Fate Needs a Push

Part 7: Randie's Night Out

Randie was sitting on Tom Paris's couch while Tom paced back and forth
in front of her.  The six other members, sans one, of USA 20 lounged
around at random places in the room, all dressed and ready to go
(Randie had helped them each design their outfits), but Tom was
waiting, none too patiently, for Harry.

        "Computer, time," Tom called out.

"The time is 2215"

"Where the hell is Harry?" he wondered out loud.  "I thought we all
agreed that ten o'clock would be the best time . . ."

"Fashionably late?" Randie offered with a smile.

Tom shot Randie an incredulous look.  "Yeah, right."

        Randie leaned back on the couch and sighed.  She had chosen,
and wisely, too, not to mention the little incident with Seven
yesterday.  She was puzzled about Seven's reaction, though, because it
was the twenty-fourth century, after all, and people should be over
certain things by now.  What was going on?  Randie closed her eyes and
tried to envision Seven's thoughts.  All sorts of worries suddenly
raced through her mind.  What would she say about me, then?  What if
she decides not to work with me anymore?  That would totally suck.

        The sound of the doors sliding open snapped Randie back into
reality.  "Sorry I'm late, but I was trying to see if I could get a
date."  Harry walked quickly into the room, straightening his jacket.
"How do I look?"

        Tom squinted and shook his head.  "Wait a second.  Date?  With
who?"

        Harry seemed a little bashful, but spoke up anyway.  "With
Seven," he said with his eyes turned downward.  "I tried to convince
her that it would be merely a friendly sort of gathering, but she
seemed extremely adamant about not going.  I almost thought she might
get a little hostile."

        Randie went absolutely pale.  Shit, she thought, I wonder what
she told him.  All sorts of profanities struggled to escape her
clenched teeth but she closed her eyes and tightened her jaw for a half
second while she managed to calm down.  She then opened her eyes and
looked at Tom with a half-hearted smile.  "Well, we'd better get going.
 I managed to get the holodeck for three whole hours and I want us to
enjoy every minute of them.  Oh, but I need to give you these."  She
reached into her black glittery purse and pulled out eight pieces of
plastic.  She handed one to each of the members of USA 20.

        "What are these?" B'Elanna inquired.

        "Those are your Texas driver's licenses," Randie informed her.
"You can't get into the club without them."  Randie led them out of
Tom's quarters and to the turbolift.  The entire group received curious
glances from other crewmembers, and even Captain Janeway stopped them
after they had left the turbolift and were on their way to the holodeck.

        "So," she said, blocking their path, "I suppose you're the
group responsible for tying up the holodeck for three hours."

        Randie opened her mouth to speak but Tom gave her a very sharp
nudge.  "Guilty as charged, ma'am.  Can we, uh, go now?"

        "Randie," the Captain eyed Randie with a curious and slightly
punishing look, "When you are ready to leave your little party, I would
like to speak with you in my ready room.  Seven was very upset about
something yesterday."

        Randie tried to make herself small while Tom glanced between
the two women, confused.  Randie gave a nervous giggle.  "Really, uh, I
can't imagine why she would be so, uh, upset, as you put it . . ."

        "Just hurry up in there.  Oh, and B'Elanna," the Captain said,
giving her chief engineer a rather predatory look, "You look stunning
in gold lame and black cotton."

        B'Elanna looked down at her skimpy black button-up sweater
stretched over her gold mini-dress.  As the Captain walked away, she
tried to pull the sweater tighter around her top.  "Are you sure people
wore so little, Randie?"

        "Hey, the program is set for summer.  I've always found winter
clothes so blah."

        "That's easy for you to say," Sandra said as she glanced down
at her black satin shorts and midriff-exposing red satin top.  "You're
wearing black velvet pants and a tee shirt."

        "Lighten up," Harry told Sandra after playfully nudging her.

        "Oh, and you," B'Elanna said to Harry, poking a finger in his
chest, "You, in your black slacks and jacket and white oxford shirt.
You were too chicken to wear what Randie had picked out for you the
first time."

        "Believe me, honey, Harry would not have been able to pull that
black mesh shirt off," Tom said with a laugh.

         Randie looked Tom up and down and smiled.  "Neither would you
so I wouldn't be laughing."  They finally arrived at the holodeck
doors, but before they could enter, Randie stretched herself out before
the doors.  "I want you all to have fun tonight, so don't drink too
much of that crap you try to say is like alcohol, and Tom, I have a
pleasant surprise for you."

        The doors slid open to reveal a gold Ford Windstar and Tom's
project Camaro from one of his other programs.  He was overjoyed,
smiling and running his fingers along the hood in disbelief.  "I'm so
impressed!  How did you find this?"

"Well, I had to get some idea of how to program the holodeck, so I
called up a bunch of other programs and I found this in one of yours,
and I had a copy of the car transferred to this when I was finished."

"This is so perfect!  But why program cars?  I thought we would just
walk up to the entrance and just go in."

"Hey," Randie said, leaning against the Windstar, "What kind of a
person would I be if I didn't give you the full experience?  We're
actually fifteen minutes away from the Village, and we are going to
arrive in style.  Now, who's riding with me?"

Sandra, Stan and Shelley walked up to the Windstar, leaving B'Elanna,
Bill, and Harry to ride with Tom.  Sandra wouldn't stop complaining
about her platform boots to Stan, but as soon as everyone had piled in,
Randie cranked the volume on the CD player so high it drowned out all
of the noises of the pesky outside world.  She turned up the base and
tapped her fingers on the steering wheel to the pounding rhythm of
Aqua's "Roses are Red" while she drove through downtown Dallas.  "Must
it be so loud?" Sandra shouted.

