An interesting merger (I hope) of everyone's favorite sci-fi universes, pulling from the narratives of Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, BattleStar Galactica, and others. I hope you will enjoy my continuing chronicles of, "The Scattering."

Paul Atreides, a young college student from 1980's Earth, stumbles upon a biological experiment run by his friend and mentor, Professor Duncan Idaho, where he encounters an alien race of cybernetically enhanced invaders, The BORG! Paul is hurled into a distant future, and an unrecognizable reality. He discovers a world where a wicked Emperor, and his evil Galactic Empire, threaten to engulf the peaceful space of the Alpha Quadrant, the last bastion of freedom left unconquered in the Galaxy. The Emperor, and his henchmen, lusts only to destroy the utopian and cooperative existence of the Federation, and her allies.

In an uncertain world, Paul must choose to fight on the side of light, or follow the path that leads only to darkness.

The Scattering

Episode One:
Sands of Time

1

The young Paul Atreides looked out of his dorm room window to the quad below. An impromptu game of football had been initiated by several of the larger and more athletic members of his all male dormitory. Paul barely registered the fact that he had not been invited to participate in the game, as he wouldn't have cared one way or the other. He had always preferred to watch such contests from the sidelines, rather than engaging in the brutality of the actual gameplay. Besides, it wasn't the sounds of the game that had drawn him to the window in the first place, but the bright orange glow of the sunset, bursting through his small window, and setting his room aflame, drenched in the sunburst. He'd always loved this time of day. The way everything seemed to drink up the light, becoming fat with the vibrant rays of the dying sun.

Paul gazed out at the quaint campus of his small private college, the normal sea of green bathed now in a tapestry of magnificent reds and oranges. But the awesome sight did little to brighten his mood, or change the reality of what was to come. Tonight, was his last night here as a student. He was dropping out, first thing in the morning.

It wasn't his grades that were the cause of his failure. Ever since he was a young boy, he had always excelled at learning. Always at the top of his class, always achieving high marks, often with minimal effort. And that was problem. Because even when his studies didn't interest him, he excelled. To everyone else, he was doing well, when in fact, he was stagnated.

With growing despaired, Paul watched as the sun disappeared behind the towering buildings of the city center in the distance, hiding itself from the world for the day. With the new darkness, and with no further thought, Paul turned away from the window, walked the span of his small ten-by-ten-foot room, and stopped at his desk. He glared down at the single piece of paper laying defiantly on the desktop, as though taunting him. Half in resignation, half in anger, he picked the overdue assignment, and focused on the last line near the bottom of the page, a date, May 8th, 1987, four days ago, a date he now knew signified the end of his time here at St. Gaius Helena's Seminary School for Young Boys. He no longer belonged here.

It was his third year at the school, and like any other subject, Paul had become an expert in Christianity and its many facets. He had assumed that, like any other assignment, the one he held in his hand, the one he'd not yet completed, would be a breeze. He hadn't even thought about the simple three-page analysis on the story of Lot and the Angels God had sent to the sinful city of Sodom. He'd put it off, purposely waiting until the last possible minute to re-read the text, and throw down a few hundred words to paper. He thought the assignment would take an hour, at most. That was five days ago.

To Paul's credit, he had tried. But he had become stuck when he came to the part where Lot had welcomed God's agents into his home. With God's agents inside, the house was suddenly surrounded by hordes of angry, and apparently horny, townsfolk. The throng demanded that Lot send out the strangers, so that they might "know" them. Biblical talk for doing the nasty. What came next, gave Paul no less than a full-blown infection of mental paralysis.

Paul, who had apparently forgotten the story from his studious as a youth, read in disgust as Lot offered his two virgin daughters to the horny mob. An attempt to dissuade them from wanting "relations" with his guests. The passage sparked an undeniable moral dilemma within Paul. Try as he might, he couldn't shake it off. The story seemed to be saying that it was perfectly acceptable to sacrifice one's own family, for perfect strangers, and that didn't sit well with him. For Paul, the story called into question, all his beliefs.

Paul's life up until this point, had been defined by hardship and tragedy. His parents had died in a car crash when he was only a boy. Both he and his sister, Alia, who was only an infant at the time, went to live with their grandfather. He was a bulbous crusty old man that smelled of cheese and rot, but he was his mother's father, and family. And they had little choice. Paul remembered his grandfather, rolling around the house on his wheelchair, spewing out long rants of how the world had forgotten the word of the lord, and how it was his duty to bring truth back to the masses. His grandfather was a truly pious man, and Paul knew that in his own way, he loved his grandchildren very much. And for a while, all was well. It fairytale didn't' last.

When Alia turned ten, she was struck down with an unusually invasive form of leukemia. Paul's grandfather, who was too poor to afford proper healthcare for his grandchildren, turned to prayer to cast out the abomination within her, which his grandfather had come to call the cancer that was eating away at his granddaughter. But prayer proved not enough, and Alia died before she reached her eleventh birthday. Paul was 16. He thought of her often. He thought of her that night when he read the story of, Lot.

He wondered if His grandfather, a truly devote man, would be able to sacrifice Alia in that same way Lot had. He wondered if he could, if he was called upon to. And over the last five days, the questions of the story of Lot, and what he had done ate away at Paul, at his faith.

