SPOCK'S ULTIMATE TRUTHS
By: Dan Bivens
Chapter 5/Conclusion
"Q's Power Play"
Before resistance from Captain Spock, Admiral James T. Kirk, or Dr. Leonard H. McCoy could be adequately demonstrated…
"What the hell?" exclaimed McCoy. Basically voicing what even Spock experienced in regards to suddenly finding themselves in some limbo of bright white light.
"Where have you taken us, Q?" angrily asked Kirk, his fists still tightly balled at his sides.
"This would seem to be some in-between universal existence," Spock said with a hum of mental notation of Nothingness.
"Nonexistence would be more accurate, Captain Spock," Q was quick to correct. "I have brought us to a point not only between-and-apart from cosmic corporeal Reality…including my Q-Continuum or 'quantum' universe. I thought this would be a much better place to…play."
"What the hell's all this talk of 'playing'?" McCoy loudly prodded the super-powerful Q still dressed in similar Command-grade crimson coat and white turtleneck. Just with a Fleet Admiral's ranking. "For God's sake, man, you can clearly do anything! Why the hell would someone so impossibly powerful want to 'play'?"
In swift answer, Q simply solidified around them the scene from McCoy's past upon a planet now known to be a "playground" for extremely evolved civilizations. A place where whatever one thought was swiftly made real via super-advanced synthetic creations.
"How soon you forget, Doctor," Q said with a sigh even as a Dr. McCoy in blue and black from many years ago was aghast at the sight of something straight out of Alice in Wonderland. "As your then-Captain Kirk pointed out when the Keeper appeared…"
The apparently living scenery swiftly switched to a battered and bruised Captain James T. Kirk correctly realizing, "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."
With less than a twitch of two fingers, everything returned to the Nothingness in White it was.
"What sort of 'play' did you have in mind, Q?" Kirk asked as his fists relaxed a little to match his more mitigating tone.
"I rather thought we could relive every single instant of excitement and intellectual evolution experienced by the three of you," Q said suddenly as a grandiose gesturing sent all four far into a mutually important past starting with…
The events at the very outset of Captain Kirk's first official introduction into the truly cosmic…
Events involving a much more alien appearing Lieutenant-Commander Spock sporting the self-same tan tunic as Kirk even as the Captain's close comrade from a pre-Command life took the form of: Lt.-Commander Gary Mitchell.
The man who, due to an accidental energy encounter at the edge of the galaxy, was transformed from Human to a god.
"Gary," Admiral Kirk breathed heavily as remembered emotional pain assaulted his seeming soul as the fast fleeting, though still real, episode played out to its inevitable end.
When Captain Kirk, after fighting it out with Gary Mitchell immediately prior to his powers return on Delta Vega, used a phaser rifle to bring down at least a metric ton of solid stone on top of the mutated man.
To add psychological salt to Kirk's raw wounds, Q skipped several years ahead to quite literally let them all know…
"As you can see, dear Admiral Kirk, your 'friend' did not die underneath all that heavy rock debris," Q stated as such was visibly viewed by the trio of tight-knit friends-for-Life. "How you could conceive such about someone mutated into 'god-hood' is beyond belief. Gary Mitchell gradually died over the passage of time spent practically crushed, physically speaking, beneath that tonnage. And you'll be 'happy' to know…he died cursing your very name."
Though Admiral Kirk kept such to himself, even McCoy could tell that he was saddened and suffused with self-guilt. Quite likely more emotion than necessary to have prevented Captain Kirk's decision on Stardate 1313.3.
Which, Captain Spock certainly understood, would've loosened an impossible-to-stop mutated Human upon an otherwise innocent universe…
"You are quite correct in what you are thinking, Captain Spock," Q suddenly said after reading Spock's conscious considerations. "No one in your universe would've survived had Admiral Kirk not taken the actions he did, in fact, take. You should take some solace in that, at least, Admiral."
Kirk considered telling Q to "go to Hell", but feared the all-powerful personage might actually take them there. Had Spock not explained that, due to an infinitude of universal Realities, that at least one of them would be hellish?
"As to you, Dr. McCoy," Q continued as Bright White Nothingness returned, "Retired. What was that moment of most painful…?"
"It won't work, Q," McCoy said swiftly with a deep-seated scowl. "Spock's half-brother, Sybok, showed me my 'pain'. I've since come to terms with having to assist in the passing of my father just before a damned cure came out. You are evidently not as omniscient as you seem to think."
"Au contraire, Mon Docteur," quipped Q as a gesture via a single solitary forefinger instantaneously altered Bright-White Nothingness into…
"Sweet, Jesus. Not this."
"Natira," another Yonadan pleaded with a lovelorn lady who, years after arriving upon the planet pre-designated generations ago as the new homeworld now known as New Yonada. "You have awaited your love for far too long. If this McCoy were coming…he would have certainly done so by now. You cannot waste your years…"
"They are my years to waste," sternly said a bittersweet Natira to the younger Yonadan next to her gray-haired Self. "I have pledged my love…my life…to Leonard H. McCoy. If I must die gazing up into the night sky for his starship to approach. So be it."
