The middle of the beginning of the end of an era.
OOC: Same story, two prompts, two communities. Crossposted from both theatrical_muse and realmof_themuse today.
theatrical_muse: Prompt 267: In medias res.
realmof_themuse: 2009.7.B.5: Put the gun down.
So here I was, at the center of the Continuum, in the middle of our loudest and most confrontational meeting ever, and my grandpa was standing across the aisle holding a gun on me.
Let me explain all the ways in which this scenario is screwed up beyond belief.
Firstly, up until a very short while previously - actually, up until he pulled out the gun - there had been no such thing as a weapon that could kill the Q. If there had been, the guy who’d spent hundreds of years petitioning the Continuum for the right to die, whose final winning of that right had triggered this split, wouldn’t have had to go to all that trouble… he’d just have had to get his hands on a weapon. There had been, in fact, no way for any one individual Q to cause worse than serious bodily harm to any other individual Q. And part of the *reason* why this was so was the fact that the old geezer holding a gun trained on me had *made* it that way.
Technically, see, he wasn’t my grandpa, but that’s the closest translation I can come up with. He was one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, one of the elders who we all respect and honor for giving us life even as we grumble about them behind their back and wish they’d go dodder off and bug someone else. And as one of the creators of the Continuum, part of the original generation of Q that spawned all the rest of us, he had been one of those who had unanimously agreed to *make* the Q in such a way as to prevent us from being able to kill each other. So the fact that *he* was the one standing there, holding a gun, was just all kinds of wrong, and if it were actually possible for me to believe that I was dreaming or hallucinating something, I might have thought so - but since the Q don’t either dream or hallucinate, I knew this was entirely real.
I didn’t know how he’d made the gun, and that was another Bizarro World aspect to all of this. Normally I’d know instantly anything another Q knows. But Quinn’s suicide, and our resulting panicked disagreement over the proper strategy to keep the rest of us from following suit, had fissured the Continuum, deepening an already existing fracture into a chasm dividing us in half, and I couldn’t sense anything from the Q on the other side. I could sense that they were there, that they were Q, and that was about it. It was as if they were walking voids, black holes of former Qness, as disturbing as the living dead would be to mortals. So I couldn’t duplicate the gun and I didn’t know what principles he’d applied to make it. But I knew it worked. We’d all felt it rip a hole in the Continuum when he’d test-fired it to make the rest of us shut up and pay attention to him. And if it could tear a hole in the fabric of the Continuum, I knew it could tear a hole in a Q just as easily.
I wasn’t the only one who thought this was messed up. Other Q, including some on his own side, were yelling about what an outrage this was, and how weapons in the Continuum was completely wrong, and what are we, mortals? and things like that. And he yelled back that this was necessary, because… wait for it… his side couldn’t get enough Q to agree with them that *our* side needed to be thrown out of the Continuum because we wanted more freedom. Okay, he didn’t exactly phrase it like that. It was more like, "We cannot cast out those who would cause this discontinuity, those who would sever the Continuum from itself. We have no choice!" and flowery stuff like that. Then he looked at us - okay, specifically, at me, but he meant all of us - and said, "Either you return to the fold, stop your ceaseless agitating for pointless change and freedoms you know we cannot afford to give-- or we will have no choice but to annihilate you."
So I stepped forward. I will confess it - the idea of walking straight up to a guy holding a gun that actually had the potential to *kill* me was not the most delightful thing I could imagine doing. But it wasn’t like I could chicken out in front of all the other Q who had come to this point because they agreed with me that the Continuum needed more freedom for the individual. "Oh, that’ll certainly bring the Continuum together," I said, projecting sarcasm as hard as I could so no one could see any of the fear under it. "In order to preserve the Continuum as it is, you’d bring us murder? Weapons of war? Oh, yes, that's exactly what I think of when I think of preserving the Continuum."
“*Do* you think of preserving the Continuum? At all?” Score one to the old guy.
