milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

captain kirk,
teja

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Jim sits quietly at the bar, looking over various and sundry briefings from Starfleet. He's particularly interested in the rather understated announcement that the transwarp drive aboard Excelsior has been removed and will be replaced with a standard (if state of the art) warp core. The Great Experiment is over, and Jim isn't at all surprised.

Come say hi.

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Teja sits. "Did I speak of the Nobodies, before?" he asks.

"I've met one of them. Rather difficult beings to understand, I'd say."

"They are from a universe where many things that are metaphors in most worlds are literally true," Teja says. "They do seem very strange to many -- they are truly strange!"

"And have you succeeded in understanding any of the seeming metaphor?" Because Jim was surprisingly perplexed.

"Oh yes," Teja says. "Once I accept that they are nothing like me in fact, they are surprisingly like me, in metaphor."

"In what way?" Jim can stand to be educated about these (and is there a better word?) aliens.

"I lost my heart to darkness, early in my life," Teja says. "Only, in a sane world like mine, it did not happen that literally. But it happened literally, for them. They are walking, talking metaphors for the darkest aspects of the human condition, and an experiment in applied metaphysics; by observing them, and questioning them, we may glean deep insights into ourselves as human beings."

"Perhaps." Jim is a bit dubious. He prefers his metaphors to remain metaphors.

"Whether we wish to gain insights is our own business, naturally," Teja says. "But metaphor made literal, they will always be, whether we use them or not."

"And do you think that they learn anything from us in return?"

"They do," Teja says, thinking of Zexion's questions. "But much than knowledge, they need our help for their survival!"

Jim raises an eyebrow. "How so?"

"You may have heard them claim that they are barely real?" Teja says. "That is literally so. And reality, in their case as ever, has its simple, surface proof in observation."

"I don't quite follow."

"They are not quite real," Teja says. "Literally. They are ever in danger to fade. Being observed by others that see them as truly there, speaking with them or touching them, even in discord, reaffirms their reality. Assume that I get angry at one, and poke him with the end of my axe, barely within the rules of this place; the resistance that my axe handles encounters proves to me, to him, and to the universe in which we interact, once more, that this Nobody is real."

"Oh. Quantum theory carried to the macro level," he says before wondering if Teja has encountered that branch of weird science.

"Quantum -- a certain amount of something, Latin," Teja says. "Theoria -- the pondering or gazing-at of some fact. Makros -- 'big', in Greek. Would that mean that the metaphors made real which make up their universe might be explained by enlarging phenomena that have been pondered, to a certain amount?"

It does not truly make sense to him. But if it offers a new angle for understanding the Nobodies, Teja is willing to ponder any strange and new idea.

"Quantum theory is the set of rules that explain how the smallest particles of matter - those that make up the atom - behave." He assumes that Teja knows Democritus' idea of the atom. "One of the strangest ideas is that at that level, the exact nature of some particles isn't determined until the particle is observed. In essence, until I study it, it isn't quite real.

"In a way, these Nobodies embody that idea." Though not exactly, and it remind Jim as much of Peter Pan as of Heisenberg.

"In a way, they do," Teja says. "it is not the only aspect of their being, not the only metaphor that can be turned upon itself -- but indeed, if one observes them, they become more real."

"I have to wonder why anyone would make beings like that. And how."

"I do not know all twists and turns of their story," Teja says. "But what I have learned seems to hint that it was some science gone awry, in a universe that take metaphor literally, to start with. They were men once, and bore other names; and then, the parts that make a living, breathing human -- or not-human, in the case of Xaldin -- were split. The first of the Nobodies were those that worked on that science; and they were betrayed by their leader, and landed in that pitiful plight. Over the years, through that which their failed science had set in motions, more Nobodies came into not-being."

Edited 2008-10-13 09:49 (UTC)

It was ghastly when Jim first heard some of it, and remains as such now. He can only think of the transporter accident that once split him between (for lack of a better term) good and evil halves. "I have to say that in this one case, there might be worlds I'm not sure I'd want to visit, if both science and the rules of nature can cause such accidents."

"I think their world is destroyed now, or ruined beyond recognition," Teja says. "But of course, time being as open to travel as space, from this vantage point, you might always reach it at an earlier point. No, I would not wish to go there, either. It is a dangerous world, since their science went wrong; and before, seeing them alive and well and real, would be truly painful."

Jim nods. "I've seen the results of science gone wrong enough times that I would rather try to undo the harm than study the cause."

"Indeed," Teja says. "Dangerous. And they have much in writing; so the cause would not be in doubt."