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theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 312: Redo a prior prompt.
Prompt 90: Have you ever experienced something you couldn't explain? Write down your brushes with the mysterious.
Okay, I admit it, I lied when I said I'd never encountered anything I couldn't explain. But it's not really my fault. When everyone around you is living in denial, it's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that either the problem is you, or maybe there's a good reason you should keep your head down and not say anything.
I think... that there is a power that may possibly have created the multiverse, or at least, that has the kind of power over the multiverse that the Q have over individual planets or solar systems. And I think She is screwing with my head. On purpose. Because She thinks it's funny.
Yeah, yeah, okay, the irony has me rolling on the floor in hilarity too. Now will you stop laughing and let me tell this story?
So I talked about this incident before, but I was kind of flippant about it (who, me? be flippant about something I thought was utterly traumatic at the time? naah.) Basically, a vortex opened up in reality and started devouring the universe, and my son and my ex, who I was still with at the time (in fact, to be honest, I suspect this whole incident has something to do with *why* she is my ex, but I digress), were sucked in. I managed to retrieve Picard and Data from falling into the vortex, I suppose rather the way a guy who is unable to retrieve his wife and son from a burning building might rescue the dog instead, because it's something he *can* rescue. We went to the Q Continuum to try to find out what was going on, and discovered that a. the Universe was ending b. the Q had decided to throw a wild party rather than attempt to do anything to stop this c. some of them were in fact actively trying to stop *me* from trying to do anything to stop this, which meant d. some of them thought I *could* possibly stop this. So I decided to. Try, at least.
No one remembers any of this but me.
That's not entirely true. Picard and Data both remember it, but both of them thought it was a dream (in fact, Data claims the whole incident is stored in his memory banks in the specific memory location he reserves for dreams). My son remembers it but won't talk about it (in that kind of passive-aggressive, changing the subject or sulking every time I bring it up, way that teenagers have of not talking about it.) My ex claims she doesn't remember it, but I think she's lying, because she hasn't actually let me touch her mind since it happened (as touching minds is more or less how we have sex, you can see part of why she's my ex). None of the other Q seem to remember it at all, although Amanda claims that she, too, dreamed it (Amanda, being the only Q who was born human, is the only Q who ever bothers to sleep. Nasty personal habit, really, kind of like picking your toenails in public, but ever since she racked up such an impressive kill ratio during the civil war, no one calls her on it.)
Objectively, this is not possible. The Q can't forget something that actually happened (all of us? forget simultaneously? really? we don't normally forget *anything*), but neither can we dream or hallucinate, and if one of us *did* manage to hallucinate something, why would it be something that a human and an android dreamed about? At the same time, I know they're not all lying to me, because that would become pretty obvious pretty quickly in an overmind like we all share. They genuinely don't remember it. They also genuinely don't believe any of it happened. And yet, when I tell them it happened, none of them have pushed for the obvious response, which would be to declare that if I am hallucinating things then I'm defective and they need to essentially vivisect my mind to figure out what's wrong with me. (Which is also why I haven't pushed them on how they could possibly all not remember something that both my son and I clearly remember; if I push them too hard I'm afraid they'll get defensive and decide that both of us are defective.)
Something had the power to wipe the memories of the Q... something that also had the power to drop those memories into the realm of dreams, for every being that dreams, except that the Q don't dream (most of us) so most of us simply don't have access to that set of memories. And whatever it was, it spared my son, and me, and possibly my ex.
So this is what happened, and my theory about what's going on.
When I attempted to explore the vortex, to find my wife and son, I ended up losing my powers and being catapulted into some sort of surreal nightmare world of tiers that started with people who were being herded to their death and refused to believe any of this was happening, proceeded to a world where everyone was senselessly enraged with everyone else (and I ran into an old personal nemesis, who happens to have been my wife's ex-girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there), then to a world where everything was for sale and my son was being manipulated into playing God, then to a world where dying people were sinking into mud and disappearing... where I found Q... If I did dream, I think I'd still have nightmares about watching her die like that. And then we ended up in a deathtrap which killed Picard and Data, and then my son and I ended up back at the Continuum, watching the universe end, and... it was just obvious to me that universes don't end this way. There had been no warning, no physical signs, and none of what was happening made any sense.
So I, um, started yelling at God.