Paul, more than anything else, was an extremely logical man. If one piece of the puzzle was wrong, then the whole idea had to be abandoned. There were no freebies in life. Things were either real, or not. Things worked, or they did not. Once doubt entered the equation, he had no choice but to wonder if any of it had ever happened at all. Before morning had arrived on that fateful night, Paul knew…He didn't believe. Perhaps, he never had.

Abandoning the desk, and the assignment, Paul went to look at himself in the mirror. He poised with his chest puffed out, trying to fill out the bagginess of his security guard uniform more than his naturally scrawny physic could do on its own. He let out the air in his lungs, returning his diminutive stature back to its normal, slumped state. He frowned, and ran his fingers through his thick sandy-blonde hair, admiring its length in the back. Paul had been trying for the past several months to replicate the hairstyle of his TV hero, MacGyver. Looking in the mirror, Paul smiled at his developing, Richard Dean Anderson-esk appearance. Paul leaned into the mirror, fastened his black clip on tie, which matched the color of the rest of his uniform, and adjusted his nametag displaying his name in bold black lettering.

PAUL A.
Security Guard.
Villains beware!

The last, he'd written in pen below his name. No one had ever noticed.

His smile vanished as he left the mirror, the worries of how he was going to tell his grandfather the truth, draining all the happiness from him. He flung himself onto his small twin size mattress with no head or footboards, and switched on the television, hoping that mindless channel surfing would be just the thing to take his mind off the heavy subject.

He turned the channel to his favorite station, MTV, happy that he had taken the time to steal the cable from his RA's room the month before. Nineteen channels, he mused at himself and at the wonder of cable TV. How would anyone be bored again! He grinned widely at the small grainy picture of Chevy Chase appear on the set, and laughed as Chevy stole the words, and the show, from Paul Simon in the video for Call Me All. Paul grimaced in agony when the next video came on, Time of Your Life, from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

"Enough of that!" He muttered to himself before smashing the channel up button of his remote.

He landed on CNN, in the middle of a heated political debate between the two remaining candidates for The President of the United States, Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, and his Republican opponent, and current Vice President, George Bush. Paul had never considered himself to be particularly political. Nor was he ever overly persuaded by either party's rhetoric. But he fully understood the main arguments of the day. He wondered if these two did. Not that it would matter much. Bush was leading in nearly all the polls against Dukakis. Besides, Paul thought to himself, what harm could a Bush Presidency do?

Forgoing the political discussion, Paul quickly switched the channel again, turning past the local news, a Calgon commercial, and a PDA from Mr. T, no doubt warning the children of the country to stay in school. Paul rolled his eyes before stopping dead on one of his new favorite shows, Unsolved Mysteries. He prepared himself for yet another unsolved case of murder, betrayal, and abduction. Each story eerily narrated by the somber voice of the unshakable Robert Stack.

Paul settled in for what looked to be an unusually creepy episode. He'd missed the opening title scene, tuning in just in time for Stack, using his signature melodramatic voice to set the scene for tonight's mystery.

It was a dark night, in the outlying suburbs around the city of Phoenix. Alexander Proust, a world renowned micro-biologist and father of two beautiful daughters, husband to Noreen, was walking to his car after an unusually long night in his lab at the University of Nevada, when he was approached by a group of individuals described by eyewitnesses as, menacing.

Goosebumps covered every inch of Paul's exposed flesh at the somber sound of Stack's narration. Unsolved Mysteries never failed to get Paul's blood pumping, despite the show's poor production quality, and famously bad acting. Stack went on to describe the abduction of the Professor at the hands of this now famous gang of hooligans.

Paul had heard the story enough times now. A famous scientist, leading expert in his or her field, shepherded off into the shadows by what was normally described as a leather clad, zombie like, biker gang. The extremely odd story was quickly developing into a full-fledged urban myth. Paul's enthusiasm for the show and the story began to fade. That was until the camera turned to one of the attackers.

The actor had been dressed in an ill-fitting, full-body, black-leotard, with chest armor and shoulder protectors, from a bad BMX movie, also black, with blinking lights crudely glued all over it. He was also pasted with white makeup, making his skin pale. Dark circles had been painted around his eyes, giving the man the look of a raccoon, and he was wearing one of those biker helmets that protected only the skull. Paul figured that the producers of the show were trying to go for a Road Warrior look, but had apparently never seen a Mad Max movie before. They guy looked ridiculous.

According to Mr. Stack, the design of the costume was based on an eyewitness of the abduction. The program hinted that the odd clothing of the group may be a diversionary tactic used by Soviet spies, a ruse to get the scent of espionage off their tracks. They even had a name for this now infamous group on the show…The BORG!

Paul thought sounded more Swedish, than Soviet!

Paul erupted into a bout of laughter that lasted a full minute. he instantly switched the channel to 4, got off his bed, and placed a recorded episode of The Fall guy, into his now ancient Betamax player. He threw himself back on his bed, pressed play. He began drifting to sleep even before the episodes first, over the top punch, was thrown by the shows frontrunner, one of his favorite actors, Lee Majors.

As his mind fell from the waking world, Paul could not help but to think of the absurd Unsolved Mysteries episode.

"Cybernetic invaders from space! What the hell!" He forced a laugh.

Somehow, the uneasy feeling the show left in him, would not go away. He closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.