Future's Past, part 9


Aboard the USS Enterprise, 2364

"Lt. Kendall, thank you for arriving so quickly," Jean-Luc Picard said. "I understand you were in the midst of teaching our young pupils."

"Yes, sir."

"History and sociology, correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me about the Holodeck program you've developed."

"Yes, sir," Kendall replied. "It's a series of programs I've developed over the past few years based on experiences my own family had on Earth. It ranges through a 100-year period in the Kansas City area, and introduces intermediate students to complex capitalism and social structure in both industrial and modern societies. The simulations in Kansas City were derived from my personal familiarity to the area and its history. I've found that once students feel that connection, they tend to remember more about it."

Picard nodded. It made absolute sense.

"Lt. Kendall, the reason we've called you here today is regarding an incident that hasn't yet been released to the rest of the ship, so I must ask for your discretion," Picard said.

"Two crew members from this ship are missing, possibly in a temporal displacement between the hours of 0700 to 0830. We believe the incident occurred just adjacent to the Holodeck where your programs were installed, and we're looking at every option."

"Are they all right, sir?"

"We don't know," Picard replied. "But we have reason to be believe that both officers may be caught in a temporal displacement, though that's yet to be confirmed. My senior staff is investigating."

"How would a temporal displacement have anything to do with a Holodeck program that wasn't even operating, sir?"

"Again, we don't know, yet. We're looking at all our options."


Independence, Missouri, January 12, 2008

"Let's try them!" Natasha Yar seemed more enthusiastic than usual about her latest, 21st century, culinary discovery. That had been their latest goal: Looking for unique dishes that couldn't be found in the 24th century.

This dish definitely fit that criteria, and Will Riker was disgusted, certain that she'd found something straight out of the Dark Ages.

"You try them," he replied.

Earlier in the day, they had taken the bus to the nearby city of Independence, which qualified as a suburb of Kansas City (though Independence residents tended to view it the other way around), to visit the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, which Will had wanted to see since first hearing about it from patrons at his workplace. The facility, built for one of the past presidents of the United States, honored the life, career and timeframe of the Missouri-native, and was a popular attraction for history buffs.

Neither Will nor Tasha had been particularly interested in history before they were stranded 350 years in their own pasts. But increasingly, they wanted to understand more about the time they now lived in. This exhibit was like walking into a mid-20th century time capsule.

They stopped at a nearby café to get something to eat. It wasn't exactly their kind of place: Country music twanged in the background and horseshoes hung over every door. Will literally could feel his arteries hardening just from inhaling the airborne grease droplets wafting from the kitchen and into the dining area.

But they'd already decided that taste tests like these were part of their grand adventure. So they grabbed a table and perused the menu.

"What are calf fries?" Tasha had asked the waitress.

"Mountain oysters," the waitress had replied, prepared for the usual, gross-out reaction typical of an out-of-towner. "Deep fried bull testicles."

Tasha was unfazed. "Oh, okay. . .I'll have those."

"The appetizer or the combo?"

"The combo, please."

Will stared at Tasha in complete disbelief. You're eating what? he mouthed toward her.

She only smiled back in his direction. Finally, she'd broken his poker face.

"What can I get for you, sir?" the waitress asked him, not really hiding her amusement, either. She'd seen Will's reaction many times before, usually from "city folks" who ambled into town to see the Library. The café's other, unique offerings of kidneys, deep-fried frog legs and sage-stuffed rattlesnake also brought some revulsion, though not as much as the testicles did.

"I'll have the catfish plate," Will finally replied, and noticed for the first time a framed poster on the opposite wall, picturing a distressed-looking cartoon bull, crossing its front hooves in front of its genital area, with the adjacent quote: 'Lost mine at Jimmy's!'

"Would you like fries or potato salad with that?" the waitress asked.

"Uh, what kind of fries?" he asked, a bit worried. The "fries" she'd referred to earlier didn't sound appetizing, at all. He tried not to think about the cartoon bull.

"Potatoes," she replied. "French fries."

"And not the. . .calf kind. . ."

"No, not the calf fries," she replied, smiling and imagining (correctly) that the woman at the table was ordering calf fries as a good-natured dig on the man she was with.

Will, who usually was quick to raid samples of whatever Tasha ordered, didn't even reach in that direction. There were four calf fries, served in a paper-lined, plastic basket with French fries and a pickle. They looked as innocuous as fish and chips. He tried not to look at her while she ate.

"How's your fish?" she asked.

"Very good," he replied.

"Want a bite of mine—?"

