NEW: VOY "West: Your Possible Pasts" PG-13 J, Q 3/6

[Alara Rogers]

Headers in first post.

The desert was hot, but not uncomfortably so; in fact the warmth felt
good in her muscles, which made her wonder if she actually *had*
muscles. She felt like a real human, with a real human body, but the
lack of excretory functions and ability (or need) to sleep clearly
indicated that whatever she was right now, she wasn't completely
human. And yet it felt like she had muscles that could relax in the
warmth of the desert like she was walking through a sauna.

Janeway thought of her spirit animal. Would it be possible to invoke
it here? If the "spirit guides" of Chakotay's beliefs were actual
entities, then probably not; if they were somehow mental
representations of the person invoking them, then perhaps. She wasn't
sure she wanted to subject Chakotay's religious beliefs to the
rigorous scientific scrutiny that would be required to check,
though.

This really was the middle of nowhere. It wasn't even a rocky desert
like most of Vulcan or the American Midwest; just endless hot reddish
sand rising and falling in dunes, an occasional wind lightly brushing
the sand into slightly different patterns. Janeway lay down in the
sand, hands behind her head, and looked up at the sky. Everywhere
else, the Continuum's sky either looked like a blue Earth sky, or a
white Earth sky like an overcast day with bright sunlight being
filtered and spread out by a solid white cloud cover, or a gold sky
like nothing she'd seen on a class M world ever. Here, the sky was
black. Solid black nothing, no stars, looking more like a ceiling
than any sort of sky, too dark for her to perceive either depth or
lack of depth in it. There was light and heat everywhere but no
apparent source of it; perhaps it was coming off the ground in some
way, because she had no shadow.

Abruptly Janeway had a revelation. For a dizzying moment, the black
was below her and the sand at her back was the sky and she was on the
top of the universe looking down, and the black was a dark pool
reflecting the desert, and the desert was a bright wasteland
reflecting the darkness. They were the same. For Continuum weapons
to have effects on specific, individual stars, there needed to be some
rough correspondence between locations in the Continuum and locations
in her universe. This was the dark between the stars, the endless
expanse of nothing between galaxies.

Sand ran through her fingers. If she wanted, could she shape the sand
into something? What did it represent? Just what she expected to
find in a wasteland? But no, that would be a lunar landscape, barren
rock. Sand was something. You could create with it, but your
creations would be impermanent.

The sand was matter, she thought. The substance of her reality. The
Q could build anything they liked out of it, here in the dark between
the stars or anywhere else, but it did not last as they did; nothing
of her universe lasted the way the Q did.

Were they even from this universe? Quinn had tried to hide from Q at
the Big Bang, but had the Q already existed then, or was it simply
that time was their playground as much as space was and they could go
anywhere within the lifespan of the universe they liked? Lady Q had
made a comment about being five billion years old, but she could have
been employing hyperbole; after all, practically everything Q had said
during that incident turned out to be not entirely true.

She saw the future and it dizzied her. Her choices were to find a way
to return to the world of mortality, and death, and end as she had
already ended, although hopefully a bit further in the future... or
this. Eternity. The universe she came from, ephemeral as sand
sculpture, as she herself went on and on.

They didn't act eternal. They acted like people. Goofy kids in
love. New mothers who were trying to reconcile with the ex-husband
they'd hurt and the child they'd left behind, now that they had a new
child to set an example for. College kids. Inventors and
anthropologists and database administrators. Explorers. Ordinary
people, who just happened to have godlike powers and live forever.

Junior had once told her it was all an act, that every time she saw a
Q doing anything at all they were acting. *"Most of the time it's a
true act. Like, you can't actually understand what we really are, so
we translate our feelings and our behavior into something that you'll
understand, and sometimes you'll understand it better if it's not
technically 100% true. So we might be kind of lying in order to
express something that's more true, that you wouldn't get if we told
the truth. Or, you know, we might just be putting on a show because
we feel like it."* Already, in spending time with them, she'd seen
ways in which they were less human than they'd seemed when they were
randomly showing up aboard her ship demanding sanctuary or child-
rearing advice. But all the ways in which they seemed less human were
ways she was familiar with from dealing with alien species. Things
like public sex and a taboo on eating and the fact that Lady Q seemed
to think that a good way to reconcile with her ex was to bring him the
mortal she had been jealous of once upon a time. Hera -- presumably a
fictional creation of humans, although since Apollo had turned out to
truly exist, perhaps that wasn't the case -- wouldn't have acted like
that. At the same time, in other ways they were very human indeed,
very much like every mortal species she'd encountered except the Borg
and Species 8721. Q was angry that Lady Q had disowned Junior.
Junior was pretending his new baby half-sister didn't exist. Queria
had always wanted children. q flirted with a younger boy while telling
him that she wasn't interested in him. q-ling wanted attention and
people to play with her. They might as well be any mortals with a
somewhat odd culture.

