Calaveras Station 2004 - Time Traveling Under the Influence

Time Traveling Under the Influence

Gerrit Thompson

We were sitting in Quark's Bar on the promenade of Deep Space Nine when the Warp Core Breach began to take hold. Rob said to me something like, "I'm drinking most of this, aren't I, you bastard." As the liquor started soaking into my brain, I slowed my drinking and concentrated on my Sisko Caesar Salad. One of us had to be sober on the walk back to Circus-Circus. Rob wanted to get smashed before going on the Star Trek ride again, so I figured he wouldn't mind finishing the drink off.

The Warp Core Breach could only be sold legally to two or more people; one person alone could not handle it. In Trek lore, a warp core breach was a major fucking disaster: when the starship's engine, the warp core, was damaged, the ship was only moments away from blowing up in a spectacular special effect. The drink was equally destructive. The menu offered this warning: "Red Alert! Order this drink and prepare to separate your saucer section! Sensors indicate Bacardi Lemon, Bacardi Light, Bacardi Spice, Bacardi 151, Razzmatazz and SoBe Power drink. We add pure ice crystals from the planet Exo III. You'll need more than one officer to handle this situation." It took little convincing from Rob, who had had one the summer before, to get me to try it. The large fishbowl of smoking maroon alcohol was delivered by a waiter in a blue Starfleet uniform.

I heeded the warning and separated from the Warp Core before it was too late; Rob gallantly, or, rather, unknowingly, stayed behind to finish the job himself. The Bacardi would rupture his brain. A noble sacrifice. Kinda like Spock in The Wrath of Khan. Quark's Bar was located on the first floor of the Las Vegas Hilton and decorated like its television namesake: low lighting, gray metal tables with matching chairs, orange and red panels of woven gothic designs, a curved bar with a glowing blue counter and video monitors all over the place. It acknowledged that not everything in the future was bathed in earth-tones and politically-correct; there were poorly-illuminated corners that were metallic and corrupt.

The way the waiter acted around usÐsquatting down next to our chairs to take our orders, squeezing my shoulder to show approval of my choices and just being very silly and giddyÐmade me wonder not only if he was gay but if he thought we were, too. If he did, he was half right: Rob was gay but I wasn't, though most people assumed I was. It was a strange and annoying phenomenon. "Have you had more than a few sips of this?" Rob asked.

"Yes but you're just chugging away at it. Besides, I thought you wanted to get drunk, so what are you complaining about?"
Our original purpose for going to Vegas was to hang out with my college roommate Bill and his friends from Chino but that fell apart; Bill's grandfather passed away a few days before the trip, leaving Rob and me with non-refundable plane tickets. So Rob devised a new purpose for the trip - actually, two purposes. One was to play every "Dance Dance Revolution" arcade machine he could find. The freak, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, played the machines at Circus-Circus, the Stratosphere and the Sahara but couldn't find the one reported to exist at Caesar's Palace. Rob's other mission was to ride the Star Trek ride at the Hilton drunk.

I tried to convince him to go to a gay strip club since I doubted any existed in Sacramento. I went to a strip club by myself our second night there - only the second time I'd been to a strip club in my life, and it proved to Rob I wasn't gay because he said no gay man would pay money to see boobies - and I thought seeing naked guys would do Rob some good, but he wanted to dance to Japanese techno in front of an arcade machine instead. I shouldn't judge, though: I spent a few hours of my trip reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas due to a need to feel postmodern. After our salads were done - we both had the Sisko Caesar but Rob added grilled chicken to his - and we'd consumed as much of the Warp Core Breach as we could, well, as much as Rob could, we paid our bill and left.
Rob nearly fell down as he got out of his chair.