I got serious. "Believe it or not, I’ve thought of nothing else since Q killed himself." Then I turned and addressed the gathering, the entirety of the Q Continuum called together to this meeting. "You see what we demand as chaos? It is nothing less than sheer survival. One of our best has died to prove to this body how empty our lives have become, how rigid the structures we live under. There was a time when we embraced change, when we actively sought new information, explored the boundaries of the universes we touch and who and what we are. We have lost that. We accepted our fate, our boredom, as inevitable. What happens to the beings who exist to question everything in the universe, when everything is known to them already?... But it's a fallacy. We've cut ourselves off from everything we could still learn by declaring it off-limits! Anything we don't already know, we've decided that there is no value in learning, and restricted those who might choose to explore it from doing so." To be completely honest, even while I was delivering this speech, the part of me that was coming up with it was pretending I was listening to Picard, because now there’s a mortal who knows how to give speeches. "Everything that lives either evolves and grows, or it stagnates. Everything. We arrogantly believed that we would be immune, that no change would be needed because we had achieved perfection. We were wrong. We're not immune, we're not perfect, and if we don't change we will die. Or worse, live, forever, wishing we could die. That's not how I was planning to spend my eternity."
"Chaos is not the answer! We can change, if needed, slowly. Carefully. Not this disruptive revolution you and yours seek!"
"Revolution? I'm not the one holding a gun!" I was getting pretty sure, at this point, that he didn’t want to actually use it. I couldn't read his mind with the discontinuity in the way... but you know someone for five billion years, you get an idea of what they're capable of. "Put down the gun, Q. You know as well as I do that killing people isn't going to solve any of the Continuum's problems. Now, if you want to negotiate, we are willing to negotiate, regardless of… past reputations. We don't need to get everything we're demanding in the next picosecond; we are willing to wait a reasonable length of time, if we see that change is actually happening…"
And I could see it, even through the discontinuity, the relief he was feeling, matching my own. No one was going to die today, no one was going to get thrown out of the Continuum today. We were going to negotiate, we were going to compromise, we were going to bring the Continuum back together and the day would be saved and flowers and puppies would fall from the sky, la la la. Oh how naïve we were.
You see, we’d never had guns. But anything one Q knows, we all know. Everyone on his side of the discontinuity knew, now, how to make themselves a gun. He’d just armed everyone on the side of order and stagnation… and some of them were on that side, not because they so passionately believed in the status quo, but because they passionately hated *me*. Which, you know, I’ve been a bad boy. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, I’ve hurt some fellow Q. Under most circumstances I actually do understand why there are Q who hate me enough to want me dead. But this day was not most circumstances.
I was in the middle of talking with the old guy when three things happened, more or less all at the same time. Someone in the peanut gallery pulled the weapon and fired at me. A guy on my side who didn’t even *like* me, personally, but believed in the cause of freedom as strongly as I did, teleported next to me so he’d have the leverage to shove me out of the way. And the gunshot hit *him* instead.
There was an explosion of energies, bits of Q essence thrown forcefully against my pattern like someone was trying to penetrate me except they were random bits and pieces, not a coherent patterned whole, and I was dazed for a moment and I couldn’t figure out what had happened and then I didn’t see my comrade in arms anywhere and then I realized that the bits of Q essence covering me were *his* essence and they weren’t connected to each other anymore because he had just been blown to pieces and I screamed. I screamed with rage and fear and hate and grief and every negative emotion a sentient being can feel, wrapped up in a single cry. And I focused all those feelings on the guy who’d just tried to kill me, who’d just committed the first murder in the Continuum ever, and I could feel other Q next to me - the lover of the guy who’d just died, a scientist who was kind of absentminded and apolitical and he was only on our side because his boyfriend was a believer; my former best friend and “older brother”, who’d betrayed me once and I’d never quite forgiven him but here and now we stood as one; Q who believed they’d die for freedom, Q who hadn’t believed strongly in the cause but were horrified by the death, all of us united together in the force of our hate and we burned the gunman, seared him with the force of our hate and he shriveled under the attack and died.