"No!"


January 19, 2008, Kansas City, Missouri

Although sporting events in the 21st century seemed unsophisticated, Will and Tasha were competitive enough to have gotten into any sporting event. That was true on the Enterprise, and now it was true on Earth, even if it was 350 years in the past.

They even found themselves taking sides.

Regardless of the sport being played, any game pitting the University of Missouri against the University of Kansas always guaranteed a crowd at area watering holes. Kansas City straddled the border between the states of Missouri and Kansas, so loyalties for each respective university also were divided.

On this winter evening, the University of Missouri was hosting the annual grudge match at their school's base in Columbia, which was located three hours away from Kansas City, deep in "Tiger Territory", as it was called. Around 300 fans of both schools who didn't want to drive that far gathered at the 43rd to watch the basketball match, and they proudly wore their school's colors: Crimson and blue, or black and gold.

Tasha already had made her preference known, mostly because her boss Gary was a KU fan. She had splurged for the occasion, purchasing a t-shirt with a University of Kansas Jayhawk emblazoned across the front.

Will arrived at the bar in the middle of the game, meandering into his usual watching spot with his usual crowd of bar buddies who still only knew each other only by their first names. Tasha was in the thick of things, as usual, hauling drinks all over the place.

She'd gotten to where she rarely spilled anything, anymore, unless someone ran into her.

But that was what finally happened, of course, about 20 minutes before Will showed up. She was heading toward the stairs with six empty glasses and two pitchers of beer just as a man came hurrying around the corner and slammed right into her.

To Tasha's credit, nothing on her tray hit the floor. She was able to keep everything on the tray, except the contents of both pitchers, which splashed into her face, then tipped over against her white t-shirt. A bit embarrassed, Gary still good-naturedly teased her, informing her that the "world will be seeing your business unless you change into a dry shirt."

The only spare shirt he had in his office was a black, Mizzou t-shirt that had been left behind in the bar one evening. It was at least two sizes too large for her, but it would have to do. She rinsed out her own shirt and had the bar's cook put it on top of the pizza oven to dry it out, hopefully before she got too much crap for wearing a shirt for "that other team".

She didn't need to wait long for her first gig from a patron about the giant tiger displayed across the front of her shirt.

"Did you lose a bet?" Will laughed when he saw her.

"No, this was an accident—," she started to say, and then he noticed that her hair was wet and that the front of her jeans were wet, too. "Two pitchers versus a patron in a hurry, and I lost. My shirt's drying out on top of the oven. This one was in the lost and found box. If my shirt hadn't been white, I'd have just kept wearing it wet, but Gary told me he doesn't run that kind of place."

Would have been nice to see, though, Will thought, then he stopped that thought process. For the past two weeks, since their not-so-accidental street corner make-out session, he'd had to force himself not to fantasize about the "what if" scenarios that could have happened if he and Tasha hadn't put a stop to it.

Of course, nothing much had happened that night. They had talked for awhile, then dozed off while sitting straight up against the back of the couch, leaning sideways against each other. They woke up the next morning spooned up on the couch, still wearing all their clothes. They hadn't even taken off their shoes.

Will didn't remember the last time he had awakened next to a woman without having used her the night before.

What had happened that night was absolutely right, he thought. Nothing had happened. The path not taken was the best path for both of them.

They had sat back up the morning after nothing had happened, finally kicked off their shoes and propped their bare feet up on the small table they'd pilfered from a trash pile two months earlier. Tasha had teased him about having hairy toes. Why do you even bother wearing socks, Will? He still had to laugh a little about that one.

They'd taken separate showers as usual and then walked several blocks toward a favorite coffee shop on Broadway for breakfast. They were just buddies, chatting and laughing about everything, and nothing.


Grumbling brought Will out of his reverie. The game was heating up, and with it, the generations-long school loyalties that had far deeper roots. F-bombs were dropped by bar patrons over what they were hearing from Mizzou fans at the game.

Mizzou's campus police had tamped out much of the shoving and brawling that used to accompany a home game against Kansas. But hyped-up MU fans still got their digs in wherever they could, often chanting slogans used since before the U.S. Civil War, when Missouri and Kansas were bitterly divided: Missouri had been a slave state, and Kansas was a free state. Even multiple generations later, Mizzou students invoked the name of one of their state's historical figures to further insult their visitors:

"Quantrill was right! Quantrill was right! Quantrill was right!"

The chant emanated from televised game coverage, and even the game commentators quickly groaned before the game abruptly cut to a commercial.

