Judgement Day: Dead Letter (commentary), (TREK)
This one was written in Dec 2003, after a hiatus of several months-- between pregnancy and the horror of "The Partisan", I just couldn't get back to it.
A dead letter is a letter that sits in the post office and never reaches its destination, due to being improperly addressed, not having enough postage, the entire world got several trillion extra people dumped on it in a nanosecond, etc.
Q demanded I write this story. I swear that character takes up all the available oxygen in the room, not to mention hogging the spotlight. I established that he was dead in Te Morituri Salutamus, but his death kept nagging at me until I wrote The Partisan, and even then he wouldn't shut up. The story that was supposed to come after The Partisan was either The Roads Must Roll, a Miles O'Brien story, or, due to that one suffering from Buf-Puf syndrome, Churchill's Black Dog, the first Picard story. (Buf-Puf syndrome: one day I was watching the TOS episode "Arena" at my grandmother's house. The Gorn is strangling Kirk! Music crescendos! What a cliffhanger! Fade to black for commercial break, and a facial sponge tumbles across the screen with a gentle voice caroling, "Buf-Puf." Having a day in the life of Miles O'Brien right after the Wagnerian destruction of the Q Continuum would, I thought, be tantamount to a commercial for Buf-Puf while the Gorn is strangling Kirk.) I couldn't manage to write Churchill's Black Dog, however, because it requires too much plot and too much thought about the sequence of events on Earth. So while I was putting together an outline for it, Q demanded that I get a message to Picard. Of course, whether or not Picard ever received the message, I don't know yet.
Jean-Luc Picard
LaBarre, France
Jean-Luc,
I have no idea what I'm going to say to you.
You must admit this isn't my usual problem. In fact I don't think I've ever felt quite so tongue-tied before. Of course there are a lot of things I'm feeling right now that have never happened to me before... which I suppose is part of it. I don't have the vocabulary, the idiom, to talk to you about this. Oh, I know all the same words you know, in fact I know quite a few more, but I don't know how to use them. I don't know how to say what I need to say, let alone what I want to say.
If I could get through to you in person, perhaps this would be easier. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'd chicken out completely like I nearly did with Kathy. It doesn't matter. I'm not likely to ever see you in person again. In fact I have no idea if this letter will get through to you. Sending it over the comm system to your vessel would be useless; I don't even know how long they'll let you remain there. But sending it to LaBarre seems almost as stupid. With your family dead I have no idea if they're going to send you there, if you're going to survive, if there's any way a letter could get through. For all I know you won't get this for years. Or ever.
It doesn't matter. I have to try. I need you to know... I tried to stop this. Yeah, it's my fault. You knew that, I'm sure. Everything always is. But it's not my doing. It's my fault because I was supposed to stop it, and I failed. At least I'm pretty sure I failed. Am going to fail. No matter how many people die on my watch I'm still not used to this failure thing, you know?
How did you ever handle it? Leading people, friends, into battle, knowing they could be killed, knowing some of them would be? How did you handle doing the things you needed to do, to win? You've been in any number of battles, and a few wars, and you've always been the one in command, the one they looked to for all the ideas. How did you handle the pressure?
You want a laugh? I've been the commander of a military force for a few of your years now. What's even more laughable is that I'm as terrible at it as you might have expected. There's five of us left. Soon to be four.
You know what I said about you being a savage race and all that? I take it back. I take it all back. I'm sorry. Sorry for everything. We're not...
But if you haven't checked in with Kathy you don't know what I'm talking about. Sorry. There's a war on. The Continuum is burning. Q has turned on Q and you cannot begin to imagine the psychic devastation, the utter violence of the soul, not to mention the repercussions to the rest of the galaxy, when immortal, omnipotent beings figure out a way to kill each other and then start doing it. Those supernovas? Sorry about that. You ever see that movie where they say every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings? Well, every time you've been seeing a spontaneous supernova the past few years, a Q has been blown to bits. The universe is our battleground and I'm afraid the collateral damage is all over the place. We've littered your dimension with our gravestones.
This needs exploring, by the way. Stars are spontaneously going supernova throughout this war, and many of them may have inhabited planets on them. Another thing the writers of The Q and the Grey didn't bother to think about.
