Post:?

I was shocked.  I was astounded.

"I can't believe it.  That's just..."  I shook my head, stumped for words.  It was unbelievable.

I was examining posting logs.  There had been two, two, in an entire year.  Two posts, for one whole year!  And, sad to say, I had written both.

I sat back in my chair, staring past the computer, quiet, pensive, for what seemed an eternity.  Time stretched out, and stretched, and stretched some more.

There was a time when umpteen posts filled the inbox on any given day; so many in a month I barely kept up.  And it had come to this: Two, in a year.  What happened?

"Like you don't know?"

Q sat on top of the monitor.  His legs were crossed, arms at his sides, in a tranquil pose, no more than six inches high.  He resembled a tiny Buddha.

"Q... what are you—"

"I'm meditating."  The entity closed his eyes and feigned a serene expression.  "Quiet, please."

I couldn't tell what he was wearing.  Reality seemed to... shift, elusively, around him, as if the barrier separating him from my world, the partition between reality and imagination, could not be seen.  I let out a sigh, looking away.

"Shhh!"  Q opened his eyes and glared at me.  "Do you know how loud you are at this size?  You are disturbing my zen.  It's hard to achieve... enlightenment."

"Q—"

He snapped his fingers.  I stood in a game emporium, a small arcade I recognized from my youth.  It didn't exist anymore.  It had been torn down years ago, replaced by an RV lot.  Patrons, teen youths as they appeared in my recollection (who probably didn't resemble the real people then), hovered near various games, video and pinball machines.

Nearby, Q surveyed a pool table, balls scattered over its surface.

He picked up the eight.  Its glossy black finish reflected his face and fingers.  The "8", inside of a little white circle on its side, was an infinity symbol.  Lines etched in the black paint resembled Earth's continents.  A black Earth.  Other balls on the table were, upon close inspection, other planets.

"If they only knew."  Q replaced the eight and retrieved a cue stick, twirling it like a baton.  He managed this with the stick nearly as long as him, passing through him.  "Fancy a game?"

"You know how to play pool?"

"What a silly question.  Like I've told Jean-Luc and Kathie... like I keep telling all of you humans, a thousand times... I know everything."

"Not with an IQ of 2005."

"2010.  We've moved forward."

I looked at a calendar on the wall.  It would be 2011, in one week.  "I'm not the best pool player," I said, though I liked to play.

"Oh, I know.  Topaz is; why can't you be more like him?"

I gave him a dirty expression and peered through a window.  Outside, it was day.  I couldn't remember what this place was called.  Predictably, the old, beat-up wooden sign was blank.  "Why the eight?" I asked.  "Why does it look like Earth?"

"Isn't it obvious?"  He circled the table, chalking his stick (with his finger-tip).  "It's the one to watch.  The one you have to avoid.  It may be the most important one in the game.  You can't sink it."  Expertly he leaned over, aligning the white cue ball.  "Not until the end of the game... and if you scratch it, game over."

He took his shot.  The cue ball struck purple number four, snapping it into the nearest pocket with an audible ker-plunk.  Then somehow he missed solid yellow #1.

"I've always hated that one," Q said.

The constellation of balls on the table seemed random, but with an ordered pattern, which I couldn't place.  I wondered who broke them, then left them.  "Are the others planets?"

"Of course.  They're inconsequential.  Except five, maybe.  That's Bajor."

I decided on green number six.  It rested between the blue-striped ten and fifteen (maroon stripe), path clear to the far corner.  It went in.  Strange.  That green ball was always a problem for me in the past, refusing to sink, like a bad-luck charm.

"There goes Romulus," Q said.

I glanced again at the calendar on the wall.

I enjoyed the game, and Q was actually a decent player.  But I lost interest, with other business pressing.  Exerting my own will, we shifted to a rocky mountainside, amidst brown leaves and trees without them, under a gray afternoon sky.  It was autumn in Missouri, real-time: When and where I lived.

"Why are we here?" asked Q.  It was cold, and barren, and getting colder.  Even he shivered, in human form.  It had rained.  It hadn't snowed yet, but it soon would.

I didn't want to be there.  This was my story.  I took us back to the computer, and warmth (though I doubt Q really needed it).

The unanswered question lingered on my lips, from earlier.

"You know why I'm here," Q said.

He was right.  I had brought him here.  Q served a function; his raison d'être, the entire reason for his existence.

He knew the question.  "Say it," I said.

"You changed.  You changed Arcadia from what it used to be.  You changed it into something else."

"Did I?"  I gave it consideration.  Not I, alone.  But I had to admit my own role in the process.  "It had to change."

"Why?"