Since it was almost ten P.M. and there were better things to do in Vegas, only a handful of people accompanied us as we were ushered into a small room to begin the ride. The walls vanished as a loud ringing filled our ears, bright halos appeared on the floor and ceiling and a Starfleet officer at a control panel materialized in front of us. Funny, it didn't feel like my body was broken down atom by atom and shot across the galaxy. The officer slapped his communicator badge and informed the bridge of our arrival. The actor delivered his lines with a wavering pitch to convey the oddity of our appearance. I felt sorry for this poor guy, who had to say the same cheesy dialogue over and over, all day long, but I guess it beat stripping.

As the actor led us down a corridor that was probably a leftover set piece from the Next Generation series, I walked alongside Rob to make sure he didn't trip and fall on his face. The actor herded us into a turbolift (that's Star Trek technobabble for "elevator"). At the end of our faked ascent, the lift doors opened to reveal the command deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, the homiest warship in history. Beige carpets and plush seats; a U-shaped, polished wood railing; and slick black consoles with yellow and blue graphic displays. I imagined an interior designer saying, "Okay, sure, I understand you're out there in deep space, boldly going where no man has gone before, getting shot at by the Romulans all the time, but that's no excuse not to travel in comfort. It's a warship but it doesn't have to scream 'Mars!' You can have a soft, subtle color scheme that reminds you of Mother Earth."

On the large screen at the front of the bridge, Commander William T. Riker, the first officer from The Next Generation, appeared. Riker was in the ship's shuttle bay, prepping a shuttle. He informed the small group that we had been transported into the 24th Century by a Klingon named Korath. Riker didn't bother to tell us primitives what a Klingon was. (The storyline, as written, would have worked better if it was about a group of people transported into the world of a fictional television show, a la Pleasantville, rather than the 24th century.) The Enterprise's crew, Riker continued, had intercepted the transport and beamed us to the ship. Riker then dropped the bombshell: the Enterprise's captain, Jean-Luc Picard, had disappeared. What was needed at this point was a dramatic piano chord. Apparently, one of the people in our group was an ancestor of Captain Picard and, by bringing us into the future, Korath disrupted the lineage that produced Picard. In fact, Riker informed us, Picard had vanished from this timeline only a few moments before. Riker had to make sure we got back to the 21st century so Picard would re-appear. I thought it was nice of Jonathan Frakes to come back and update this video message for the new millennium.

I could have just gone along with the silly plot but since this was my second time around and I was really sick of Star Trek relying on time-travel stories, I analyzed it:
Hypothesis
Picard's disappearance was the result of an ancestor being removed from the 21st Century and transplanted into the 24th.
Evaluation
If the ancestor's expulsion was the cause of Picard's removal from the timeline, it suggested that this ancestor had yet to conceive any offspring. So if Picard had not been born due to the missing ancestral link, then Riker should've had no knowledge of Picard existing in the first place. It's not like he'd turn to the captain's chair and say, "Oh shit, the captain's disappeared! My god, he was never even born!" In a Picard-less timeline, Riker, who probably would not have been the executive officer of the Enterprise, would have gone about his business, not knowing that time had been altered because, from his point of view in the new timeline, nothing would have changed.

Think of it this way: if someone went back in time and killed Hitler's parents before they could conceive, no one in the 21st century would be saying, "Thank god that Hitler boy was never born."

If the Klingon commander, Korath, had succeeded in his mission to get rid of Picard, he wouldn't have known since Picard would not have existed to begin with. In realityÐand it was pretty sad that I was analyzing Star Trek in real-life termsÐKorath would've ended up with a group of primitive humans and asked, what the hell are these people doing on my ship? That is, if he even commanded a ship in the new timeline; he could've been scrubbing toilets in some Klingon fast food joint, which would have served him right since this was a pretty pansy-assed way for a Klingon warrior to eliminate his enemy.

In this context, the most the 21st century group could have hoped for was for Starfleet, a Starfleet unaware of Picard's non-existence, to intercept them and decide to send them back to their proper era because it was the right thing to do, which would have resulted in Picard's birth. Of course, the Picard-less Starfleet would not know if they succeeded or not since that timeline would cease to exist once Picard's ancestor was back in his or her proper time.

