Kill or be killed
Mar. 31st, 2008 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumOOC Note: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse, today.
Prompt 174: Would you ever kill a human being (or if you are not human - would you ever kill a being from your own species?)
There was a time when it was, essentially, impossible for one Q to kill another Q. It's a question of leverage; you can't pry someone out of a matrix that you yourself are equally embedded in. We were equals in power, equals (theoretically) in the Continuum, and to harm another Q was literally to harm oneself. It was possible to *hurt* another Q, pretty badly, if you didn't mind taking significant damage yourself, but before you could actually kill another Q you'd have done so much damage to yourself that it would paralyze you.
Trust me, I was grateful for this – especially as a Q that on more than one occasion other Q were inspired to do violence to. There was a time, once, that a former best friend turned on me and ripped me to shreds; it took me 40 years to heal the damage and I wasn't quite sane for a while, but although I did nothing to fight back – the attack was so sudden and from someone I trusted, I didn't realize I needed to fight back until I was too disabled to do it – she damaged herself pretty badly in the process. On occasion, individual Q have attempted to... how to put this... *devour* me, absorb me into themselves. This would have been an incredibly stupid idea on their part even if I hadn't been so good at fighting off such attacks, because if they'd succeeded, they would have ended up more me than them; in the kind of Q combat where we try to eat each other, we end up with the traits of the other, and sometimes the personality, inside us, and the stronger the personality the more likely that it will survive even if devoured, and perhaps overwrite the weaker personality of the winner. I have a *very* strong personality. On another occasion, five Q ganged up on me and tried to forcibly overwrite my personality because they didn't like me and thought I needed to be someone different. Humans wouldn't think of this as murder because in humans, the body is interpreted to be the self, not the mind, but from the Q perspective this is kind of like raping and murdering someone and then making them an undead zombie; there's something running around that used to be you, but it's not you anymore. Five Q might have had a little more luck pulling a stunt like this than one Q, but... let's just say, I did have friends at the time and they didn't take kindly to such a thing.
The Q can also destroy each other by ganging up on one another, if the numbers are sufficient. If five or six Q can hate another Q with all their heart and soul, with no empathy and nothing in them but rage and hate, they can more or less burn the other Q to death, or at least that would be the closest human equivalent. This is normally quite impossible because the Continuum ensures that we all feel what each other feels and we can't avoid empathy, but it has been known to happen even before the war. What's much more common is that if one Q is creating such problems – so much ill feeling that people *want* to hate him to death, even if they can't, quite – that it threatens to create a break, or discontinuity, in the Continuum, then a majority of the Continuum can simply declare that that person is not a Q anymore. So long, you're voted off the island, bye bye and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. This effectively kills the Q who was just thrown out of the Continuum because without the Continuum, we are mortal. (It's more complicated than that. We're made of Continuum. Without the Continuum we literally don't exist. To exist in a different universe, we must translate ourselves into matter or energy, and when we sever a Q from the Continuum, we force them to translate into matter and then sever the link to the Continuum that would let them draw power or translate back. This invariably produces a being that needs to draw on finite sources of energy to survive, which means they are subject to entropy, which means sooner or later they'll die.)
So those were the ways a Q could kill another Q – always in concert with many fellow Q who agree, always with forethought (without forethought, you'd end up in a situation like my friend did, where you hurt yourself almost as badly as you hurt your target), and therefore, we *couldn't* simply murder each other. Causing the death of another Q was always an execution, carried out by the state, the Continuum... or if it was a lynch mob it was sanctioned by the Continuum, because the victim couldn't be a victim if they had any redeeming features whatsoever. So I always felt quite superior to lesser, mortal races where they kill each other all the time, because my species, as loud and vitriolic as our arguments with one another could get, simply did *not* kill each other. Mostly because we couldn't, but I didn't think about it that way.
And then we had a civil war.