And it's about to get worse.
See, we can't see our own futures. Or the futures of any other Q. I know my future, now that it's gotten really really short, but I don't know what's going to happen to my companions, if my sacrifice will mean anything, if they'll survive, if we'll win. I suspect we won't win. I can see your future, you see, and so I know that my enemies in the Continuum will consider their position sufficiently unassailable, shortly, that they can risk locking you down.
By now I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that. Confining you humans to your solar system. All of you. Yes, I can do the math. I know what that's going to do to you. I was a claustrophobe when I was human, remember.
I don’t always take Q's declarations of claustrophobia in "Deja Q" seriously, but sometimes I like to.
I'm sorry. I've tried to stop it, and I've put something in motion so that sometime after my death maybe someone else will be able to stop it. But I just don't have much hope.
As soon as I'm done with this letter, which you have to understand is taking me bare nanoseconds to write, I'm going to go back into the Continuum, back into my war, and I'm going to die. If I'm not shot to death I'm going to blow myself up to take out a large contingent of my enemies and make sure my last four comrades can make it to safety. I'm sure you're as shocked as I am. I always thought that attempt to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain was really a self-centered attempt to kill myself out of boredom and fear, not a genuine sacrifice. Here I am, omnipotent, and I'm about to do it again. Who knew?
You said you weren't my father-confessor but if you're still bothering to read this letter then you can't exactly reject me this time, as by the time you read this I'll be quite beyond knowing or caring about your opinion. And I'm absolutely sure I'd never have had the nerve to say this to your face.
I am absolutely terrified.
I'm going to die. I'm going to cease to exist, and I'll never even know if there was a point to it, if my friends will survive, if my ideals will ever surface in the Continuum again. If my life hadn't been such sheer unadulterated hell for the past few years, if I hadn't had to watch so many friends die-- many of them of orders I gave-- and commit so many atrocities on what were once my brothers and sisters, before the civil war broke out... I don't know if I'd have the nerve to do this. Even now I'm only doing it because I'm too selfish to endure the pain of sending one more friend to their death. I'm not fooling myself. I'm still a coward, it's just that dying, as much as it scares me, doesn't frighten me as much as living with the knowledge that I gave the orders that led one more of my Q to their death.
And, of course, the fact that all five of us will be killed if one of us doesn't make a sacrifice.
I'm sorry. I wanted to reform my people, not destroy them. Yes, you laugh. Me, next of kin to chaos, a reformer? But I've always tried to be a bringer of change. I got as bitter, as vicious and bored, as you saw me because I exist to challenge the status quo, to promote change and growth, and the Continuum hasn't allowed any such thing for three billion years. You'd have started taking it out on lesser species too. When I saw the opportunity to try to make a meaningful change, I took it. I never expected... Well, how could I have? We've never even had the ability to kill each other one on one like this. We haven't had a war in billions of years. We were a Continuum, all joined mind to mind, all part of a whole. How could I have imagined a war breaking out?
The notion that Q has become what we see in the early TNG episodes-- essentially, a self-centered, bitter, nasty asshole-- because the Continuum has been stifling the function he was created to serve is one that only occurred to me recently, but it's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
I still can't wrap even my enormous intellect around it. We were supposed to be superior beings. We were supposed to be advanced beyond this. Sometimes I wish I were human so I could pretend I'm dreaming, that none of this is real and I'll wake up and it'll have been a particularly nasty nightmare. Unfortunately for me the Q don't dream, so I don't even have the luxury of pretending. This is as real as my life gets, and I know it.
A reference back to Q Who-- "This is as real as your so-called reality gets."
We're not superior. Obviously, we never were. I've been living a lie for billions of years, and all of us have, and that hurts almost as much as the destruction of our society, though not nearly as much as killing people I used to care about and sending those who trust me to their death has hurt. If I weren't so scared I'd be positively looking forward to this death thing, because I just don't want to live with what I have learned, with what I have done.
