Chief Miles O'Brian
Home region:
Killarney, Ireland, Earth
Parents:
Mr. and Mrs. Michael O'Brien; widowed father remarried
Family:
Molly, born 2368 (girl)
Kirayoshi, born 2373 (boy)
Education:
Starfleet Academy
Marital status:
Married Keiko Ishikawa in 2367 in Ten-Forward, U.S.S. Enterprise
Starfleet Career Summary Prior:
2346: Enlisted as a non-commissioned officer in Starfleet
2347: As young crewman posted to U.S.S. Rutledge under Capt. Ben Maxwell,
was decorated after Setlik III and re-assigned by Maxwell as a bridge
tactical officer
2364: After serving on two more ships in the last two years, transferred
to new U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain Jean-Luc Picard as relief flight
control officer in command duty division, later as security in operations
division
2365: Re-assigned at chief petty officer rank to Enterprise transporter
chief, usually posted in Transporter Room 3
2369: Accepts offer as chief of operations at Deep Space Nine, onetime
Cardassian mining station, under Cmdr. Ben Sisko
Psychological Profile: Report of Starfleet Counselor Telnorri, Bajoran Sector
The curly-headed Miles Edward O'Brien, who would become DS9's first Starfleet chief of operations as the latest chapter in a hard-working career, was born with a deep pride in his Irish ancestry, traced back to medieval King Brian Boru and 1902 American labor martyr Sean Aloysius O'Brien. The family, which also included two brothers, was living near a small town on Earth - most probably in Ireland - by the time he was of age, and his mother cooked unreplicated, meat-and-potatoes meals. He was an ordinary child, getting a disciplinary swat from his father now and then, giving substitute teachers a rough time and once owning a pup pesky for attention when locked up - yet peaceful by nature, timid for the life of even a mosquito. He also enjoyed building subspace transceiver models, along with ships in bottles, but actually scored in the lower third of his age group for mechanical aptitude.
O'Brien joined Starfleet as an impulsive act two days before he was supposed to leave for the unwanted Aldebaran Music Academy to play cello, as his father had always wished. The elder O'Brien - who'd made him practice every day and sent in his recorded audition - was furious, but calmed down and later accepted his son's choice proudly. Even so, O'Brien got to be quite good at the cello, and has kept up his public playing; one of his favorite composers is Minezaki. In later life, his mother died in 2368, and his father remarried in the spring of 2370 to a woman his son had not yet met by later that year.
Nearly a year after sign-up in 2346, though, he came face to face with death for the first time at age 18 as a member of the U.S.S. Rutledge under Capt. Maxwell, when he was forced to kill a Cardassian who jumped him on patrol on Setlik III after the massacre there during the border wars. The do-or-die pressure of that incident is what awakened his dormant interest in mechanics: he saved 13 men by getting a field transporter operational in less than 10 minutes with no prior knowledge - a cool-headed feat that led to his post as Maxwell's tactical officer. Since then he's used transporters for 22 years without an accident, and served until 2362 on that ship.
Two years and brief stints aboard two more ships later, he was among the first crew aboard the new Galaxy-class Enterprise when it departed Utopia Planetia, serving in command division as a relief con officer and later on the battle bridge after saucer separation en route to Deneb IV. After transferring to the gold tunic of the operations division during his first year , his favorite worksite on the 1701-D became Transporter Room 3. Himself a brave man, he once admitted he'd be scared to try a Klingon exchange program as Riker once did, and later confided he most feared for his life during the Borg attack at Wolf 359.
After proposing to her in her Arboretum on the Enterprise, he survived her bridal "cold feet" and married botanist Keiko Ishikawa with LaForge as his best man in Ten-Forward on SD 44390, or May 23, 2367; Data, who had introduced them, served as bridal escort. Keiko has tried to give him her green thumb as well as her neatness streak, both without success; he's become known as the "Black Thumb." He in turn had to adapt his meat-and-potatoes tastes to her bent for organic seafood; on duty he drinks hot coffee, double-black and sweet, though he's had synthale; his onetime assistant Neela got him hooked on sweet jumja sticks. He dislikes most alien food but relishes even Starfleet combat rations.
