III. Q's STORY


Time (2376 A.D. five years before the Galactica reaches Federation space.)

Amanda (1,2) materialized on a barren rock some distance from the Endeavor and Explorer with Trelane (3) following her closely. She was in her late twenties and she blond hair was even longer than when she was just a girl on the Enterprise so long ago. She had decided that she liked the look of being a twenty-six year-old and she intended to keep herself that way for the next few millennia. And it was clear for anyone who'd care to see that Trelane was completely smitten with her.

Once again she marveled at the boy, equivalent teenager actually, at how quickly he was maturing, considering how obnoxious he was when she first met him. Those had been rough times for her. Her adjustment to the Q continuum hadn't been pleasant. The other members either didn't speak to her or considered her some type of freak. Only Q would speak to her with any type of consideration for her feelings. Her parents had been condemned to death by the Q simply because they chose to be different, in this case becoming human and living on Earth. They had forsworn their powers and lived a happy, contented, simpler life- without their powers. They had a child the human way and all of them were happy. Then everything fell apart. A small indiscretion and the powers-that-be had her parents killed. "Couldn't have super powered entities running amok' they said. They lied.

They were afraid of change of any kind. The status quo had to be maintained or there would be disharmony and they couldn't have that. Stagnant people always used that excuse to destroy something different. She was almost killed herself but Q intervened because, deep down he knew that she was exactly what the Continuum needed but were too afraid to admit. William Riker's attempted seduction into the Continuum was the case in point. Now, faced with the reality-her-they couldn't handle it. But a lot had changed since those terrible days of loneliness and despair.

First came Quinn's death. And then there was the war. It happened so quickly with the ultimate result of little Q, that little monster, being born. No longer was she under the microscope. She was stable. Baby Q something else. Even his mother couldn't stand to be around him for long periods of time. Q was worse than his father. In other words, he was his daddy's child.

The entire Q were in an uproar. They couldn't terminate baby Q and they couldn't let him run all over the universe. They were trapped. It was the best time of her life. Finally! The Q realized that she wasn't as bad as they thought.

The common phrase was 'why could Q be more like Amanda?' It marked the beginning of her freedom. Suddenly they trusted her not to do anything rash. They had more important things worry about, like that little brat exploding pulsars every chance he got. He liked things that went boom.

Meanwhile, Amanda decided to take a detailed tour of the galaxy and in order to keep the rest of them off her back, she went to Lady Q, Q's wife, and asked her what would be nice to see since she was still a little kid- compared to these ageless creatures-what would be of interested to her, a learning experience as it were. Q was flattered to death and she told Amanda of every sight worth seeing. Carefully Amanda went on her tour and did nothing to upset the rest of the Q. That trip was the catalyst that pulled the Q over. Trust had been established and most restrictions were lifted.

Now she was beginning her second tour of a more profound nature when she met Trelene. It was clear that he was a touch more powerful than she, but for all that he was basically a kid. He'd left his foppish older image he was so fond of, a hundred and fifty years ago. Now his personal self-image was that of his relative age, approximately eighteen. The hair was still dark and he still had those god-awful sideburns, but he was a touch more reserved. He was actually nice, well almost, but he did have this one fault. He'd chosen Q for his mentor. He suspected that Q wasn't always pleased with him and when baby Q was born, Q had deserted him, had told him to grow up and get a life. Amanda realized that the boy was lonely. She'd never have any peace ever again if she couldn't control the situation. She gave him a little focused attention and he became her friend for life.



Trelane on the other hand had almost ruined this friendship before it began. For some reason, he never understood until later, he had been attracted to this human female on Uoknia IV. Humans had never been that far from their home world before and he was curious. Why was she there? Where was her ship?


Remembering Uhura fondly from the days of his wayward youth, the young entity re-imaged his self to human form and boldly approached her in a way he hadn't done to anyone else before. He didn't understand why he did what he did until much later. For some reason this blond female intrigued him and he wanted to make a lasting impression. Moving majestically through the crowd towards her, he stopped, faced her. He batted his eyes like that Captain Kirk did once and smiled magnificently.

"Hello," he said. "My name is Trelane and I'm God."

Then he patted her on the butt. Actually, he grabbed it. Well, essentially, his hand performed a complete examination.

That turned out to be the biggest mistake in his young life. He discovered this important point when Amanda proceeded to kick him into low Uoknia orbit. Seconds later, he reappeared next to her, stunned-and more than a little hurt- at this little nothing that...that-

"You're Q!" he stammered. "But how? I saw you. You were human, then, your aura changed to Q! How did you do that?" he yelled at her. "You are duality!" she'd hurt him and he was supremely angry, but even more afraid of her. Not even Q had resorted to physical violence. Her response was so ...so human.

"I've heard about you, brat," she growled. "How dare you touch me like that?"