They're going to take it out on you because I loved you people. Yes, you heard that right. I'm going to be dead in the next few minutes, and they say confession is good for the soul, right? I loved your stupid, pathetic, small species and the way you were growing, changing so rapidly you terrified some of us. Not me. Once I verified for myself that it was true growth and not a cancer, I couldn't wait to see what you would become. I even tried to push you, personally, just a bit. I thought your species had certain qualities mine lacks, qualities I wanted to bring in among us in hopes of stopping the war. Well, it didn't work out. Probably wouldn't have worked anyway. But they know I loved you. And they know I was right about you. And because they oppose everything I stand for, because they want the universe to remain in a perpetual status quo for eternity, and because they know you will grow to surpass them... they'll intervene. They'll lock you down, and I can't stop them. I've seen it in every one of your futures, every possible timeline.
Although I've thrown in some nods to P/Q, this is not, fundamentally, a P/Q story. Q means it, in my view, when he says "I loved you people"-- it's not code for "I loved you." The notion that the rapid growth of humanity could be seen as positive, or as negative like a cancer, appears in "Do It Again 3: Quality of Growth", and is my take on why Q changes his opinion of humanity over time and why the Continuum demands extra testing by the time Q has come to believe in humans.
I wish I could give you some advice. I wish I knew whether you personally were going to survive any of this; I can see multiple timelines, but different things happen in them. I wish any of this could be different. I wish I could see you, talk to you, again. I mean, you'd just tell me to get off your ship or something, but I still wish I could do it.
I'm sorry. I've said that a lot in this letter but I mean it. I am really, really sorry. They're going to hurt you, maybe destroy you, and I can't stop them, and I won't even be alive to see it, and I have no idea if what I've done or what I'm doing is going to do any good. I'm sorry.
You know if I wasn't about to die I'd probably chicken out later on and disintegrate this letter. If you actually get this, you'll know I died before I had an opportunity to have second thoughts.
Did I mention I'm sorry?
The constant repetition of the apologies is deliberate. Because Q can't talk to Picard, he can't receive any acknowledgement of his apology, so saying it doesn't actually reduce the compulsion to say it.
Adieu, mon capitaine. Try not to hate me too much, please? I did try. I know that on this kind of scale, trying doesn't matter nearly so much as doing, and I didn't succeed in doing. I know I am a miserable failure. But at least... at least I did try, all right?
Q
A dead letter is a letter that sits in the post office and never reaches its destination, due to being improperly addressed, not having enough postage, the entire world got several trillion extra people dumped on it in a nanosecond, etc.
Q demanded I write this story. I swear that character takes up all the available oxygen in the room, not to mention hogging the spotlight. I established that he was dead in Te Morituri Salutamus, but his death kept nagging at me until I wrote The Partisan, and even then he wouldn't shut up. The story that was supposed to come after The Partisan was either The Roads Must Roll, a Miles O'Brien story, or, due to that one suffering from Buf-Puf syndrome, Churchill's Black Dog, the first Picard story. (Buf-Puf syndrome: one day I was watching the TOS episode "Arena" at my grandmother's house. The Gorn is strangling Kirk! Music crescendos! What a cliffhanger! Fade to black for commercial break, and a facial sponge tumbles across the screen with a gentle voice caroling, "Buf-Puf." Having a day in the life of Miles O'Brien right after the Wagnerian destruction of the Q Continuum would, I thought, be tantamount to a commercial for Buf-Puf while the Gorn is strangling Kirk.) I couldn't manage to write Churchill's Black Dog, however, because it requires too much plot and too much thought about the sequence of events on Earth. So while I was putting together an outline for it, Q demanded that I get a message to Picard. Of course, whether or not Picard ever received the message, I don't know yet.
Jean-Luc Picard
LaBarre, France
Jean-Luc,
I have no idea what I'm going to say to you.
You must admit this isn't my usual problem. In fact I don't think I've ever felt quite so tongue-tied before. Of course there are a lot of things I'm feeling right now that have never happened to me before... which I suppose is part of it. I don't have the vocabulary, the idiom, to talk to you about this. Oh, I know all the same words you know, in fact I know quite a few more, but I don't know how to use them. I don't know how to say what I need to say, let alone what I want to say.
