Five years. More or less.
OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 260: Five years.
So the planet Semora was *just* technologically advanced enough to realize that an asteroid was headed its way and would impact them in five years (technically, four of their years, or five Earth years and two Earth months, but who wants to be anal about it?) but not advanced enough to figure out how to prevent it. This is where I came in.
As you might imagine, chaos reigned at first. People were looting, murdering, raping, because hey, we have only five years to live, why not break all social rules and do whatever we want? Governments fell. Rather short-lived wars broke out. I say short-lived because people quickly realized that as pointless as *anything* was on a planet where all life would be destroyed in five years, wasting time on killing one another en masse was especially pointless. And before long, society stabilized. Life went on. People put their impending doom out of their heads, mostly. Those that couldn't killed themselves.
Except for Eirhean.
Eirhean was one of their top scientists. She had three husbands and four children, and she was a nuclear physicist, and she couldn't allow herself to simply give up and let her children die. Or at least that's what she told me, when I asked her why she didn't give up. She had the notion that it should be theoretically possible to reach the asteroid and detonate a sufficiently large charge on it that it would be redirected, so it wouldn't be pulled into Semora's gravity well and their people would be spared. Since she had been working on the atom bomb, she had a strong sense that a nuclear explosion *might* be big enough to knock the asteroid off course. All she needed to do was a. solve the problem of the atom bomb, single-handedly, because all government funding into weapons had dried up completely when the Semorans collectively realized the futility of war and b. single-handedly develop rocket science and space travel to the point where nuclear missiles could be fired at the asteroid, because Semora didn't even have a space program yet.
I told her it was completely pointless and she should simply give up and accept her fate. Which, you know, was absolutely true. There was no way a single mortal, however intelligent and driven, could develop nuclear weaponry *and* a space program by herself. She would have been better off spending her time with her children and husbands. Instead she was so focused on doing everyhting she could to save their lives that she became completely uninvolved in their lives -- cold, distant, a workaholic who was too irritable to stand being around the loved ones she was trying to save. One of her husbands left her, and took his daughter with him when he did. The other two husbands and three kids basically forgot that they *had* a wife and mother. It was a terrible decision and I told her so.
She told me to be helpful or to shut the hell up.
See, this is the kind of thing I like to see in mortals. Eirhean thought of me as a god, at first, but quickly revised her opinion and started treating me as, well, what I am... a person who was not of her species. Since her people hadn't even invented space travel yet, I thought this was pretty big of her. Admittedly treating me as a person, for most mortals, involves a lot of yelling at me, arguing with me, insulting me and telling me to go away, but this is a vast improvement over throwing themselves at my feet in prostrate worship. Eirhean told me, over and over, that she would not accept defeat; that until the day the asteroid hit, she would keep fighting to find a way to save her children, and the whole world if she could.
So, mm, I might have, shall we say, helped her out a tad. I mean, come on. If the asteroid had shown up fifteen years later the Semorans would have been in good shape to do *something* about it, so, you know, what difference did it make? I mean, fifteen years isn't much to the Q, so I couldn't see why the Continuum'd be upset about it. All I did was give her knowledge she'd have gotten herself if she had enough time.
After one year, Eirhean had solved the problem of creating an atomic bomb. Three years in, Eirhean successfully built a prototype nuclear-powered rocket ship, and persuaded her government to send an expedition to the asteroid to plant nukes (it turned out the missile option wasn't feasible because the precision required for the explosions would be too great.) So with great fanfare the Semorans sent off a team of Big Damn Heroes, including one of Eirhean's remaining husbands, to go blow up the asteroid and save the world.
They failed miserably. They blew *themselves* up and shattered the asteroid, knocking about a third of it away, but the remaining portions that were still on course were *more* than enough to destroy life on Semora completely.
