The interesting thing about the Q who was born a human named Amanda, Q reflects, is that her human origins makes her almost invisible in the Continuum when she wants to be. During the war, she was one of their deadliest fighters because unlike the vast majority of Q, she was actually capable of sneaking up on her fellow Q, most of whom she shot without any warning.
He supposes, as he looks at the gun she holds trained on him, that it's a mark of her former regard for him that she actually gave him warning before firing.
"Amanda?" he says, deliberately using her human name to remind her of who she was before he brought her to the Continuum – to remind her that without him, she wouldn't be in the Continuum. "Would you mind pointing that thing someplace else?"
She smiles thinly. "That would miss the point, Q. I just found out a very interesting piece of information. Want to guess what it was?"
"You learned how to make public service announcements for the children of the Continuum and that's why you're doing a little play about why you should not point guns at your old mentor."
"I found out that my old mentor, as you put it, executed my parents." Her shields are totally closed. He has no way of telling what she actually feels, outside of the controlled information she lets out by speaking to him.
"Who told you that?"
"Does it matter? I verified the information against the Continuum's historical records. It's true."
"And it doesn't occur to you that coming after me with a gun might be exactly what the person who gave you the information was counting on you to do?"
"Maybe it was. It doesn't change the fact that you killed my parents, you bastard." The shield cracks just a tiny bit, letting through a blast of rage, grief and betrayal. "You told me they were your friends! You told me you disagreed with the decision to kill them!"
This might actually be serious. Q is getting alarmed. This is one of his private pocket dimensions, not the Continuum proper, but since he used to rely on Amanda to babysit his son a good deal, Amanda has the keys to all his private dimensions, just as his son does. He can't contact the Continuum proper directly from here; he has to send a message out the same way he would go if he fled, and he remembers how quick Amanda's reflexes were in the war. If Amanda seriously wants to kill him, she can probably actually do it; he can't manifest a gun faster than she can shoot the one she's already manifested, and if he either calls for help or tries to teleport out, she'll be able to sense the action before it's completed and shoot him. Of course she'll be executed herself if she does it – the new rules of the Continuum have no more tolerance for the murder of a fellow Q than the old rules would have, had the murder of a fellow Q even been possible before the guns – but it's possible that she doesn't care.
"Everything I told you was true, Amanda." He sighs. "I didn't approve of the decision to kill your parents. I argued against it. If you checked Continuum records, you must have seen that."
"Yes, I saw that. I also saw that the decision to kill them was unanimous, no one abstaining. Well, except for my parents themselves, and Quinn, who was in a comet at the time. But you were there."
"The vote wasn't on whether or not to kill your parents. The vote was on whether or not the law, as recorded, required that we kill your parents. And unfortunately, the law was pretty unambiguous. If there had been a number of others who agreed with me that your parents shouldn't die, regardless of what the law said, I could have made a motion to change the law on the basis that the law wasn't fair. But only two other Q agreed with me that your parents shouldn't be killed; I could have made a motion but it wouldn't have carried. It would, in fact, have had no impact whatsoever. I already knew that, because I'd spent weeks at that point arguing that it wasn't fair to kill them, regardless of whether or not it was the law."
"You couldn't cast a protest vote?"
"When you're looking at a text that says 'Green is up,' and the question is, 'Does the text say green is up?', you can't vote no just because green is not up. You're not being asked 'does this make any sense' but 'does this text say a certain thing'. If I had cast a protest vote in favor of 'the text does not say green is up' when in fact it does, because I strongly believed that the text was wrong, I would have been ignored as a troublemaker and an obstructionist... believe me, that's happened enough times that I knew better. If I had done that they would have ignored everything I had to say on the matter, or any other matter, for the next thousand years or so. The only way I could retain enough power to do anything about the situation was to agree that yes, the text does say green is up. The laws said your parents had to die."
"If the law was that unambiguous why did you even put it to a vote?"
"Because you can't take a step like killing a Q without voting on every aspect of it, including on whether your actions are legally justified. It was a formality, Amanda. The decision had already been made."
"And then you killed them. You, personally."
"Your mother would have wanted it that way."
Now raw fury blazes for a moment out the cracks in her shielding. "She would have wanted it that way? Wanted to be murdered by her close friend?"