If I could get through to you in person, perhaps this would be easier. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'd chicken out completely like I nearly did with Kathy. It doesn't matter. I'm not likely to ever see you in person again. In fact I have no idea if this letter will get through to you. Sending it over the comm system to your vessel would be useless; I don't even know how long they'll let you remain there. But sending it to LaBarre seems almost as stupid. With your family dead I have no idea if they're going to send you there, if you're going to survive, if there's any way a letter could get through. For all I know you won't get this for years. Or ever.
It doesn't matter. I have to try. I need you to know... I tried to stop this. Yeah, it's my fault. You knew that, I'm sure. Everything always is. But it's not my doing. It's my fault because I was supposed to stop it, and I failed. At least I'm pretty sure I failed. Am going to fail. No matter how many people die on my watch I'm still not used to this failure thing, you know?
How did you ever handle it? Leading people, friends, into battle, knowing they could be killed, knowing some of them would be? How did you handle doing the things you needed to do, to win? You've been in any number of battles, and a few wars, and you've always been the one in command, the one they looked to for all the ideas. How did you handle the pressure?
You want a laugh? I've been the commander of a military force for a few of your years now. What's even more laughable is that I'm as terrible at it as you might have expected. There's five of us left. Soon to be four.
You know what I said about you being a savage race and all that? I take it back. I take it all back. I'm sorry. Sorry for everything. We're not...
But if you haven't checked in with Kathy you don't know what I'm talking about. Sorry. There's a war on. The Continuum is burning. Q has turned on Q and you cannot begin to imagine the psychic devastation, the utter violence of the soul, not to mention the repercussions to the rest of the galaxy, when immortal, omnipotent beings figure out a way to kill each other and then start doing it. Those supernovas? Sorry about that. You ever see that movie where they say every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings? Well, every time you've been seeing a spontaneous supernova the past few years, a Q has been blown to bits. The universe is our battleground and I'm afraid the collateral damage is all over the place. We've littered your dimension with our gravestones.
This needs exploring, by the way. Stars are spontaneously going supernova throughout this war, and many of them may have inhabited planets on them. Another thing the writers of The Q and the Grey didn't bother to think about.
And it's about to get worse.
See, we can't see our own futures. Or the futures of any other Q. I know my future, now that it's gotten really really short, but I don't know what's going to happen to my companions, if my sacrifice will mean anything, if they'll survive, if we'll win. I suspect we won't win. I can see your future, you see, and so I know that my enemies in the Continuum will consider their position sufficiently unassailable, shortly, that they can risk locking you down.
By now I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that. Confining you humans to your solar system. All of you. Yes, I can do the math. I know what that's going to do to you. I was a claustrophobe when I was human, remember.
I don’t always take Q's declarations of claustrophobia in "Deja Q" seriously, but sometimes I like to.
I'm sorry. I've tried to stop it, and I've put something in motion so that sometime after my death maybe someone else will be able to stop it. But I just don't have much hope.
As soon as I'm done with this letter, which you have to understand is taking me bare nanoseconds to write, I'm going to go back into the Continuum, back into my war, and I'm going to die. If I'm not shot to death I'm going to blow myself up to take out a large contingent of my enemies and make sure my last four comrades can make it to safety. I'm sure you're as shocked as I am. I always thought that attempt to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain was really a self-centered attempt to kill myself out of boredom and fear, not a genuine sacrifice. Here I am, omnipotent, and I'm about to do it again. Who knew?
You said you weren't my father-confessor but if you're still bothering to read this letter then you can't exactly reject me this time, as by the time you read this I'll be quite beyond knowing or caring about your opinion. And I'm absolutely sure I'd never have had the nerve to say this to your face.
I am absolutely terrified.
I'm going to die. I'm going to cease to exist, and I'll never even know if there was a point to it, if my friends will survive, if my ideals will ever surface in the Continuum again. If my life hadn't been such sheer unadulterated hell for the past few years, if I hadn't had to watch so many friends die-- many of them of orders I gave-- and commit so many atrocities on what were once my brothers and sisters, before the civil war broke out... I don't know if I'd have the nerve to do this. Even now I'm only doing it because I'm too selfish to endure the pain of sending one more friend to their death. I'm not fooling myself. I'm still a coward, it's just that dying, as much as it scares me, doesn't frighten me as much as living with the knowledge that I gave the orders that led one more of my Q to their death.