I politely suggested to Eirhean that the giving up option might be her most attractive alternative. She told me to go to hell. See, she was getting a lot less polite as time went on, too. In fact, she had a big argument with me in which she told me I was an amoral monster for standing around watching her planet in its death throes without doing anything to help. Interestingly, she said that it would have been different if I'd never interacted with her, if I had never talked to her; if I had only been a disinterested god, observing from on high, she didn't think I would have had any obligation to help. But now I had involved myself directly with her species, by speaking to her as if we were on the same level, and *now* if I wouldn't help I was actively evil.
It was a completely specious argument, of course. I am the same me whether I choose to interact with mortals or not, and I am under no obligation to aid them in any way. Nonetheless, I thought about what she'd said a good deal as the day of Semora's death approached. The universe is not a fair place, and hard work and clean living don't always save the day, and Big Damn Heroes sometimes screw up the best-laid plans and doom themselves and their world, and no matter how desperate a mother is to save her kids' lives, sometimes she just *can't*. Eirhean was a brilliant woman, but she was only mortal. There was nothing she could do, and that was just the way it was, and this should not in any way have obligated me to do a damn thing about it.
Sometimes, though, on *rare* occasions, my sentimental streak overrides my common sense.
In my defense, it wasn't until Eirhean herself finally gave up, when the tides were swallowing the coastlines and the asteroid was as visible in the sky as Earth's moon is and the impact was expected later that afternoon, when the whole world held its breath waiting to die and Eirhean herself finally held her children in her arms and cried, that I became too overwhelmed with sentiment to think straight. The truth was, she was right, but not for the reasons she thought. I had no obligation, no moral duty to help these mortals. In fact I probably shouldn't have, especially considering what came later. But by involving myself with them, talking to them, I'd come to *care* about them... a dangerous state for a Q. And when I saw Eirhean finally break down and admit defeat, on the day she expected her whole world to die, I realized that I would miss them when they were gone.
So I turned the asteroid into water, and misted it into the atmosphere. It rained everywhere for a week and there were floods, but no asteroid and no planetary death.
The people of Semora were stunned. Firstly, because they'd expected to die, had been living their lives for the past five years in the expectation of death, and now all of a sudden they were going to live. Secondly, because what I did was a flagrant violation of the laws of physics and by their beliefs shouldn't have been possible, unless something supernatural had occurred. Even Eirhean had never known the full extent of my power; she had been thinking of me as being something more like, oh, like humans are now, with their starships and their transporters and whatnot -- something she could imagine becoming, with technology. She simply wasn't advanced enough to imagine how technology could become so advanced the interface between it and the self could vanish, and it could do things that seemed blatantly impossible.
She decided I'd been a god the entire time. And worse, told everyone on her planet that I was a god. And gave up science to proselytize her newfound worship of me.
I was kind of disgusted, so I left, hoping things would cool down. They didn't. When I got back, fifty years later, Eirhean's grandson was the head of the religion dedicated to worshipping me, and there had already been schisms and disagreements as to exactly what I wanted them to do and infidels had already been imprisoned or killed for refusing to sing songs of praise and gratitude to me. All the progress they'd made during the days when they thought they were going to die, all the peace and unity and all the understanding of how petty their little tribal conflicts really were, all gone, and the worst of it was their belief that this was what I *wanted*.
So I told the entire planet to leave me alone, that their worship was like the whining of annoying small insects to me, and that if anyone mentioned my name one more time I was going to blow the planet up. And just to prove that I was not a nice guy who would benevolently save them all from whatever disasters they were too stupid to figure out how to save themselves from, I dropped another asteroid on them. To be fair, this one was *much* much smaller, and only ended up killing five percent of the planet through the initial shockwave and then the famines that occurred when the dust cloud caused a three-year winter. But it got my point across.
On Semora, it is now a capital offense to mention my name, so they call me the Nameless One. Half of them still think I'm a god, but not a very nice one. The other half think I'm a demon. They've colonized another planet in their solar system, but they haven't developed warp drive yet. And sadly, none of them so far have been half as smart as Eirhean was before I broke her brain by saving her planet.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Prompt 260: Five years.
