Captain Jimmy - An amphetamine and Jane Austin freak who's austere, but fair and at times somewhat aloof demeanor can drive the crew up the bulkheads and make them curse the day they ever signed on. Fortunately for all, after a somewhat obscure and traumatic encounter with an antiquities dealer in a bar in Duluth, Minnesota, Captain Jimmy now spends his time hunkered down in his ready room next to the food replicator sucking on a strawberry candy, lips stained red and muttering: "The horror! The horror!"

Vice Commander Valerie - a somewhat analytical, but warm and beautiful Betazoid woman who, in her younger days, led a life of dissolution and abandonment on a planet that never stayed up past midnight and was banished in a collective planetary telepathic boot the bitch out episode: "Get out, you slut! Never return and take your adenoidal little alligator with you!" (There are stories about this, ever more elaborate and baroque, but bottom line, she never speaks of the matter, on or off camera) She has made the Star Wreck crew her life's work and the Star Wreck her permanent home in exile. Although warm, dedicated and affectionate, filling an almost parental role, very few viewers confuse her with their mother.

Vice Commander Valerie would always sit beside Captain Jimmy in a black Flammarian fabric dress with a neckline reaching down to forever, while the captain counseled crew members to re-up for another three year commitment. Each male crew member would shake his head in disbelief, recalling the Counselor sitting beside the Captain in half naked splendor and the warm fuzzy contentment with which they had signed the proffered papers, realizing at that moment they were in need of therapy, long, detailed, deep probing psychotherapy under the direction of a ship's counselor.

Commander Click - an android with a passion for the usual android stuff: Bach, Mozart, the fine arts, music, painting, house cats and quantum computer mechanics with an odd passion to become more like men with their conflicting passions, appreciation for humor and compulsive neurotic behavior. Curiously, his admirers have exactly the opposite interests: To become more like Commander Click as he is, unemotional, rationale, less susceptible to life's little distractions and to gain a similar facility in the manipulation of a computer console much like those on the Star Wreck, capable, they suspect, of really awesome game simulations. Still, human or robot, Commander Click is universally envied and admired for his one night of passion with the Star Wreck's most famous female security officer.

The Female Members of the Crew - The women who comprise fully half the Star Wreck crew, some 50.87% by actual computation, were less problematic when it came to recruitment since when they joined they were uniformly brilliant, dedicated, ambitious, beautiful and willing to serve (in swell little uniforms that showed lots of leg).

This was true even though the Space Wreck was notorious throughout the galaxy as a hard duty ship with impossibly good luck in impossibly bad situations (some weird and dangerous event would occur like clockwork once every week during the winter solar cycle), yet every woman of intelligence and ambition knew the female crew somehow never, absolutely never got fried or died in phaser disasters, alien abductions, close by super novae explosions or lecherous onslaughts on the command deck.

It looked good on your resume, this dangerous duty without the need to die. Thus the lack of a re-up problem. With the exception of the counselor, the ship's doctor, a bar tender, and a security geek or two, no one ever did. One tour, the resume is complete, stalwart duty in the face of the enemy, one tour and out! So what if the captain never came out of his ready room? They'd had much worse times with captains who did.

Back to the Journal

OK. Back to the journal. This is just a start at an introduction, not even a complete list of the crew, let alone a beginning of the story: A tale of flash and sorrow on the far side of another galaxy, hopeless odds, but new hollow deck hardware allowing even more interesting simulations, simulations to distract you from the fears and forces that surround us. But later, after a few more hours in the tub.