You need to be somewhere around six in the morning on a weekday to catch the starting whistle of the morning game of the New York Yankees. Even on a Monday, it's not too bad. There are a few cameras outside the stadium, but nothing as large as the image of Michael Jordan that's spread across the front of every TV around the world. That is a lot of camera time. He is still the first-pick fantasy for anyone playing fantasy sports, whether it be football, baseball, or basketball. His gameness and ability to get the ball to the hoop with style, and his body like no one had ever seen before, made him a house owner for all of the major sports.
As a child, you didn't always like Michael Jordan. He was so very tall, and he seemed too cool for school, and everyone was always watching him, and he never seemed to listen to you when you tried to tell him stories or play like him. In elementary school, you grew taller, and he never seemed to notice. Later, in college, you grew a little bit closer friends with him, and you saw a different side of Michael Jordan. When you were in grad school, you tried to do research on him, and when you could finally talk to him, he didn't really want to talk about the basketball. Instead, he wanted to talk about the Lord. You introduced him to your parents, as only their Pastor's daughter gets to do. He listened to them, and he was so charming. He didn't really care about the sports. He had always been a family-oriented man, watching over his brothers and sisters who he had taken care of, saving all of his money and getting them the best education he could.
When you graduated, you gave him a card that you had made, one that had all of your friends' names on it. You were planning on giving them all, but when you tried to pass it to him, he reached out and grabbed the card. He shook it a little bit, giving all of the cards a bounce, then he smiled and said, "There's a lot of you." He swallowed them all up, and as you watched, he slipped the picture of your face in the middle of his, so it looked like he was looking at it from the bottom. Then he looked at you and made a small, nervous laugh. You were sure that it wasn't even real. He was going to return it. Before you could grab it, he had stuffed it in his pants pocket and walked off. The only ones who survived were your parents, and the only ones left with them were his.
You didn't really know what to think about him when he died. You heard around campus that he was still pretty cool, though, and you were so close to your parents. Still, it seemed odd that you were there. Everyone had a special reason to be there. You were there for history. Your parents were there for…something else. It was something that they didn't want to talk about. You didn't do your best to press them, knowing them well enough not to pry.
When you graduated—your parents were immensely proud, though they didn't understand why you would want to get your Master's degree—and when you started your job in New York City, you still kept in touch with your parents and your master's degree. You were excited to be in the big city, and you really wanted to do the best that you could. Work was hard, but you were up for a challenge.
You never thought that you'd be put in a science fiction show. The director explained the set-up, and you got to thinking about it. It was a good idea, and people would be interested, and it was exactly the kind of research that you had been working on in college. You had been thinking about the evolution of civilization. Not much about it, but just the science. You grew up unusual in that you always made sure that what you did was interesting to all kinds of people. Even if it didn't seem interesting to others, you were convinced that it would be, and so you spent a lot of time researching and creating things that would be interesting for everyone. You also discovered that your parents had been working on this exact creation. The timeline was not right for them, yet, but they had done a lot of work before their death, and you thought that if your parents could do this, so could you.