"Yes. Because the alternative would have been that she be murdered by someone who would have killed her baby, too."
"Oh, I see. You're trying to claim that you saved my life?"
"I'm not 'trying' to claim anything. I did save your life. Do you actually know why your parents were killed?"
"Because they wouldn't return to the Continuum when they were ordered to, and they wouldn't stop using their powers."
"That was the proximate reason. And it was reasonably valid, on the face of it. There are those in the Continuum who believed at the time – probably some who still do believe, though we kicked their side to the curb in the war – that when Q spend their time and emotional energy outside the Continuum, it weakens our unity and risks discontinuity. And even if that's not true, it's wrong to live among mortals, interacting as if you were one of them, while still using your powers. It runs the risk of abusing power. You know that's why we wanted you to come to us instead of staying with humanity."
"But you're going to tell me that wasn't the only reason."
"That's exactly right, in fact. Many Q were terrified of you. There had never before been a Q child... and, as I'm sure you've realized by now, a lot of us don't deal well with change." He smiles wryly. "Your parents didn't want to return to the Continuum because they were afraid that if they did so, you would die, or at the very least your Q nature would; they were quite sure that bringing you into the Continuum would kill you, and they feared that if they cut themselves off from you so they could go back without you, that your development as a Q would cease, or be stunted. They thought, naively, that the Continuum would grant them more time, for your safety – they never comprehended that many Q actually wanted you destroyed, that you threatened them."
He shakes his head, remembering. "You need to understand this, Amanda. I loved your mother. She was one of my closest friends, as committed to the cause of transforming the Continuum as I was. I didn't really care so much about your father – he was kind of her sidekick. He'd do anything she wanted because he was obsessed with her. But if there had been anything I could have done to save your mother, I'd have done it. I tried my best to talk her into coming home, leaving you behind. I tried to make it clear to her what the stakes were, that she was being manipulated into breaking the law. It's very, very difficult for a Q not to use our powers, to truly limit ourselves to the capabilities of a mortal body; our powers are second nature. Some have managed, but most don't even try. Your parents had no experience with trying to do without their powers. They were set up to fail."
"Why couldn't you have taken away their powers, then? The Continuum did it to you."
"Taking away my powers was a punishment. Until your parents broke the rules, they hadn't technically done anything bad enough to justify such a punishment, and after they broke the rules, it would have been too little too late... I never out and out refused to obey an order of the Continuum. And no one would have proposed it, because those of us that didn't secretly want them dead for daring to do something no one had done before wanted them to come home. I didn't want them to be mortal, to face the possibility of death... I wanted them to realize how hard the task they'd set for themselves was, and give it up. I underestimated how much they loved you – I didn't understand it until I became a parent myself. None of us had ever been parents. We couldn't have known that your parents would never have willingly abandoned you."
"So you killed them."
"Someone was going to kill them. I couldn't stop that from happening. I tried, but it was impossible. The only thing I could do was to be the one who carried it out. Because any other Q would have killed you. You were mortal then, as vulnerable as any human baby. It would have been very, very easy to kill you along with your parents and call it collateral damage. No one else who was willing to carry out the Continuum's orders would have saved you; no one else who was willing to protect you was willing to do the Continuum's dirty work. I was the only one who could bring myself to kill people I cared for to protect what they would have died to preserve. You know, I'd actually asked your mother about that. I told her that the Continuum might execute her and her boyfriend if she wouldn't leave you behind and come home. She didn't believe me, but she said that even if what I was saying was true, she would die rather than leave you alone and unprotected. She was willing to die to save you. I couldn't save her life, Amanda, but if I volunteered to be the one to kill her, I could save what she valued more than her life."
Her eyes narrow – or rather, since they're both in native form, not in human bodies, she projects the emotion that would be signified if a human's eyes narrowed. "You did it all for me," she says, with just the tiniest note of sarcasm.
"Yes," he says, trying to ignore the signs that she simply doesn't believe him, or doesn't care. After everything they've been through together, everything he's done for her, it would be too horribly ironic if she killed him. He refuses to believe that she'll actually do it. "And I made sure you ended up on the Enterprise so that I would be the one assigned to assess you, after you started to manifest your powers."
