Lt. Comm. Jackson McGillicutty
Chief Engineer

    In his extended college career, Jackson McGillicuty tended to wear a beret and scarf.  He was underfed and wore dark clothes in part because they hid dirt well.  He traveled, and although he was rebelling against a bourgeois career path and typically only had the food and gear that Federation welfare allowed, he enjoyed the idea that a Renaissance gentleman finished his education with a Grand Tour of Europe.  Of course he would never have let his friends know that.  Jackson and his friends made no pretense of being gentlemen, or even being well born.  No. They made pretenses of being extra sensual and more deeply artistic due to their nobly unmotivated, impoverished ways.  The Grand Tour thing went unspoken, which made Jackson certain that it was on everyone's mind.
    Some few of Jackson's acquaintances became moderately successful performers and artists.  This of course meant that they had no time for the old gang anymore, and Jackson never saw them again.  Over time, the gang lost momentum.  Some of the guys took straight jobs.  Some of the girls married straights and were never heard from again.  Pred died...that was just stupid.
  Pred's dad was part German, so to honor whatever heritage might have been Pred was given the name Frederick at his birth.  By college, Pred insisted that his name was Phred and that the "h" was silent.  It was sort of cute, but it seemed to be Pred's only line and Jackson never remembered Pred having a date.
   Jackson's gang spent a couple seasons on Agua Minor.  Agua Minor is a Class-M moon of a blue-and-teal gas giant (Agua Major.)  The nights on Agua Minor is frequent and beautiful, but the storms caused by the repeated coolings of sunfall and eclipse prevented it from being a tourist attraction until the weather-control satellites were installed. After that, a predominantly Spanish-speaking resort company outfitted several of islands with beautiful white-plaster cottages in a Castelian style and opened for business.  Every resort needs artistic wait staff, and Jackson's gang was looking to get away from academia.  Jackson's gang made it a point of pride to learn not one word of Spanish during their tenure at Agua Minor.
   Jackson loved the speedboats built on Agua Minor.  A great deal of local pride went into customizing and stylizing the cigarettes.  They were fast.  They were sleek.  They were balanced, and brilliant and sexy and every good thing.  He loved opening the turbines up wide and feeling the bracing sting of the mist he kicked up.  He loved slaloming back and forth through the chop.  While on the beach, or waiting for a customer to pick his squinty, fat way through a menu, Jackson frequently thought of the cigarette as a mathematical construct, plowing through space. Sometimes he doodled numbers in the hot sand, or on a bill at the restaurant. Victoria caught him at it once, on the beach, just before an eclipse. She must have thought him strange, but apparently found satisfaction in that.  He never knew.  Victoria didn't talk much. Ahh, Victoria.  Those indeed were the days...
    When on land he might have thought of the cigarettes as projectiles or as some other thing, but when at the wheel he thought of nothing. After the fact Jackson couldn't describe his time on Agua Minor as happy, but in some violent tropical way it was deeply addicting.  If Pred was three degrees smarter or if any girl fell for his schtick Jackson would probably never have left. But Pred was an idiot, and every girl he met, no matter how daring or rebellious, knew better than to risk ruining one of her eggs with Pred's miserable seed.  Pred baked in the sun with a bucket of beers by his side and the only time he enjoyed boating was when he leaned off the side during a slalom turn and held on in the wash.  Stupid, drunk, brown Pred would never take advice and never got a chance to learn from his mistake. He might not have sank so fast if he hadn't broken his arm when he bounced off the side.
    After Pred's death the resort life meant fairly little to Jackson's gang , but they couldn't agree on what to do next, so they went several different ways. Jackson and two buddies decided to do the purist thing and get back to studies.  In order to do their studies purely, they went to Vulcan. This is something Jackson would never have done, but Victoria, wordlessly, avoided him after the accident.  "So," he thought to himself, "I'll go someplace dry and see about getting to the bottom of things."
    Vulcan was a disaster.  The natives were rude, the studies were difficult, yet bland, the showers stung, the food was stiff, the doors all jammed, the traffic was endless.  Jackson learned very little.  Mark claimed to find the concrete university inspirational, but Jackson only saw the heat waves slowly lift themselves off the tarmac and was certain that Mark was just trying to be interesting.  Tom dropped out and left. Jackson might have muddled along on the Federation dole for years more at Vulcan U except that one of his Philosophy professors made it a point to spend a lecture railing against what he called "linear pragmatism."  Three years earlier, the University lost a faculty member to a  Federation research station and most of the community was still outraged.  Jackson's mind wandered, and he doodled, and he wondered what it would take to make him happy.  He used to love art.  He used to love dimensional geometry.  He used to love velocity, and propulsion, and...Jackson sighed.  His artistic ability had peaked, he was fairly certain.  And in order to get to the engines that really made a difference, he would have to be rich.  Why, he could hardly imagine anyone giving access to the exotic machinery that bends space.  Only
Starfleet has more than a handful of those magnificent engines... Jackson realized that his mouth had been gaping for several seconds. He snapped it shut, grabbed his bag and left his desk.  He walked down the rows of desks, past the podium.  He stopped and turned.  "Thank you, professor," he said.  Then he turned and left.
   When he stepped out into the blaze that Vulcans call "outside", he realized that it was one of the last times he would do so.  This thought made him happier than he had been in months.  He saw a local girl, one who on any other planet would be called a co-ed, but who here is called a student, with thick Moe Howard bangs to keep her frown in place.  She was lean, and stark, and nearly morbid in her seriousness and in her veneer of politeness that she used to deal with the dirty, weak-minded foreigner who approached her through the relentless waves of heat.
    "Sure is a hot one, isn't it?"  Jackson asked her with a big ignorant-tourist grin.  Oh, yes.  He was leaving Vulcan.

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     In his youth, Jackson was an unsuccessful student, hooligan, artist and bohemian.  His rebellion against his much-loathed parochial background was almost completely ignored by his taciturn parents.  Over time he lost the friends and acquaintances he made to indifference.  The only thing that interested him throughout all of this was his fascination with the variations of distance over time.  And the only way he could hope to gain access to the hardware and training to work more deeply with velocity warps and their beautiful side effects was through Starfleet training.  In his heart he knows that he really isn't what Starfleet is looking for.  He knows that when push comes to shove, (his game stats) won't be what saves the day, whether in getting those phaser banks recharged faster than the other guy or in repelling boarders who know enough to take Engineering first.  So, even though he is at heart a slacker, he is in his way extremely anal (just like Mom and Dad, and he knows it.)  He always wants to be prepared for crises.  After all, he loves twisting space.  He even loves all the tools and countdowns involved.  He gets to do it every day and he is grateful.  The very last thing he wants to do is to prove that he never should have been admitted to the Academy.