And, of course, the fact that all five of us will be killed if one of us doesn't make a sacrifice.
I'm sorry. I wanted to reform my people, not destroy them. Yes, you laugh. Me, next of kin to chaos, a reformer? But I've always tried to be a bringer of change. I got as bitter, as vicious and bored, as you saw me because I exist to challenge the status quo, to promote change and growth, and the Continuum hasn't allowed any such thing for three billion years. You'd have started taking it out on lesser species too. When I saw the opportunity to try to make a meaningful change, I took it. I never expected... Well, how could I have? We've never even had the ability to kill each other one on one like this. We haven't had a war in billions of years. We were a Continuum, all joined mind to mind, all part of a whole. How could I have imagined a war breaking out?
The notion that Q has become what we see in the early TNG episodes-- essentially, a self-centered, bitter, nasty asshole-- because the Continuum has been stifling the function he was created to serve is one that only occurred to me recently, but it's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
I still can't wrap even my enormous intellect around it. We were supposed to be superior beings. We were supposed to be advanced beyond this. Sometimes I wish I were human so I could pretend I'm dreaming, that none of this is real and I'll wake up and it'll have been a particularly nasty nightmare. Unfortunately for me the Q don't dream, so I don't even have the luxury of pretending. This is as real as my life gets, and I know it.
A reference back to Q Who-- "This is as real as your so-called reality gets."
We're not superior. Obviously, we never were. I've been living a lie for billions of years, and all of us have, and that hurts almost as much as the destruction of our society, though not nearly as much as killing people I used to care about and sending those who trust me to their death has hurt. If I weren't so scared I'd be positively looking forward to this death thing, because I just don't want to live with what I have learned, with what I have done.
They're going to take it out on you because I loved you people. Yes, you heard that right. I'm going to be dead in the next few minutes, and they say confession is good for the soul, right? I loved your stupid, pathetic, small species and the way you were growing, changing so rapidly you terrified some of us. Not me. Once I verified for myself that it was true growth and not a cancer, I couldn't wait to see what you would become. I even tried to push you, personally, just a bit. I thought your species had certain qualities mine lacks, qualities I wanted to bring in among us in hopes of stopping the war. Well, it didn't work out. Probably wouldn't have worked anyway. But they know I loved you. And they know I was right about you. And because they oppose everything I stand for, because they want the universe to remain in a perpetual status quo for eternity, and because they know you will grow to surpass them... they'll intervene. They'll lock you down, and I can't stop them. I've seen it in every one of your futures, every possible timeline.
Although I've thrown in some nods to P/Q, this is not, fundamentally, a P/Q story. Q means it, in my view, when he says "I loved you people"-- it's not code for "I loved you." The notion that the rapid growth of humanity could be seen as positive, or as negative like a cancer, appears in "Do It Again 3: Quality of Growth", and is my take on why Q changes his opinion of humanity over time and why the Continuum demands extra testing by the time Q has come to believe in humans.
I wish I could give you some advice. I wish I knew whether you personally were going to survive any of this; I can see multiple timelines, but different things happen in them. I wish any of this could be different. I wish I could see you, talk to you, again. I mean, you'd just tell me to get off your ship or something, but I still wish I could do it.
I'm sorry. I've said that a lot in this letter but I mean it. I am really, really sorry. They're going to hurt you, maybe destroy you, and I can't stop them, and I won't even be alive to see it, and I have no idea if what I've done or what I'm doing is going to do any good. I'm sorry.
You know if I wasn't about to die I'd probably chicken out later on and disintegrate this letter. If you actually get this, you'll know I died before I had an opportunity to have second thoughts.
Did I mention I'm sorry?
The constant repetition of the apologies is deliberate. Because Q can't talk to Picard, he can't receive any acknowledgement of his apology, so saying it doesn't actually reduce the compulsion to say it.
Adieu, mon capitaine. Try not to hate me too much, please? I did try. I know that on this kind of scale, trying doesn't matter nearly so much as doing, and I didn't succeed in doing. I know I am a miserable failure. But at least... at least I did try, all right?
Q