"I won that internship!"
"No, you didn't." He does not, quite, do the Q equivalent of rolling his eyes, but some of the sentiment comes through. "Oh, your grades were superb, of course, and your essay was spot on, and there's no question that you deserved that internship. You were competing against mortals, after all; even untrained, your base intelligence as a Q was far greater than any of them. But 1500 mortals were competing for 10 internship spots, and the Enterprise was the flagship, the crème de la crème. And your interview, to put it bluntly, sucked. You whispered instead of speaking clearly, you looked at your feet a lot, you um'd and ah'd and said 'I think' and 'that's just my opinion' instead of having confidence in your ideas, and you acted as if you had no idea that you were even the equal of the others, let alone the person who had gotten the highest scores on their tests, ever. They might have given you an internship based on your scores, but it wouldn't have been Enterprise... and they might have decided that your lack of confidence in yourself was too crippling to justify giving you a slot."
"I was scared! And I didn't want to act arrogant. My mother and father – my human mother and father – always taught me it was wrong to act as if I was better than everyone else."
"I'm sure that's a very wise lesson to teach a human child who is not only a greater genius than human minds can imagine, but is genetically indistinguishable from one of the engineered supermen they love to discriminate against. But you know perfectly well that it nearly destroyed you as a Q. The war was the best thing that happened to you after you joined the Continuum; you could barely hold your own against any one single Q before that. I couldn't both focus on teaching you to stand up to me and persuade you to come to the Continuum; the stakes were too high, and the Q who took you in after that... well, I'm sure she did her best, since you eventually did have the self-confidence to dump her and join our side."
"And you'd all have been dead if I hadn't."
"Yes, we would have. I'm eternally grateful to you for that, Amanda, you know that I am. It benefited you as well, of course, since their side would never have continued to tolerate you... do you know that my original orders, which were heavily influenced by people we fought against in the war, weren't to persuade you to come to the Continuum? Originally I was just supposed to kill you."
"But, of course, you didn't. Because my mother would have wanted you to save me. Yadda yadda blah blah blah."
"You can be as sarcastic about it as you want; I suppose I deserve that. But yes, I did fight for your life. I arranged for you to end up on the Enterprise specifically to make sure that they had to send me; I was the Q for humanity, so they should have sent me, given that you were human or thought you were, but if you had stayed on your little colony world or gone to a different ship, they might have argued that I'd demonstrated I wasn't objective, and sent someone else, who would simply have killed you. Remember, many of them wanted you dead. You represented change, and you know as well as I do they didn't like change. With you on the Enterprise, though... no other Q would dare intrude on my territory, and the Enterprise was mine. And when they told me to kill you, I insisted that you deserved the chance to join us. You had to be willing – no one wants to put up with a Q who doesn't want to be here, sulking at us for all eternity – but you were connected to the Continuum, you were drawing power from it, you were even listening to us when your human consciousness slept. You were a Q, and you'd done nothing wrong. Our jurisprudence doesn't have a lot of wiggle room in it for ignorance of the law, given that Q are generally never ignorant of the law, and you had been living among mortals and using your powers in unauthorized ways... occasionally to harm others. Remember Stacy Rembrandt?"
She nods. "I never actually meant to hurt her. I didn't know that wishing that all her hair would fall out would actually make her go bald."
"Of course. Humans wish horrible things on their enemies all the time, without fear of consequence because they know it won't actually happen. I had to persuade the Continuum to actually take into account your background and level of training – not a concept we were used to, particularly in dealing with other Q -- to recognize that you deserved no less than your parents got. You needed to be given a chance to come home to the Continuum and join us. We would have offered any Q the same; it was discrimination that your origin as a human infant was being held against you."
"But you would have killed me anyway. If I refused."
He sighs. "You know... you're right. I didn't want to do that, and I was a coward for letting them push me on it. They'd taken away my powers for my flouting the spirit of the law too often, as you know, and... I was afraid they'd do it again. But I did everything in my power to make sure it wouldn't come to that. Including, after Picard told you what I'd told him about your parents... and I still can't believe he was such an insensitive moron as to do that, given what was at stake... I knew you were going to refuse me, out of spite and anger at what we did to your parents. I knew you would do what Picard obviously wanted you to do, and choose humanity. So I told you we would let you stay if you could refrain from using your powers, so you would feel you weren't being coerced. I gave you the space you needed to make the free choice you wanted, in your heart of hearts, to make."
