Chapter 6
Returning to this new Enterprise was as easy as stepping through a doorway. An invisible doorway. There was likely a gate room somewhere that could spin a million gates to a million worlds. They could place gates in front of people unexpectedly and move people in the blink of an eye. They could open gateways and drop invisible probes through and study remotely. They could open gateways and drop androids in to the wild, androids shaped to appear like indigenous life forms. There is no privacy in space. Even a cloaked ship can be seen if you know what to look for. But with Iconanian gateway tech, there was no privacy anywhere. All of time and space was knowable. The Iconanian Wars the federation had, well that was hardly a skirmish. At some level of advancement, there is no fighting, there is only acceptance.
There had to be trust. If they wanted him dead, they would have killed him outright. There was no need for this game. He had to assume they had access to knowledge that he didn’t, or their immediate supervisors had knowledge that they and consequently he would not have access to. And if they were asking him to participate, then, there was a level of trust being extended towards him. A trust that he was ready and would not blow things up. On purpose.
Bliss extended a hand to him. “Welcome aboard.” He accepted her hand.
“How can I be of service?” Garcia asked.
They went from one room to another in the blink of an eye. It was a conference room. It was similar to the one he had known. People stood. There was a cat on the table. She looked up, then put her head back down and closed her eyes. Captain Jon Harister met him with a hand shake and then pulled him in for hug.
“I feel like I have known you all my life,” Harister said.
“Have you?” Garcia asked.
“Perhaps,” Garcia said. He introduced him to his command.
“You’re familiar with my first Officer, Captain Bliss,” Harister said.
Chief of Security, Captain Jackie Chan. Chief Medical Officer, Doctor Gregory
House. Chief Psychiatrist, Doctor Carl Jung. Chief Navigator, Captain Sacagawea. Chief
Engineer, Captain Nicola Tesla. Chief of communications and operations, Captain Nyota Uhura. And finally, there was the Ambassador, Isis. At the mention of her name, she stretched and rolled onto her back. “Mew.”
“I think there is joke being played on me. Are we in the holodeck?” Garcia asked. “Not a joke. But if it is easier to accept this moment as a holodeck simulation, we can leave it at that,” Harister said.
“I want to know the truth,” Garcia said.
“That’s a continuum that’s needs to be navigated,” Harister said. He invited him to have a seat. “Let’s start with a story. A long time ago, in a time you’re most familiar with, the 231st century, there was a man that read a book. Maybe you’ve heard of it ‘Think and Grow Rich,’ by Napoleon Hill. In that book are instructions for a particular meditation. The Invisible counselor technique. Chapter 13, if I am not mistaken. That man decided to experiment. He chose seven people, instead of the recommended ttwelve because he thought, if he was going to do something crazy, he would only be half crazy. He wanted an advisor on strength. Chan seemed like the perfect instructor, because strength without being tempered with humor lacks compassion. He was exploring his unconscious mind, so Carl Jung was a no brainer. He needed a guide, and Sacagawea just seemed perfect. She brings with her the light of her people, connection to nature, but also a fierce courage to overcome. Captain Tesla, well, he’s the inventor of everything! And he has deep insights into the nature of reality that help us travel. We travel, not just with warp-drives, hyper-drives and quantum drives, but with the power of thought. We’re all travelers, here. Uhura, too, no brainer. She speaks many languages. She brings music and love. You’re probably thinking, she doesn’t look like the Uhura you remember. We’ll get to that. As for the Ambassador, if you’re going into darkness, one should always invite a messenger of Light. Why not the Goddess.”
“Please tell me, I am not Osirus and your mission is to find all the pieces of me,” Garcia said.
“That’s funny,” Bliss said.
Coffee became available via site to site replicator. Garcia continued: “You can imagine how any of these people could have been ripped from time, transporter clones made manifest, but how do you explain House, a character from a television show? He is that, minus the limp. He resembles the actor that personified him and made him real. That man who did the invisible counselor technique experiment wanted to know what would happen when you introduced an element of fiction. Assuming the technique works, is House a construct? Is he an archetype? Or is he just a man that was birth through a confluence of contributors, made real by an audience, and manifested due to need?”
“So, all of you are mental constructs? Archetypes within the Borg collect mind?” Garcia asked.
“No, but if that makes this easier, we can operate from that perspective,” Harister offered. “Ty not to explain this yet. It’s difficult not to contextualize and draw conclusions. Paraphrasing Jung, the Redbook, ‘don’t interpret the experience when you’re having it; just go with it.’ Let me give you another story. Imagine you’re a Q. An inter-dimensional being, possessing immeasurable power over human beings.” “They remind me of the Jinn,” Bliss said.
“Indeed,” Harister said. “I can spend stories to that end. Now, you’re Q, and every thought you have manifests a reality. Every dream you have is as solid of a universe as our universe.”
“This is a dream?” Garcia asked.
“Simulation theory,” Bliss said. “We always come back to that analogy.” “Forget everything you know about Q, in terms of history,” Garcia offered. “We, humanity, are the children of Q. We grow up to be, or evolve into, Q. We take on human form, or incarnate if you will, into human vessels, because it slows down our creative powers. The human body is a cradle that allows us to learn to control our thoughts and emotions without unraveling the entire universe. All universes are real. All realities and possibilities are real. You once lamented it felt like someone was determined to destroy the universe you knew, the closest thing to utopia that humanity had ever established and trade it for a dystopia. Well, they did. Someone had that dream, others bought into it. It became a consensual whirlpool into another frame of reference. That reality is real and the children of Q are exploring it.”