Okay, seriously. The universe is ending in a way that makes absolutely no sense unless there's an intellect behind it, shutting it down... an intellect who isn't even considerate enough to end the whole thing cleanly and at once but is taking us apart bit by bit, and, um... I might have had some strong words for such a being. Because, you know, if I was ending a universe I'd just snap my fingers and poof. They'd never know they were dying. This being, whatever it was with the power to end the universe... it wasn't even as merciful as *I'd* be, and I am not exactly known for being a merciful god.
Which, by the way, is completely unfair. I should not have to bend to the caprice of some sort of supernatural entity who is *less* merciful and responsible than *I* am. I should be about as bad as beings of my nature get.
So I wrote (well, "wrote" is a metaphor - I encoded my memories in a narrative form, with appropriate editorial tagging, or inappropriate as the case may be) the story of everything I had dealt with since the beginning of the end, and I packaged it into a unit of pure thought, an idea, which I hoped would be able to cross out of the universe of energy and matter, and I flung it into the void as we were all dying, demanding that if the being ending the universe was going to kill us all at least it should know what it was doing, in the words of someone capable of understanding.
And then I have no idea what happened, because the next thing I knew, I was on the Enterprise's holodeck, in a boat, with Picard, Data and Q, all of whom had been dead last I checked, and then we found my son (at the time he was q; he insists on being a grown-up Q now) floating in the holographic water, and he told us that there was a lady, who had written a note and put it back in the package I'd flung into the void (which, metaphorically, looked like a bottle to Picard and Data, because I liked the imagery of throwing a message in a bottle into the void.) He said her name was Melony, and that she'd said she knew me.
The only Melony I'd known was a human being who died in a terrorist attack on New York City, the New Year's Eve that ushered in their current millennium, in 2000.
The note she had written was "Let there be light."
And when Q, q and I returned to the Continuum, no one knew that anything had happened.
Q had a complete emotional breakdown, was tremendously clingy toward q for a short while, and then... distanced herself. Started fighting with me over stupid things, snapping at our son over nothing. Claimed she didn't remember anything, either. Refused to join with me. q, meanwhile, told me the rest of his experiences with Melony, who had indeed manifested to him as a human woman who looked exactly like the one who died on Jan 1, 2000 at midnight in a bombing. if what he remembered was accurate, she sounded as if she was taking credit for having almost destroyed the universe because she'd wanted to die, and my story made her laugh and this somehow convinced her to let us all live. Or something. The myth of Sodom and Gomorrah was mentioned, in the context of me being the sole decent man, which is patently ridiculous. The whole thing was just... *insane*.
From this, I have come to the conclusion that there is a God -- perhaps a creator of the multiverse, perhaps only a caretaker, I don't know -- but whatever it is, She's sick of Her job and apparently tried to kill Herself, which resulted in the destruction of the universe, and there are *absolutely no guarantees* She won't get depressed and do it again.
I think Q remembers perfectly well what happened. I think she remembers giving in to despair, and dying of it, and she's so ashamed she won't allow any Q to see her memories, which meant she stopped joining with any of us, which made her even more persona non grata in the Continuum than she already was from having invented weapons that mortals could use to kill Q, and also destroyed our relationship, though the thing that really drove the nail in the coffin was the unforgivable things she said about our son, in front of him. I think q's memories of what happened changed him; he was a sweet little boy, a bit rambunctious, before any of this, with the open-minded sense of wonder about the universe that I remember from the beginning of my own existence, and now he acts as jaded and bored as a far older Q, and I have to wonder if his faith in the Continuum or in the rationality of the universe was shattered and it turned him as cynical as I am.
And I am EXTREMELY PISSED OFF at Melony. You just don't *do* that to your creations. You want to end them? Fine... do it *instantly*. Don't let them know you're doing it, don't torture them with the knowledge of their own impending doom. Just... wink them out of existence. For that matter, if you want to die that badly, and the existence of everything that is depends on you... how about some more creative solution than ending it all? Would it have been too difficult for something that's supposedly more omniscient and omnipotent than *I* am to figure out how to end Herself without ending the existence of everything?
Look, Melony, if you're totally sick of your job, give it to me. Or someone. I mean, I would be an incredibly lousy choice for God of the universe, but since I wouldn't annihilate it just because I was feeling moody and depressed, plainly I would be a better choice than you!
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek: TNG
Note: This prompt based on "I, Q", a Pocket Books novel by Peter David and John de Lancie.
theatrical_muse today.Prompt 312: Redo a prior prompt.