If she stayed here, would she come to understand them? Would they
seem more different from humans as they dropped the act around her, or
would *she* become more different from humans and find the Q more
comprehensible, the way she had found her memories of her own humanity
incomprehensible when she'd been the amphibious sentient?

If she could have been an amphibious sentient who couldn't comprehend
technology but who could encompass the vastness of space in her mind,
who longed to explore and didn't want kids but was protective and
loving toward the ones she had even though they burdened her... who
had sexual tastes for being in control, for god's sake, the way
Janeway herself did... was humanity necessarily a defining trait of
Kathryn Janeway? That being had been *her*. Her human taboos and her
human culture and her human understanding of technology had fallen
away, but what had been left behind had been recognizably the core of
her self. Could she cease to be human and still be who she was?

Maybe that was the point Q had been trying to make with his gift.

Janeway got up. She was done with the deep thoughts for now, done
with exploring the Continuum for the moment. Now she wanted more of
those memories. What else could she learn about herself from the
lives she couldn't remember?

She visualized her "home" in the Continuum, saw in her mind's eye
where she was in relation to it... and transited, as she and Tom had
when they were salamanders.

When she reappeared in her home, she felt cold and exhausted. For the
first time since her death, she was actually *tired*. She stumbled to
her bed. Maybe she shouldn't teleport in the Continuum; transiting
when she'd been a living amphibian had made her very, very hungry and
sometimes quite tired, as if she'd been doing hard physical work. Now
that she wasn't alive, where was the energy that sustained her coming
from, and what would happen if she drained it?

She changed into a nightgown with a thought -- the thought being "I
want to be wearing my blue nightgown" -- and crawled into bed. Could
she actually sleep, now?

It turned out, she could.

****

In the morning -- or when she woke up, anyway, there being no
'morning' here -- she felt much better. So apparently there were
things she could do to run out of energy and need to sleep. After her
thoughts yesterday about how human she still was, it was actually
reassuring that she might still have to sleep sometime -- although,
hadn't Q slept after he got shot, during the war? He'd been
unconscious, anyway. She'd have to ask somebody, sooner or later, how
her biology, such as it was, worked now. The replicator made her
delicious dark black coffee and she drank three cups of it, not
because she had to -- unlike when she was alive, she woke *fully*
rested and alert, and actually didn't need the coffee -- but because
she liked it, and it made her feel like something, at least, hadn't
changed completely.

And then she turned to the memories again.

//The first time she remembers encountering the Krenim timeship, Kes
stays, purging herself of her power and forcing herself back into an
Ocampan form by force of will, and does what she can to help the new
former Borg drone acclimate again to being human. And then she comes
onto the bridge to warn Janeway of the Krenim and their chroniton
torpedoes, in the middle of the battle, and Janeway gives the orders
to take evasive maneuvers. Then a console explodes in front of her,
and there is a searing bright pain and--//

Right. Kes had told her about that, that she had died in the opening
battle with the Krenim timeship.

//The second time she encounters the Krenim, Kes is gone, and Seven is
adjusting on her own. She has the information she was given by Kes, so
she knows what this is as soon as she hears the name 'Krenim.' This
time she isn't killed in the opening battle. They find a way to keep
the timeship from erasing them from existence, but the ship takes more
and more damage, and the Krenim grow more and more threatening with
each temporal incursion. Finally Chakotay and Paris buy her the chance
to destroy the timeship, to save the universe, perhaps to undo
everything it has done -- the math suggests that the timeship itself
is somehow maintaining the alternate timeline it has created, and
destroying it might cause the universe to revert all the changes. But
she has no weapons anymore. Voyager is falling apart, doomed anyway,
and there is no autopilot.

She makes everyone else evacuate, and sets course to ram. A captain
always goes down with her ship.

"Time's up."//

This time dealing with her own death was easier, less of a shock to
her system. She remembered four deaths now -- her actual one when
Seven's virus destroyed the Borg, the other Janeway's destruction of
the Viidian-invaded *Voyager*, and two times at the hands of the
Krenim. *"Most of them end with you dying,"* Q had said, and he hadn't
been exaggerating. Five alternate lives, three alternate deaths, and
counting.

In a weird way, this was almost fun. There was nothing enjoyable or
pleasant about remembering the Year of Hell and everything she had
been through in that horrible year, but it gave her perspective. That
was a worst case scenario that made her own recent death look
positively benign. At least she got her people home, and none of
*them* had died in the Borg assault.

She picked up the ball again and pressed it to her head for another
one.

//She is Captain Janeway, but she's not. She knows what she is. She is
a mimetic life form, native of the planet her other self had called a
"Demon-class planet". But she is also Kathryn Janeway, captain of the
starship *Voyager*, and a life trapped on a planet seems impossibly
empty. The mimetic surface touched *Voyager*; it is more than bio-
mimetic. It can duplicate anything. She talks it over with her senior
crew, and they all agree -- they don't want to be pinned down to a
planet either. They induce their homeworld to make them a ship, a
copy of Voyager, and they sail off into the stars, intending to
explore.