"No…Natira," McCoy muttered as tears welled within his blue eyes even as this supposedly realistic living image conjured by Q allowed her own tears to tumble down the wrinkles wrought by Time.
A Time that should have stayed in that painful past, but which was once again alive thanks to the sadistic desires of a super-powerful entity from the quantum heart of an electron.
"Shame on you, McCoy," tormented Q, "to leave that lovely lady believing you would live up to your parting promise to meet her and her people upon reaching their world. You know…she died brokenhearted."
"Go to Hell!" McCoy grumbled in grief-fueled growing rage. Barely held in check by the touch of a close compeer named James T. Kirk.
"Now, now, Leonard," warned Q with a wag of a finger, "let's not tempt me to take you to a Hell Universe. And last but seldom least…Spock."
"Do your worst, Q," Spock said staidly. "Since I have no emotion, you cannot 'damage' me as you have my two friends."
"No emotion?" Q curtly asked. "Now, that isn't exactly true, Captain Spock. Vulcans have emotions…they just keep them buried underneath intense intellectual control. Making every event, no matter how trivial, a variable of an equation where all aspects are considered, analyzed, weighed…then you come to some emotionless decision in how to behave. How to respond to 'stimuli'. To anything and everything. Yes?"
Inclining his head, pointy-tipped ears twitching, single slanted brow lifting, prior to replying pointedly, "Yes. We do."
"But, being half-Human," Q continued impishly with a smirk, "you especially examine every little thing before permitting yourself to speak or act. But, as a young boy, such was not only highly improbable…your half-brother would, during an attempt to assist in your development of logic, suffer the aftermath."
It became clear to Kirk and McCoy, both grappling with emotional elements of their own painful pasts, that Spock was, most assuredly, suddenly confronted with one of his own.
Something all would see as Q conjured up that past, seemingly lost to Time and buried deep in a Vulcan subconscious, at a point when Spock was but six years old…
"Spock," a slightly older Sybok, from a far different marriage between Sarek and a Vulcan Princess prior to shamefully, some would say, letting a period of pon farr form a bond between Vulcan and Human. "I know how the Vulcan children treat you. It is terrible. Shameful. Perhaps, younger brother, I might mitigate and mediate such shameful emotions via a mind meld. I know you have not yet mastered such…but I have. Let me…help you."
Kirk and McCoy suddenly understood the reason Spock never mentioned Sybok, his half-brother, until the Laughing Vulcan, as many came to call him, boarded the ENTERPRISE during the starting Stardate 8454.1 of said mission log-codenamed "The Final Frontier".
There before them, as much a moment in Living Time as anything else, they watched two young Vulcan half-brothers engage in a mind meld meant to assist in Spock's more rapid development of logic.
Though it did work, making it far easier for a half-Human/half-Vulcan to complete his intensive training and ignore the prejudices of fellow Vulcan children, it came at a terrible price…
"Ha, ha, hahahaha!"
It so twisted the previously perfected mental patterns of Sybok that he would be considered "crazed" and basically disowned by his species and planet.
Leading him to one day attempt to "take away pain" from emotional men and women, including Kirk and McCoy, in order to form a following of quasi-religious proportions that, inevitably, led to his demise on a curious world at the very center of the galaxy. A place where an errant "God" existed and attempted to con itself away from its cosmological prison.
As had been the case so many decades ago, guilt, yet another completely illogical emotion shoved deep down by an equation-thinking Spock, reared itself inside the Human half of the current Captain.
"Ahhh," Q said as he swiftly shifted the four of them from a featureless Nowhere to wind up where they started in an Academy classroom. "It would seem, Spock, that you are not as 'emotionless' as you claim."
"Leave him alone, you—"
"No, Admiral," Captain Spock said as he stiffened in his struggle to reacquire the sweet sterility of logic. "It is sometimes important to remember where we were…in order to appreciate where we are."
"Oooo, deep," Q almost laughed, then prepared to pop out of this Reality as easily as he'd popped in. "Before I go…let me leave you with another seeming impossibility to ponder…"
Whether they wanted to or not, Kirk, McCoy, and Spock suddenly listened with extreme interest for a Truth by Q…
"While you are here living your lives, there is someone in another Reality writing what he believes to be a simple story. In other words other worlds truly live quite close to stories seemingly made up in someone's mind. Think about it. Taa-taa!"
Suddenly, the sound of deeply puzzled Cadets came the self-same microsecond that Q disappeared in a flash of bright-white. No doubt returning to his Reality within the heart of a "yacto-point black hole" in the midst of a single fleeting electron.
Spock, Kirk, and McCoy looked about at the crowded rows overlooking the lecture area wherein stood this trio of heroic officers of Starfleet and the Federation. It became clear that they knew nothing of the events involved after all of them had been reduced to doll-like "action figures" for as long as it took for the torturous trip taken at the behest of a humanoid called Q.
"Uh, maybe we should go," McCoy managed as embarrassment replaced past shame, "so that Spock, here, can finish clueing in our Cadets to 'Ultimate Truths'."
"Somehow, Bones," Kirk commented with a forced smile, "I just don't think even Spock could explain this."
Lifting a single slanted brow, bringing folded hands once again behind his back while burying the painful past one last time…
"Indeed."
END
