns home to Enceladus, or else recreates his pop culture fantasies. He sometimes does light entertainment venues. Rarely but not unheard of, erotica.
Music: Most of Noah's early life revolved around music and not so much engineering. He was attracted to music early on, and by age eight and nine he was finding the music he thinks of as "him." He began playing a guitar. he is still very interested in music but it has taken a back seat to systems engineering.
Reading: Another hobby that's fallen somewhat to the side as extroverted friends have pulled him from his more lengthy solitude time. he used to read murder mysteries, science fiction, even offbeat comedy. He was quite voracious as a child. His reading these days has shifted to informational, gathering knowledge and shoring up what he knows or doesn't know.
Animals:. Noah only had a pet cat as a child. He loves animals but Enceladus is not a settlement that is conducive to having a diverse array of animals. He likes watching sea life. But he really likes cats, butterflies, dogs and birds.
Junk Food: Mozzarella sticks, saag paneer, Detroit-style deep dish pizza and bagna cauda. Noah also loves soups: vegetable Pho broth, tom kha, matzo soup and wedding soups are his favorite. He's not an avid alcohol fan and prefers "soft drinks" like orange and cream sodas. He starts every day with an orange and a glass of milk.

Birth

Noah Balsam was born on the bathyscaphe colony of Eilat Anchorage on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. He was the couple's second child and the first born on Enceladus. Noah was born what Catullan scientists designate as X(o)Y: Catullans carry a third genetic marker which increases or decreases competitiveness vs. collectivist tendencies. This genetic sequence makes the miscarriage rate for mixed species very high and Norah had to endure numerous medical examinations to assure her children came to term. Noah was born as a "Bytta"- what Catullan science views as the dominant male genome. His brother and his father were born with the recessive trait and are "Sykma."

Noah developed Longbone Syndrome early in childhood, a form of osteopenia common on worlds with low gravity. It is characterized by hyper-mobile joints (double-jointed) and long leg and arm bones making the afflicted of a thin, lanky build. The main treatment is daily amounts of exercise to strength the muscles and osteo-fortifiers to strengthen the bones: Noah bucked the former though he did eventually take up swimming and walking. But Noah has never considered himself remotely athletic.

Early Life

Before age eleven, Noah's life was typical for many children on the small, science-leaning colony. He lived in a sterile installation submerged in deep bluish-black methanated water six kilometers under an ice shell. His colony was a member of the Federation, but one that had no issues with being critical of its actions. For a Human colony, it joined well after the charter of the Federation was signed.

Noah was raised to be a critical thinker but to consider the collective needs of the group before his wants. And he was raised to believe that self-sufficiency was a virtue. Technology was a tool to be wielded with responsibility and events such as the Eugenics Wars should never be repeated. Technology was a great equalizer and allowed Enceladans to live a life dedicated to study and expanding knowledge, not worrying about their next meal. It was a somewhat austere culture with a focus on material minimalism- not a trait that Noah took to heart as much as some of the other elements of his culture.

Life on Eilat Anchorage, a bathyscaphe colony of less than 3,000, could be quiet and routine. Most of the people there came from the culturally modest, introverted and intellectual types. Typical hobbies were music and art or light sports. When Noah picked up an interest in music- especially rock and pop-, his parents were puzzled where it came from: in all, none of his family were musical and music was rarely played in the household.

They eventually found out: their oldest son, Simon, and his friends would occasionally sneak down to the Hatch Sector which housed a dive known as "Dingo's Deep Dive-" and Noah would tag along. It served pizza, beer and what would become one of Noah's favorite foods- fried mozzarella sticks. Noah had ingratiated himself to the grizzly owner, Dingo Spitale, and his sons Charlie and Mateo. They played the music of Noah's fascination in their establishment.

B.S.V. Jacques Cousteau and the Qashimli Ice Sheet Collapse

Noah's life changed only a scant few days after his tenth birthday. His school class had boarded a Bright Thinktank science vessel- the Jacques Cousteau- to help study a new marine zone that had opened in the southern pole ocean, a region known as the Qashimli Ice Shelf. The recent fissure had freed the water within, effectively adding an isolated "sea" to the wider Enceladan Southern Abyss. Enceladan scientists were expecting to encounter many new life forms that had evolved separately from the Southern Abyssal waters.

Recovery on Cendo Prae (Catulla)

Divorce and Resettling

Shifting Interests in Adolescence, Rebellion

Academy Life

Ishikawa Station, Activism (and Arrest)