One of our number had agitated for the right to die, and when we were pressured (by my misjudgment, mostly) to give it to him, it terrified us. Some of us, like me, saw our own future in his death; we saw the mind-numbing boredom he suffered from, and we feared that if the Continuum didn't change, didn't become interesting again, all of us would end up like him... bored to death and wanting to die. Others saw his death as a change itself, and feared that change would in itself destroy the Continuum. We saw his death as a symptom of what was killing us all; they saw his death as the problem itself, because they weren't bored yet. And it proved to be impossible to reconcile our perspectives.
They tried to throw us out, and found, much to their chagrin, that there wasn't enough of them. Though they outnumbered us, it wasn't by a high enough percentage that they could get the leverage to sever us from the Continuum. In fact it was as if the Continuum itself was splitting in half. And that split was why we didn't know that an idiot had created a gun that could kill other Q.
See, he was on the side of stasis, of order and the rule of law. He was in fact one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, one of the serious oldsters. And he made a horrible mistake. He created a weapon so terrible that surely it would prevent war, because of course everyone would have to think it too terrible to ever use. If he'd spent more time studying mortals he'd have known it doesn't work that way. He pulled a gun at the meeting where we were trying, and failing, to reconcile, attempting to use it to blackmail our side into standing down. Of course, I knew the guy, and I knew that killing another Q was anathema to him, so I knew he wasn't going to shoot. So we were talking, negotiating, and I was calling his bluff and arguing that bringing guns to the Continuum wasn't exactly the best way to preserve the status quo... and one of the aforementioned Q on their side who really, really hates my guts copied the gun and tried to kill me.
All Q know everything all other Q know. Except right before and during the war, when the Continuum had split in half and the discontinuity prevented us from knowing the minds of the other side or being forced to feel empathy with them. So Ol' Grandad had created the gun, never intending to use it, but everyone who was on the side of order instantly knew how he made it and how to make one for themselves, and a lot of them were on that side because they really couldn't stand me and I was our side's main proponent and spokesQ. One of them made his own copy of the gun and shot at me, and a guy who really didn't even like me that much but believed strongly in the things I stood for shoved me out of the way, and he was killed instead. Butchered, his energies – our flesh and blood, in human terms — covering me and the others on our side.
I cannot describe the rage I felt. I can't even remember it clearly. Because I don't want to. Just like I don't want to clearly remember going insane with loneliness and anger at being betrayed. But... remember when I said that the Q can hate each other to death? I and a few others on my side killed the gunman, burned him alive, because our friend and comrade had been murdered, the only Q *ever* to be outright murdered by one other Q (yet), and we could feel nothing but hate and the need for vengeance.
The other side started shooting at us, and as much as this fueled our rage and hate, it also terrorized many of us into fleeing. See, we didn't have the weapon. Many Q can hate one Q to death, but one Q can kill a whole bunch of other Q with the weapon... and because it was invented on their side we couldn't sense how to make it. We tried to shield from it, but we would have all died there if Amanda, the Q child raised among humans, hadn't left the side of law and order and come over to us with the blueprints for the weapon in her mind.
And the moment she planted it on me, I wanted to use it. I *wanted* them all dead, I wanted to see them explode and their energies cover the landscape. I don't know how many of them I shot before cooler minds prevailed and dragged me off because we had lost enough people to make it worth retreating and regrouping. Two, three? I didn't care. I didn't care that I was murdering my own kind, I didn't care that I was committing an act so anathema to the Q we had designed the Continuum in the first place to make it impossible. I wanted them dead.
It wasn't until after we retreated and I had time to cool down, to stop being *quite* so enraged, that I realized what I had done. Entities I had played with as an adolescent, that I had exchanged pleasure with, entities I had known for five billion years, entities who were never supposed to die, were dead. At my hands. They had been power and fire and energy incarnate, they had been gods, and then I broke them and now all they were was dissipating rivers of energy dissolving back into the Continuum, mindless, bodiless, gone.
