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qcontinuum) wrote2008-08-18 12:25 pm
qcontinuum) wrote2008-08-18 12:25 pm
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Let the games begin
OOC: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 243: If you could be in the Olympics (summer or winter), what event/sport would you want to do most? Why?
You know, it is sometimes *really really hard* for me not to snort in disgust and throw my metaphorical hands in the air at these questions. The *Olympics*? A contest of physical prowess, held on Earth for about 200 years, with solely human contestants? Am I supposed to care about such things?
*sigh* But, I am *trying*, very hard, to come up with answers to questions that seem completely ridiculous and have absolutely no connection to my existence, which frequently involves answering the spirit of the question if not the way it was actually phrased. So I'll tell you a story about a contest I participated in, which actually *involved* tests of physical prowess between humans and other humanoid sentients similar to Earth's Olympics, though I myself obviously didn't actively take part in those tests.
We in the Q Continuum can't actually conduct games of physical prowess against each other. We're all equally nigh omnipotent. If we were actually to contest our powers against each other directly we could cause incredible damage to space-time should we go all-out, and we're close enough to equal in power that it would take going all-out to actually uncover any differences between us. But that isn't to say we don't play games against each other. The ability to play is one of the fundamental differences between sentient beings and non-sentient ones, and when you're bored, games and contests and challenges can fill the time and give you some excitement, whether you're playing or standing on the sidelines betting on the result.
So we have contests with each other all the time. And in fact we conduct our politics that way. Frequently, when two Q are opposed to one another and neither will back down, the issue is resolved with a duel -- a contest of some sort, where the winner gets the loser's political support in the Continuum for whatever it is they can't agree on.
Now, I had been arguing for some time that humans were sentient and the Continuum should either declare them such, or let me set them a final exam to pass that would get them declared as such. Other Q disagreed. Some, quite vehemently. There had actually been a prophecy (well, it wasn't a prophecy so much as a visiting Q from the future who couldn't keep his mouth shut when conversing with one of us) that humans would irrevocably change the Continuum. Me, I thought the prophecy had been fulfilled by the birth of Amanda Rogers, the first new child born to the Continuum in aeons, who had been born in a human form and raised by humans as a human. So I wasn't worried about it. Other Q, however, continued to be concerned that if humans were declared sentient it would cause some sort of horrific transformation to the Continuum, somehow.
The most vehement opponent of my position was a Q who is the Goddess of a particularly nasty race of xenophobic muscle-bound cannibals. In her opinion, might literally made right, physical strength, endurance and ability to commit violence are the traits that make a species *morally* worthy to overcome other species, and she hated humans because humans, a physically feeble species that were hardly the brightest of beings, had managed to very quickly achieve dominance over more than half of the Alpha Quadrant by making friends, schmoozing with other species, creating a framework for cultural exchange and promoting peace. *Really* got her goat. It didn't help that she thought I'd betrayed her; she was one of the ones who arranged for me to be sent to test humanity in the first place, because I was angry at humans for what had happened to Amanda's parents, and because I sort of had a rep at the time. For... some time... since some unpleasant things had happened to me... I'd been... well, shall we say, most species I tested didn't pass. So they all thought they'd send me out to be their bully boy and assassin and make sure humanity got kicked to the curb, and instead humans passed my test and I promptly fell in love with the species. For this reason, this Q was obstinately refusing to allow me to conduct a final exam for humanity.
Why this mattered was that as long as a species is declared non-sentient by Q standards, the Q have the right to destroy it if it's seen as a threat to other species and especially if it's seen as a threat to the Q. With the prophecy of humans changing the Continuum hanging over humanity's head, and the number of Q who hated humans, I *needed* humanity to be declared sentient to protect them from my fellow Q. So, since this conqueror goddess was standing in my way, I challenged her. A duel, to be carried out between my favorite humans (and their non-human allies; this was important, as I'll explain later) and her favorite species, the Mastragor.
We arranged for a third Q to provide judges and overseers for the competition. For fairness' sake, since Q can influence other Q, this judge set the contest to be on *his* favorite world, overseen by his favorite species, a highly evolved, peaceful, and very very boring group of people who live in harmony with nature and gaze at their own navels and spend a lot of time studying history. This guy personally could not stand me, and I thought his favorite race was one of the most boring in existence, but I suggested him on the grounds that he'd be "fair" and Conqueror Goddess Q took the bait. For all the violence of her philosophies she was much better at schmoozing with other Q than I was, and she was friends with this guy, so she naturally thought he would lean toward ruling for her. But I had a master plan.
