by Randy Munch Oct/21

A Word List storey utilizing the following 15 words:

                 space               kitchen              function           dinner              far-reaching

                 window           power              radiant             match              natural

                 camaraderie        replace          synthetic          choice              hydrate                          

For many days during the year 2238, in Riverside, Iowa a small boy named Jimmy sits at the dinner table gazing out the kitchen window.  He is fixated not on the sky, but the vast far-reaching space beyond. He dreams of one day commanding a star ship and going boldly where no man has gone before. He dreams of discovering new worlds and new civilizations. He dreams that unlike Icarus his wings will not falter in the intense heat of the radiant rays of the sun because his star ship will have the power to function in the most hostile of environments. He dreams all of this because he is James Tiberius Kirk and one day he will graduate from Starfleet Academy and soon after be given the command of the USS Enterprise.

What Jimmy doesn’t know is that some 270 years earlier a fictitious Captain Kirk would portray many of Jimmy’s yet-to-be adventures in an entertainment medium of a long antiquated media technology. Due to years of success of that portrayal this impersonator would be able to afford a tourist flight to space which would match only the shortest and the most inconsequential flights of the USS Enterprise.

In order to make such a flight it is only natural that the aspiring Captain would have to train as a modern day astronaut. During his training he would develop a camaraderie with his fellow astronauts who simply replace Scotty, McCoy, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov. Driven by the explosions of synthetic jet fuels the “wanna-be” Captain would experience the violent G forces of a launch into space. While he would have no choice in setting the course, the path of the flight would allow him to watch the blue of the sky instantly flash into the blackness of space and he would wonder if that’s what it’s like to die. Upon re-entry his ship’s capsule would parachute safely onto the desert of West Texas where on that arid spot on Earth he and his crew would hydrate with a bottle of champagne. Then they would pontificate on their voyage.

Little Jimmy would eventually learn that more than two centuries earlier his impersonator, at 90 years of age, would be the oldest human to ever experience the voyages of the tour ship Blue Origin and to “boldly go” to the edge of space.