 Quick Facts:
- Rank:
Chief petty officer, senior chief specialist
- Current assignment: Professor of Engineering, Starfleet
Academy; previously, Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine
- Full Name: Miles Edward O'Brien
- Year of birth: September, 2328
- Place of birth: Killarney, Ireland, Earth
- Parents: Mr. and Mrs. Michael O'Brien (mother died
2368; father remarried 2369)
- Marital status: Married Keiko Ishikawa in 2367 in
Ten-Forward, U.S.S. Enterprise
- Children: One daughter, Molly, born 2368; a son,
Kirayoshi, born 2373
- Quarters: Currently relocating to Earth from residence
at Deep Space Nine (several cities under consideration)
- Security clearance: Level 1
- First Seen: "Encounter at Farpoint" (TNG)
Complete Bios:
FROM
STARTREK.COM
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 and giving
substitute teachers a rough time. He once owned 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 2369 to
a woman his son had not yet met over a year later.
 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 later and brief stints aboard two more ships, he was
among the first crew aboard the new Galaxy-class Enterprise when
it departed Utopia Planetia, serving in command division as a
relief conn 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 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 La Forge 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 — Jamaican blend, double-strong,
double-sweet — though he occasionally partakes in synthale. His
onetime assistant Neela got him hooked on sweet jumja sticks. He
dislikes most alien food, but relishes 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 in five years — since the
second year of the Enterprise-D mission — after O Brien was
framed and nearly executed by the Cardassian government for a
Maquis-related weapons incident. (Apparently, the trip home a
year earlier for Keiko's 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 were marked
early on 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 a role in 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 future when he died of radiation
poisoning. During the station's near-self-destruct crisis, Jake
Sisko saved O'Brien's life by pulling him from a fiery
plasma-filled conduit. All these incidents took place within
about a year of each other.
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 gotten Odo interested on two such "trips."
Around 2355, O'Brien kept a regimen of playing racquetball five
hours daily, and missed it so much that he built a live court
himself on DS9. 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 Cardassians was examined after Keiko rejected it when the
war orphan Rugal stayed 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.
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