"Are you telling me that you lied about that? That if I'd chosen to stay human, you'd have killed me anyway?"
"Oh, come now, Amanda, be realistic. Your parents couldn't stop themselves from using their powers, and they had training. Without full control over your own powers... you'd have used them. Eventually. And then I would have had to kill you. I was hoping it wouldn't come to that, and I was also hoping that I could negotiate with the Continuum to give you more time to make the decision if it did come to that, so if you did use your powers, I'd be given the freedom to come back and use that to persuade you to join us again, instead of being forced to execute you. But you know very well you didn't know how to not use your powers. The conscious uses, yes, but humans sleep. Sooner or later you'd have gone to bed and while you slept someone you didn't like would die horribly, or suddenly become your best friend ever, or simply disappear from reality. Or someone you wanted would fall as madly in love with you as Riker did, and you wouldn't have realized you were the one who did it, so you wouldn't release them in time. Or you'd have been faced with the sudden death of someone you cared about... and you had that Starfleet disease where you cared about everyone... and you'd have acted to save them. As you did."
"You told me you didn't trigger that ecological disaster from coming to a crisis right then."
"I didn't. I knew it was on its way and I was stalling for time, hoping to keep you from making any kind of final decision until it happened, because I knew what you'd do. I didn't cause it, Amanda. You know, by that point you were attuned closely enough to the Continuum that I couldn't have lied to your face."
"But you lied that I had a choice."
"I only got away with that because I was focused on ways that I could give you more time to make the choice. Fundamentally, you didn't have a choice because fundamentally, you couldn't have stopped yourself from using your powers. But you did have the freedom to say 'no' to me then and there without dying, and I would have kept coming back, trying to persuade you otherwise. You could see that my surface thoughts, that I was going to give you the freedom to say no without killing you, matched what I was saying, and I was at least adept enough to keep you from seeing any deeper than that. You may have been a Q, but most Q can't see any deeper than that into me if I don't want them to."
"Why couldn't you have taken my powers away? You said you wouldn't do that to my parents before they disobeyed because it was a punishment, but I wouldn't have seen it as a punishment."
"Oh yes you would have." He shakes his head. "A human brain can't contain the totality of a Q. As soon as you connected to the Continuum you started to outgrow the limits of your human form, and if we had cut you off you wouldn't have fit anymore. To take your powers away, I would have had to essentially lobotomize you – cut off parts of your mind that could no longer fit in your human brain."
"That's not what happened to you."
"Firstly, that is what happened to me, and secondly, I knew it was coming and could make sure that my core self, that the parts of my mind and personality that most define me, were the parts that were in the human brain when they broke the connection. I couldn't have done that for you without mentally raping you. You know what we think of a Q who breaks into another Q's mind and rearranges it, even if it's to save their life. You didn't know who you were, you didn't know what parts of you were in the Continuum versus in your brain at any given moment; how could you have been expected to know how to preserve your core identity, or even know that you needed to do it? All Q believe that death is preferable to losing parts of our selfhood, or being forcibly transformed into someone else. Forgive me for assuming that you would hold such a thing as anathema as we did."
"All right then." She shakes her head slightly. "You killed my parents because it was the only way to save my life. You manipulated me to save me, you lied to me and to Captain Picard to save me, everything you did was for me. You're just a swell, standup guy. So can you explain to me, then, why the way you killed my parents was some kind of sick joke?"
If he had a heart, it would lurch right then. "What do you mean?" he asks, the hope and confidence he'd been feeling starting to melt into dread.
"I mean they were killed by a tornado. In Kansas. A house fell on them. The Wizard of Oz?" She scowls at him. "I didn't know you well enough, when I learned how they died, to know how much that fits your style. And when I knew you well enough, I believed you that you cared about my parents, that you'd tried to stand up for them to the Continuum. You really did seem sincere, Q, even after we'd been in the Continuum for years together and I'd learned how to read you. And even now, talking to you... you say all the right things, and you project all the right emotions, and I can't feel anything dissonant leaking through your shielding." The gun doesn't waver, although if she were human, she would be crying now. "But you tell me, if you cared about my mother so goddamn much, why did you make her death into a twisted joke? You killed her with a reference from a 20th century Terran movie. How sick is that? Especially to do to someone who cared about you, someone who thought you cared about her?"
