there are days the memory of my own cowardice appalls me.
OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.
Prompt 344: Have you ever sold out?
I'm five billion years old. I think that at one point or another I've done everything there is to do except die.
Yes. I've sold out. What's worse, I've sold out other Q.
I had a friend, once (why do so many of my less pleasant tales of my sordid past start that way?), who, like me, was always up for something new. She was chronically bored. Unlike me, she had a hanger-on who was madly in love with her and would have done anything she suggested (well, to be fair, I spent a significant part of my existence having *two* Q claiming to be madly in love with me, and one of the two generally doing most things that I suggested, but neither of them could ever have been called my sidekick. Whereas this Q? Was very much her sidekick.) So she got this brilliant idea. There was this planet that two Q had previously been assigned to study. The first one was in the middle of his analysis of the species when he decided that the real problem with the Continuum is that no one ever dies, and he volunteered to be the first. So we locked him up in a comet. The second one decided that she loved the species so much she wanted not just to pretend to be one, but to incarnate as one, impregnate one of their number with herself and grow up from infancy without her memories of her true identity. Needless to say, we mocked her. A lot.
So my friend wanted to know what was so special about this place that it made the Q do such incredibly idiotic things. So she took her sidekick with her, they took the form of the species, and they began hanging around on the planet pretending to be one of them.
Soylent Green is made from people!... no, wait, sorry, wrong twist ending. It was Earth. Betcha didn't see that coming.
And having gone, in part, to investigate why Q end up getting truly stupid ideas as a result of exposure to humanity, Q got a really stupid idea. She decided to get pregnant. Her boytoy was all in favor of the project, and no one knew what they were planning until they'd already done it and the kid was almost born.
Most of the Q were horrified. There's a reason we don't reproduce by creating infants; infants can't survive the Continuum. (Well, they couldn't at the time. Later on I solved this little technical detail, but at the time, having an infant would keep you out of the Continuum for decades.) Plus, they were incubating this infant Q inside the body of an infant human, which many of us perceived to be sort of like making a cradle for your baby out of a pile of dung. Plus... infant Q. That was an oxymoron at the time, rather like guest host, jumbo shrimp, or human intelligence. A thing that was part of our Continuum, one of us, but was nothing but a bundle of irrational emotional responses, no higher mental functions, no *mind* to speak of... humans may think their babies are cute, but the Q can read the babies' minds, and we know better. It was like making an animal who was supposed to turn into a sentient being eventually.
I wasn't horrified. I mean... yes, there was something repulsive about the idea of an infant Q. But it was new, and I like things that are new. This was something different. If they could just come to the Continuum and explain what they were trying to do, I was sure everything would be just fine. Except they wouldn't do it because they couldn't bring the infant into the Continuum and the child's father didn't want to separate from my friend. Really unhealthy co-dependence there, if you ask me.
I tried to talk them out of it. I even recruited my older sister, the one who'd incarnated herself as a human, who had been human for close to 20 years and was expecting a boring human life of going into Starfleet -- I gave her her memories back (which she's still mad at me about) and asked *her* to persuade them. But they wouldn't budge. They refused to return to the Continuum, because they feared that doing so would harm the baby. And they continued to use their powers for their personal comfort because hello, any of us would (except for my ex, who is nuts, but that's another story). Technically it's against the rules to use powers when you're walking among a lesser species in their guise, but no one ever pays attention to that rule.
Except, of course, when the Continuum wants to drop a hammer on you.
I went along with the Continuum's decision to forbid them to use their powers if they wouldn't come home. Because I wanted them to come home and explain themselves. Specifically I wanted my friend to come home and her idiot boyfriend to stay there with the kid, but if they couldn't work that, why couldn't they just abort the kid and then make a new one after they'd gotten permission from the Continuum? What they were doing was exciting and different, and I was interested in their project, but that thing that was an elemental Q except with no mind wasn't a *real* Q yet, and it had less of a mind than most non-sentient mammals, so if they had to kill it and start over later, who cared?
(It wasn't until I had a child of my own that I realized what an outrageously stupid idea that was. But no Q had ever *had* a child, so how was I supposed to know?)
Of course they refused to come home. And then they kept using their powers.