It takes hardly any time at all before the urgency, the reality of
Kathryn Janeway's memories, the utter Janewayness of what she feels
herself to be, overrides and eventually wipes out her knowledge of
what she truly is. At first she remembers almost all the time, and
loses it only in occasional wistful daydreams of what she'll do when
they get back to Earth, only to be brought up short with the memory
that she is not the real Janeway and cannot go back to the real
Janeway's life. And then she forgets about half the time, and it's a
cold shock every time she remembers, and it's unpleasant and she
doesn't want to think about it. And then she only remembers when Tuvok
and Seven remind her. And then, three months after leaving their home,
she doesn't remember at all, and neither does anyone else. They have
always been the crew of *Voyager.* Occasionally the Doctor notes the
medical anomalies of their identities, and she remembers again, but
it's like a dream, a nightmare forgotten shortly after waking up. It's
too hard to accept. She knows she is Kathryn Janeway, and the
objective truth that she is not is too painful to bear.

So she doesn't. She forgets it. Again and again. When they upgrade the
warp drive with technology bought from an advanced species, she is
overjoyed; their journey home will be much shorter now. They're within
a handful of years of reaching the Alpha Quadrant. People are having
babies. Tom and B'Elanna get married.

And then her people start to die.

They learn the truth of what they are. She can't forget again; the
evidence is right in front of her, in the form of B'Elanna's cold
body. The enhanced warp drive is killing them. But they have to get to
Earth. She can't give up that dream. They need to stop at a class Y
planet and make repairs, change their atmosphere to be compatible with
what they truly are, and as the Doctor suggests, find the original
Voyager. If they do that they can all live again, even poor dead
B'Elanna. Her 'silver blood' still lives; it just can't hold its
cohesion in the form of a living half-Klingon half-human. They could
re-imprint her from the real B'Elanna. They could re-imprint all of
them, and survive to make it home.

Paris** points out that Earth isn't home. Janeway won't listen.

They can't use the closest class Y planet; the aliens manning it won't
let them. And then, as Chakotay is arguing with her about the need to
return to their actual home, to the Demon Planet... he dies. The shock
floors her. Her obsession with getting home is killing her people, and
there's no guarantee they can find the real *Voyager*, no certainty
they will all live again.

They have to go back.

But there's no guarantee they'll make it to their real home, either.
People are still dying. Janeway orders a capsule to be prepared,
information to be sent to the real *Voyager*. If they're all going to
die she wants her real self, all of their real selves, to know what
happened to them, to know they existed.

And then the deflector shields fail. And then she dies. Her last
desperate thought as she falls into oblivion is that she trusts Harry
Kim, and she wishes she had promoted him from Ensign after all. He'll
make a good Captain someday. Or the other one will. But she trusts
him, and she has confidence that he'll get the survivors back home. To
Voyager to live again, or to the Demon Planet to return to the silver
blood, but he'll make it somehow.//

They had never received any kind of capsule or any message. And then
Janeway realized the dates, and her blood ran cold. They'd received
what had seemed like a Starfleet distress signal, but there had been
nothing but debris, not even bodies, when they'd gotten there. No one
had checked the debris field for the biomimetic life forms of the
Demon Planet; why would they have? She had recorded that the ship's
log buoys and identifiers had all been destroyed, and that even if it
had been a Starfleet vessel there would be no way to know which one,
and had gone blithely on her own journey. She had never realized that
the people who'd died there had been her and her crew.

The other Janeway's dying confidence had been misplaced. The other Kim
hadn't made it. They had all died. Killed, largely, by her obsession
with getting home. B'Elanna's death hadn't been her fault, but if she
had turned the ship around the moment they had learned they were
biomimetic lifeforms from the Demon Planet, maybe they would have made
it. Maybe some of them would have survived the trip.

It *hurt.* The joy they'd all felt at B'Elanna and Tom's wedding...
Ensign Harper's new baby, who had truly been new life, who hadn't had
an equivalent duplicate on *Voyager*... and all of it had fallen apart
into horror and death, so quickly. Had she, herself, been as
dangerously obsessed as the copy? Had the other Janeway been partially
deranged by the radiation when she'd made the decision to keep
going... or would Janeway herself have made the exact same decision
under the same circumstances?

She needed another one, one that was truly her. She needed to forget
being someone she never was -- well, not forget, but put aside the
memory, stop thinking about it for now. Perhaps this next one would
include every bit as much death and pain, but it wouldn't include the
horror of realizing that she was not who she thought she was, at
least.

//It begins simply enough, with anomalous readings from a nearby
planet, Monorha, and Seven's report of wormholes like Borg transwarp
corridors all through that region of space. It turns into a mission of
mercy, as they encounter an unusual alien craft full of refugees. And
it turns into horror, when their offer to tow the refugees to the
planet they are seeking to reach ends in disaster, the refugees and
their ship splintering into subatomic particles before them, the laws
of physics themselves so different in the space they evolved in that
they cannot survive out of it any more than a hologram can survive off
the holodeck without a mobile emitter.