Several hundred things flashed thru his mind in a nanosecond. Utmost on his mind was his parent's potential response when they found out what he'd just done. He had more power than this, this person. He could feel it. But he really didn't want to start a fight, because everybody of course, would blame him, even if she had started it.

-Which she did. So he did the only thing he could do. "I'm sorry. I promise to never to that again. It was just that-"

"Save your excuses," she snapped at him. "Don't do it again." For a moment, he watched her studying him very carefully. Then she relaxed, which made him relax at little also. "I am Amanda. I am Q. You must be Trelane."

For a moment, he didn't know how to respond. It was flattering that his fame preceded him, but flattery could be good or bad depending on someone wanting to hurt him because of it. This Q intimidated him, but he didn't understand why. And she was so beautiful. Her energy matrix reminded him of his mother but different. He was confused.

Everything she had been told about Trelane could be summed up in one word. Unpredictable. His power was legendary, but she had two advantages. The first was that she was an adult female and he a mere teenager. The other was she was human who understood the powers of inflicting guilt. "What was this God thing? Is that how you want to introduce yourself to a woman?"

She watched him blush. "Most females seem to be impressed by it. Meeting God and all."

"She licked her lips. "You could have done much better and it would have work, too." The bait had been thrown out.

"How?" he asked, genuinely interested.

"Simple pleasantries are so much more effective than simply grabbing someone's butt. I wished you would have done that instead."

Throw in the guilt now. Make him whine.

"I said I'm sorry," he responded miserably.


She had him and a friendship was born. That bargain was sealed when Amanda personally went and talked to his parents about him accompanying her on her journey of self-discovery. He was ecstatic that he wanted him to come with her. They were ecstatic that someone actually him anywhere around them. Since she knew that he'd start following her everywhere she had planned her actions well. And the wonderful thing about it was that if Trelane acted up, then she could tell his parents. The boy was on a leash and didn't even know it.


"Why did you save those pathetic humans," he asked again. He always called them pathetic when he compared them to himself, but now she noticed there was none of the malice that used to permeate his comments.

"You said it a long time ago," she answered softly. "I am duality. I want to understand why in a whole universe of choices did my parents choose to become human."

"That's why you changed their temporal distortions to bring them to this time."

"Yes. They needed help while traveling in the Delta quadrant. The people here would help them."

"Don't you think that the distress call was over the top?"

"Not at all," Amanda answered. "You know they weren't earth-born."

"Yes," he agreed. ""But the Delta humans are."

Amanda watched the two Alliance starships go to warp. This fledging group of humans and their new allies were going to reproduce the same type of organization as their brethren in the Alpha quadrant...if they survived the Kazon and the Borg and the Ciona Imperixe. And if they did, then the two Federations would invariably join forces. When that time came, she intended to be there to see it. Right now though she planned to change the conversation. "Trelane, she asked. "Do you believe in God?"

"No," came the answer. "Q kept telling me that he was god or the closest thing to it but I didn't believe him. I think he was just trying to throw me off track. I think he was just trying to keep me from playing with his stuff because he kept thinking of ways to make me leave his Enterprise alone. That part was simply jealously because I had mine first. He played with his and called it testing but I know he just wanted to show me up. I still think Kirk was better than Picard because he had that pointy-eared Vulcan helping him all the time. I remember that I wanted to be just like Q. I copied everything he did and I tried to do it better. I tried to be around him as much as possible and but he kept leaving me in places like that quantum whirlpool. I remember one time before little Q he started screaming at me and I asked him why. He said because I acted like him and he felt imprisoned by his likeness. I told him he was perfect and I was going to prove it by copying him forever. The he started disappearing into the past, but that made me want to prove that I could follow him everywhere. And I did. Then..."

She just moaned. "Somebody, help me," she whispered. Loudly: "Trelane. Let me repeat myself. Do you believe in God?"
"I have never seen him or her," he answered flatly. "We're the most powerful creature in the universe but..."

"Yes. But." She became quiet for a moment. "Look at us. We are power. But what are we really?"

"What is all this talk about god? If you have a few centuries you can talk to my father. He knows everything."

'Then why couldn't he bring you up to be less of a nuisance', she thought. "Trelene let's go."

"Where to?"

"Kobol. There's something I want to see there."

The two entities arrived on top of massive pyramid situated in the middle of a desert-like, very dead planet. The planet had been stripped of its resources and the last remaining bits of plant life were slowly dying. The pollution had filtered out of the air long ago settling in the seas killing what was left of life in them.

"What a dreary place," Trelane whispered while examining the last remaining stargate in his universe's existence. "I don't want to stay here long."

Amanda agreed with him wholeheartedly. It had the scent of death here. "Gather yourself, Trelane," she commanded. "Join with me."

