Scary stories.

[qcontinuum]

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse 4/9/2005, 27 of 50.

If you could do one totally irresponsible or even bad thing with absolutely no consequences, what would it be and why?

Just *one*? My whole *life* used to be like that.

Which leads me into my next topic.

What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?

They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? But then, they never probably had to deal with losing friends and family, becoming crippled and blind, and facing death, all in the same day. I mean, if they *had*, and they still think it makes you stronger... well, they're idiots. Wiser, maybe. More cautious? Definitely. But stronger? No, I can pretty much declare that I was *stronger* before it happened.

I am, of course, talking about the single day I was human.



At this point I know the humans reading this are going to snicker to themselves... which is pretty much what the humans I was surrounded with did. "What's so scary about being human?" humans think. "I do it every day!" Which is great, yippee for you. You've never known anything better. And you've grown up with the knowledge that you can die. Actually facing it, right in front of you, scares most of you out of your shorts, true, but at least the *possibility* has always been in your mind.

The Q are immortal, invulnerable, and as close to omnipotent as makes no real difference. We can do anything we want as long as the rest of the Q Continuum has not forbidden it. Over the aeons, the laundry list of things the rest of the Q Continuum has forbidden got longer and longer, and being the great fan of stultifying order and strait-jacketing authority that I am, this annoyed me. Considerably. So I spent, oh, pretty much *all* my time skating around the limits of what I was allowed to do. Which is why my entire life used to be full of wonderfully irresponsible or even bad activities with absolutely no bad consequences, or consequences that consisted of me listening to a lecture, wising off at the lecturer, and going on my merry way. And even after some friends of mine were executed for flagrantly disobeying an order from the Continuum, I still figured that nothing bad would ever happen to *me.* After all, I wasn't actually disobeying orders. Just... interpreting them creatively. I had a clever rationalization for why it was absolutely necessary to do everything I did, but the truth is, I mostly did it for fun. I was *supposed* to be making contact with different species and testing them on a number of points, such as, are they total hypocrites and are they primitive enough to worship a godlike being like me and do they have potential to be better than they are and stuff like that. And, well, I did do that. Creatively. Which is to say I went out of my way to find the most obnoxious way I could carry out my tests possible, because it's enormously fun to watch people squirm in terror.

I hear you say, "Good Gad, a loathesome lad you are!" Or words to that effect, with apologies to Cole Porter. In my defense, I didn't understand fear. I'd never experienced it, you see. Due to that "immortal and invulnerable" thing mentioned above. Oh, I could read people's minds and *see* their fear, but I couldn't *feel* it, so I couldn't really comprehend it. Knowledge is not the same as understanding.

So I went around terrorizing lower life forms, creatively, until the Continuum dropped the hammer on me. They declared that I had showed myself to be incorrigible. That I had been repeatedly warned, and repeatedly flouted their authority. And because of this they declared that I was not responsible enough to wield the powers of the Q. Now, you can't be a Q and not be nigh-omnipotent, it doesn't work that way. Therefore I could not be a Q, and they had to make me into something else. So they sentenced me to become mortal.

At the time, I think I'd rather have been executed. More dignified, and the end result would be the same, I thought. But they weren't going to do that, and I wasn't suicidal enough to force the issue, so I took the deal they offered. Choose any mortal species to be, and any place in the universe to go.

This sounds like a wide spectrum of choices. It's not. I couldn't be an energy being, the closest thing to what the Q are, because they're not considered mortal. It's not enough that something *can* be killed, it has to be on a countdown to automatic death. Something that ages and decays. I didn't *want* to be non-sentient, because the integrity of my selfhood is very important to me, and I wouldn't be able to carry my memories or selfhood into a non-sentient's brain without the power of the Continuum to back me up. I needed to become a mortal of a species I was familiar with personally and recently, because no mortal mind can hold all the memories of five billion years and I'd have to give up all but the most recent and important ones. And since I'd never studied how to *survive* as any mortal species I'd tested, I needed mortals who'd teach me how to fit in. Also, who wouldn't kill me. Because running around the galaxy terrorizing people does not make you friends. In fact, mortals who would protect me from *other* mortals (or for that matter immortals) who wanted me dead for what I'd done to them would be the best.