I scrolled through time until I found a point where the Enterprise (the one commanded by Jean-Luc Picard, of course) was trying to help a species resolve a conflict between their oppressive government and a nihilistic terrorist group. The terrorists had gotten hold of a sunkiller bomb - a weapon that causes stars to go nova. It was assumed that they didn't really want to use it, as it would destroy them as well. No one had any idea how desperate and nihilistic these people were. They set off their bomb, and the Enterprise tried, and failed, to catch the bomb before it hit the sun. It disappeared into the star's corona, and Picard had just enough time to stare at it and recognize his ship didn't even have time to go to warp before the sun blew up and devoured them, before I stopped time for him.
I made him, and later his shipmates, a deal. I told them I had a bet going with a fellow Q. (I didn't tell them the stakes. If they knew that I was actively supporting getting humanity declared sentient, it would screw with my ability to actually administer the final exam.) If they agreed to go with me and fight for my side in this contest, I promised that whether they won or lost, I would stop the sunkiller bomb. However, if *they* wanted to survive, they had to win, because their opponents were cannibals who would eat the losers. (Sadly, I was not making this up.) They agreed. I made it clear to my fellow Q that although it was humanity I was specifically testing, I would include nonhuman friends and allies of humanity in my team, so "humans" would win if non-humans acted on their behalf to make sure my team won the contest. Since everyone knew I always picked the Enterprise crew and they had several non-humans and a half-human among them, they allowed it. This was part of my master plan.
The contest itself was to be feats of physical skill and prowess, similar to Earth's Olympics. For the most part, her team kicked my team's ass. See, the Mastragor were *all* physically huge -- not outside the normal range for humanoids, but built like humanoid bodybuilders -- and extremely strong, and genetically engineered, and culturally conditioned to consider failure at anything something that gets you killed, by your fellows if not directly by the consequences of the failure. Data and Worf held their own, but the actual humans, plus Troi, were defeated in increasingly humiliating ways. And when the other team won, they gloated, loudly and obnoxiously, about how they would, once the victory was granted to them, rape, kill and eat their opponents, not necessarily in that order, and how much superior they were, and how their Goddess would lead them to victory over all lesser species, and they would crush, maim, obliterate, etc.
The species conducting the test, the boring peaceful guys? They didn't like this so much.
They liked my humans. Because my humans are likable. That's humanity's incredible strength; they can make allies out of almost anyone. They liked Picard's speeches and the way my humans and their non-human friends worked together and the way they tried (but failed) to persuade their opponents not to be so vicious. They liked the way Picard's side actually showed concern for *them*, the boring judges, whereas the Mastragor were vicious and arrogant to the judges. So when the contest was more than half over and Picard's side was losing with less than a third of the total points, the judges created a new game, a final game that would count for two-thirds of all points, where the objective could not be realized without teamwork.
See, the Mastragor came from a society where failure wasn't tolerated, but backbiting and assassination were. They *couldn't* work together. They were all, individually, glory hounds, all out for their own personal aggrandizement. My humans and their friends were *very* good at working together as a close unit, combining the individual strengths of each person to create a working gestalt that was capable of far more than the sum of the parts. So my team beat the pants off the enemy team in the last contest, and because the judges liked my team better and had set it up this way on purpose, this earned them enough points to win by a healthy margin.
Q objected, claiming that the judges had cheated by creating a test that was designed to the strengths of my team. I pointed out that we had given Q free reign to judge the test and *he* had handed the responsibility entirely over to his favorite species, giving them authority to run the contest as they saw fit; and moreover, she and Q had *specifically* agreed that anything a non-human, non-Q should do to support the efforts of my team would be allowed. She protested that she had agreed to that because members of my team were not human, and didn't think that judges should count, but I demonstrated that she hadn't agreed to the statement "Q's team may consist of both humans and non-humans working together for humans to win", but the statement that "humans shall be permitted to win if their victory is due to non-humans working on their behalf for the benefit of their team," with nothing in it to specify that only members of the team could work for the benefit of the team. And, yes, I planned it that way.
So my team were allowed to return to their ship, believing they'd just undergone a pointless and dangerous ordeal for no better reason than my entertainment, and I won my contest, and the right to test humanity for sentience. (And then the Continuum came up with the stupidest test possible *and* demanded that I destroy humanity if it failed, but that's another story.)
OOC Note: The plot of this story is adapted from an actual storyline that the Star Trek writers planned, according to an interview in Cinefantastique, where Q and another Q were to conduct a contest with each other that involved the Enterprise crew fighting a race of super-strong cannibals. Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to play the leader of the bad guys. The storyline was apparently dropped for being too complicated. I added the name of the species, the part about the terrorists with the sunkiller bomb, the resolution of the plot and the behind-the-scenes Continuum politics stuff.
theatrical_muse today.Prompt 243: If you could be in the Olympics (summer or winter), what event/sport would you want to do most? Why?