What the Continuum demanded of us was not a vote on the question "should we kill them?" but a vote on the question "does direct disobedience of the will of the Continuum deserve death?"
I wanted to say no. I really, really wanted to say no. But... I'm a Q. I'm part of this Continuum. As much as I hate to admit it, it shapes me and controls me more than I want to realize. And I couldn't bring myself to believe that it could ever be all right for a Q to run around the universe willy-nilly doing anything they wanted with their powers and sneering at the Continuum's directives. They'd been given an ultimatum, they'd ignored it, and I couldn't make myself believe there shouldn't be consequences for that. I didn't want them to die; I wanted to find a loophole, a reason why we wouldn't have to kill them, one more chance to give them. But I couldn't disagree with the basic premise that they were in the realm of actions that could get them killed.
And then, having decided that what they had done deserved death, the Continuum decided to kill them.
I decided to kill them. I am the Continuum. It is me and I am it and we are all together. I can't separate the decisions the overmind makes when I'm part of it from the decisions I personally make. Because I didn't get a vote, per se. I got to be a dissenting part of the overmind, an embodiment of the trait of "regret" and "desire to show mercy", but my dissent wasn't strong enough, I couldn't sway enough of the rest of the Q, and when we the Continuum made the decision, we all made it. They had to die.
And I... volunteered.
I volunteered because I was the only one who was capable of carrying out the mission who wouldn't have also killed the baby. Most of the others either wanted Q, Q and their baby dead, and had not represented any dissent or regret... or they wanted them to live, and couldn't handle having made the opposite decision, and wouldn't have been able to bear carrying out the Continuum's will. I can hurt people I love. I can do things that tear me apart inside because they have to be done, to protect something larger. In fact, not only can I do terrible things, I can *enjoy* doing terrible things... while I'm doing them. And then just manage to not ever think about the fact that I did them, after the fact.
So it was me. I chose to carry out their execution because I was the only one who'd do it who would spare the baby, and they wanted that baby to live more than they wanted to live themselves, and it was the only thing I could do for them, because I couldn't defend them, and I hadn't successfully gotten the overmind to agree not to kill them, and they were going to die and nothing I could do would save them. I could make it quick and I could save the baby.
But it hurt so much, I knew my will would falter. Q will is the root of our powers, and a reluctant killer Q up against two Q who want very much to live will lose. So I... I don't know how to explain this in human terms... I let the overmind have me. I channeled the Continuum's will through my self. It's like... I don't know how to describe it. I hate doing it, it makes me feel like a puppet, but I chose it because it was the only way I could win. My ego was still present but my emotions, my desires, were driven by what the Continuum as a whole wanted, not what I personally would have wanted... except that isn't entirely true either. I had enough of myself to spare the baby, as I'd come to do. I had enough of myself to decide that what the situation really needed was some dark humor, so instead of just killing them outright, after I severed them from the Continuum I manifested a tornado and dropped their house on them. In Kansas.
I remember Q screaming at me, attacking my mind to try to break me free from the overmind, to bring the me-self parts of me to the foreground and override the Continuum-self parts. I remember that it worked. For a moment. And it was so crushingly painful that I was murdering one of my closest friends that I dove back down and threw myself back into the overmind as hard as I could, practically drowned myself so I wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I was killing someone I desperately did not want to have dead.
She didn't deserve that. Neither of them did. They should have been killed by someone who wasn't so much of a coward that they would hide from their own actions by taking refuge in the overmind, letting the Continuum act through them instead of taking responsibility for their own acts. I tell myself I did it because it was the only way to save the baby... but by the time the baby was an adult and manifesting her Q powers, I'd been thrown out of the Continuum once for rebellion and had almost been killed myself, and I was terrified that they'd do it again... so instead of telling the Continuum to go jump in a supermassive black hole when they told me to kill the kid, I told them I'd test her, see if she could control her powers, and if she could, I'd offer her the chance to come home. And if she refused, then I agreed I would kill her.
Some days I want to tell Amanda the truth. She knows I would have killed her if she'd refused; she knows that my agreeing to that was me selling out because I was scared of losing my powers again. She doesn't know I'm actually the one who executed her parents. She could find out; the information's in the Continuum, but... I don't think she wants to know. And I'd really rather she didn't. Because knowing I was going to sell her out is one thing; knowing I did sell out her parents is something else.