I don’t quite remember what happened next. I mean, I *could*. So many other Q were there, and it was at the center of the Continuum - I could look up everyone else’s memories if I really wanted to know. Probably my own memories aren’t really missing either. Probably I just don’t want to remember. Because I think, for a little while, I was insane. They were shooting at us, and others were dying, and we were trying to put up shields but the shields were blistering and burning under the gunfire and we were lashing out through our shields with our hate, but some of us were getting hit and others were running and I knew we were going to die. We were all going to die. There was no other possible outcome, because we didn’t have the weapons. We couldn’t shield indefinitely, and if we ran, they would hunt us down and kill us, or take control of the Continuum in our absence and exile us to mortality, or simply demand our surrender. And a reasonable Q would have surrendered. But at that moment I was a completely unreasonable Q. I preferred, at that moment, the thought of fighting them face to face until they shot me dead than the thought of running away, even though I thought I had no hope.
And then the youngest Q, Amanda, the child who’d been raised among humans, who I’d brought to the Continuum (and who I’d told in no uncertain terms to stay *out* of the Continuum until this conflict was over, because that trick we’d just pulled with hating the gunman to death? Some on the side of order, despising her for her human origins, had nearly killed *her* that way, before the meeting began), came over to our side... came in right behind me, actually, behind my shields. And before I could do more than say “What the-?”, she… hmmm…
I think, if there had been mortals there and a translation metaphor running to let them see some representation of what was going on that they could comprehend, what they’d have seen was Amanda grabbing me, bending me over and planting one smack on my lips. (Which would have looked hilarious, because in human form I am about twice Amanda’s size.) What she was *actually* doing was forcibly invading my mind just enough to plant the specs for the gun on me. Because, despite the fact that some of the order-bots had tried to kill her, the fact that Amanda’s chief mentor in the Continuum was on the other side had left her on the other side of the discontinuity… where she had gotten the information about the gun at the same time as everyone else on that side had. And then she brought it to me, because Amanda was raised a human, and humans, at least in the time period Amanda grew up in, appreciate freedom.
I told her she was a stupid child, completely corrupted by her human upbringing… and that I loved her for it. Then I transmitted the knowledge of the weapon to everyone else on my side, so we could fight back. And then I picked up the gun Amanda had brought me, and I began to kill my brothers and sisters.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG and Voyager
theatrical_muse: Prompt 267: In medias res.
realmof_themuse: 2009.7.B.5: Put the gun down.
So here I was, at the center of the Continuum, in the middle of our loudest and most confrontational meeting ever, and my grandpa was standing across the aisle holding a gun on me.
Let me explain all the ways in which this scenario is screwed up beyond belief.
Firstly, up until a very short while previously - actually, up until he pulled out the gun - there had been no such thing as a weapon that could kill the Q. If there had been, the guy who’d spent hundreds of years petitioning the Continuum for the right to die, whose final winning of that right had triggered this split, wouldn’t have had to go to all that trouble… he’d just have had to get his hands on a weapon. There had been, in fact, no way for any one individual Q to cause worse than serious bodily harm to any other individual Q. And part of the *reason* why this was so was the fact that the old geezer holding a gun trained on me had *made* it that way.
Technically, see, he wasn’t my grandpa, but that’s the closest translation I can come up with. He was one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, one of the elders who we all respect and honor for giving us life even as we grumble about them behind their back and wish they’d go dodder off and bug someone else. And as one of the creators of the Continuum, part of the original generation of Q that spawned all the rest of us, he had been one of those who had unanimously agreed to *make* the Q in such a way as to prevent us from being able to kill each other. So the fact that *he* was the one standing there, holding a gun, was just all kinds of wrong, and if it were actually possible for me to believe that I was dreaming or hallucinating something, I might have thought so - but since the Q don’t either dream or hallucinate, I knew this was entirely real.
I didn’t know how he’d made the gun, and that was another Bizarro World aspect to all of this. Normally I’d know instantly anything another Q knows. But Quinn’s suicide, and our resulting panicked disagreement over the proper strategy to keep the rest of us from following suit, had fissured the Continuum, deepening an already existing fracture into a chasm dividing us in half, and I couldn’t sense anything from the Q on the other side. I could sense that they were there, that they were Q, and that was about it. It was as if they were walking voids, black holes of former Qness, as disturbing as the living dead would be to mortals. So I couldn’t duplicate the gun and I didn’t know what principles he’d applied to make it. But I knew it worked. We’d all felt it rip a hole in the Continuum when he’d test-fired it to make the rest of us shut up and pay attention to him. And if it could tear a hole in the fabric of the Continuum, I knew it could tear a hole in a Q just as easily.