Humans can cry, or throw up, or have nightmares when they do things like this. The Q don't have tears in our true form, we don't ingest food, and we don't sleep. But I'm pretty sure that if I had been human I would have done all of those things. Because when it comes down to it, I really don't care how many mortals die because mortals are supposed to die and they're not what I am anyway, but I am not nearly as tough when it comes to the death of other Q. And I don't think I'd want to be. I can't imagine a Q who is not devastated by the death of other Q unless they're a sociopath, or raised by humans. (Amanda, despite being our weakest, was actually our most effective fighter, because she *didn't* care. These weren't her family and friends of five billion years, they were the people who killed her parents. Technically *most* of us had voted with the majority to kill her parents, but she was able to ignore that fact and just put it all on our opponents, which says something about how human she is where it counts. But Amanda's not a sociopath; she was just raised by mortals. Different moral system. Inferior, but not absent entirely.)
I had to keep killing because now it was war. You don't know how many times I wanted to give up – we were fighting for such a stupid reason. I mean, the argument, the disagreement that had led to this, was not stupid, and in fact I was willing to die for my beliefs, or kill for them. But the fact that it had come to killing at all was so incredibly idiotic. Surely they wanted to quit too. Surely we could resolve this somehow. But they were just as afraid of losing as we were. So the killing had to go on. And it was going to go on until either one entire side was dead or we found some way to persuade them, or to persuade the rest of the Continuum, the majority that hadn't taken sides.
I think, maybe, we could have killed them all. I'm almost positive of it. We had flexibility and experience with war (we tended to be the ones that studied mortals, and mortals have wars all the time), and we weren't outnumbered *that* badly. But I didn't want to win that way. I didn't want to have the deaths of so many Q on my conscience. I agonized and planned and plotted and finally I came up with an idea to try to persuade them; death is change, but so is life. So is birth. Perhaps by having a child, by bringing procreation to the Continuum, I could convince at least my undecided brethren, if not the ones actually trying to kill us, that change could mean life as well as death.
So to answer the question: would I ever kill a member of my species? Yes, I would, and I have, if the cause was sufficient. And if I believed in any power greater than the Continuum I would pray fervently to it that I never, ever, ever have to do that again.
theatrical_muse, today.Prompt 174: Would you ever kill a human being (or if you are not human - would you ever kill a being from your own species?)
There was a time when it was, essentially, impossible for one Q to kill another Q. It's a question of leverage; you can't pry someone out of a matrix that you yourself are equally embedded in. We were equals in power, equals (theoretically) in the Continuum, and to harm another Q was literally to harm oneself. It was possible to *hurt* another Q, pretty badly, if you didn't mind taking significant damage yourself, but before you could actually kill another Q you'd have done so much damage to yourself that it would paralyze you.
Trust me, I was grateful for this – especially as a Q that on more than one occasion other Q were inspired to do violence to. There was a time, once, that a former best friend turned on me and ripped me to shreds; it took me 40 years to heal the damage and I wasn't quite sane for a while, but although I did nothing to fight back – the attack was so sudden and from someone I trusted, I didn't realize I needed to fight back until I was too disabled to do it – she damaged herself pretty badly in the process. On occasion, individual Q have attempted to... how to put this... *devour* me, absorb me into themselves. This would have been an incredibly stupid idea on their part even if I hadn't been so good at fighting off such attacks, because if they'd succeeded, they would have ended up more me than them; in the kind of Q combat where we try to eat each other, we end up with the traits of the other, and sometimes the personality, inside us, and the stronger the personality the more likely that it will survive even if devoured, and perhaps overwrite the weaker personality of the winner. I have a *very* strong personality. On another occasion, five Q ganged up on me and tried to forcibly overwrite my personality because they didn't like me and thought I needed to be someone different. Humans wouldn't think of this as murder because in humans, the body is interpreted to be the self, not the mind, but from the Q perspective this is kind of like raping and murdering someone and then making them an undead zombie; there's something running around that used to be you, but it's not you anymore. Five Q might have had a little more luck pulling a stunt like this than one Q, but... let's just say, I did have friends at the time and they didn't take kindly to such a thing.
