There's a tiny man walking past a window of the starship Enterprise.
You can see him in the opening credits of Star Trek: The Next Generation, if you look carefully enough.
As the enormous spaceship passes the camera, a little figure appears behind one of its windows, walking through a room.
He seems to be going somewhere.
Apparently, the figure was drawn by hand and inserted into the window to make the ship seem inhabited. More human.
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As a student, I worked in the photo lab of a camera shop, sometimes until midnight. Sometimes later.
Once, I was still developing film and printing photographs as morning approached. I had to hurry out before the first person arrived.
Those summers, my hair and skin smelled of bleach. Of all the chemicals we used to make images appear on paper, that was somehow the smell that lingered most.
I spent long hours adjusting magenta and other colours, looking through other people's holiday photographs.
Hundreds of rolls a day.
The late nights were usually devoted to aerial photographs of Finnish houses.
The homeowners apparently bought them. Enough, at least, to keep the door-to-door aerial photograph salesmen in business.
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I sometimes wondered about that.
Someone rented a helicopter and took a photograph of a house from the air.
Then a busy man brought me a plastic bag full of film rolls.
I developed the films and printed the images. Eventually, a salesman carried a print back to the same house and tried to sell it to the people who lived there.
They already knew the house.
They knew what was behind the windows, where the furniture stood, what happened in the rooms.
But perhaps they’d never seen their own roof from above.
Even a house full of people could look empty from that height.
I don't remember seeing a single person in any of those photographs.
I sometimes wonder whether any of those photographs are still hanging on walls somewhere in Finland.
Inside the houses they show.
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After work, I often watched an episode of Star Trek.
A friend had all the episodes on VHS, with handwritten labels showing the seasons and episode numbers. I borrowed the tapes.
Since then, the bridge of the Enterprise — NCC-1701-D, to be precise — has felt familiar.
The strangely comfortable-looking furniture. The particular sound of the doors opening. The background hum.
Captain Picard, who somehow managed to make sitting in a chair look like both a serious responsibility and an act of contemplation.
And all those other crew members going about their daily business: meeting new species and occasionally sorting out problems with the timeline.
All that with considerable optimism and an almost suspicious amount of wisdom, hundreds of years in the future.
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Patrick Stewart, the actor who played Captain Picard, died this week.
My feeds filled up with clips of him ordering Earl Grey, reciting Shakespeare, wrestling with moral dilemmas, and doing all those familiar Picard things.
I'd spent so many perfectly ordinary evenings in the captain's company.
That night, I watched the opening credits again.
The ship passes the camera. The little man walks past the observation lounge windows, going somewhere.
Of all the places I've never been,
the Enterprise is probably the one I know best.
I'm not entirely sure where — or when — to place all those evenings. But I suppose the hours were real enough.
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And Captain Picard won't be born for another 279 years.