He became a father a year later when his daughter Molly was born, with a second child expected early in 2373. In 2370 the couple had taken their first vacation for either one in five years - since the second year of the Enterprise-D mission - after he was framed and nearly executed for a Maquis bombing by Cardassia. Apparently the trip home a year earlier for her mother's 100th birthday was not considered a vacation.
O'Brien's "promotion" and move to DS9 in 2369 as chief operations officer - the equivalent of chief engineer - was only reluctantly supported by Keiko, and the O'Briens early on were marked by gossip that Keiko was extremely unhappy; they had had squabbles but have worked through them all and love each other and their children very much. Actually, O'Brien has offered to transfer at least twice - early on, and again when then-Vedek Winn attacked Keiko's secular school, but she turned him down and stood her ground. In 2369 a local incident thrust him into the role of as a Bajoran village's ritual sirah but he was true to his wife and his down-to-earth nature there, as well as when a female Cardassian engineer mistook his irritation for flirting later. As a parent he loves reading to Molly and recommended Sisko separate Nog's influence from Jake, whom he also tutored in mechanics at his father's request.
Despite his family, O'Brien often agrees to go along on potentially fatal missions. In fact, more than any other DS9 senior officer, he has had numerous odd near-death experiences: given up for dead on a sabotaged T'Lani III peace mission, nearly killed while an unwitting replicant is substituted in his place, and actually replaced by his doppelganger from five hours into an alternate universes future when he dies of radiation poisoning. Soon after, Jake Sisko saved his life by pulling him from a fiery plasma-filled conduit.
Along with his musical and mechanical background O'Brien remains quite an athlete - an ideal relief for the long hours and hard work he puts in. A kayak enthusiast, he has had a holo-program since 2364 during his Enterprise assignment - though he has never finished it, dislocating his shoulder six times in the process as of late 2371. It's his favorite activity after work and family, and he sings "ancient human sea chanteys" during it such as "Louie, Louie" to establish a smooth paddling rhythm. Lately he's even got Odo interested on two such "trips." Around 2355, O'Brien kept a regimen of playing racquetball five hours daily, and missed it so much on DS9 he built a live court himself. He sparked a good-natured rivalry with Bashir, progressing through that sport into darts during Keiko's months-long absence on a Bajoran bio-survey. He's never had a run like his 47-game win streak at darts, ended only by a torn rotator cuff in his shoulder, his most serious injury there yet.
Beyond sports and games, O'Brien enjoys detective fiction such as Mickey Spillane and at DS9 loaned copies to Odo; he's also an old hand at poker. The chief enjoys the holosuites as well for role-playing, going from RAF pilots in Bashir's own program for the Battle of Britain of Terra's World War II to his own replaying of the ancient Irish-Viking Battle of Clontarf as High King Brian Boru, a direct ancestor.
When short-tempered he's been known to utter the quasi-curse "Cardies" and "bloody hell!" However, his lingering racism toward Cardasssians was examined after Keiko rejects it when the war orphan Rugal stays with them - although his trumped-up monkey trial and torture on Cardassia didn't help any. He dislikes getting medical physicals and hates surprise parties for himself. He had a fear of spiders, but largely conquered it during a crisis among Talarian hook spiders and their meter-long legs in a dark Jefferies Tube on the Zayra IV starbase - and after being married kept a pet tarantula, Christina, found on Titus IV.
Professional Assessment: Report of Starfleet Engineering
As Captain Maxwell realized in his early career, O'Brien has the special ability to quickly analyze a situation and present options for all contingencies - a talent expressed in command as well as engineering applications. His calm words with the former captain helped diffuse a powder keg, averting a Cardassian incident in 2368, and Picard tapped him to be tactical officer after Worf resigned from Starfleet and other key officers were farmed out to crews in a blockade fleet. He repeated that job often for Sisko on the USS Defiant.