He didn't even think about it. Their powers blended, and the atmosphere around them darkened, became pitch black, then darkened even more. A small light appeared in front of them slow growing in size. Soon, the light appeared as a giant screen, dwarfing the pyramid.

"What are you doing?" Trelane was clearly uncomfortable with the events unfolding, but never stopped for an instant.

Locked in concentration, she answered tersely. "I'm creating a multiversal view of this planet. I want to see the possibilities that unfolded in other parallel universes. That's why I needed you to help me."

On their three -dimensional screen, twenty images of the Planet Kobol appeared conjuring an image of what marbles would look like if connected to one another. Both of them looked at their creation in wonder.
 
"The planet Kobol, so-called birthplace of Man here in the Beta quadrant. See there?" she asked him, pointing to a small dot rapidly growing in size as it decelerated preparing to orbit the planet. "That ship is the Battlestar Galactica in all twenty of these realities, coming to Kobol. Notice the sizes," she said. "Each one is a slightly different length although the configuration is exactly the same. This one," she pointed at the first planet, "will travel to earth space and meet with humans at something called Babylon-Five. Those two over there will reach earth in the late twentieth century. These six will never make it to earth. Those two will make it to Earth in the twenty-fourth century and meet their contemporaries and a temporal anomaly called Buck Rogers. One will temporarily connect with a runaway Earth moon which houses a small community called Moonbase Alpha. Two will meet the Goa'uld and the Stargate defenders called the Tauri. The rest, including our time line will meet various versions involving the Federation past and future. Now, let's take a look at their enemies, the Cylons."

Trelane stifled a yawn. "Not very impressive are they?"

"That's not the point, Trelane," she snapped. "Look at the variations. In most realities," she continued pointing at several worlds, "the Cylons are essentially cyborgs in various percentages. But in many realities, as they are in ours, they are completely robotic. Oh look!" she said with some surprise, pointing to one-dimensional reality. "The Cylons captured some people on that prison ship and turned them into cyborgs. But they escaped."

"Amazing! Those sociopaths developed into what we know to be the Borg in that reality!"

"It seems that this Kobol is a temporal nexus or maybe a focal point for multiple realities. The question is why?"

Trelane began to detect it also. "There's something not right here. It is a nexus."

"Yes," she confirmed. She looked around in wonder. "In this timeline, this planet, this Kobol, is the planet Earth. But the Earth is the planet Kobol."

"Oh, oh," Trelane murmured. "Somebody here really screwed up. I'm using an old Earth term there," he reflected. Then a flash of insight: "The anti-time situation?"

"The anti-time equation," she hissed. "How could the continuum have messed up like this? They created a quantum absurdity. It affected everything! No wonder they were afraid to get involved to clean up the mess."

"Wow. At least my parents can't blame me for this."


Amanda collected her memory of the events, trying to put them in perspective. In a flash she understood the full import of the continuum's mistake. When Q took Picard to Earth at the beginning of life on Earth in order to explain what was happening and why the galaxy was being unmade, two quantum realities that should have never been in one another's presence mingled, fought and produced a multiversal fracture that would change everything. Picard, from the Earth that is, stood on the Earth that was being subjected to anti-time flux. In that instant, that primitive, volcanic world was split into two equal planets and like identical poles of a magnet, were repelled from one another. One, the original Earth, remained where it was. The copy was flung to the edge of the Beta quadrant where it orbited a sun exactly the right distance away to sustain life. That world would become a home to an identical race of men and women, dogs and cats. The names would be different but the creatures would duplicate one another down the line. Earth. Kobol. More than clone. Duplicates.

Both planets could legitimately claim the honor of being humanities birthright.



"Do you see the pattern, now?" Amanda relaxed and the image faded.

"It simple," Trelane answered. "Q and my father told me that the multiverse follows defined patterns. What we see in one reality is somehow connected to what we see in another reality."

"Possibly, but I'm coming to the conclusion that there are forces that we don't understand guiding this existence of ours. The biologicals on both planets should not have developed identically no matter how close the original template was. But it did. "

"Please, Amanda," Trelane sniffed. "You're making something out of nothing. We are the pinnacle of evolutionary scale in the universe. There are no forces in existence that are above us."

"No," she retorted. "You're wrong. I am duality." She disappeared in a flash and a moment later was scooping a little of the brownish sand and letting it sift thru her fingers.

"I am what they wanted Will Riker to be. The one who could see past our stagnation, to move on to something greater."

Trelane phased in next to her. "I don't understand." By the look on his face, he didn't either. "What do you mean greater?"

"Both our people have lost something in our quests to be supreme in the universe. We have lost that spark that gives us that desire to improve." She looked at him what that look and Trelane almost melted. "We have mental and physical abilities far beyond anyone else. But our spiritual development is non-existent. We've sacrificed it for other, seemingly more important things and therefore we have lost our standing with that we call God. That is why the Q have been ultimately miserable, so afraid of death. If we are to survive even with all our powers, we need to start experiencing what we've feared for so long. We have closed in on ourselves in too tightly, like misers withso much, yet so little."