"Huh?" Tasha didn't understand that one.

Gary leaned closer to explain over the noise. "Quantrill was with the Missouri militia back before the Civil War, and he led a group of men over to Kansas on a raid, to get the Free Staters back for another raid they'd done earlier."

Tasha always got a kick out of Gary's pronunciation of the state's name. She'd most often heard it pronounced 'Missouree', but Gary and some other area residents always said, 'Missourah'. He'd told her that he was from someplace in Missouri called Joplin, and as a native Missourian, he could call it whatever he wanted to.

"Quantrill and his group killed about 200 men and boys, burned down the entire town of Lawrence, and then they left," Gary said. "In Missouri, William Quantrill is considered a hero, and in Kansas he's considered a butcher. But this stuff was going on everywhere in those days."

"So they're chanting that they think this guy was right to burn down a community and murder its citizens?" Tasha asked. "This happened, what, 500 hundred years ago?"

"150 years ago," Gary replied, winking at her, as an irrepressible grin spread across his face.

Oops. . .Tasha thought, glad Will hadn't overheard that slip-up. Will was too busy talking politics and basketball at the other end of the bar.

"Yeah, Kansas might have moved on after the Civil War, but some people from Missouri never did," Gary said, having moved on, as he always did. "The majority of us are good people, we aren't racist and we're grown ups, but racism's here, too. I'm not a racist, but people find out my family's from Joplin and they automatically think I'm in the KKK. It's stupid. The White Power crap's made us all look bad.

"And then these immature students up there in the stands, they get so wrapped up in school pride, they don't even know what they're shouting about. But some of the KU fans bring it on. I guarantee you that right now, there's a whole crowd of 'em who drove over from Lawrence all the way out to Columbia just looking for a reason to kick someone's ass, and they sort of invite it. Some of 'em don't even go to the game. They're in town on game day just to stir some shit. That's why I insisted you work tonight. We need you here in case people start pounding on each other."

Tasha thought about retreating to the bathroom to turn her shirt inside out, and then providence intervened, and a welcome voice from the kitchen got her attention.

"You're off the hook, Tasha!"

She glanced up in time to see her KU shirt, now dry, sailing through the air toward her, and she caught it. Al waved at her.

"You're such a good sport!" Al said. "I'd have displayed my beer gut to the world before wearing a Mizzou shirt, tonight!"


Early February, 2008

Will became intrigued with basketball. It was more compact, more fast-paced, a good workout. Where Tasha preferred beating the hell out of people for the sport of it at her dojo, Will enjoyed a good pick-up game.

He purchased a used basketball and began shooting hoops at the community center down the street, then learned the rules of one-on-one and grew interested in collegiate play, mostly because of the buzz he'd picked up from nearly everyone in town. Kansas City was a big-time, college basketball city.

It had been 20 years since Kansas had taken a national title, but expectations were high in 2008. No one believed a Jayhawk football team could have made it to a high-caliber game like the Orange Bowl, let alone won the game. Now that momentum had built into big-time expectation for the school's sports specialists. Kansas was known for its basketball excellence, and anything less than a national title was viewed as a failure of some sort.

Even the mainstream news media had gotten on the basketball bandwagon. Basketball talk even eclipsed political jabber, and already there was plenty of that, with 2008 being an election year.

In February, Will joined one of the city's recreational leagues as a mid-season substitute. He arranged to be off from work every Tuesday so he could hop on a bus to Penn Valley Community College, where the city's metro league met for "all-in-good-fun" games. He didn't know any of the other players on the team to which he'd been assigned and had stumbled through his first few minutes of play, but then hit his fourth attempt at a basket and felt vindicated.

Tasha hadn't made it to that first or second game because she'd had to work. But she was there at the third game, and was immediately jealous that he got to play and she didn't. But it was a men's only league. Even though the distinction didn't exist in many areas in the 24th century, it was everywhere in the 21st.

They both were shocked to discover that racism was still an issue. They had learned in EarthCiv that laws guaranteeing civil rights had been passed more than 40 years earlier, and didn't understand why it still was prevalent, more so in some locations than in others, and going ways between races and ethnicities. Every day in the news, there were accusations of racism, sexism, groupism, discrimination, harassment of some sort.

Tasha dealt with reverse discrimination at times when she volunteered at Reconciliation, which was based on the edge of a neighborhood where the majority of residents happened to be of African ancestry. She quickly learned almost every derogatory name for a Caucasian woman that existed in the English language, and blew them off just as fast, so she gained a reputation as someone who was tough enough to take the worst.