The Q can also destroy each other by ganging up on one another, if the numbers are sufficient. If five or six Q can hate another Q with all their heart and soul, with no empathy and nothing in them but rage and hate, they can more or less burn the other Q to death, or at least that would be the closest human equivalent. This is normally quite impossible because the Continuum ensures that we all feel what each other feels and we can't avoid empathy, but it has been known to happen even before the war. What's much more common is that if one Q is creating such problems – so much ill feeling that people *want* to hate him to death, even if they can't, quite – that it threatens to create a break, or discontinuity, in the Continuum, then a majority of the Continuum can simply declare that that person is not a Q anymore. So long, you're voted off the island, bye bye and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. This effectively kills the Q who was just thrown out of the Continuum because without the Continuum, we are mortal. (It's more complicated than that. We're made of Continuum. Without the Continuum we literally don't exist. To exist in a different universe, we must translate ourselves into matter or energy, and when we sever a Q from the Continuum, we force them to translate into matter and then sever the link to the Continuum that would let them draw power or translate back. This invariably produces a being that needs to draw on finite sources of energy to survive, which means they are subject to entropy, which means sooner or later they'll die.)
So those were the ways a Q could kill another Q – always in concert with many fellow Q who agree, always with forethought (without forethought, you'd end up in a situation like my friend did, where you hurt yourself almost as badly as you hurt your target), and therefore, we *couldn't* simply murder each other. Causing the death of another Q was always an execution, carried out by the state, the Continuum... or if it was a lynch mob it was sanctioned by the Continuum, because the victim couldn't be a victim if they had any redeeming features whatsoever. So I always felt quite superior to lesser, mortal races where they kill each other all the time, because my species, as loud and vitriolic as our arguments with one another could get, simply did *not* kill each other. Mostly because we couldn't, but I didn't think about it that way.
And then we had a civil war.
One of our number had agitated for the right to die, and when we were pressured (by my misjudgment, mostly) to give it to him, it terrified us. Some of us, like me, saw our own future in his death; we saw the mind-numbing boredom he suffered from, and we feared that if the Continuum didn't change, didn't become interesting again, all of us would end up like him... bored to death and wanting to die. Others saw his death as a change itself, and feared that change would in itself destroy the Continuum. We saw his death as a symptom of what was killing us all; they saw his death as the problem itself, because they weren't bored yet. And it proved to be impossible to reconcile our perspectives.
They tried to throw us out, and found, much to their chagrin, that there wasn't enough of them. Though they outnumbered us, it wasn't by a high enough percentage that they could get the leverage to sever us from the Continuum. In fact it was as if the Continuum itself was splitting in half. And that split was why we didn't know that an idiot had created a gun that could kill other Q.
See, he was on the side of stasis, of order and the rule of law. He was in fact one of the pioneers who created the Continuum, one of the serious oldsters. And he made a horrible mistake. He created a weapon so terrible that surely it would prevent war, because of course everyone would have to think it too terrible to ever use. If he'd spent more time studying mortals he'd have known it doesn't work that way. He pulled a gun at the meeting where we were trying, and failing, to reconcile, attempting to use it to blackmail our side into standing down. Of course, I knew the guy, and I knew that killing another Q was anathema to him, so I knew he wasn't going to shoot. So we were talking, negotiating, and I was calling his bluff and arguing that bringing guns to the Continuum wasn't exactly the best way to preserve the status quo... and one of the aforementioned Q on their side who really, really hates my guts copied the gun and tried to kill me.
All Q know everything all other Q know. Except right before and during the war, when the Continuum had split in half and the discontinuity prevented us from knowing the minds of the other side or being forced to feel empathy with them. So Ol' Grandad had created the gun, never intending to use it, but everyone who was on the side of order instantly knew how he made it and how to make one for themselves, and a lot of them were on that side because they really couldn't stand me and I was our side's main proponent and spokesQ. One of them made his own copy of the gun and shot at me, and a guy who really didn't even like me that much but believed strongly in the things I stood for shoved me out of the way, and he was killed instead. Butchered, his energies – our flesh and blood, in human terms — covering me and the others on our side.