I picked humans, and I picked the starship Enterprise, run by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, because at that time humanity considered one of its defining characteristics to be compassion, mercy and willingness to forgive. They'd made friends with several species of former dire enemies. And Picard himself was an exemplar of humanity. I used him in my tests because he *passed* the first one, which, among other things, was to see how close to the ideals of humanity a sample human actually kept. And because the first test revealed that he was, in fact, compassionate, merciful, and willing to forgive, and the next test revealed the ethical strength to not misuse power. (Okay, it was actually Riker who turned down being omnipotent, but he did it because Picard wanted him to.)

So here I am, on the bridge of their ship, in the human body I'd always worn when visiting them, only now it was really me and I couldn't just keep it going with energy drawn from the Continuum, I'd actually have to feed it and things like that. Picture this: you've been exiled from your entire species, most of your senses have been shut down and you feel blind and deaf, most of your abilities have been stripped away, leaving you crippled, you're naked and cold and you know that someday you will die and it might even be soon, whereas before you'd never imagined the possibility. And these people, these exemplars you've turned to for compassion and guidance, are yammering on about how you have to wear clothes, and making you wear THE UGLIEST OUTFIT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, and accusing you of all kinds of stupid things, like making a moon fall out of a planet's sky. And you tell them the truth. And they don't believe you. Despite the fact that some voyeuristic, prying emotion-reader declares to the entire room that you're terrified. Thanks, Troi, I wasn't humiliated enough up to that point. Did I mention that, up to this point, boredom was the absolute worst thing I'd ever encountered? So Picard promptly threw me in the brig, where I could be terrified and bored, at the same time. How nifty.

I managed to talk him into letting me go (after enduring the absolute terror of feeling my BRAIN SHUT DOWN and the energy leach out of my body, which I thought was me dying, only it turned out I was falling asleep, which meant I was going to have to go through this every night for the rest of my now-vastly-shorter existence), because he had a physics problem on his hands, and I know physics intimately. The only trouble was, I didn't know enough about their primitive technology to know what aspects of practical physics they could do, and what they couldn't. And then my back locked up on me, which was the most painful thing I have ever encountered, which is to say, since I had never suffered pain before that day, the most painful thing I'd encountered that day. So I couldn't focus, and I gave them the easy answer. If a black hole is yanking a moon out of orbit, change the local gravitational constant of the universe to disrupt the pull. Probably I should have guessed that was something they couldn't do, but hello? Pain? I couldn't think of anything better, due to the fact that I literally couldn't think. It was as if part of my mind was trying to think through the problem and the rest of it was shouting "OW OW BACK HURTING OW OW" so loudly that I couldn't hear myself. This, of course, convinced them that not only was I making a really ineffective human, but that I was an idiot and should be given trained monkey jobs.

As if I was not having enough fun by this point, this body decided that now would be a good time to get fed, so Data took me to get something to eat. One of those aforementioned enemies who'd be seriously ticked off with me? Ran the restaurant where the food was. Imagine the person you would *least* like to be vulnerable in front of. Now imagine that you're blind, crippled and utterly humiliated and there they are, gloating at you and telling you you'll never survive unless you learn to beg. Oh, and stabbing you in the hand with a fork. That was fun. No, it wasn't, I'm lying. It wasn't as bad as the back thing, but it was the first time anyone had committed *violence* on me, which reminded me that actually anyone who didn't like me could do the same thing, and there's no shortage of people who don't like me in the universe.

And then the point was proved when the Calamarain, who despite being a plasma cloud race are actually a lot more dull than you'd think, showed up and tried to kill me for the crime of attempting to make them just a tiny bit less boring. Let me repeat. TRIED TO KILL ME. I mean, I knew people might try to kill me, but that's nothing at all like having it actually happen. Strangely, the Calamarain attack was actually less painful than the back thing-- it mostly felt like small electrical insects were crawling over my entire body and delivering thousands of tiny shocks, which sounds worse than it felt-- but when it was over, my muscles gave out on me completely. I felt drained, and weak, and I could barely move, and I realized that *this* was what having the life ooze out of you felt like, which might have reassured me about the safety of going to sleep, except I was too busy being terrified. While it was happening I didn't fully comprehend that the Calamarain attack was killing me-- hurting me, yes, but not being experienced with the dying thing, I didn't really know what was happening. It was after it was over, and I collapsed, and I realized that I couldn't move and the world was spinning and mostly all I could see was gray dots dancing in front of me and nothing to either side and there was a whooshing in my ears that was so loud I couldn't hear anything else, that I realized I was dying.

