Pavel Andreievich Chekov

[The wee hours of Friday morning find Chekov, dressed in ill-fitting but time-period-appropriate clothing, on the roof of apartment building number twelve. He's sitting cross-legged on one of the long lawn chairs recently moved up there by Charlie with papers, pencils, a ruler, and goodness-knows what else in front of him and working by the dim glow of a light that, as far as the video shows, appears to be mounted on his network device.

Well, was working. Chekov studies the papers in front of him--what's on them will remain a mystery to the network--as he addresses his device, tone rather contemplative.]

Are there stories concerning what is beyond the City's barriers? I think that there must be something; there is a curvature to the horizon, as if we are on a planet. The area we may access would take up only a small amount of room on a planet, and I wonder what may be out there.

The sky, too, is peculiar. The moon and sun and stars look as they would on any planet with a rotational period of nearly twenty-four hours, appearing in the east and disappearing in the west. I do not think that this moon's features are the same as Earth's moon, but maybe I am mistaken. The stars flicker as they do on Earth when their light passes through the atmosphere. It is hard to see unaided, but I believe the stars are different colors--hot blue stars, cool red stars. It is all very like Earth.

What is odd is that I cannot find planets. Very few stars have only one planet orbiting them. [He looks up at the sky and then back down at the paper he's holding.] I cannot find familiar constellations, either, but that is to be expected.

With a telescope, maybe, I might find distant planets.

[Chekov pushes his papers and gadgets aside to stare at the early-morning sky, as if he can make sense of all of this by staring at it long enough.]

So that is all strange, but I am posting this mostly because I am curious: why would an advanced species--or whatever the deities may be--go to the trouble of creating an Earth-like planet with a moon and a sun and stars, but not put in other planets? Or, if this planet was here already, why is it so similar to Earth and why can we access only a small part of it? If the deities have trapped us here to observe our behavior, they constructed our cage oddly.

But then, of course, it is possible that everything beyond the barriers is illusory. Even a complex hologram would be relatively simple to create, given the right technology. I think that its maintenance would be problematic, but I am not a technologically or evolutionarily superior being with a human ant farm, so what can I know?

[He reaches for the network device and turns off the light. Little remains visible but stars and the faint glow of approaching daybreak.]

Deities, you are teasing us by showing us things we cannot reach. Very rude.

[petulantly] You might have also considered equipping this City with replicators.


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