“And sometimes, people get stuck in that. That’s where we come in. We are here to help the human beings find their way out of darkness,” Sacagawea said.
Garcia didn’t say anything. He was trying to keep his brain from spinning a story. Would spinning an explanation make it concrete? Quantum physics! The double slit conundrum, wave or particle. An observer was needed to make it real… He couldn’t not make connections.
“Space is not the final frontier,” Bliss said. “Consciousness is.”
“Ever heard of Remote Viewing?” Harister asked.
“Yes. The concept originated in the 70s, a form of psychic spying during the cold war, part of the Stargate project,” Garcia said.
“Psychic spying is really the wrong word,” Jung said. “Remote Viewing is a function of consciousness. So is telepathy. We’re connected all the time. To everyone and everything. We can’t not be.”
“My esteem colleague, Einstein, was right about one thing,” Tesla said. “Spooky action at a distance is a real thing. Whether you take Carl’s metaphysical world view or science, we are all connected.”
“But if you’re a person wanting to control information and to hold secrets, you’d deny it’s a real thing, or distract people from truth to make profit or hold power,” Tesla said.
“All industrial based philosophies, Capitalism, Marxism, Communism, require a philosophy of secrecy. Without secrecy, capitalism ceases to work. If everyone knows you product’s value is based on a lie, marketing strategies, then no one will buy it,” Bliss said. “In fact, that’s why you need marketing, to convince people of a need they don’t have.”
“From that perspective, conspiracies feel real. It is true that there are people who hold that position in order to maintain control,” Chan said. “It is also true, that if our adult form is Q, then sometimes adults don’t tell their children everything. Children are informed based on their ability to comprehend. One human lifetime is not enough to understand what being an adult Q is like. We need to experience limitations to grow. We need to experience losing in order to motivate us to try harder. We need thousands of life times. Sometimes hundreds of thousands. We need to learn to control Chi.”
“Cycling through time, as you did, counts as lifetimes,” Uhura said.
“Being raised in a brain simulator, as you were, counts. How many pre-lives did you live?” Tesla asked.
“And now, you want to send me back in the game,” Garcia said. “You want me to incarnate?”
“Not incarnate, exactly,” Garcia said. “We want you to be a walk-in.” “A what?”
“Bodies are like avatars, in many ways. The body itself isn’t the soul. In fact, the body isn’t even a single self. The body has an innate awareness comprised of all the flora and fauna, all the individual cells, and the relationship to the Q soul is a symbiotic relationship, the gestalt of all of this, results in greater awareness for all,” Uhura said. “It’s like an overture, a hundred instruments coming together as one.”
“We found a way to insert you into the timeline,” Uhura said. “It’s the ideal opportunity for us. Someone called for help. They want out of the game. We can accommodate them, but we need someone to take their place. We have everything approved. We can answer their call and swap them out.”
“In other words, we beam them out, you get beamed in, and you lived the remainder of that life,” Harister said.
“As me, or that person?” Garcia asked.
“They will see as you as that person. You will have the lifetime experiences and memories of that person available to you, but you will also have yours,” Bliss said.
“That’s the advantage of being a walk-in. You get to keep you past memories. Your personal memories and experiences will help you navigate, but you must realize, none of this reality is anything like the one you remember. It was so vastly different your memories will be nothing more than a fiction.” “A useful fiction,” Bliss said.
“So I get to keep my sense of self?” Garcia asked. “Yes,” Bliss said. “Privilege of being a walk-in.” “Do I get special training?” Garcia asked.
“You have all the training you need,” Harister said. “You say yes to this, we’ll make it happen.”
“Do I have goal?” Garcia asked.
“Just live a good life,” Harister said.
“That’s pretty vague,” Garcia said.
“The timeline is changed,” Harister said. “What do suppose will happen when Kirk and the Enterprise fail to meet and stop the Kelvin? They don’t go to Iotia. They don’t meet Apollo. Some things still have to happen. Kirk met the Doomsday machine. He went up against V’Ger. What do you suppose will happen when Vulcan is removed from the time line? There will be a greater Romulan and Klingon presence. These won’t be the Klingons you remember.”
“They’re the reptilians,” Garcia said.
“Yeah,” Bliss said. “You met. Your influence in trying to change the past will help you in this life time, in unexpected ways.”
“You know everything that will happen?”
“No,” Harister said. “We have some good guesses, but no one knows everything. Even our descendants don’t know everything. They know more than we, but for every age there is a field of probabilities. Some things tend to repeat, or manifest regardless. Consequently, these ‘hard’ events require a certain level of engagement to maintain the time line. There are timelines that are lost to us. We’re here. We can affect this one, and in doing so, fortify it, the people in it, and the surrounding timelines so ultimately, they all continue to exist.”
“You’re not sending me as a female, are you?” “Is that a problem?” Sacagawea asked.
“Um, no,” Garcia said, regretting the question.
“You will be male,” Bliss said.
“Will I be in Star Fleet?’ Garcia asked.
“We will leave the fine details to you,” Harister said. “From time to time, we may advise you along the way.”
“Really?”
“You didn’t think we’d put you in completely blind without contact, did you?”
Uhura said. “This a team effort. Not just you. It’s not about you.” “It will feel like it’s all about you,” Jung said.