Todd sat at his computer console. It was 2:20 a.m. He couldn't
sleep, once again.
He'd done too many late night shifts at KMAJ or V100.. since
both were owned by the same company... and now he was used to
staying up until 6:00a.m.. so sleeping had become something he
enjoyed doing in the daytime.
Topeka was cold this time of year, and he didn't feel like
going for a walk to make himself sleepy, so he decided to surf
the web until he dropped off a few times. Then, he'd go to bed.
Todd signed on to the Reynolds Wrap Home Page and looked at
a nifty picture of an aluminum turkey for a few minutes.
His head snapped back when he realized his nose had about bounced
off of the wrist rest on his desktop. He'd caught himself sleeping
and decided it was time to go to bed. He clicked the shutdown
button on the keyboard and was rewarded with a red alert klaxxon
that about destroyed his ear drums. Todd tried to shut off the
noise before it woke his two girls and wife.
Fully awake and looking around for a shut off switch, he realized
he was not in his den. He was someplace else, with gleaming control
panels and a lot of red flashing lights. One of the red lights
flashed the words Red Alert! over and over. He pressed the button
below it, and was rewarded with silence, which was a good thing,
since he now had a terrible headache.
He sat down in the nearest chair and swiveled around to take
in his surroundings. "Wow! This looks just like the Enterprise
of Captain Kirks era!" Todd said to himself.. He was totally
alone. He noticed for the first time that the bridge was making
the same sound effects that he had heard on the television show,
only more authentic.
For a few minutes, Todd was amused by all that he saw. After
a while, however, he started to come to his senses and wondered
how in the world he had come to be on this bridge. "Screen
on?" He asked the air around him.
The viewscreen at the front of the bridge came to life and
displayed a nice star field. It was hard to see all of the stars
because there was a large Klingon ship in the way. "I must
be dreaming. There is no way that this is real." He said
aloud to his lonely surroundings.
The ship in the viewscreen powered up it's photon torpedo tubes
as was obvious to Todd when the tube began to glow a nice reddish
color. "But just in case this isn't a dream... shields up?"
The ship shield-display indicated that shields had gone up.
"This is only a dream. This is only a dream." Todd chanted over and over, hoping this was only a dream.