You know, it is sometimes *really really hard* for me not to snort in disgust and throw my metaphorical hands in the air at these questions. The *Olympics*? A contest of physical prowess, held on Earth for about 200 years, with solely human contestants? Am I supposed to care about such things?
*sigh* But, I am *trying*, very hard, to come up with answers to questions that seem completely ridiculous and have absolutely no connection to my existence, which frequently involves answering the spirit of the question if not the way it was actually phrased. So I'll tell you a story about a contest I participated in, which actually *involved* tests of physical prowess between humans and other humanoid sentients similar to Earth's Olympics, though I myself obviously didn't actively take part in those tests.
We in the Q Continuum can't actually conduct games of physical prowess against each other. We're all equally nigh omnipotent. If we were actually to contest our powers against each other directly we could cause incredible damage to space-time should we go all-out, and we're close enough to equal in power that it would take going all-out to actually uncover any differences between us. But that isn't to say we don't play games against each other. The ability to play is one of the fundamental differences between sentient beings and non-sentient ones, and when you're bored, games and contests and challenges can fill the time and give you some excitement, whether you're playing or standing on the sidelines betting on the result.
So we have contests with each other all the time. And in fact we conduct our politics that way. Frequently, when two Q are opposed to one another and neither will back down, the issue is resolved with a duel -- a contest of some sort, where the winner gets the loser's political support in the Continuum for whatever it is they can't agree on.
Now, I had been arguing for some time that humans were sentient and the Continuum should either declare them such, or let me set them a final exam to pass that would get them declared as such. Other Q disagreed. Some, quite vehemently. There had actually been a prophecy (well, it wasn't a prophecy so much as a visiting Q from the future who couldn't keep his mouth shut when conversing with one of us) that humans would irrevocably change the Continuum. Me, I thought the prophecy had been fulfilled by the birth of Amanda Rogers, the first new child born to the Continuum in aeons, who had been born in a human form and raised by humans as a human. So I wasn't worried about it. Other Q, however, continued to be concerned that if humans were declared sentient it would cause some sort of horrific transformation to the Continuum, somehow.
The most vehement opponent of my position was a Q who is the Goddess of a particularly nasty race of xenophobic muscle-bound cannibals. In her opinion, might literally made right, physical strength, endurance and ability to commit violence are the traits that make a species *morally* worthy to overcome other species, and she hated humans because humans, a physically feeble species that were hardly the brightest of beings, had managed to very quickly achieve dominance over more than half of the Alpha Quadrant by making friends, schmoozing with other species, creating a framework for cultural exchange and promoting peace. *Really* got her goat. It didn't help that she thought I'd betrayed her; she was one of the ones who arranged for me to be sent to test humanity in the first place, because I was angry at humans for what had happened to Amanda's parents, and because I sort of had a rep at the time. For... some time... since some unpleasant things had happened to me... I'd been... well, shall we say, most species I tested didn't pass. So they all thought they'd send me out to be their bully boy and assassin and make sure humanity got kicked to the curb, and instead humans passed my test and I promptly fell in love with the species. For this reason, this Q was obstinately refusing to allow me to conduct a final exam for humanity.
Why this mattered was that as long as a species is declared non-sentient by Q standards, the Q have the right to destroy it if it's seen as a threat to other species and especially if it's seen as a threat to the Q. With the prophecy of humans changing the Continuum hanging over humanity's head, and the number of Q who hated humans, I *needed* humanity to be declared sentient to protect them from my fellow Q. So, since this conqueror goddess was standing in my way, I challenged her. A duel, to be carried out between my favorite humans (and their non-human allies; this was important, as I'll explain later) and her favorite species, the Mastragor.
We arranged for a third Q to provide judges and overseers for the competition. For fairness' sake, since Q can influence other Q, this judge set the contest to be on *his* favorite world, overseen by his favorite species, a highly evolved, peaceful, and very very boring group of people who live in harmony with nature and gaze at their own navels and spend a lot of time studying history. This guy personally could not stand me, and I thought his favorite race was one of the most boring in existence, but I suggested him on the grounds that he'd be "fair" and Conqueror Goddess Q took the bait. For all the violence of her philosophies she was much better at schmoozing with other Q than I was, and she was friends with this guy, so she naturally thought he would lean toward ruling for her. But I had a master plan.
