When the Milky Way Curdled

Tony was probably the smartest guy I ever met, so I had to wonder if I had been the cause of his downfall.

He could glance at a stick of RAM and tell you the year it was manufactured and what type of computer it drove. He knew about everything going on in Washington and could quote the bill numbers for anything that might make it to the floor in either the House or the Senate. He dished out Vonnegut and Dickens quotes to illuminate any subject, and he could cure a running toilet. He could do math in his head and play the Hendrix version of All Along the Watchtower note-for-note on his Stratocaster.

There was a lull in our conversation one day at Nirvana Burger, when he turned his attention to his side order after completing some profound train of thought.

"So, did you see about that lost episode of Star Trek?" I asked, interrupting the arc of the French fry heading for his mouth.

"Foundation Star Trek? Or one of the rip-offs?"

"Foundation."

"No way! Got a link?" Tony put the fries down and straightened up. "Serious, dude! Send me the link or it didn't happen."

"It's not on my phone," I admitted. "I saw that it never aired, but there are fragments on the web. I'll find it again and send you something tonight."

I'd come across this random tidbit the night before, but hadn't thought much about it. It took two hours of back-tracking and Googling and talking to Alexa before I found it again. If Tony had been there, he would have just read my browser history and saved us both a lot of time.

The gist of it was that in Star Trek's final season, they shot an episode called Spock's Conflation that was never broadcast. The premise was that a parallel universe mirrored the reality we know. If our two universes came in contact, they would cancel each other out and everything -- our universe and its reflection -- would turn into a gray sludge. Picture the Milky Way curdling. Game over.

You could find a few clips on the internet, but the entire episode, and the reason it never made prime time, seemed to be lost forever. I sent the links I had to Tony that night, and I never saw him again.

Now, that's not quite accurate. In fact, I saw Tony a number of times after that. It's just that he wasn't Tony anymore.

"This could explain a lot of things," he texted me late the next afternoon. "Can't believe I didn't know!"

I didn't think much about not hearing from him after that. It wasn't unusual. We'd run into each other fairly often, and once a week or so, one or the other of us would send a link to something that fell into the sweet spot of the Tony and Me Venn Diagram.

But it was probably a month later when I ran into Susie at Nirvana Burger.

"Have you seen Tony?" she asked, eyes wide.

"Sure. I mean, how recently?"

"I skyped him last week and he looked awful."

"Skype will do that. That's what it's for, isn't it?"

"No, I mean really bad. Worn out. He looked like he hadn't changed his shirt in a week. And there was crap all around. He had some kind of bulletin board behind him with God knows what stuck on it."

"That's Tony."

"You're awful." She was really upset. She wasn't going to finish her fries. I could never quite understand how people do that. "You should go see him," she went on. "Or whatever you guys do."

So, I did. I texted him that afternoon.

"Yo bro wasup?"

Tony was in cloaking mode.

When I phoned the next day, he was wired.

"Props to you, man," he said, sounding a little hoarse. "You know sometimes I haven't taken you as seriously as I should, but you nailed it this time. Full props to you."

"Are you coming down with a cold?"

"I'm fine. Been up late talking to some very smart guys in Australia and Germany. Crazy hours."

"What was it I nailed?"

"The whole Star Trek thing. You know what really convinced me?"

I had no idea. In fact, at that moment I didn't have any idea what he was talking about.

"It's when the Enterprise is getting sucked into that wormhole and all of a sudden, Sulu's monitor flashes these patterns of green, red, yellow and black pixels. When you slow the video way, way down, you see the green lights are the message. The rest is just noise."

"Uh huh."

"The green pixels are Morse code -- this was the Sixties, after all -- and it says 'CONTACT NOW' over and over."

"That sounds pretty Sixties. Then what happens?"

"Nobody knows. That's where the fragment ends. But we have some pretty good ideas. My man in Germany is way ahead of us on this part."

Over the next week or so, Susie and I talked about the effects of sleep deprivation, but nothing seemed too urgent. After all, Tony was Tony. So I was a little surprised when he called me one morning while I was still in bed. Neither Tony nor I were morning people, as far as I could tell.

"I love Lucy!"

Okay. I was a little groggy. I'd been up late following a thread on whether James Cameron was the best sequel director of all time. Think T2, Aliens, and you don't need to go any further.

So I asked, "You've got a girlfriend?"

He breathed so heavily into the phone I counted three exhales, each a little more measured than the last, before he said, "Can you try to keep up? Are you even paying attention? Lucille Ball! She practically invented syndicated TV shows."

"I know Lucy!"

"Well, welcome to the world. You know she gave Star Trek the green light for production? Without her, we never would have seen it. And without syndication -- which she invented out of whole cloth -- it would have been forgotten by 1970. Wake up, dude!"

"Live long and prosper," I said, after he hung up. People don't slam their phones down anymore, like in the old days when Star Trek was new. But I could tell Tony jammed a hard thumb onto his screen to disconnect from me.

Google and I spent another late night together.

It seems this whole lost episode business had turned into a thing.

The minority opinion was that the whole idea was a hoax. Someone cut a couple of deep fake videos, dropped a few memes and watched while the internet did what internets do. That is, send a lot of people down the rabbit hole.

The majority opinion -- the vast majority, the unsilent majority -- was that this strange episode was real, but it had been suppressed by either a paranoid government agency or a sponsor afraid of panicking the audience, because it cut too close to the truth.

None of this information had been available just a few weeks ago when I first came across the premise of the lost episode. Now you could hardly open a browser without finding some reference to it. It wasn't the first time Tony had latched on to something that was going to be the next big thing. I felt a little queasy.

And then my phone played Ride of the Valkyries, my ring tone for Tony.

"Yo?"

"Looks like Lucy knew J.B. Foster. We've got the documents."

"Who?"

"Wake up! Lucille Ball."

"No, I mean Foster?"

"Are you offline or what? He owned the ranch where the Roswell aliens hit."

So, as Tony lays it out for me, aliens crash in New Mexico in 1947. I Love Lucy premieres in 1951. Lucille Ball becomes influential television producer and green lights Star Trek which debuts in 1966. As the show's ratings dwindle, she okays the lost episode, which draws on secret info her friend knows about the alien crash on his ranch. It's set to air in 1969, but dark forces block the show from broadcast and bury it from public view.

"Oh, yeah. That's pretty realistic," I said, hoping against hope that Tony would catch the irony.

But we were way beyond that.

"Gotta go," he said. "Incoming from Belgium."

I don't watch much television, but a couple weeks later, as I was surfing through the channels, I stopped when I saw Tony transformed into a talking head on a mainstream cable news show.

The chyron read, "Who buried the Star Trek truth?"

He looked awful, like he hadn't slept in weeks. There was crap all around, and some kind of bulletin board behind him with God knows what on it.

I answered Susie's ring tone.

"I think he's right," she said. "Why didn't you tell me?"