But she still wouldn't go into the church, not even during the Epiphany on January 6. She stayed downstairs in the kitchen, helping to prepare the feast that accompanied the Eastern Orthodox's commemoration of the 12 days after the birth of Jesus. "The Rec" as it was known in the community, always had a special meal on that day, and hundreds of people came for services.

Tasha stayed downstairs at the Rec and considered the irony of everything. The usual crowd of drunks lay passed out in the cold outdoors, near overflowing trash cans on the opposite corner of the intersection of Troost Avenue and 31st Street, where a convenience store (or the "stop-and-rob," as local police labeled it) was doing brisk business, mostly in junk food, cigarettes and liquor.

The store had bars across each of its thick, scratched-up, Plexiglas windows. There were no vending machines, nor even a telephone outside. The store's management did away with the pay phones because too many people were using them for drug deals. There had been so many shootings (one of which sparked a petrol fire) that the store hadn't sold gasoline in years. Even the ice machine had been moved inside, because people either urinated into it at night, or left the freezer doors wide open to cool off during the summer.

It was an idiosyncratic mix; addiction and hopelessness on one corner, and faith emanating from the other. Even through the church's closed doors, Tasha could discern the chants and blessings she hadn't heard since she was a child. Her eyes clouded by memories that included her childhood church engulfed in flames, she turned and walked back into the kitchen.


Mid-April, 2008, Lawrence, Kansas

The University of Kansas did indeed go on to win the national title three months later. That game was a close one, won in overtime, and Tasha had been at the bar cleaning up until 0330. Her ears rang for days from the cacophony that had erupted in the bar—and in Westport—when the KU basketball team fulfilled the expectations of its fans.

A celebration was planned for the team that next Sunday in Lawrence, and both Will and Tasha collectively were relieved that neither of them were working that day. Sounds intriguing, Will had said. So a longer than normal field trip was planned, and that morning they hopped aboard a KC Metro bus and trekked to a depot in Overland Park, a city suburb located on the city's "Kansas side".

From there, they squeezed aboard an overloaded shuttle bus that went back and forth between the Kansas City area and the town of Lawrence, where KU's campus was located around 45 minutes away. Will figured they could spend the day in Lawrence, maybe check out the campus, find someplace to eat and head back to Kansas City.

The bus dropped everyone off 15 blocks south of the parade route, which irked many aboard the bus, but then Will realized the driver had a valid reason: Fifteen blocks away was as close as that driver was going to get.

Tens of thousands of fans had crammed the sidewalks for more than a dozen city blocks along Massachusetts Street, the main drag in downtown Lawrence. They spilled from the sidewalks into the street, climbed trees, streetlamps and drainpipes mounted along the buildings.

Most of Lawrence's downtown area storefront buildings didn't go above three stories high, and fans leaned out every window above the parade route. More people stood on roofs overlooking the parade, and the sidewalks were jam-packed. Despite hosting the state's largest university, the small city of Lawrence really wasn't designed for crowds like these. Then again, a national championship wasn't exactly a daily thing, either.

At around 1500 hours, KU's marching band squeezed past the crowd, and Will immediately felt a bit sorry for the trombone players, who needed extra space to play but really didn't have that luxury. They were marching side-by-side, with their shoulders touching each other's to make it through the surging crowd.

Then came the convertibles, one at a time, slowly pressing forward while carrying their cargo for the customary hero's welcome. First the coach and his wife, then each of the players, and fans lurched forward toward the street for high-fives and close-up pictures. Some of them seemed ecstatic only to touch the cars each player rode in.

Tasha gave a shout-out to one of KU's star players who had been born and raised in Russia. He glanced in their direction, his expression unsure if he'd heard someone congratulating him in Russian over the rest of the crowd, or not. But he still smiled, and waved.

"Nice touch!" Will said.

"Hope I said it right," she replied, and she had to shout in his ear to be heard over the cheering crowd. "My Russian isn't very good."

"Speaking of Russian, you suppose Worf would like basketball?" Will asked later, as they meandered through the dissipating crowd after the last of the players had passed by.

"I don't know about basketball, but he'd like football," Tasha remarked. "He enjoys crunching people. If he played basketball, he'd foul out within a few minutes."

"He'd like hockey, too," Will said. "He'd enjoy putting a puck through someone's teeth."

"What's hockey?"

"Field hockey, only on ice."

"How would you get any leverage on ice?"

"On ice skates," Will remarked.

She stared at him with a blank look on her face.

"What, you've never been ice skating?"