I scrolled through time until I found a point where the Enterprise (the one commanded by Jean-Luc Picard, of course) was trying to help a species resolve a conflict between their oppressive government and a nihilistic terrorist group. The terrorists had gotten hold of a sunkiller bomb - a weapon that causes stars to go nova. It was assumed that they didn't really want to use it, as it would destroy them as well. No one had any idea how desperate and nihilistic these people were. They set off their bomb, and the Enterprise tried, and failed, to catch the bomb before it hit the sun. It disappeared into the star's corona, and Picard had just enough time to stare at it and recognize his ship didn't even have time to go to warp before the sun blew up and devoured them, before I stopped time for him.
I made him, and later his shipmates, a deal. I told them I had a bet going with a fellow Q. (I didn't tell them the stakes. If they knew that I was actively supporting getting humanity declared sentient, it would screw with my ability to actually administer the final exam.) If they agreed to go with me and fight for my side in this contest, I promised that whether they won or lost, I would stop the sunkiller bomb. However, if *they* wanted to survive, they had to win, because their opponents were cannibals who would eat the losers. (Sadly, I was not making this up.) They agreed. I made it clear to my fellow Q that although it was humanity I was specifically testing, I would include nonhuman friends and allies of humanity in my team, so "humans" would win if non-humans acted on their behalf to make sure my team won the contest. Since everyone knew I always picked the Enterprise crew and they had several non-humans and a half-human among them, they allowed it. This was part of my master plan.
The contest itself was to be feats of physical skill and prowess, similar to Earth's Olympics. For the most part, her team kicked my team's ass. See, the Mastragor were *all* physically huge -- not outside the normal range for humanoids, but built like humanoid bodybuilders -- and extremely strong, and genetically engineered, and culturally conditioned to consider failure at anything something that gets you killed, by your fellows if not directly by the consequences of the failure. Data and Worf held their own, but the actual humans, plus Troi, were defeated in increasingly humiliating ways. And when the other team won, they gloated, loudly and obnoxiously, about how they would, once the victory was granted to them, rape, kill and eat their opponents, not necessarily in that order, and how much superior they were, and how their Goddess would lead them to victory over all lesser species, and they would crush, maim, obliterate, etc.
The species conducting the test, the boring peaceful guys? They didn't like this so much.
They liked my humans. Because my humans are likable. That's humanity's incredible strength; they can make allies out of almost anyone. They liked Picard's speeches and the way my humans and their non-human friends worked together and the way they tried (but failed) to persuade their opponents not to be so vicious. They liked the way Picard's side actually showed concern for *them*, the boring judges, whereas the Mastragor were vicious and arrogant to the judges. So when the contest was more than half over and Picard's side was losing with less than a third of the total points, the judges created a new game, a final game that would count for two-thirds of all points, where the objective could not be realized without teamwork.
See, the Mastragor came from a society where failure wasn't tolerated, but backbiting and assassination were. They *couldn't* work together. They were all, individually, glory hounds, all out for their own personal aggrandizement. My humans and their friends were *very* good at working together as a close unit, combining the individual strengths of each person to create a working gestalt that was capable of far more than the sum of the parts. So my team beat the pants off the enemy team in the last contest, and because the judges liked my team better and had set it up this way on purpose, this earned them enough points to win by a healthy margin.
Q objected, claiming that the judges had cheated by creating a test that was designed to the strengths of my team. I pointed out that we had given Q free reign to judge the test and *he* had handed the responsibility entirely over to his favorite species, giving them authority to run the contest as they saw fit; and moreover, she and Q had *specifically* agreed that anything a non-human, non-Q should do to support the efforts of my team would be allowed. She protested that she had agreed to that because members of my team were not human, and didn't think that judges should count, but I demonstrated that she hadn't agreed to the statement "Q's team may consist of both humans and non-humans working together for humans to win", but the statement that "humans shall be permitted to win if their victory is due to non-humans working on their behalf for the benefit of their team," with nothing in it to specify that only members of the team could work for the benefit of the team. And, yes, I planned it that way.
So my team were allowed to return to their ship, believing they'd just undergone a pointless and dangerous ordeal for no better reason than my entertainment, and I won my contest, and the right to test humanity for sentience. (And then the Continuum came up with the stupidest test possible *and* demanded that I destroy humanity if it failed, but that's another story.)
OOC Note: The plot of this story is adapted from an actual storyline that the Star Trek writers planned, according to an interview in Cinefantastique, where Q and another Q were to conduct a contest with each other that involved the Enterprise crew fighting a race of super-strong cannibals. Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to play the leader of the bad guys. The storyline was apparently dropped for being too complicated. I added the name of the species, the part about the terrorists with the sunkiller bomb, the resolution of the plot and the behind-the-scenes Continuum politics stuff.