They return the survivors to the planet, and take a handful of the
Monorhans' leaders aboard, only to be blasted into a subspace pocket
where molecular cohesion and the sanity of sentient beings begins to
fail. A Bolian crewmember dies, dissolving into blue taffy in Sickbay.
Harry Kim puts his hand through a console as if either he or it are
not real. Chakotay leaves a pressurized shuttle for the unpressurized
shuttle bay because he didn't, in that moment, think oxygen was
important. And Torres and Seven are lost, left behind on the planet...
they hope. Lieutenant Carey does his best, but by his estimates, the
shields that protect their sanity and molecular structure will hold
for only fourteen hours.

It's long enough. They find their way out of the subspace pocket, an
adventure in itself that involves an alien saboteur and a few more
bouts of going insane, and Janeway concludes that the pocket was
somehow artificially created -- a patch on reality, explaining why the
system is so anomalous. Life forms within range of a highly
radioactive white dwarf star, laws of physics that vary from place to
place, stars that exist in subspace as well as normal space... things
like this aren't natural. Someone created this place, and from the
jury-rigging feel of it, she thinks it was someone who was in a rush
and didn't have the time or resources to actually do a good job.

She comes up with a plan to save the aliens by collapsing the white
dwarf star with trilithium. It comes close to backfiring when the star
instead collapses into a small singularity, but it's far enough from
the planet that the people are safe. One of the aliens gives her an
artifact called the Key to Gremadia, a legendary realm of godlike
entities, saying that his grandfather appeared to him and told him to
give it to her. And then Tuvok, after suffering some sort of psychic
backlash, flees the ship.

They investigate and discover an array, like a city in space, out
beyond the collapsed white dwarf. In the meantime, Janeway's sister
Phoebe has suddenly always been aboard *Voyager*, and an
electromagnetic surge in Janeway's quarters, that she initially puts
down to Phoebe working on the replicator (but Phoebe hasn't always
been on the ship... has she? No, Janeway clearly remembers that she
has), destroys the corpse of the Caretaker, stored in *Voyager*'s
morgue. ** Naomi Wildman nearly dies, the Doctor is replaced with a
very old backup, and the artifact known as the Key to Gremadia
vanishes. When Naomi recovers, she tells Janeway of a monster
aboard... and describes a Nacene, one of the Caretaker's kind.

The Doctor is able to determine that Neelix and Samantha Wildman and
Janeway herself all show signs of memory implants... but not Naomi,
because her molecular structure is very slightly out of phase with
theirs. If Phoebe is a Nacene who has altered Janeway's memories to
make her think her sister has always been on Voyager, and her illusion
cannot work on Naomi because of the molecular phase variance, then her
power won't work on Harry Kim, either. So when he returns from
rescuing Tuvok, Janeway has Kim come with her to confront Phoebe.

Shooting her just gets Kim knocked unconscious. Janeway is forced to
negotiate with the entity that wears her sister's face. Phoebe
explains to her, to the extent that she can, the nature of the Nacene;
that at one point they dwelled in a realm outside Janeway's universe,
called Exosia, where they held some sort of control over or
responsibility to the strings, the basic building blocks of reality.
Phoebe demonstrates her story by taking Janeway to some sort of
representation of Exosia, where she is temporarily granted the power
to control the strings, and finds it a terrifying and tempting
ability, with enormous potential to wreak havoc in her own dimension.
It's a graphic demonstration of what happened when some of the Nacene
found that they could manipulate the strings to control matter in
Janeway's reality, and played with reality like children with phasers,
heedless of the damage they were doing. One of those was the
Monorhans' god, the All-Seeing Light, an ironic name given that
photonic energy was inimical to existence in Exosia, who had created
life in this distorted space and either was unaware or uncaring that
the life he created was bound to Monorhan space by subtle differences
in the laws of physics here. Monorhan space itself was as terribly
distorted as it was because it had been the location of the gateway
from Exosia, where the Nacene had done the most damage.

The Others, the Nacene who had remained behind in Exosia, closed the
gateway aeons ago, Phoebe tells Janeway. The Key is the means for the
Nacene to return, to open the gateway, made from the remains of
hundreds of Nacene that fell in the great battle between those that
left Exosia and those that stayed behind. If the Key is not used
within three days, the Others will open the gate themselves, and
destroy Phoebe, Janeway, Voyager and possibly the Monorhans as well in
their effort to keep Exosia free of the exiles' contamination. If the
Nacene who left Exosia are ever to go home, it must be now.