I called for help. Data brought me to Sickbay. Guinan, on the other hand, stood over my prone body and gloated. And this is the woman Picard thinks is so wise and wonderful. Someday I would dearly love to show him what she really is.

So here I am, having survived a murderous attack, and instead of giving me any sympathy or realizing what it might be like to face death for the first time in your very existence, the Enterprise crew entertained a serious discussion of handing me over to the Calamarain, or at least dumping me on some forlorn starbase where I wouldn't know anybody, because I wasn't lonely and frightened and feeling abandoned enough yet by having my entire *species* kick me out. Data managed to persuade them that I could be useful enough to keep around. Did I mention I'm extremely fond of Data? This kind of thing is why. So we go to Engineering, to fix the moon thing, but they don't listen to any of *my* ideas, due to that little mistake about the gravitational constant. They *could* have cut me some slack for one little mistake while I was experiencing pain for the first time, but nooo. LaForge gave me a job a trained monkey could do, and then yelled at me for not being good at it. Hello, would you be good at a job that only used a fraction of a percent of your intellect? I bet not. You'd be too bored to be good at it.

And then the Calamarain attacked me, again. *This* time, I was paralyzed *during* the attack, and then they dragged me several meters off the floor. I don't know, maybe they intended to drop me in the warp core, or zap me to death, or something. Data grabbed me, and it turns out that positronic neural networks are actually *more* sensitive to the kind of disruptions the Calamarain caused than human neural tissue is. I ended up badly bruised from falling two meters to the floor after they stopped the attack; Data ended up nearly dead.

I know that the universe is spectacularly unfair. I know that, in general, altruists suffer more than the selfish do. I know that there's no parity, no karma, no outside forces that punish the guilty and reward the worthy. And normally this didn't bother me. But perhaps there's something built into the human brain that demands such fairness, affecting me, because it occurred to me, as I watched LaForge and Crusher trying to fix Data, that it was really unfair for a being who could, potentially, live forever (well, maybe not forever, but an extremely long time), being snuffed out so casually to protect a being who was going to manage 80 more years, tops. Or for a person who'd gone out of his way to help someone in need dying to protect a person who had spent several million years annoying people for fun. Or for someone who liked his life and was well adapted to it dying to save someone who simply couldn't stand living like this.

The truth was, I didn't actually want to die. But it was going to happen anyway-- because of this moon thing, the Enterprise actually *couldn't* protect me. Every time they lowered their shields so they could push the moon, the Calamarain would attack. So, let's see. Millions of people on the planet die. Or, the entire ship full of people, including me, die *and* maybe the millions of people on the planet. Or, me alone. And I wasn't a Q anymore; there was no good reason why I would be more special, more deserving of life, than any of those other people. If I was still a Q, yes, my life would have been significantly more important than theirs. But not if I was as mortal and as powerless as they were.

So I stole a shuttlecraft and went out to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain, consoling myself with the thought that at least I wouldn't have to suffer the horrible tedium and physical pain that it seemed human life was all about, and I'm sitting there in this shuttlecraft, wondering how much it's going to hurt when I die, when Q shows up and tells me my act of selflessness has earned me my place in the Continuum again, at least provisionally. Okay, first he tells me he got me kicked out of the Continuum in the first place, which, considering that I always thought he was one of my closest friends, was not what I wanted to hear. *Then* he told me I was reinstated. And thus ended my Day From Hell.

The truth is? It never ended. Having faced death once, I was always aware that it was a possibility again. And for years, I stayed scared. Colored in the lines, dotted the i's, agreed to test my previously executed friends' daughter and kill her if she couldn't control her powers, agreed to conduct really stupid tests because the Continuum demanded it, that kind of thing. It wasn't until another Q killed himself to promote his beliefs about reforming the Continuum that I got back enough of my courage to challenge my superiors again. Which started a war, but that's a different story.



This entry refers to the events of Star Trek:The Next Generation episode "Deja Q".