She slowly shook her head, knowing—dreading—where this was heading.

"There's our next field trip! I'm teaching you to ice skate. You'll love it."


Late April, 2008, at Midwest Ice Rink in South Kansas City, Missouri

"OK, let go of the boards."

Tasha barely had been able to wobble across the rubber mats wearing rented ice skates. Will had tightened up the laces so her ankles didn't fall inward, but could tell this was going to be easier said than done.

He finally cajoled her onto the ice, and now she had a death grip on the handrail at the edge of the ice rink.

"You'll never learn to skate unless you let go of the boards," Will implored. He was standing on his own, rented hockey skates about four feet away, but was much more sure of himself. "Just push off and glide forward."

"If I let go, I'm going to bust my ass," she muttered.

"Well, it's already cracked," he replied with a grin.

She glared back, then nodded and smiled. "Nice one, Will."

"So, just give it a try," he said. "Come on. You're blocking people who want to get onto the ice."

She really wasn't. They were buzzing right past her. Children who couldn't have been older than four or five years old were speeding past, with their parents in hot pursuit. And this was supposed to be the "slower" of the four rinks at this huge facility.

"They're skating around me," she replied. "You can skate around me."

"Oh, I'll skate around you—," and he pried her fingers loose from the boards, despite her protests, and began pushing her away from the boards, far enough away that she couldn't reach out and grab them. But she was still standing, and that was a good sign.

"Use your arms to balance and push off with the inside of your skate," Will said, gently pushing the middle of her back with one hand so she'd glide forward. "Or use the toe pick. You've got on figure skates, so you can use the toe pick to push off, and you can also drag it across the ice to stop . . . you're getting it! You're doing fine. OK, here comes a corner . . .you need to veer to the left—what are you doing?"

"Taking a break," she said, skating straight toward the boards and grabbing onto them. "My feet are cold."

"I told you to wear socks!"

"I am wearing socks!"

"The longer you stand here, the colder your feet will get," Will remarked, then nodded toward the center of the rink, at a little girl who seemed as comfortable on the ice as she was off of it, spinning rapidly on one foot. "Look how much fun she's having!"

"That reminds me of Null-G training, when I threw up in my helmet," Tasha said.

"You threw up because you didn't null out your spin, and then you looked past your handholds," Will said, though he remembered feeling queasy during his own training before figuring out to never look away from his hand and footholds.

"Wait a minute . . . that's why they have all these trash cans around the edge of the ice!" Tasha said. "So people can throw up into them after they've finished spinning around in circles. Someone put a lot of thought into this."

"Well you're not very much fun to skate with," Will said.

"I'm not good at this!"

"Are you telling me that's your only reason for participating in a sport, because you're good at it? That's pretty lame, Tasha," he said. "I'm not very good at basketball but I had a hell of a great time playing earlier this year. You weren't good at throwing a softball, but you stuck out the season and learned how to throw that ball. You know what? I'm going to skate around for awhile because I am enjoying myself. I might even get a hockey stick and take a few shots during open shot time in an hour. You can get off the ice, or you can stay on and learn something new, because I really think you'd enjoy it if you gave it a chance. I can tell you that they probably won't give a stick and puck to someone who can't turn a corner—both literally and figuratively, no pun intended. So if you're interested in joining me later, I'd suggest you figure it out."

"Sounds good to me," she said, her face flushing.

"Great," Will said, skating backwards, away from her, and then crossing over to skate more rapidly. "I'll see you later." And he knew that this would get her hackles up, being chewed out and left behind. That should do the trick, he thought.

He was right.

Within 15 minutes, she was skating as fast as everyone else, only falling once, and getting right back up without a hitch. He taught her to skate backward, which was actually easier for her than skating forward had been. He attempted to teach crossovers, but she wasn't quite ready for those. Her skate blades got tangled in each other and down she went. Her only bad wipeout came when he was teaching her how to turn her blades sideways in an ice-spraying stop. She contented herself with digging her toe pick into the ice to slow down, instead.

"I think you need hockey skates, next time," he said. "So, what do you think? Fun? Good workout? I grew up with this. A lot of kids in Alaska learn to skate at the same time that they're learning to walk."

"Yeah, it's a good workout," she said, a little out of breath. "I didn't think I was this out of shape."

"Skaters use muscles that most of us don't use on a regular basis."

"Isn't that the truth!" she remarked. "I'm sweating in places I never knew I had."

"Ah, that's nice to know, thanks a lot," he said, but they were both laughing. "Come on, let's go abuse some hockey pucks!"