Prompt 344: Have you ever sold out?
I'm five billion years old. I think that at one point or another I've done everything there is to do except die.
Yes. I've sold out. What's worse, I've sold out other Q.
I had a friend, once (why do so many of my less pleasant tales of my sordid past start that way?), who, like me, was always up for something new. She was chronically bored. Unlike me, she had a hanger-on who was madly in love with her and would have done anything she suggested (well, to be fair, I spent a significant part of my existence having *two* Q claiming to be madly in love with me, and one of the two generally doing most things that I suggested, but neither of them could ever have been called my sidekick. Whereas this Q? Was very much her sidekick.) So she got this brilliant idea. There was this planet that two Q had previously been assigned to study. The first one was in the middle of his analysis of the species when he decided that the real problem with the Continuum is that no one ever dies, and he volunteered to be the first. So we locked him up in a comet. The second one decided that she loved the species so much she wanted not just to pretend to be one, but to incarnate as one, impregnate one of their number with herself and grow up from infancy without her memories of her true identity. Needless to say, we mocked her. A lot.
So my friend wanted to know what was so special about this place that it made the Q do such incredibly idiotic things. So she took her sidekick with her, they took the form of the species, and they began hanging around on the planet pretending to be one of them.
Soylent Green is made from people!... no, wait, sorry, wrong twist ending. It was Earth. Betcha didn't see that coming.
And having gone, in part, to investigate why Q end up getting truly stupid ideas as a result of exposure to humanity, Q got a really stupid idea. She decided to get pregnant. Her boytoy was all in favor of the project, and no one knew what they were planning until they'd already done it and the kid was almost born.
Most of the Q were horrified. There's a reason we don't reproduce by creating infants; infants can't survive the Continuum. (Well, they couldn't at the time. Later on I solved this little technical detail, but at the time, having an infant would keep you out of the Continuum for decades.) Plus, they were incubating this infant Q inside the body of an infant human, which many of us perceived to be sort of like making a cradle for your baby out of a pile of dung. Plus... infant Q. That was an oxymoron at the time, rather like guest host, jumbo shrimp, or human intelligence. A thing that was part of our Continuum, one of us, but was nothing but a bundle of irrational emotional responses, no higher mental functions, no *mind* to speak of... humans may think their babies are cute, but the Q can read the babies' minds, and we know better. It was like making an animal who was supposed to turn into a sentient being eventually.
I wasn't horrified. I mean... yes, there was something repulsive about the idea of an infant Q. But it was new, and I like things that are new. This was something different. If they could just come to the Continuum and explain what they were trying to do, I was sure everything would be just fine. Except they wouldn't do it because they couldn't bring the infant into the Continuum and the child's father didn't want to separate from my friend. Really unhealthy co-dependence there, if you ask me.
I tried to talk them out of it. I even recruited my older sister, the one who'd incarnated herself as a human, who had been human for close to 20 years and was expecting a boring human life of going into Starfleet -- I gave her her memories back (which she's still mad at me about) and asked *her* to persuade them. But they wouldn't budge. They refused to return to the Continuum, because they feared that doing so would harm the baby. And they continued to use their powers for their personal comfort because hello, any of us would (except for my ex, who is nuts, but that's another story). Technically it's against the rules to use powers when you're walking among a lesser species in their guise, but no one ever pays attention to that rule.
Except, of course, when the Continuum wants to drop a hammer on you.
I went along with the Continuum's decision to forbid them to use their powers if they wouldn't come home. Because I wanted them to come home and explain themselves. Specifically I wanted my friend to come home and her idiot boyfriend to stay there with the kid, but if they couldn't work that, why couldn't they just abort the kid and then make a new one after they'd gotten permission from the Continuum? What they were doing was exciting and different, and I was interested in their project, but that thing that was an elemental Q except with no mind wasn't a *real* Q yet, and it had less of a mind than most non-sentient mammals, so if they had to kill it and start over later, who cared?
(It wasn't until I had a child of my own that I realized what an outrageously stupid idea that was. But no Q had ever *had* a child, so how was I supposed to know?)
Of course they refused to come home. And then they kept using their powers.
What the Continuum demanded of us was not a vote on the question "should we kill them?" but a vote on the question "does direct disobedience of the will of the Continuum deserve death?"
