Ensign Kim does night duty on the starship Voyager

70,000 light years from home, as the senior officers slept, Ensign Kim sat in the Captain's chair. Sailing through uncharted space, he stared at the screen as Voyager passed nebulae, binary stars, white dwarfs, pulsars, quantum singularities, sub-space ruptures, temporal anomalies, and black holes. The sky was filled with wonders, but Ensign Kim imagined Sixth Avenue in New York, how once he stood mid-street late at night, staring down the avenue - free of the stream of taxis and vehicles. It only lasted half a minute, but it was a sailor's night - the calm sky, the red light, the streets as empty as the sea. The traffic came, the moment over, but he thought of how that moment of peace came and went so quickly and how Voyager, once the flagship of the fleet, would need 700 years to return home. Was this the pattern of the universe - the brief moment of happiness, the lifetime spent trying to regain it? How long would they have to sail the stars - how much data would their sensors have to collect - to see if this was true?

Brandywine
3/28/01