A Long, Long Time Ago

A long, long time ago...

I can still remember
how that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
and, maybe, they'd be happy for a while.

– Don McLean (American Pie)

=/\=

She was a great piece.

Whenever Rick Daniels thought about Tina April, his mind usually went straight there. He was immensely gifted, and could think of all sorts of things at once. Nearly constantly multitasking, he was. But when he thought of Tina, it was nearly always in that particular context.

Not that there weren't other contexts. They had been seeing each other, on and off, for a good four months. And they did more than burn up the sheets – they would go to dinner, or sometimes on vacation. Their conversations were pleasant and fairly high brow – she was a schoolteacher, after all. They would be about history, or art, or literature, or science, or politics. Or it was about her charges, a bunch of overly precocious seven- and eight-year-olds.

But their conversations were virtually never about his life, and his work, and he liked it that way. When the topic veered too closely for his tastes, he would stealthily steer it elsewhere, and soon they were back to talking about the old Pre-Warp days or some such.

That was good, as so much of his life, and his work, was restricted and classified that he couldn't say anything anyway. It was also better, for he really didn't want to say anything. Sharing his personal feelings and desires was absolutely foreign to his nature – it was as if it had been almost bred out of him.

He didn't love her – he didn't love any of them – but she was good company and she was his sister's friend and so he had continued on, longer than he knew he should have, deeper into 3109, and into the summer, and her bikini distracted him even more.

Plus, she was a great piece.

=/\=

Admiral Carmen Calavicci stared out the window of her office at the Temporal Integrity Commission, gazing back at the Milky Way from beyond the galactic barrier. She was a little older than Rick – 42 to his 40 – and she was his boss. Money had been abolished long ago, but resources, alas, had never become infinite. Governments still had to allocate, if not financial budgets, then at least a budget based on time – labor hours, that is.

There was finally a chime, and she checked her PADD. Excellent! Five more full-time equivalents had been approved, just as she had requested.

Their work was stealthy and shadowy. Time travel was more than possible – hell, it was almost easy – and that's how things could get, as her Chief Engineer, Kevin O'Connor would say, "a little caca."

All right – more than a little. There were strict rules for time travel. You needed to file with the Commission. You needed to show scientific, historic or cultural need. You needed to follow protocols and a list of regulations longer than most sentient beings' arms.

But not everyone did so, or they would mess up, and they didn't mean it, but oops! Suddenly the Berlin Wall would be up an extra decade or the Eugenics Wars would start differently or whatever.