I wasn’t the only one who thought this was messed up. Other Q, including some on his own side, were yelling about what an outrage this was, and how weapons in the Continuum was completely wrong, and what are we, mortals? and things like that. And he yelled back that this was necessary, because… wait for it… his side couldn’t get enough Q to agree with them that *our* side needed to be thrown out of the Continuum because we wanted more freedom. Okay, he didn’t exactly phrase it like that. It was more like, "We cannot cast out those who would cause this discontinuity, those who would sever the Continuum from itself. We have no choice!" and flowery stuff like that. Then he looked at us - okay, specifically, at me, but he meant all of us - and said, "Either you return to the fold, stop your ceaseless agitating for pointless change and freedoms you know we cannot afford to give-- or we will have no choice but to annihilate you."
So I stepped forward. I will confess it - the idea of walking straight up to a guy holding a gun that actually had the potential to *kill* me was not the most delightful thing I could imagine doing. But it wasn’t like I could chicken out in front of all the other Q who had come to this point because they agreed with me that the Continuum needed more freedom for the individual. "Oh, that’ll certainly bring the Continuum together," I said, projecting sarcasm as hard as I could so no one could see any of the fear under it. "In order to preserve the Continuum as it is, you’d bring us murder? Weapons of war? Oh, yes, that's exactly what I think of when I think of preserving the Continuum."
“*Do* you think of preserving the Continuum? At all?” Score one to the old guy.
I got serious. "Believe it or not, I’ve thought of nothing else since Q killed himself." Then I turned and addressed the gathering, the entirety of the Q Continuum called together to this meeting. "You see what we demand as chaos? It is nothing less than sheer survival. One of our best has died to prove to this body how empty our lives have become, how rigid the structures we live under. There was a time when we embraced change, when we actively sought new information, explored the boundaries of the universes we touch and who and what we are. We have lost that. We accepted our fate, our boredom, as inevitable. What happens to the beings who exist to question everything in the universe, when everything is known to them already?... But it's a fallacy. We've cut ourselves off from everything we could still learn by declaring it off-limits! Anything we don't already know, we've decided that there is no value in learning, and restricted those who might choose to explore it from doing so." To be completely honest, even while I was delivering this speech, the part of me that was coming up with it was pretending I was listening to Picard, because now there’s a mortal who knows how to give speeches. "Everything that lives either evolves and grows, or it stagnates. Everything. We arrogantly believed that we would be immune, that no change would be needed because we had achieved perfection. We were wrong. We're not immune, we're not perfect, and if we don't change we will die. Or worse, live, forever, wishing we could die. That's not how I was planning to spend my eternity."
"Chaos is not the answer! We can change, if needed, slowly. Carefully. Not this disruptive revolution you and yours seek!"
"Revolution? I'm not the one holding a gun!" I was getting pretty sure, at this point, that he didn’t want to actually use it. I couldn't read his mind with the discontinuity in the way... but you know someone for five billion years, you get an idea of what they're capable of. "Put down the gun, Q. You know as well as I do that killing people isn't going to solve any of the Continuum's problems. Now, if you want to negotiate, we are willing to negotiate, regardless of… past reputations. We don't need to get everything we're demanding in the next picosecond; we are willing to wait a reasonable length of time, if we see that change is actually happening…"
And I could see it, even through the discontinuity, the relief he was feeling, matching my own. No one was going to die today, no one was going to get thrown out of the Continuum today. We were going to negotiate, we were going to compromise, we were going to bring the Continuum back together and the day would be saved and flowers and puppies would fall from the sky, la la la. Oh how naïve we were.