When she returns from her travels with "Phoebe", Janeway learns that
Tuvok has been infected with a life form that is transforming him,
that in fact all of the Monorhans who came to this array, who had been
thought dead, were so transformed as well, and that he wants the
transformation, although it will kill his physical body. One Monorhan
alone was not transformed -- Assylia, the leader of the group that
fled to the array. She has been residing in the array's computer
systems all this time, driven nearly mad by loneliness and the
apparent death of her people. Tuvok helps her to understand what has
actually happened to her people, but a delayed self-destruct she set a
long time ago is triggered, and the array will be destroyed... and
with it, the Nacene's only way home.

When Janeway takes the Key to the array, preparing to open the
gateway, she learns that matters are more complex than she has been
told. The life forms that transformed the Monorhans are spores created
for the sake of the Nacene, which should be used by them to make them
compatible with existence in Exosia once again. Nacene who are not
transformed by the spores cannot go home, but the spores have been
largely used by the Monorhans, who were accidentally infected and
transformed when they came to the array. Phoebe wants to destroy the
Monorhans to free up spores for Nacene, or at least to hold off on
using the Key -- let the array be destroyed, but the gateway remain,
to be used later. Janeway does not consider either a viable option.
The Nacene are immortal; they can find another way home. But the
Monorhans will be killed when the array explodes unless the gateway to
Exosia is opened.

At the last minute, Phoebe warns Janeway that the gateway requires her
life force to open it. Janeway doesn't hesitate. She's already made
her decision, and her own life is a price she's willing to pay to save
all these people.

At the last moment, as she feels her consciousness fading, another
consciousness impinges on hers -- the sense of Assylia, the one who is
responsible for self-destructing the array. In guilt and gratitude,
Assylia pushes Janeway aside and takes her place as the conduit, her
own life force being consumed. Janeway senses that much. And then
everything is dark.//

Her head hurt. Janeway sat up. There was no explanation whatsoever she
could think of for why she didn't remember any of this, why what she
remembered from that time period was simply that they'd entered a
lightless region of space and she'd become inexplicably and deeply
depressed. The memories didn't tell her when the timeline had changed,
assuming they had and this wasn't just another duplicate of her. For a
moment she was tempted to call Q to demand an explanation; the people
she actually wanted an explanation from, her crew, were not here to
ask. But she didn't want to be beholden to Q for help. She'd ask the
help of various other Q in getting around in the Continuum if she had
to -- although with Queria's gift, thankfully, it didn't look like
she'd have to anymore -- because she was a stranger in their world.
But she wasn't going to ask Q a personal question about the memories
he had given her.

The memory of the entity that had impersonated Phoebe reminded her of
her family, a sharp sorrow. She could see Phoebe any time she wanted
to, but after watching her own funeral she hadn't been able to bear
it; she'd stopped looking at her family, in particular, because it
hurt too much that she couldn't talk to them, couldn't make them see
*her.* And unlike her crew, her mother and sister hadn't been fighting
the Borg, hadn't been an integral part of the tale of the war that had
claimed Janeway's own life.

Angrily she got to her feet. She couldn't make the Q send her home.
But maybe she could make them tell her where to find her children. If
*they* could go back and forth between her dimension and the
Continuum, or if she could get someone to take her to see them, maybe
they could carry a message for her. There had to be some way to
reconcile with them, some way to make them understand that she simply
had lost all memory of them when she'd been turned back human.

"Computer, is Q back in the Continuum yet?" she asked, meaning the
being "her" Q had told her to go see about her children.

"You're in luck. If you can call it luck. He's back."

"Show me."

An image came to her mind of the Q in question in a laboratory
setting. She focused her mental image of him, and wished herself
there.

The Q did not look up as she appeared in his lab; he had an insane
number of monitor screens up in front of him, all showing him various
tabulations and scan results, and he was leaning back in a chair
reading them. She walked up to him, hands on hips, and waited for him
to notice her. Sometimes it took Q a while to notice her; she was
apparently very small and hard to see in the Continuum.

When she'd been standing there for a couple of minutes, though, she
cleared her throat, hoping to draw his attention. It didn't work. He
still ignored her.

"Excuse me," she said. And then when that didn't work, she took a
step closer and raised her voice slightly. "*Excuse* me."

He waved a hand at her idly, and she found herself standing "outside"
on the road metaphor that seemed to dominate public spaces in the
Continuum, in front of what looked like some sort of top secret
laboratory building, square and beige brick with no windows and solid
grey doors. The doors, of course, did not slide open when she
approached them.

Angrily, she summoned up her focus again, and transited, holding it in
her mind the way she had when she'd been a salamander. She reappeared
next to the Q. He turned toward her, a look of startlement on his
face.

"Q told me to go to you because you could answer my questions about my
children," she snapped. "He said you were difficult to deal with, but
he never said you'd completely *ignore* me."

The Q, who was wearing a lab coat and a 20th century t-shirt that
showed the finger of God pointing at an exploding planet with the
caption "So many idiots... so little antimatter", looked taken aback.
And then he grinned sharkishly. "*You're* that one! I never made the
connection before."

"What connection?"

