In the torchlit gloom of a portentous night, an unnaturally pale face peers from beneath a hood. Gripping a gnarled staff, the cloaked figure grandly intones the famous lines:

Prospero has summoned his mystic power one last time before renouncing the occult and re-embracing his rightful political position as Duke of Milan. And in this casting, Prospero is played by Commander Data, an android on the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the seventh season of The Next Generation, Data's character was accustomed to refining his Shakespearean acting skills as a means of approaching humanness. He does so now aboard the Starship Enterprise, specifically on the “holodeck,” a room in which the ship's computer is able to convert energy to matter and thereby construct convincing simulations of hypothetical realities. But as the ship's cultured captain, Picard, stands to offer constructive criticism on Data's performance, a white light appears, growing brighter as a whistling and clatter fill the air and the two leap out of the way of … the Orient Express, chugging incongruously across Prospero's island.

What could have caused this merging of imaginary worlds?