#doc vc: where's the damn KEYBOARD??

[doctorbrown]

Starfleet Academy.

He's been staring up so long at the institution marvelling at the grandeur of it all that he can no longer ignore the ache at the base of his neck spreading across his shoulders. Emmett digs his fingertips into the worst of the pain with a groan and sets his sights ground-level, sweeping over freshly manicured lawns and what he can only imagine must be the students of this academy. The utilitarian uniforms give him the distinct impression that this may be a military academy but he sees no schoolbags or reading materials or even those fancy laptops he had learned about through one of his previous jaunts into the early twenty-first century in the hands of any of the students.

Every student has some stripe of colour on them—red, yellow, or blue—which he surmises must be indicative of their chosen major, but the fact that there are only three leads him to believe that this is a highly specialised institution. Weapons, research, and soldiers; those are the three most prominent things that come to mind when he thinks military, but that leaves him no closer to puzzling out what each of the colours mean or why there is such a disproportionate amount of students wearing yellow compared to blue or red.

Passing behind him, two cadets discuss at length a course led by a Doctor Arendan, debating a lecture about—and surely he must be hearing things—silicon-based lifeforms. The scientist in him wants to assert that such a thing is only science-fiction, that all lifeforms are indeed carbon-based, but the time-traveller in him suggest otherwise, that this is either a future or a dimension where science and biology have evolved to truly mesh science-fiction and reality.

Great Scott.

So, short of attempting to sneak further onto the academy grounds—which, if this was a military installation, surely would involve some kind of checkpoint and he was already the odd man out in his pineapple-printed orange Hawaiian shirt—he flags down the nearest yellow-clad student, preparing himself for the look of surprise that follows a seemingly innocent query—today's date and year, what is it?

Emmett has never been ashamed of his age, as it is a natural progression of human life, but he takes great pride in the fact that even over sixty years old, he's still going with the vigour of a young man in his forties and his memory is no worse off for it. Should the question raise suspicion, he's prepared to play it off as a fault of his aging mind.

❝The Gregorian Calendar, of course,❞ Emmett says, helpfully leaving off the what other calendar would I mean?, only too late realising it's possible that this future, however far in the future he was, may have shifted to yet another measure of time. ❝Always losing track of time—you know how it is.❞

@doctorbrown

It was not a usual occurrence for someone to ask another the time. There were examples of such a question of course, in historical literature, but with computer terminals dotted around Starfleet Academy's campus and, indeed, just about everywhere else, there wasn't much use in asking another person when that person would only have to turn around and ask the nearest computer as the first person could have just as easily done themself.

From what Data understood of the tradition, asking the year was even more unusual as, in most systems of calculating this measurement, the year was a constant for a considerable amount of time. Perhaps this was another example of a 'practical joke', a human ritual of which Data had become very familiar since enrolling in the academy (after becoming victim to a few).

"The year, sir? Might I ask by which calendar?" Even if one were to limit the sampling to just those native to this world, there was a great many systems, which was why Starfleet and much of the Federation had gone over to using stardates, less for ease and more to avoid arguments.