Damn it, Jean-Luc, I tell you that Star Fleet's top command people are changing! This could affect the very core of our organization. Officers I've known for years are bluffing their way through talk of old times.
---Captain Walker Keel from Star Trek: The Next Generation
Walker Keel is a guest character appearing in the first season episode Conspiracy in the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is the captain of the starship USS Horatio and has called Captain Picard of the Enterprise, along with two other starship captains, to an isolated abandoned planet to discuss what he sees as an insidious conspiracy overtaking the United Federation of Planets leadership. It's a great episode, my favorite in the series...I highly recommend it! Yet conspiracy isn't why I quoted this fictional character. Rather it's what Keel says about "bluffing their way through talk of old times" that reminded me of some strange experiences I've had with people...some of them close to me...over the years and recently as well. In each case I'll bring up some anecdote they were involved with, to which they deny everything and sometimes even come up with an alternate reality version of events. And there's no compelling reason for them to lie or conceal anything...these are all harmless memories. With one person I might say they are deluded with the memory in question, but when I see it with others then I wonder whether their memories are truly intact and that, over the years, they might have rolled over with their identities and conscious memories into another reality. It reminds me of another sci-fi experience, the end of the Matrix Reloaded movie when Neo meets the Architect and sees all these different versions of himself on the above screens. Are people just naturally slipping over time from one state into another? Or perhaps maybe I myself am deluded. Anyway, it's fun to speculate while going on with life as it is (or seems)...
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