There’s a throwaway gag in Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol 1: Second Contact that stopped me in my tracks: the mention of the “Starfleet Corps of Rhetoric Engineers.” It’s absurd, brilliant, and, if you squint hard enough, entirely plausible. Because really, what is Starfleet if not a federation of diplomats, philosophers, and silver-tongued technocrats who can talk their way out of a temporal anomaly with nothing but a well-placed metaphor?
Let’s imagine them: stationed on a quiet asteroid base, sipping raktajino while debating the ethics of transporter clones and the semiotics of warp signatures. Their uniforms? Slightly more velvet than standard issue. Their motto? “We speak, therefore we boldly go.”
These are the unsung heroes who trained Picard to monologue with gravitas, who coached Janeway through her coffee-fueled diplomacy, and who probably had to sit down with Kirk to explain why “seduction” isn’t technically a negotiation tactic. They’re the ones who write the Prime Directive in iambic pentameter, just to make it stick.
But beneath the satire, there’s something oddly beautiful about the idea. Trek has always been about language; about the power of stories, of shared meaning, of finding common ground across species and star systems. The Corps of Rhetoric Engineers is a perfect emblem of that ethos: a fictional institution that reminds us that words matter, especially when the stakes are galactic.
So here’s to them: the speechwriters of the stars, the metaphor mechanics, the persuasive pacifists. May their arguments be airtight, their analogies illuminating, and their comm badges always tuned to the frequency of nuance.
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