But would the ancestor's transplant into the 24th Century, only to be sent back to the 21st, really have resulted in a Picard-less future? Obviously, if Starfleet were successful in sending him or her back in time, Picard would have been born. So, from the future's point of view, the ancestor's return to his or her proper time would have already happened. The start of the "return process" had yet to occur but the end result, the return to the 21st century, had, so the mission to return the ancestor was a success before it even began. Picard should have been there to greet his ancestor. There would have been no Picard only if the ancestor didn't make it back, which would have been known from the future era ("Let's see, according to our records, you disappeared one day in Las Vegas, Nevada in the year 2001, never to be seen again. Sucks to be you").

Conclusion
The creators of the ride came up with this lazy storyline and threw out a temporal paradox to work around the fact that Patrick Stewart had better things to do with his career than to appear in a Las Vegas attraction.
Rob, smiling, swayed beside me.
Sometime during my analysis, Korath, with his bumpy forehead, dreadlocks and sharp teeth, appeared on the Enterprise's screen and threatened bloody violent death. How stereotypically Klingon.
Riker's image reappeared and barked "Red alert!" The command deck's soft lighting turned off, replaced by red emergency lights.
This is where the fun began.

The group crowded into a turbolift that led to the shuttle bay. The lift shuddered to simulate a direct hit on the ship's hull. I feared what all the shaking was doing to Rob's equilibrium.
We were led to a shuttle mock-up and seated. Rob and I sat down in the front row. I pointed across Rob's chest to the left and said, "If you're gonna puke, do it in that direction."
Rob leaned over to me. "Bleeeeh!" He giggled.

The screen at the front of the shuttle turned on, displaying an image of the shuttle bay with soft edges, as if the 24th Century lacked high-definition video. This ride, like the Star Wars-inspired Star Tours at Disneyland, used a large screen at the front and hydraulics underneath to simulate an outer space journey. As we watched the screen, the bay doors opened and the shuttle ejected from the Enterprise. I leaned over to the rightÐRob crashed into my shoulderÐas the hydraulics simulated the shuttle's turn away from the ship headed in the direction of the temporal rift, a swirling blue pinwheel suspended in space that led back to 21st Century Las Vegas. Why were all Star Trek time-space anomalies blue? Why were there never gun-metal gray time-space anomalies?

On the screen, the Klingon Bird of Prey, a rusted vulture of a starship, swooped toward us, phasers blasting. The shuttle weaved between the Bird of Prey and the Enterprise, dodging photon torpedoes and ducking under the ultra-macho insults tossed between Riker and Korath. As the hydraulics threw the shuttle around, Rob flopped in his chair like an invertebrate. Forward, backward, side to side. "Weeee! Weeee! Weeeeeee!" He laughed the entire time. I hoped he remembered to puke to his left.

After a bumpy ride through the rift's electric-blue canal, Las Vegas appeared on the screen. The assorted themed buildingsÐthe emerald MGM Grand lion, the Luxor pyramid shooting a light into space, the cramped skyline of New York, New YorkÐmade the city look more cartoonish than Disneyland. As the shuttle swept low toward the MGM Grand, the Bird of Prey materialized above the lion's headÐthe Klingon captain cackled as he declared victory. Then, in a moment worthy of James T. Kirk, Riker snarled over the intercom, "I don't think so, Korath!" and the unseen Enterprise blasted the Klingon ship to bits. The Enterprise, triumphant, flew into view and arced up to outer space. Meanwhile, as our shuttle glided to the Las Vegas Hilton, I'm sure falling debris crushed hundreds of Las Vegas tourists but none of them, I assumed, were important to the Picard timeline, so why worry?

Before the shuttle crashed through the lobby of the Hilton and skidded to a halt, Picard's voice thanked us for restoring the timeline, assuring his birth, blah blah blah. I was just relieved that Rob didn't puke on me.

He puked later, in the bathtub of our hotel room.

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