Prompt 90: Have you ever experienced something you couldn't explain? Write down your brushes with the mysterious.
Okay, I admit it, I lied when I said I'd never encountered anything I couldn't explain. But it's not really my fault. When everyone around you is living in denial, it's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that either the problem is you, or maybe there's a good reason you should keep your head down and not say anything.
I think... that there is a power that may possibly have created the multiverse, or at least, that has the kind of power over the multiverse that the Q have over individual planets or solar systems. And I think She is screwing with my head. On purpose. Because She thinks it's funny.
Yeah, yeah, okay, the irony has me rolling on the floor in hilarity too. Now will you stop laughing and let me tell this story?
So I talked about this incident before, but I was kind of flippant about it (who, me? be flippant about something I thought was utterly traumatic at the time? naah.) Basically, a vortex opened up in reality and started devouring the universe, and my son and my ex, who I was still with at the time (in fact, to be honest, I suspect this whole incident has something to do with *why* she is my ex, but I digress), were sucked in. I managed to retrieve Picard and Data from falling into the vortex, I suppose rather the way a guy who is unable to retrieve his wife and son from a burning building might rescue the dog instead, because it's something he *can* rescue. We went to the Q Continuum to try to find out what was going on, and discovered that a. the Universe was ending b. the Q had decided to throw a wild party rather than attempt to do anything to stop this c. some of them were in fact actively trying to stop *me* from trying to do anything to stop this, which meant d. some of them thought I *could* possibly stop this. So I decided to. Try, at least.
No one remembers any of this but me.
That's not entirely true. Picard and Data both remember it, but both of them thought it was a dream (in fact, Data claims the whole incident is stored in his memory banks in the specific memory location he reserves for dreams). My son remembers it but won't talk about it (in that kind of passive-aggressive, changing the subject or sulking every time I bring it up, way that teenagers have of not talking about it.) My ex claims she doesn't remember it, but I think she's lying, because she hasn't actually let me touch her mind since it happened (as touching minds is more or less how we have sex, you can see part of why she's my ex). None of the other Q seem to remember it at all, although Amanda claims that she, too, dreamed it (Amanda, being the only Q who was born human, is the only Q who ever bothers to sleep. Nasty personal habit, really, kind of like picking your toenails in public, but ever since she racked up such an impressive kill ratio during the civil war, no one calls her on it.)
Objectively, this is not possible. The Q can't forget something that actually happened (all of us? forget simultaneously? really? we don't normally forget *anything*), but neither can we dream or hallucinate, and if one of us *did* manage to hallucinate something, why would it be something that a human and an android dreamed about? At the same time, I know they're not all lying to me, because that would become pretty obvious pretty quickly in an overmind like we all share. They genuinely don't remember it. They also genuinely don't believe any of it happened. And yet, when I tell them it happened, none of them have pushed for the obvious response, which would be to declare that if I am hallucinating things then I'm defective and they need to essentially vivisect my mind to figure out what's wrong with me. (Which is also why I haven't pushed them on how they could possibly all not remember something that both my son and I clearly remember; if I push them too hard I'm afraid they'll get defensive and decide that both of us are defective.)
Something had the power to wipe the memories of the Q... something that also had the power to drop those memories into the realm of dreams, for every being that dreams, except that the Q don't dream (most of us) so most of us simply don't have access to that set of memories. And whatever it was, it spared my son, and me, and possibly my ex.
So this is what happened, and my theory about what's going on.
When I attempted to explore the vortex, to find my wife and son, I ended up losing my powers and being catapulted into some sort of surreal nightmare world of tiers that started with people who were being herded to their death and refused to believe any of this was happening, proceeded to a world where everyone was senselessly enraged with everyone else (and I ran into an old personal nemesis, who happens to have been my wife's ex-girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there), then to a world where everything was for sale and my son was being manipulated into playing God, then to a world where dying people were sinking into mud and disappearing... where I found Q... If I did dream, I think I'd still have nightmares about watching her die like that. And then we ended up in a deathtrap which killed Picard and Data, and then my son and I ended up back at the Continuum, watching the universe end, and... it was just obvious to me that universes don't end this way. There had been no warning, no physical signs, and none of what was happening made any sense.
So I, um, started yelling at God.