And there's nothing he can say to that. Because Amanda has never been in the position of having to kill friends. In the war Amanda had killed more efficiently and coldly than any of them because the enemy hadn't been her friends, her family, the people she had lived with for five billion years... to her, they had been the ones who killed her parents, the ones who had tried to hate her to death. Amanda has no idea what it feels like to kill people you've gamed with, shared pleasure with, gone on exploring expeditions with and sat around with having arguments for fun. Amanda lives now in a remade Continuum where no one has to kill friends who only wanted a tiny bit of freedom, or else see their child murdered, or else lose everything and be blinded, crippled, lobotomized and exiled. She'll never know what it's like to have to distance oneself with black humor, make a joke out of a friend's death because that's the only way you can deal with doing what you have to do. She's too human to have a Q's sense of perspective about such things; what does it matter if your death is amusing or not, if you're going to be dead at all? But mortals, including humans, care more about the way they die, because they can't avoid the inevitability of it.
He knows, then, that Amanda will never understand, that to her the way he killed her parents will always be a sign of callousness, not a sign that he cared too much to endure doing it if he didn't take refuge in depersonalizing them, if he didn't distance himself with a dark joke. And he's never been very good at getting anyone to understand how he feels if they're coming from a different mindset, if they can't take for granted the same initial premises he's starting from. He will never convince her.
"Amanda," he says instead. "Don't do this. This isn't like the mortal world, where you can hope to hide what you've done. They'll know, and they'll execute you. Do you think that's what your parents would have wanted? They were willing to die for you; will you make their deaths be in vain, just because you think they deserve vengeance?"
"I've lived in the Continuum for thirteen thousand years. If I'd been human, I would have died a very long time ago. Death doesn't scare me." She raises the gun.
"Amanda, you babysat my son. Please, don't."
"Did my parents beg, Q? Did they say 'you're our friend, please, don't?'"
"They didn't, actually. They knew I'd been sent by the Continuum. And I told them—" If he had a voice, it would be breaking. "I told them I would make sure you survived. And I did my best. But if you kill me, and the Continuum kills you—"
"Then you'll be too dead to worry about breaking your promise to them." She would have tears in her eyes if she had eyes, but her attention is fixed on him. "I fought in your war because they were the ones who killed them. They were the enemy, they destroyed my parents, they took from me the only chance I'd ever had to be raised by people who both loved and understood me. And now I find out it was you, all along? I trusted you, you were my mentor, you were my leader in the war, I'd have died for you... I betrayed my other mentor to save you, to save your side... and it was you who killed them? All along?"
Her shielding is in tatters from the strength of her emotion. He knows what she's going to do before she does it, knows he has no further hope of talking her out of it. With nothing left to lose, he tries to run. But she's still so much faster with the weapons than any other Q. The teleport's incomplete and he's still half in this dimension when the shot tears through the part of him still here, shreds him and his reality both and pulls him back together from the teleport, snapping all that's left of him back into this pocket dimension like a rubber band releasing.
The physical pain is worse than anything he's felt as a Q, but it's the emotional pain that overwhelms him. She'd become like a daughter to him, and he's failed to stop her from destroying herself by destroying him. His promise to his friends, when he killed them, has been broken. The sacrifice he made by choosing to be the one who carried out their sentence, rendered in vain.
He'll never see his own son again.
He sees the look of horror and grief on her face and smiles bitterly. So she's having second thoughts. A little late now, aren't they? Whoever engineered this by telling her what he'd done, whatever old enemy from the war who sought to destroy them both at the same time... it was brilliantly done. If he knew who it was and was going to have time, he'd salute them. Well played, anonymous enemy.
And then there is a roaring of sensation, white light and sound and pain. Distantly he senses his pattern unraveling as he disappears, his energies melting back into the Continuum. And there is nothing more.