He scowled at her. "I don't care if Q is the head of the faction or
not. Any debt I may owe him for his self-interested pursuit of goals I
wanted to achieve as well doesn't translate into my being his lapdog.
I don't jump when he says fetch."

"I'm positive he knows that," Janeway said sharply. "But perhaps he
assumed -- as *I* did -- that you would be a responsible and mature
being, who would actually have a conversation with people who've come
to talk to you instead of teleporting them out of the room."

"Just because Q thinks you're a *person* doesn't mean that those of us
with sense agree," the Q said, leaning back in his chair. "I don't
need to have a conversation with Q's pet just because he thinks I
should pretend it's worth talking to."

"You said Q is the head of the faction. I presume that means you're a
member of the Freedom Faction. Are you aware that my crew of mortals
are the only reason you didn't *lose*?"

He snorted. "Yeah, I knew about Q bringing in a bunch of mortals with
weapons that would work. Who doesn't? Scared the shit out of those
fat cats, but it's not like you people *did* anything. It was all Q's
doing for giving you the weapons, and it's not like even the faction
wants to give her the time of day for it. I mean, there are ways to
win wars, and then there are disgusting ways to win wars, and she
picked door number two."

"I don't think you'd have won without resorting to her disgusting
strategy."

The Q shuddered. "Better that than *Q's* disgusting strategy, at
least. When he told us all his brilliant plan was to procreate with a
mortal, I nearly threw up. I mean, winning by mating with *meat* is
kind of like one of you people winning a sheepfucking contest. Sure
you won, but now you're a sheepfucker."

Q had warned her the guy was an asshole. And she'd realized at the
time that if *Q* thought he was an asshole, he had to be *really*
bad. So she was able to keep her temper, barely. "You had a better
plan?"

He shrugged. "If I'd had a better plan, I'd have implemented it
millennia ago and then I'd be the head of the faction. It's not like
Q's all that. People just listen to him because he was louder about
it than anyone else, earlier than anyone else."

"In other words, people listen to him because he was willing to stand
up for the things he and apparently you believe in, long before it was
popular enough to be safe. Sounds to me like that's a damn good
reason to make someone the head of your movement."

The Q rolled his eyes. "You're just going to make noises at me all
day until I tell you this story, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Who the *fuck* taught the meat to teleport?"

"I'm not exactly meat any longer."

"Oh, marvelous. You're *dead* meat. That's *so* much better." He
sighed. "But hey, I'll tell you this story, 'cause it's hilarious and
I never get tired of telling it. And then you'll go away and I'll
never have to look at you messing up my nice clean Continuum again,
got it?"

"If you don't want me messing up your nice clean Continuum, I'd be
perfectly happy to leave. Just give me back a living body and send me
to Earth and I won't mar your Continuum a moment longer."

"Naah, Q would kick my ass if I did that. That bitch is *scary.* You
know she gives up her powers for fun? And goes and fights meat with
*bladed weapons?* And gets herself *cut?* We should have kicked her
out of the Continuum for being totally bugfuck nuts millions of years
ago, but she used to know how to suck up."

"Well, if you won't send me home, then I can't promise you that you'll
never have to see me again. But I *assure* you that I won't willingly
talk to you again after you tell me what Q wants you to tell me."

"Good enough, I guess." He sat up straight in his chair. "So here's
the thing. Q plays like he's all hard and ruthless and badass, but
it's a shell that's approximately thirteen picometers thick and the
inside is so squishy it might as well be plasma. I'll give him that
he's brave enough to stand up to the entire Continuum and demand the
right to be a meat-loving perv, but it doesn't change the fact that he
gets way too attached to you things. For a while back there we all
thought he'd gotten past that and toughened up, so when the top dogs
wanted humanity to get a smackdown, being that you people were getting
massively too full of yourselves, they sent him. But damn, did he ever
roll over and turn into a pussy. First he gives you a cakewalk, and
then when we tell him go back and do the test right, he gives the
Continuum a big fat F U by making the test all about a human *joining*
the Continuum, so even if he wins, we lose. I mean, I'd have thought
it was a sweet prank to pull on those sanctimonious assholes in
charge, except he was serious about it."

"I'm not sure any test Q subjected humanity to could be described as a
cakewalk."

"Oh, come *on.* Is the space station a freaking energy jellyfish just
like the jellyfish that's attacking it, and is the attacker hostile or
just pissed at the meat who took its pal captive? How stupid would you
have to *be* not to get that?" He sighed. "So then Q cashes in every
favor anyone owes him so he can get the right to test humanity for
*sentience*, despite it being blatantly obvious that you're not ready,
and he actually gets his votes. Even Q voted for him, and Q hates him.
Word is, they cut a deal involving Q performing unspeakably sordid and
degrading sexual acts in exchange for Q's vote." He waggled his
eyebrows. "But then, it shouldn't shock *you* of all people that Q's a
whore."

"Does any of this character defamation have a point?" Janeway asked,
her voice steel.