I wanted to say no. I really, really wanted to say no. But... I'm a Q. I'm part of this Continuum. As much as I hate to admit it, it shapes me and controls me more than I want to realize. And I couldn't bring myself to believe that it could ever be all right for a Q to run around the universe willy-nilly doing anything they wanted with their powers and sneering at the Continuum's directives. They'd been given an ultimatum, they'd ignored it, and I couldn't make myself believe there shouldn't be consequences for that. I didn't want them to die; I wanted to find a loophole, a reason why we wouldn't have to kill them, one more chance to give them. But I couldn't disagree with the basic premise that they were in the realm of actions that could get them killed.
And then, having decided that what they had done deserved death, the Continuum decided to kill them.
I decided to kill them. I am the Continuum. It is me and I am it and we are all together. I can't separate the decisions the overmind makes when I'm part of it from the decisions I personally make. Because I didn't get a vote, per se. I got to be a dissenting part of the overmind, an embodiment of the trait of "regret" and "desire to show mercy", but my dissent wasn't strong enough, I couldn't sway enough of the rest of the Q, and when we the Continuum made the decision, we all made it. They had to die.
And I... volunteered.
I volunteered because I was the only one who was capable of carrying out the mission who wouldn't have also killed the baby. Most of the others either wanted Q, Q and their baby dead, and had not represented any dissent or regret... or they wanted them to live, and couldn't handle having made the opposite decision, and wouldn't have been able to bear carrying out the Continuum's will. I can hurt people I love. I can do things that tear me apart inside because they have to be done, to protect something larger. In fact, not only can I do terrible things, I can *enjoy* doing terrible things... while I'm doing them. And then just manage to not ever think about the fact that I did them, after the fact.
So it was me. I chose to carry out their execution because I was the only one who'd do it who would spare the baby, and they wanted that baby to live more than they wanted to live themselves, and it was the only thing I could do for them, because I couldn't defend them, and I hadn't successfully gotten the overmind to agree not to kill them, and they were going to die and nothing I could do would save them. I could make it quick and I could save the baby.
But it hurt so much, I knew my will would falter. Q will is the root of our powers, and a reluctant killer Q up against two Q who want very much to live will lose. So I... I don't know how to explain this in human terms... I let the overmind have me. I channeled the Continuum's will through my self. It's like... I don't know how to describe it. I hate doing it, it makes me feel like a puppet, but I chose it because it was the only way I could win. My ego was still present but my emotions, my desires, were driven by what the Continuum as a whole wanted, not what I personally would have wanted... except that isn't entirely true either. I had enough of myself to spare the baby, as I'd come to do. I had enough of myself to decide that what the situation really needed was some dark humor, so instead of just killing them outright, after I severed them from the Continuum I manifested a tornado and dropped their house on them. In Kansas.
I remember Q screaming at me, attacking my mind to try to break me free from the overmind, to bring the me-self parts of me to the foreground and override the Continuum-self parts. I remember that it worked. For a moment. And it was so crushingly painful that I was murdering one of my closest friends that I dove back down and threw myself back into the overmind as hard as I could, practically drowned myself so I wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I was killing someone I desperately did not want to have dead.
She didn't deserve that. Neither of them did. They should have been killed by someone who wasn't so much of a coward that they would hide from their own actions by taking refuge in the overmind, letting the Continuum act through them instead of taking responsibility for their own acts. I tell myself I did it because it was the only way to save the baby... but by the time the baby was an adult and manifesting her Q powers, I'd been thrown out of the Continuum once for rebellion and had almost been killed myself, and I was terrified that they'd do it again... so instead of telling the Continuum to go jump in a supermassive black hole when they told me to kill the kid, I told them I'd test her, see if she could control her powers, and if she could, I'd offer her the chance to come home. And if she refused, then I agreed I would kill her.
Some days I want to tell Amanda the truth. She knows I would have killed her if she'd refused; she knows that my agreeing to that was me selling out because I was scared of losing my powers again. She doesn't know I'm actually the one who executed her parents. She could find out; the information's in the Continuum, but... I don't think she wants to know. And I'd really rather she didn't. Because knowing I was going to sell her out is one thing; knowing I did sell out her parents is something else.