It came up because of the parking lot. The StrongDM office was close enough to Great America that on clear days you could hear the distant screaming from the roller coasters if you stood in the right spot outside the building. Jay was standing in that spot, holding a coffee, when the sound reached him and his face did something complicated.
"I haven't been to Great America since the early nineties," he said, to nobody in particular. Navan happened to be nearby, checking his phone.
"What's Great America?" Navan asked.
Jay turned to look at him. It was the look of someone who had just been reminded, gently and without malice, that time passes and generations don't share the same reference points.
"California's Great America. The amusement park. It's right there." He pointed south. "Paramount's Great America, when I went. It changed names a few times. They had a ride called the Klingon ride. I don't remember the official name. Everyone just called it the Klingon ride because it was in the Star Trek section of the park."
"The park had a Star Trek section?"
"It had a Star Trek section. This was when Paramount owned it. Early nineties. You'd walk through these themed areas and there was one that was all Star Trek. The Klingon ride was this—I want to say it was an inverted coaster. Your feet dangled. It was terrifying in the way things are terrifying when you're young enough to believe a roller coaster might actually kill you."
Jay paused, looking at the distant silhouettes of steel track against the sky. "I can't even find pictures of it online anymore. The park got bought by Cedar Fair, they rethemed everything, the Klingon ride became something else. All that's left is people like me who remember riding it."
Navan had no frame of reference for this. He had grown up in a different time, a different place. But he recognized the weight of it—the specific melancholy of watching something you remember being replaced by something you don't.
Justin walked out with his own coffee just in time to hear the tail end. "Top Gun," he said.
Jay turned. "What?"
"The ride was called Top Gun. Well, originally. They renamed it a few times. But the one in the Star Trek area you're thinking of was—no, you're right, there was a Klingon-themed one too. I rode it when I was twelve. My dad took me."
"You remember it?"
"I remember the queue was designed to look like the interior of a Klingon ship. It had these murals. My dad pointed out that the perspective was wrong on one of them."
Jay laughed. "Of course your dad noticed the perspective."
"He was an engineer," Justin said, as if that explained everything. It probably did.
They stood there for another minute, two men who remembered the same ride from the same park from the same era, and one younger man who understood that some things live only in the people who were there. Navan didn't write this conversation in his notebook. Some things you remember because they weren't written down.
The Paramount Great America era was magical and deeply weird. The Star Trek theming was real. The fact that Jay and Justin share this memory while Navan doesn't says something gentle about how teams are made of people from different timelines.