"What?" Randie shouted back.

"Loud, the music's loud!" Sandra screamed.

"Hold on a sec," Randie leaned over and turned the knob on the radio
down.  The music suddenly became barely audible.  "I couldn't hear you,
the music was too loud."

"Does it have to be that loud?" Shelley restated Sandra's question.

"Well, if you don't want to go deaf when you walk into the Village.
I'm trying to get you acclimated to the volume level so the club won't
blow your eardrums out."

"Okay, fine," Stan said, who was sick of all of the chatter.  "Just
turn it up.  It's actually, uh, cooler that way."

"Very good, Stan!"  Randie cranked it up once more and began to move
back and forth while her passengers stared at her with a mixture of
wonder and fear.

Randie checked her rearview mirror periodically to make sure that Tom
was still behind her.  In the three weeks she had come to know him she
figured out that he was a little scatterbrained.  I don't know what
B'Elanna sees in him, she wondered.  They seem so opposite, and yet so
cute it's gross.  Something about being in Dallas and seeing Tom and
B'Elanna together made Randie think of her home, about driving through
downtown Dallas on her way to the real Village, blasting "Supermodel"
on her CD player and holding hands with her own special someone.  I
miss Maggie, she thought to herself.  God, Mags, I wish you were here.
She tried not to let the tears escape her eyes while she was driving,
but her heart began to grow heavy.  I'll have a good time while I'm
here, for you Mags, I promise.

Randie turned right into the parking lot and parked the van neatly
between a Firebird and a motorcycle.  "We're here," she announced
cheerfully to the back seat, and unbuckled her seatbelt to get out and
let everyone else out.  She led them down the sidewalk and around the
corner, but before they were to enter the club, she turned around and
began to make a little speech.

"A rave club is more than just a building with a bunch of people
dancing and having a good time.  It's almost like being inside a living
thing."  She began to lose herself a little and the poetry she used to
use back home came back to her as she stood on a broken sidewalk in
Dallas.  "The music is its heartbeat, and the people are the lifeblood.
 It breathed second-hand smoke, drinks and eats synthohol and lemon
slices and cherries.  What comes out the other end, well, you can
imagine.  I've worked really hard on trying to re-create a place where
I've had some of my most cherished memories.  I hope you all enjoy
yourselves.  Now, the way that this works is you give your license to
the bouncer, and then he'll give you a wristband and stamp your hand.
Everything's free tonight because I was pressed for time and didn't
want to bother with programming prices, but if you feel like money's
necessary just let me know and I'll do the prices for next month."

Around the corner, Randie could hear the thud of the music outside of
the club, a primal force calling her inside, something irresistible to
her.  She licked her lips and approached the door and was sucked into
the past she had left behind for some purpose . . .

**********

Tom and Randie walked out of the holodeck completely sober.  B'Elanna
was giggling and hanging off of Tom's shoulder.  The rest straggled
behind, the men trying to keep the women upright and from running into
things.

"You did all of that in a week?"  Tom asked, impressed by her work.

"It wasn't hard, the computer had the building design and the layout
of Oak Lawn and so I went from there.  The hardest thing was the
people, but I set it up so that the computer would randomly make
people, and I would check them out, make sure the computer hadn't
picked a bunch of weird stuff, clothe them, and then stick them into
the program.  It was actually a lot of fun.  And I had a lot of free
time on my hands."

"How did you create all of the algorithms for the computer to pick
randomly from?  I've never thought about doing it that way before.  I
always did it the old fashioned way, one at a time, from scratch."

"Have you ever programmed Pascal?"

Tom laughed.  "I've heard of that archaic language.  What does that
have to do with programming holodecks?"

Randie stopped and gave Tom a dirty look.  "You guys could learn a lot
from some of the 'archaic' stuff I know.  But you can do the same thing
in Pascal.  You define a bunch of sets and you give the computer some
parameters to work within.  For instance, one of my sets was gender, so
I had straight man, straight woman, gay man, gay woman, and drag queen
as the elements of the set.  Then I told the computer that 60% of the
characters should be gay men, 20% should be straight women, 10% should
be gay women, 5% should be straight men, and 5% should be drag queens.
Then it started creating.  With all of the other sets in mind, of
course."

"You are a really innovative person, for your time, I mean."

She gave Tom a sarcastic look.  "Uh huh," she said, nodding slowly.

"Oh, and another thing, why didn't you warn us that this would be a
gay club anyway?  I mean, not that I'm against homosexuals or anything,
but I was a little, well, surprised."

"I didn't think it mattered.  Besides, gay clubs are generally better
than straight clubs anyway.  Oh, and I programmed the characters not to
hit on heterosexuals."  This realization suddenly brought a disturbing
thought to Randie's mind, and as much as she tried, she could not
dismiss it.

"Are you okay?" Tom asked, noticing the change on Randie's face.

She put a hand on his shoulder.  "No, no, I'm fine, I just need to get
to bed.  I'm pooped.  And," she said, looking behind her, "You'd better
make sure these sailors make it back to their quarters."

Tom smiled.  "All right.  I'll see you tomorrow, Randie.  This was a
great night.  Thanks."

Randie continued down the hallway, perplexed by her own thoughts.
Maybe there had been something wrong with the program yesterday.  Maybe
not.