O'Brien has many accomplishments in his career field, led by his first-ever use of a genetic pattern in the Enterprise's modified biolfilter to restore a transported object to a prior state. Though he easily catches on to many alien technologies, he had never worked a Cardassian transporter before his arrival at DS9; their inflexible computer design, the many Starfleet technology patch-overs and the station's run-down, ransacked state kept him in fits early in the assignment. He coaxed the theoretical maximum of the USS Prometheus warp engines past WF 9.5 to 9.6. And in late 2371 he alone saved the Defiant against an auto-destruct countdown while Odo battled a Changeling saboteur. Like a typical engineer, he lengthens his repair time estimates and, to welcome Worf to DS9 as an in-joke, recalled that the only thing their Enterprise colleagues couldn't do right was keep the ship's Holodecks functioning without constant glitches.
Psych Profile: UPDATE of Stardate 50000 Counselor Telnorri recording
Shortly after the prior posting, this counselor saw the subject O'Brien for some 12 weeks of therapy in dealing with 20 years of simulated imprisonment on Argratha compressed into a few hours -- a wrongful conviction realized to late to reverse the process. O'Brien exhibited extreme guilt over the "murder" of his virtual-reality cellmate and flirted with suicide over the helplessness of the anger that came from his denial. Thanks to breakthroughs at the time by Dr. Bashir and his wife, the subject overcame his initial violent disapproval of therapy and the treatment proceeded as well as could be expected. In follow-up reports by this counselor and Dr. Bashir we have detected little if any residual fallout from the episode affecting his work or personal life.
Psycho-Medical File Update: CMO J. Bashir recording, Stardate 50500
To update and correlate Counselor Telnorri's previous entry: The Chief continues to thrive on the challenges required by DS9's patched-together, cross-cultural platform -- as well as the busy nature of our strategic area. In fact, he has recently confided to Worf that he was bored with the perfection of his last posting, the Galaxy-class Enterprise. Still, we continue with our own weekly dart games - though I have yet to try his favorite breakfast of two eggs over easy, three bacon strips, and corned beef hash ... or the single malt Irish whiskey, neat, which he enjoys off-duty when not in the synthehol mood.
O'Brien has only recently concluded the biggest distraction of his recent career: his son's emergency fetal transplant by his doctor to Major Kira for surrogate pregnancy after his wife sustained threatening injury. While the ongoing health of the fetus was never in any real danger after the initial trauma, the unusual situation took a toll on both the O'Briens and Kira. After Miles' initial shock at the arrangement, I applauded he and Keiko inviting Kira to move in with them and accept her as Molly's "Aunt Nerys," but the degree of intimacy they came to share was beyond my belief. Aside from the Chief's clear overprotectiveness regarding her diet, I would almost suspect that the two encountered at one point a mutual attraction that both fascinated and frightened them.
By the time young Kirayoshi was born circa 50450, his tension had disrupted the traditional Bajoran birthing routine Kira had requested and spilled over to First Minister Shakaar, who had attended out of concern for Kira.
The lone exception to this point was the stress caused by the hijacking of Keiko's body by a vengeful, cast-out Prophet alien bent on forcing him to help its plan of destroying the wormhole under penalty of harming Keiko's body and Molly. The chief came through on his own, once again finding himself on a two-front war, and protected himself, his loved ones and the station.
Recently the chief has also confided to me how he prepares a "final message" tape to his wife and children prior to each departure on a dangerous mission, such as the covert infiltration to ascertain the rumored Changeling doubling of Gowron and the help in retrieving a prize Jem'Hadar vessel. On a sad note, I know the loss of one of his star engineers, Enrique Muniz, hurt him deeply. Even so, O'Brien remains a secular skeptic of the spiritualism of faiths such as those practiced by Worf and Kira.