"Sure it does. See, Q got you declared sentient, after playing
hardball politics and *then* practically giving the answers away on
the test, and if you're sentient then no Q can cause you harm...
unless you infringe on the Q. And *that* is the really sweet loophole
that you fell through."

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't, you're meat. The universe isn't actually large
enough to contain a description of just how stupid you are."

If she had actually needed to breathe, Janeway would have taken a deep
breath. But that was giving him too much power over her, given that
she didn't have a physiology that actually required air. "I don't
understand because *I* am not telepathically connected to a database
that contains all the information in the universe. Q aren't
particularly more knowledgeable than humans when deprived of that
particular advantage. So instead of complaining about the fact that I
don't already have the information I'm asking you for, which is
foolish since it fails to recognize that if I already had the
information I wouldn't be asking for it... why don't you just give me
the information. What loophole are you talking about? We didn't
infringe on the Q."

He grinned widely. "Oh, yes, you did." The Q stood up. "You don't know
anything about how the universe works, do you?"

"I know quite a bit about how the universe works, but I'll acknowledge
that you know more than I do."

He rolled his eyes. "All right, let's see if I can come up with a
metaphor that your primitive brain can grasp." As he spoke, he paced
and made gestures. It reminded Janeway of "her" Q, the one who had
sent her on this errand, the way that siblings who didn't physically
look much alike and didn't think highly of each other still had
similar patterns of speech and body language. "Think of an onion. The
outermost layer is your universe, realspace. And the constraint on
realspace is that there's a discontinuity at c. As you approach the
speed of light, your mass increases and your duration decreases, until
at c those numbers are infinity and zero."

"Yes, I am in fact aware of all of that."

He ignored her completely. "Subspace has a different discontinuity
point. As you approach Warp 10, if you don't drop down to a lower
layer of the onion like transspace or slipspace, duration doesn't
change and neither does mass, but the energy needed to do it
approaches infinity and *space* approaches zero. You define Warp 10 as
infinite speed, but that's incorrect; Warp 10, if you could get there,
which you can't, is infinite *energy* and zero space, meaning that you
are simultaneously everywhere at once. But of course you can't get
there because you don't have infinite energy."

"There are ways to get around the infinite energy requirement."

"No, there aren't. You just think there are. Just as you can't
actually travel at c in realspace, you can't actually travel at Warp
10 in subspace. As you approach, consuming more and more energy, you
destabilize the fabric of subspace, punching a hole through the layers
of reality. You see, infinite energy is a defined state, and we call
that state the center of reality, or sometimes, the Heart of the
Storm. Just as your asymptote to c has next to no time distortion down
at the lower levels of realspace speed, like your impulse drive, but
starts to become more and more massive and use less and less duration
as you go up the asymptote, your asymptote starts to get weird around
Warp 9.9. The energy levels you consume and the shortening of subspace
you commit can actually bring you *through* the layers of the onion,
which is why you think of transwarp as something you get to by going
really fast rather than something you get to by shifting to an
entirely different layer of reality. Use enough energy, fast enough,
and you jump through the layers, just like an overly excited electron
can jump two or three shells at once."

"So instead of achieving Warp 10... we jumped through the layers?"

"Correct." His grin got even wider. "Your lackeys actually found a way
to jump into the outer corona of the Q Continuum. See, where we are is
the energy state of infinite energy and no space; the numbers right
here, right where you and I are standing, aren't actually infinity or
zero, but they're damn close, close enough that you wouldn't be able
to tell the difference. So when you jumped up to a near-infinite
energy state... you ended up *here*. Well, not in the Continuum
proper, not in the parts we live in, but the outer edges of it."

If the Continuum had virtually zero space, she wondered how it was
possible to have location. When she had been a salamander-being and
she had transited, she had felt the sense of being everywhere at once,
of there being no such thing as location, but when she transited in
the Continuum she had the distinct sense that things existed in
places. She was not, however, going to ask this particular Q to
clarify. "Is what Tom and I sensed what we would have sensed when we
went to the Continuum with Q if he hadn't provided us with a
translation metaphor?"

"Who knows? You were in the outer corona, in a spaceship. Not quite
the same thing as being on the main thoroughfare. The point is...
there you were. Infringing on the territory of the Q. Which made you
fair game." He laughed. "Really, I was doing Q a favor. He got *so*
pissed off that I was playing with humans without notifying him, but
honestly, I was just adding to his body of research on the species,
doing the experiments he's not hardcore enough to do himself. I mean,
he's interested in human evolution, right?"

Horror went through her as she suddenly understood. "It wasn't a
natural property of breaking the Warp 10 barrier. *You* did it to us."