"It's the universal constant."

"That's your reason?"

"Everything changes.  We can't stop it.  Everything must change."

"So it would have changed on its own, eventually?  Is that it?"

Q asked a lot of questions.  But, again: raison d'être.  Providing answers wasn't his job, despite being "all-seeing, all-knowing" (which was a lie; an omnipotent being would not be so handicapped).

"I enacted changes, yes," I said.  It had already changed from my original vision.  It wasn't change for the better, in my opinion.  "I tried to keep things interesting.  I wanted it to be different.  Honest.  Original.  Different from everything else."

"Is that what killed it?" Q said.  "Does that mean you are responsible?  Who wants change, or originality, when it's easier to imitate what's been done?  You.  Look at yourself.  What are you doing?  You're talking to yourself.  You are writing yourself.  You're writing as if you're in a story.  I believe there's a technical term for that."  His eyes narrowed.  "Bonkers."

"Am I?"  I shrugged.  "I always was a little insane."

"And getting crazier every day."  Q's retort carried a hint of the usual smug but disinterested sarcasm.  Maybe he was tired of it – in which case, we both were.

But I couldn't submit to that line of thinking.  I gestured at the computer before me.  "This direction... these stories, things I write... They're coming from somewhere.  There's some kind of force at work in the universe.  I feel it, every day... a feeling that there's something inside the world, guiding me, pushing, needing to be expressed... demanding existence.  Look at the drafts."

On my other website, which many people didn't know about, hundreds of post-starts and snippets, plots and unfinished storylines, had accumulated.  All revolved around a central, recurring theme, but it was vague, elusive, difficult to define; the many pieces didn't quite fit.  I couldn't make heads or tails of what to do with it.  But I couldn't let it go.  I scrutinized everything and pounded my brain daily, watching for the unifying factor to leap out.  At some point, if I kept at it long enough, everything would fall into place.  It always did.  Once I had that direction, I could start posting again: chapters in a long, intricate saga, spanning time and space, affecting hundreds of characters.

But it wasn't happening.  It wasn't falling into place.  The more I worked, the more angles I tried, introducing new characters and experimental elements and developments and what-if scenarios, the longer it grew, and the more complicated it became.  I had a small novel on my hands.  But it wasn't happening.

To my shock, over a year had passed, in which I had posted only twice, to a group once bustling with activity... now dead – because of me?  The world of Arcadia was quiet... serene, and still, as Q was (pretending to be), perched atop the computer monitor.  No one (besides me) knew it lived, raging inside my head.  And still my grand storyline, my unifying master achievement which would 1) answer unanswered questions, 2) tie up loose ends of the past, and 3) set a new direction for the future, sat unfinished.

"Q, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse.  I've tried to walk away.  Yet every time, I come back, intending to start anew, and the beast is waiting.  It creeps in, and before I know it I'm back to banging my head against a wall, trying to hammer it out."

Q smirked.  "You humans and your euphemisms."

"I can't get past it."

"Let it go.  Let the whole thing go."

"I can't."

"The group... Arcadia... characters, storylines..."

"Can't do it."

"...along with your hope of revitalizing it.  Call it quits, once and for all."

"I can't.  I just said: Every time I try, every time, it's only a matter of time until I come back, or it comes back, but either way, it won't go away.  I've tried throwing in the towel.  I've told myself in the past that I could let it go.  But I couldn't.  I don't know why, but I can't.  It won't let me go.  So I quit trying to quit.  I give up on giving up.  I can't quit.  It's with me – every... single... day."

I lapsed into silence.

Then...

I felt myself react to the question.  It wasn't Q who said it.  I wasn't sure where it came from: Myself, or... not me.

That was partly it.  Partly.  But not all.

"There's an ending which must be realized," I said.  "It needs to be complete.  The steps to getting there are laid."  I paused, fingertips tapping my keyboard.  "It has to make sense."

"How much of what you write makes sense?" Q said.  "To anybody?"

"I don't know.  If no one else, then it has to be for me.  It has to make sense to me.  If I'm the only one left who cares about it, it has to be for me.  I have to finish what I've started.  I have to see it through."

"Does it matter?" Q said.  "You people are born then die; your nations rise and fall; and worlds go around the stars.  All that you do may mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of cosmic destiny.  What does it matter, what you do?"

I thought about it.  "I suppose it comes down to one question."

Q nodded.  "Are you happy?"

Did it make anyone happy?

It might have surprised some to hear such speech, from Q.  But then, was it surprising? – if one considered the source.  Q said, "What are you going to call this?"

I couldn't help grinning as it hit me.  Now that was something different.. at least for Arcadia.