So the planet Semora was *just* technologically advanced enough to realize that an asteroid was headed its way and would impact them in five years (technically, four of their years, or five Earth years and two Earth months, but who wants to be anal about it?) but not advanced enough to figure out how to prevent it. This is where I came in.
As you might imagine, chaos reigned at first. People were looting, murdering, raping, because hey, we have only five years to live, why not break all social rules and do whatever we want? Governments fell. Rather short-lived wars broke out. I say short-lived because people quickly realized that as pointless as *anything* was on a planet where all life would be destroyed in five years, wasting time on killing one another en masse was especially pointless. And before long, society stabilized. Life went on. People put their impending doom out of their heads, mostly. Those that couldn't killed themselves.
Except for Eirhean.
Eirhean was one of their top scientists. She had three husbands and four children, and she was a nuclear physicist, and she couldn't allow herself to simply give up and let her children die. Or at least that's what she told me, when I asked her why she didn't give up. She had the notion that it should be theoretically possible to reach the asteroid and detonate a sufficiently large charge on it that it would be redirected, so it wouldn't be pulled into Semora's gravity well and their people would be spared. Since she had been working on the atom bomb, she had a strong sense that a nuclear explosion *might* be big enough to knock the asteroid off course. All she needed to do was a. solve the problem of the atom bomb, single-handedly, because all government funding into weapons had dried up completely when the Semorans collectively realized the futility of war and b. single-handedly develop rocket science and space travel to the point where nuclear missiles could be fired at the asteroid, because Semora didn't even have a space program yet.
I told her it was completely pointless and she should simply give up and accept her fate. Which, you know, was absolutely true. There was no way a single mortal, however intelligent and driven, could develop nuclear weaponry *and* a space program by herself. She would have been better off spending her time with her children and husbands. Instead she was so focused on doing everyhting she could to save their lives that she became completely uninvolved in their lives -- cold, distant, a workaholic who was too irritable to stand being around the loved ones she was trying to save. One of her husbands left her, and took his daughter with him when he did. The other two husbands and three kids basically forgot that they *had* a wife and mother. It was a terrible decision and I told her so.
She told me to be helpful or to shut the hell up.
See, this is the kind of thing I like to see in mortals. Eirhean thought of me as a god, at first, but quickly revised her opinion and started treating me as, well, what I am... a person who was not of her species. Since her people hadn't even invented space travel yet, I thought this was pretty big of her. Admittedly treating me as a person, for most mortals, involves a lot of yelling at me, arguing with me, insulting me and telling me to go away, but this is a vast improvement over throwing themselves at my feet in prostrate worship. Eirhean told me, over and over, that she would not accept defeat; that until the day the asteroid hit, she would keep fighting to find a way to save her children, and the whole world if she could.
So, mm, I might have, shall we say, helped her out a tad. I mean, come on. If the asteroid had shown up fifteen years later the Semorans would have been in good shape to do *something* about it, so, you know, what difference did it make? I mean, fifteen years isn't much to the Q, so I couldn't see why the Continuum'd be upset about it. All I did was give her knowledge she'd have gotten herself if she had enough time.
After one year, Eirhean had solved the problem of creating an atomic bomb. Three years in, Eirhean successfully built a prototype nuclear-powered rocket ship, and persuaded her government to send an expedition to the asteroid to plant nukes (it turned out the missile option wasn't feasible because the precision required for the explosions would be too great.) So with great fanfare the Semorans sent off a team of Big Damn Heroes, including one of Eirhean's remaining husbands, to go blow up the asteroid and save the world.
They failed miserably. They blew *themselves* up and shattered the asteroid, knocking about a third of it away, but the remaining portions that were still on course were *more* than enough to destroy life on Semora completely.