You see, we’d never had guns. But anything one Q knows, we all know. Everyone on his side of the discontinuity knew, now, how to make themselves a gun. He’d just armed everyone on the side of order and stagnation… and some of them were on that side, not because they so passionately believed in the status quo, but because they passionately hated *me*. Which, you know, I’ve been a bad boy. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, I’ve hurt some fellow Q. Under most circumstances I actually do understand why there are Q who hate me enough to want me dead. But this day was not most circumstances.
I was in the middle of talking with the old guy when three things happened, more or less all at the same time. Someone in the peanut gallery pulled the weapon and fired at me. A guy on my side who didn’t even *like* me, personally, but believed in the cause of freedom as strongly as I did, teleported next to me so he’d have the leverage to shove me out of the way. And the gunshot hit *him* instead.
There was an explosion of energies, bits of Q essence thrown forcefully against my pattern like someone was trying to penetrate me except they were random bits and pieces, not a coherent patterned whole, and I was dazed for a moment and I couldn’t figure out what had happened and then I didn’t see my comrade in arms anywhere and then I realized that the bits of Q essence covering me were *his* essence and they weren’t connected to each other anymore because he had just been blown to pieces and I screamed. I screamed with rage and fear and hate and grief and every negative emotion a sentient being can feel, wrapped up in a single cry. And I focused all those feelings on the guy who’d just tried to kill me, who’d just committed the first murder in the Continuum ever, and I could feel other Q next to me - the lover of the guy who’d just died, a scientist who was kind of absentminded and apolitical and he was only on our side because his boyfriend was a believer; my former best friend and “older brother”, who’d betrayed me once and I’d never quite forgiven him but here and now we stood as one; Q who believed they’d die for freedom, Q who hadn’t believed strongly in the cause but were horrified by the death, all of us united together in the force of our hate and we burned the gunman, seared him with the force of our hate and he shriveled under the attack and died.
I don’t quite remember what happened next. I mean, I *could*. So many other Q were there, and it was at the center of the Continuum - I could look up everyone else’s memories if I really wanted to know. Probably my own memories aren’t really missing either. Probably I just don’t want to remember. Because I think, for a little while, I was insane. They were shooting at us, and others were dying, and we were trying to put up shields but the shields were blistering and burning under the gunfire and we were lashing out through our shields with our hate, but some of us were getting hit and others were running and I knew we were going to die. We were all going to die. There was no other possible outcome, because we didn’t have the weapons. We couldn’t shield indefinitely, and if we ran, they would hunt us down and kill us, or take control of the Continuum in our absence and exile us to mortality, or simply demand our surrender. And a reasonable Q would have surrendered. But at that moment I was a completely unreasonable Q. I preferred, at that moment, the thought of fighting them face to face until they shot me dead than the thought of running away, even though I thought I had no hope.
And then the youngest Q, Amanda, the child who’d been raised among humans, who I’d brought to the Continuum (and who I’d told in no uncertain terms to stay *out* of the Continuum until this conflict was over, because that trick we’d just pulled with hating the gunman to death? Some on the side of order, despising her for her human origins, had nearly killed *her* that way, before the meeting began), came over to our side... came in right behind me, actually, behind my shields. And before I could do more than say “What the-?”, she… hmmm…
I think, if there had been mortals there and a translation metaphor running to let them see some representation of what was going on that they could comprehend, what they’d have seen was Amanda grabbing me, bending me over and planting one smack on my lips. (Which would have looked hilarious, because in human form I am about twice Amanda’s size.) What she was *actually* doing was forcibly invading my mind just enough to plant the specs for the gun on me. Because, despite the fact that some of the order-bots had tried to kill her, the fact that Amanda’s chief mentor in the Continuum was on the other side had left her on the other side of the discontinuity… where she had gotten the information about the gun at the same time as everyone else on that side had. And then she brought it to me, because Amanda was raised a human, and humans, at least in the time period Amanda grew up in, appreciate freedom.
I told her she was a stupid child, completely corrupted by her human upbringing… and that I loved her for it. Then I transmitted the knowledge of the weapon to everyone else on my side, so we could fight back. And then I picked up the gun Amanda had brought me, and I began to kill my brothers and sisters.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG and Voyager