I cannot describe the rage I felt. I can't even remember it clearly. Because I don't want to. Just like I don't want to clearly remember going insane with loneliness and anger at being betrayed. But... remember when I said that the Q can hate each other to death? I and a few others on my side killed the gunman, burned him alive, because our friend and comrade had been murdered, the only Q *ever* to be outright murdered by one other Q (yet), and we could feel nothing but hate and the need for vengeance.
The other side started shooting at us, and as much as this fueled our rage and hate, it also terrorized many of us into fleeing. See, we didn't have the weapon. Many Q can hate one Q to death, but one Q can kill a whole bunch of other Q with the weapon... and because it was invented on their side we couldn't sense how to make it. We tried to shield from it, but we would have all died there if Amanda, the Q child raised among humans, hadn't left the side of law and order and come over to us with the blueprints for the weapon in her mind.
And the moment she planted it on me, I wanted to use it. I *wanted* them all dead, I wanted to see them explode and their energies cover the landscape. I don't know how many of them I shot before cooler minds prevailed and dragged me off because we had lost enough people to make it worth retreating and regrouping. Two, three? I didn't care. I didn't care that I was murdering my own kind, I didn't care that I was committing an act so anathema to the Q we had designed the Continuum in the first place to make it impossible. I wanted them dead.
It wasn't until after we retreated and I had time to cool down, to stop being *quite* so enraged, that I realized what I had done. Entities I had played with as an adolescent, that I had exchanged pleasure with, entities I had known for five billion years, entities who were never supposed to die, were dead. At my hands. They had been power and fire and energy incarnate, they had been gods, and then I broke them and now all they were was dissipating rivers of energy dissolving back into the Continuum, mindless, bodiless, gone.
Humans can cry, or throw up, or have nightmares when they do things like this. The Q don't have tears in our true form, we don't ingest food, and we don't sleep. But I'm pretty sure that if I had been human I would have done all of those things. Because when it comes down to it, I really don't care how many mortals die because mortals are supposed to die and they're not what I am anyway, but I am not nearly as tough when it comes to the death of other Q. And I don't think I'd want to be. I can't imagine a Q who is not devastated by the death of other Q unless they're a sociopath, or raised by humans. (Amanda, despite being our weakest, was actually our most effective fighter, because she *didn't* care. These weren't her family and friends of five billion years, they were the people who killed her parents. Technically *most* of us had voted with the majority to kill her parents, but she was able to ignore that fact and just put it all on our opponents, which says something about how human she is where it counts. But Amanda's not a sociopath; she was just raised by mortals. Different moral system. Inferior, but not absent entirely.)
I had to keep killing because now it was war. You don't know how many times I wanted to give up – we were fighting for such a stupid reason. I mean, the argument, the disagreement that had led to this, was not stupid, and in fact I was willing to die for my beliefs, or kill for them. But the fact that it had come to killing at all was so incredibly idiotic. Surely they wanted to quit too. Surely we could resolve this somehow. But they were just as afraid of losing as we were. So the killing had to go on. And it was going to go on until either one entire side was dead or we found some way to persuade them, or to persuade the rest of the Continuum, the majority that hadn't taken sides.
I think, maybe, we could have killed them all. I'm almost positive of it. We had flexibility and experience with war (we tended to be the ones that studied mortals, and mortals have wars all the time), and we weren't outnumbered *that* badly. But I didn't want to win that way. I didn't want to have the deaths of so many Q on my conscience. I agonized and planned and plotted and finally I came up with an idea to try to persuade them; death is change, but so is life. So is birth. Perhaps by having a child, by bringing procreation to the Continuum, I could convince at least my undecided brethren, if not the ones actually trying to kill us, that change could mean life as well as death.
So to answer the question: would I ever kill a member of my species? Yes, I would, and I have, if the cause was sufficient. And if I believed in any power greater than the Continuum I would pray fervently to it that I never, ever, ever have to do that again.