I politely suggested to Eirhean that the giving up option might be her most attractive alternative. She told me to go to hell. See, she was getting a lot less polite as time went on, too. In fact, she had a big argument with me in which she told me I was an amoral monster for standing around watching her planet in its death throes without doing anything to help. Interestingly, she said that it would have been different if I'd never interacted with her, if I had never talked to her; if I had only been a disinterested god, observing from on high, she didn't think I would have had any obligation to help. But now I had involved myself directly with her species, by speaking to her as if we were on the same level, and *now* if I wouldn't help I was actively evil.
It was a completely specious argument, of course. I am the same me whether I choose to interact with mortals or not, and I am under no obligation to aid them in any way. Nonetheless, I thought about what she'd said a good deal as the day of Semora's death approached. The universe is not a fair place, and hard work and clean living don't always save the day, and Big Damn Heroes sometimes screw up the best-laid plans and doom themselves and their world, and no matter how desperate a mother is to save her kids' lives, sometimes she just *can't*. Eirhean was a brilliant woman, but she was only mortal. There was nothing she could do, and that was just the way it was, and this should not in any way have obligated me to do a damn thing about it.
Sometimes, though, on *rare* occasions, my sentimental streak overrides my common sense.
In my defense, it wasn't until Eirhean herself finally gave up, when the tides were swallowing the coastlines and the asteroid was as visible in the sky as Earth's moon is and the impact was expected later that afternoon, when the whole world held its breath waiting to die and Eirhean herself finally held her children in her arms and cried, that I became too overwhelmed with sentiment to think straight. The truth was, she was right, but not for the reasons she thought. I had no obligation, no moral duty to help these mortals. In fact I probably shouldn't have, especially considering what came later. But by involving myself with them, talking to them, I'd come to *care* about them... a dangerous state for a Q. And when I saw Eirhean finally break down and admit defeat, on the day she expected her whole world to die, I realized that I would miss them when they were gone.
So I turned the asteroid into water, and misted it into the atmosphere. It rained everywhere for a week and there were floods, but no asteroid and no planetary death.
The people of Semora were stunned. Firstly, because they'd expected to die, had been living their lives for the past five years in the expectation of death, and now all of a sudden they were going to live. Secondly, because what I did was a flagrant violation of the laws of physics and by their beliefs shouldn't have been possible, unless something supernatural had occurred. Even Eirhean had never known the full extent of my power; she had been thinking of me as being something more like, oh, like humans are now, with their starships and their transporters and whatnot -- something she could imagine becoming, with technology. She simply wasn't advanced enough to imagine how technology could become so advanced the interface between it and the self could vanish, and it could do things that seemed blatantly impossible.
She decided I'd been a god the entire time. And worse, told everyone on her planet that I was a god. And gave up science to proselytize her newfound worship of me.
I was kind of disgusted, so I left, hoping things would cool down. They didn't. When I got back, fifty years later, Eirhean's grandson was the head of the religion dedicated to worshipping me, and there had already been schisms and disagreements as to exactly what I wanted them to do and infidels had already been imprisoned or killed for refusing to sing songs of praise and gratitude to me. All the progress they'd made during the days when they thought they were going to die, all the peace and unity and all the understanding of how petty their little tribal conflicts really were, all gone, and the worst of it was their belief that this was what I *wanted*.
So I told the entire planet to leave me alone, that their worship was like the whining of annoying small insects to me, and that if anyone mentioned my name one more time I was going to blow the planet up. And just to prove that I was not a nice guy who would benevolently save them all from whatever disasters they were too stupid to figure out how to save themselves from, I dropped another asteroid on them. To be fair, this one was *much* much smaller, and only ended up killing five percent of the planet through the initial shockwave and then the famines that occurred when the dust cloud caused a three-year winter. But it got my point across.
On Semora, it is now a capital offense to mention my name, so they call me the Nameless One. Half of them still think I'm a god, but not a very nice one. The other half think I'm a demon. They've colonized another planet in their solar system, but they haven't developed warp drive yet. And sadly, none of them so far have been half as smart as Eirhean was before I broke her brain by saving her planet.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG