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qcontinuum) wrote2008-02-15 11:49 am
qcontinuum) wrote2008-02-15 11:49 am
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I don't have parents, exactly.
OOC: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse today.
Write about a lie your parents told you.
As I've mentioned before, I don't have parents, I was created more-or-less full-blown by an entire Continuum, all of whom have at one point or another felt they had the right to act in loco parentis toward me, so I suppose you could say I have nearly a thousand parents. Except that when we act together as the Continuum, we act in concert as an overmind, which makes the Continuum sort of one entity. And it is, in a way, my parent.
So, has the Continuum ever lied to me?
Not knowingly, I don't think. "You have all of eternity ahead of you to explore" wasn't a lie, though it turned out not to be true, because at the start of eternity none of us realized how finite the universe really was. The exploring ended after about three billion years, but who expects anyone who hasn't experienced eternity to understand what it entails? I don't blame them for that.
"You are the equal of any other Q" wasn't a lie when they said it, either. It wasn't until after I'd been out exploring for millions of years that I found out that the Q who'd stayed home to analyze the knowledge we explorers sent back had taken over the joint.
Was "We need you to challenge us, to question us, to keep us from stagnation" a lie? Probably they meant it at the time, as much as they came to despise me later for playing the role they made me for.
And they genuinely believed things like "Q and Q must die for violating the will of the Continuum" or "If we change for the sake of change as you demand, we will all be destroyed!" Hell, some of those things *I* believed, at the time.
So... the Continuum has told me many things that turned out, in the passage of time, not to be true, but I'm not convinced that any of those things were exactly *lies*. They were things that were sincerely believed at the time.
Maybe they lied to me by omitting to tell me, when they took away my powers, that they were continuing to monitor my behavior and I was actually on probation, not out-and-out sentenced to death. But then, they never actually *said* "you will never get your powers back, you will never return to the Continuum" -- they just said they were exiling me and I had to choose what kind of mortal to be, and no, I couldn't choose to be sent to the heart of a supernova because they weren't going to kill me, so pick something I thought I could survive. In retrospect maybe I could have guessed that that meant I was on probation -- given how short mortal lives are, why would they otherwise have cared how long my mortal life would be? So no, I guess that wasn't a lie either.
theatrical_muse today.Write about a lie your parents told you.
As I've mentioned before, I don't have parents, I was created more-or-less full-blown by an entire Continuum, all of whom have at one point or another felt they had the right to act in loco parentis toward me, so I suppose you could say I have nearly a thousand parents. Except that when we act together as the Continuum, we act in concert as an overmind, which makes the Continuum sort of one entity. And it is, in a way, my parent.
So, has the Continuum ever lied to me?
Not knowingly, I don't think. "You have all of eternity ahead of you to explore" wasn't a lie, though it turned out not to be true, because at the start of eternity none of us realized how finite the universe really was. The exploring ended after about three billion years, but who expects anyone who hasn't experienced eternity to understand what it entails? I don't blame them for that.
"You are the equal of any other Q" wasn't a lie when they said it, either. It wasn't until after I'd been out exploring for millions of years that I found out that the Q who'd stayed home to analyze the knowledge we explorers sent back had taken over the joint.
Was "We need you to challenge us, to question us, to keep us from stagnation" a lie? Probably they meant it at the time, as much as they came to despise me later for playing the role they made me for.
And they genuinely believed things like "Q and Q must die for violating the will of the Continuum" or "If we change for the sake of change as you demand, we will all be destroyed!" Hell, some of those things *I* believed, at the time.
So... the Continuum has told me many things that turned out, in the passage of time, not to be true, but I'm not convinced that any of those things were exactly *lies*. They were things that were sincerely believed at the time.
Maybe they lied to me by omitting to tell me, when they took away my powers, that they were continuing to monitor my behavior and I was actually on probation, not out-and-out sentenced to death. But then, they never actually *said* "you will never get your powers back, you will never return to the Continuum" -- they just said they were exiling me and I had to choose what kind of mortal to be, and no, I couldn't choose to be sent to the heart of a supernova because they weren't going to kill me, so pick something I thought I could survive. In retrospect maybe I could have guessed that that meant I was on probation -- given how short mortal lives are, why would they otherwise have cared how long my mortal life would be? So no, I guess that wasn't a lie either.