"Yup." He beamed at her and sat down, propping his legs up on his
console. "I did just a teeny bit of tweaking your pilot guy's DNA, to
see how close I could get you people to being Powers. Amazing how
little I needed to do, really. And then I wondered, what would happen
if he bred, with the new DNA? Would the children, born as members of
the more evolved species, be able to take that final step? So I gave
him a compulsion to mate. He was gonna go for that half-Klingon thing,
but the experiment was *human* DNA, and anyway, I'd rather piss off Q
than Q... like I said, she is one scary bitch, and Klingons belong to
her. So I had him go for you instead. Needed something that passed for
brains and analytic ability at the human level, and you were the
smartest female full human on the ship at the time... which is kind of
like saying the most attractive slime mold, but hey, you got a lot
smarter once I fixed you up."

"You *forced* us to mate! To produce children that we ended up
*abandoning* because we couldn't even remember them!"

"Hey, it's not my fault that your crew didn't appreciate your
evolutionary journey. And I didn't force you to mate, human; I didn't
*need* to. Once I made you into something that couldn't remember all
those stupid-ass rules you humans put around who to reproduce with and
when, you were hot to trot. I'd have had to use mind control or mess
with your hormone levels to *keep* you two from going at it."

Her faced flamed with embarrassment (why, oh why, did she still have
that reaction when she was dead and incorporeal?), but she kept her
voice level and hard. "Where are my children? What happened to them?"

"Shit, why would I care?" He shrugged. "Once the Continuum identified
them as proto-Powers, they passed the sentience test easily, and then
I couldn't do any more experiments with them. So, y'know, they're
someplace. I really don't care exactly where."

"*Experiments?*" Fury made her see red, and it was all she could do to
keep from grabbing him and shaking him. "What experiments did you
perform on my children?"

"Oh, you know, the usual. Dumped a handful of Hirogen on the planet to
chase them, dropped a Borg scout pod on their planet, sent Viidians
after them, blew up their planet to see if they could figure out how
to transit off of it... that kind of thing. They lived through it,
though it was kind of touch and go with the youngest when I infected
them all with the Drovis plague." He sat up and looked at her, a small
smile of cold amusement on his face and his dark brown eyes completely
hard. "That answer all your questions?"

She wanted to ask how he lived with himself, how he dared think of
himself as a superior being if he did such things to innocent
children, but he'd already made it crystal clear that he had no
respect whatsoever for mortal sentience. She wanted to threaten him,
to tell him that he would pay someday for what he'd done, but he
probably wouldn't; even if someday she became a Q, she wasn't going to
start a second civil war just to punish one psychopath, and she
already knew that outside of the context of the war, inter-Q violence
was practically unheard of. She wanted to demand, again, the location
of her children -- as a Q he could know anything in an instant if he
wanted to -- but clearly he didn't want to, and for all she knew the
Continuum might have forbidden him to know their location as
punishment for his harassment of beings they had later decided were
proto-Powers. The Continuum decidedly operated on the assumption that
some life forms were more equal than others, and Powers -- incorporeal
beings, or corporeal ones with extraordinary psionic abilities --
rated higher with them than ordinary mortals did.

If she couldn't say any of that, then there was nothing left to say.
"Yes," she said in a clipped, sharp tone.

"Then we're done here." He waved his hand again, and once again she
found herself outside the laboratory.

The rage she had had no outlet for while she was actually talking to
the being swamped her. "You son of a bitch," she snarled under her
breath at the blank wall of the lab. "Treat me like an object,
experiment on Tom, *mind-control* Tom into kidnapping me, turn us
*both* into some completely different form of life... I don't honestly
expect much better than any of that from a Q. But you *experimented*
on my *children!*"

The concrete she was standing on shattered, crumbling into dust, and
the dust rose around her, swirling in a cyclone. She had the dim sense
that the cyclone was under her control, that she could make it stop if
she wanted to, but she didn't want to. The rage was all out of
proportion to anything; it was the buildup from however long she'd
been here, of well-meaning, patronizing people who wouldn't let her go
home and being treated as invisible by most of the people she met and
being virtually powerless in the land of gods, weaker than a *baby*,
and none of the clocks ran on time and the topography made no sense
and she was so *frustrated*. This Q and what he'd done to her lost
children was just a convenient target. The dust cyclone tore at the
building, ripping at the blank beige brick, as more and more of the
sidewalk she was standing on ripped off and flung itself into the
winds spinning around her, and she felt power flow through her, red
and dark like blood, like a sandstorm on Vulcan, like fury itself.

"Aunt Kathy, *stop!*"

There were hands on her arms, pulling them away from her sides,
opening her fists. The power drained away, the cyclone falling to the
ground, and Janeway suddenly felt woozy. For a moment she saw the
concrete torn to bits around her, the damage to the brick building in
front of her, and Junior's friend q standing, surveying the damage
with hands on hips and raised eyebrows, saying, "Wow. A *human* did
this?"

And then everything spun. She saw Junior's face above her, and then
she fell backward against him dizzily. "She's badly drained," q said.

"Should I--?"

"No, you'd probably step on some human taboo. I'll get Amanda."

Everything went dark and cold.

****