Okay, seriously. The universe is ending in a way that makes absolutely no sense unless there's an intellect behind it, shutting it down... an intellect who isn't even considerate enough to end the whole thing cleanly and at once but is taking us apart bit by bit, and, um... I might have had some strong words for such a being. Because, you know, if I was ending a universe I'd just snap my fingers and poof. They'd never know they were dying. This being, whatever it was with the power to end the universe... it wasn't even as merciful as *I'd* be, and I am not exactly known for being a merciful god.
Which, by the way, is completely unfair. I should not have to bend to the caprice of some sort of supernatural entity who is *less* merciful and responsible than *I* am. I should be about as bad as beings of my nature get.
So I wrote (well, "wrote" is a metaphor - I encoded my memories in a narrative form, with appropriate editorial tagging, or inappropriate as the case may be) the story of everything I had dealt with since the beginning of the end, and I packaged it into a unit of pure thought, an idea, which I hoped would be able to cross out of the universe of energy and matter, and I flung it into the void as we were all dying, demanding that if the being ending the universe was going to kill us all at least it should know what it was doing, in the words of someone capable of understanding.
And then I have no idea what happened, because the next thing I knew, I was on the Enterprise's holodeck, in a boat, with Picard, Data and Q, all of whom had been dead last I checked, and then we found my son (at the time he was q; he insists on being a grown-up Q now) floating in the holographic water, and he told us that there was a lady, who had written a note and put it back in the package I'd flung into the void (which, metaphorically, looked like a bottle to Picard and Data, because I liked the imagery of throwing a message in a bottle into the void.) He said her name was Melony, and that she'd said she knew me.
The only Melony I'd known was a human being who died in a terrorist attack on New York City, the New Year's Eve that ushered in their current millennium, in 2000.
The note she had written was "Let there be light."
And when Q, q and I returned to the Continuum, no one knew that anything had happened.
Q had a complete emotional breakdown, was tremendously clingy toward q for a short while, and then... distanced herself. Started fighting with me over stupid things, snapping at our son over nothing. Claimed she didn't remember anything, either. Refused to join with me. q, meanwhile, told me the rest of his experiences with Melony, who had indeed manifested to him as a human woman who looked exactly like the one who died on Jan 1, 2000 at midnight in a bombing. if what he remembered was accurate, she sounded as if she was taking credit for having almost destroyed the universe because she'd wanted to die, and my story made her laugh and this somehow convinced her to let us all live. Or something. The myth of Sodom and Gomorrah was mentioned, in the context of me being the sole decent man, which is patently ridiculous. The whole thing was just... *insane*.
From this, I have come to the conclusion that there is a God -- perhaps a creator of the multiverse, perhaps only a caretaker, I don't know -- but whatever it is, She's sick of Her job and apparently tried to kill Herself, which resulted in the destruction of the universe, and there are *absolutely no guarantees* She won't get depressed and do it again.
I think Q remembers perfectly well what happened. I think she remembers giving in to despair, and dying of it, and she's so ashamed she won't allow any Q to see her memories, which meant she stopped joining with any of us, which made her even more persona non grata in the Continuum than she already was from having invented weapons that mortals could use to kill Q, and also destroyed our relationship, though the thing that really drove the nail in the coffin was the unforgivable things she said about our son, in front of him. I think q's memories of what happened changed him; he was a sweet little boy, a bit rambunctious, before any of this, with the open-minded sense of wonder about the universe that I remember from the beginning of my own existence, and now he acts as jaded and bored as a far older Q, and I have to wonder if his faith in the Continuum or in the rationality of the universe was shattered and it turned him as cynical as I am.
And I am EXTREMELY PISSED OFF at Melony. You just don't *do* that to your creations. You want to end them? Fine... do it *instantly*. Don't let them know you're doing it, don't torture them with the knowledge of their own impending doom. Just... wink them out of existence. For that matter, if you want to die that badly, and the existence of everything that is depends on you... how about some more creative solution than ending it all? Would it have been too difficult for something that's supposedly more omniscient and omnipotent than *I* am to figure out how to end Herself without ending the existence of everything?
Look, Melony, if you're totally sick of your job, give it to me. Or someone. I mean, I would be an incredibly lousy choice for God of the universe, but since I wouldn't annihilate it just because I was feeling moody and depressed, plainly I would be a better choice than you!
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek: TNG
Note: This prompt based on "I, Q", a Pocket Books novel by Peter David and John de Lancie.