"Then," he asked softly. "What do you see, Amanda?" he was confused by what she was trying to convey to him, but NEVER would he dismiss her out of hand.

"I begin to see something that has gone out of its way to make us not see it for what it is. The barest glimpse of something greater than we are. I think that it's trying to make us remember again how important faith is for powerful creatures such as us."

The young male was clearly disturbed by her words. "Amanda, we are power. We can do anything we want. We can control it all. That's what we are. I can't have faith in something I can't control."

"You may have too. Eternity is meaningless if we are all that there is. I'm beginning to see that we can be more than we are now." She laughed and her voice soared like a gentle breeze. "Who knew when I became Q that I would start placing my faith in something I can't understand?"

She disappeared. A frightened Trelane followed.



Appendix

1. Q: defined as an individual or group of entities; collectively call the Q, which resides as a whole, in the Q continuum. These supremely powerful beings are the self appoints agents of order in the universe. These self appointed agents of order have a tendency to define their names and personas as Q and Q only. Henceforth it is imperative that one concentrates carefully on the texts in which they are mentioned as several Q may be mentioned at one time causing confusion to reign. For some reason - simple arrogance is suspected- the Q have tendencies not to define themselves in any other form other than the letter Q. Repeated requests for clarification have not been answered, other than to express their standard statement 'we are Q. We know who we are.'

2. Three hundred years after the rescue of Commander Tigh and the Colonial survivors of the Colonial Warship Kinia by members of the then Alliance Star Corps, Federation temporal scientists discovered evidence of temporal tampering in that immediate region of space which most likely caused the Kinia to drop into normal space so close to the Briori-Earth home world in the Delta quadrant. To quote one temporal scientist who studied the phenomenon, "there was no way that the Kinia, which was in an uncontrolled flight path would have deactivated at exactly the right place and more importantly the right time in order for the crew to be saved by another branch of previously unknown humanity." Amanda of the Q who graciously volunteered the information to the temporal archivists in 2743 A.D confirmed this theory. The Kinia crewmembers were saved approximately four years after the departure of Voyager (2376 A.D.) from the Briori-Earth home world, but one year before its arrival home.


3. Trelane: an entity usually associated with the Q and the Q continuum and thought to be Q.



However, recent events seem to suggest that he is NOT Q. Evidence is provided as follows in a recent news article dated approximately two weeks after the return of Kathryn Janeway and the USS Voyager.

There was an altercation between Klingon and Terran scientists yesterday at the Semi-Annual Symposium of Esoteric Quantum and Spatial Anomalies and Mechanics, Temporal Phenomenon and Higher Entity life forms. The earth-born scientist Dr. Angeles Hermano presented new bits of information, which suggests that, the entity known as Trelane, may not be part of the Q. His arguments were summed up thusly:

:Trelane is a youngster who initially required instrumentation in order to actualize the environment around him, namely aggravating one Captain James Kirk and crew. The child known as Q does not have this limitation and has exhibited a growth rate that appears to have accelerated past Trelane at this point in their respective existences.

: His name is Trelane, not Q. That in itself is suggestive.

: If Trelane is a child and evidence provided by the Enterprise crew of that time confirms this, he could not have been Q since we now know that the child Q (other than Amanda) is the first child conceived in more than several millennia. Trelane's parents were clearly accounted for by Kirk. Also, the parents were respectful to so called lower life forms (mortals), a trait not normally associated with the Q.

: Both Trelane and Q exhibit analogous abilities so it has been hypothesized that the Q and Trelanes may be equivalent, to be similarly compared to the differences between humans and Betazoids, very similar but with unique attributes characteristic of their species.


Theorist Kraqq of the Klingon Science academy vigorously disputed this hypothesis stating that those so-called clues could be easily explained by a number of different possibilities. Then he called Dr. Hermano 'a human pitaggih wallowing in molded filth' for daring to bring up such a pathetic argument.

Hermano responded by suggesting that his parents should have waited a couple more minutes before conceiving him. "In that way, maybe that child would have had an increase of at least two points in its IQ quotient. He, she or it would have been far superior that the intellectual reject facing me now."

The resulting melee landed several high-ranking scientists in the local detention area. The Trelane theory is still being discussed at this time. Reporters interviewing an angry Dr. Hermano quoted him as saying, "these Klingons think they're so bad. I come from a little town from Colombia on Earth. I can show them what bad means."

Author's note, personal opinion: In science those small differences can determine whether things are related or something entirely different. I have come to believe that Trelane is NOT a Q. However, I believe his race is so close as compared to the Q's phenotypically as to make no difference. Future analysis by Paramount and the creators of Star Trek would do much to clear up this...difference of opinion.