Chapter Text
The Curiosity Lab on DS9 ran hot when all three of them were in it. The environmental system kept losing the argument; somewhere above the false ceiling a regulator clicked and clicked and never quite settled, and the air had gone warm and slightly used.
A test console threw up the same green cascade it had been throwing for nine hours. Then, on line four hundred and something, it stopped being green.
MILES: There. There it is. Four-seventeen.
He didn't move from the stool.
JULIAN: I see it.
Julian was already leaning in, one hand flat on the console edge, the other hovering over the readout without touching it.
JULIAN: Initialization order. The probabilistic layer requested the calibration table before the deterministic core finished writing it, so it got…
He stopped. Scrolled up. Scrolled back down.
JULIAN: Garbage. It got garbage and ran anyway. Which means the table was late, which means…
He scrolled up again.
MILES: Which means we found it.
JULIAN: No.
His hand came off the console.
JULIAN: We found it the last four times. Cat, run it again.
Cat was lying on the floor under the secondary display with her boots up on a supply crate, a PADD balanced on her sternum, and a mug on the deck beside her head with a skin on it.
CAT: Running it again won't…
She tipped the PADD up to read it, tipped it back down.
CAT: Okay. Running it again.
Her thumb moved. The cascade restarted. Four hundred lines of green. Four-seventeen: green.
CAT: It passed.
JULIAN: Same input?
CAT: Identical input, that's the…
She sat up, caught the mug before her elbow took it out, set it somewhere worse.
CAT: That's the thing, Julian, it's the same table, the same call, the same order, and one time it eats garbage and one time it doesn't, and a system does not change its mind…
JULIAN: It does if the timing changes.
CAT: The timing can't change, it's the same…
She stopped. Looked at the ceiling. The regulator clicked.
CAT: Anyway. The timing can't change.
Miles dragged both hands down his face.
MILES: Eleventh time. That's eleven. I've stopped trusting the green ones more than the red ones. At least the red one's telling me something.
JULIAN: It's telling us the same thing it told us at oh-two-hundred.
Julian pushed back from the console and stood, and for a second just stood there, fingers laced behind him, looking at nothing. Then he unlaced them.
JULIAN: We're not converging. We've been circling the same four lines since this morning and we keep arriving back where we started, with marginally more certainty that we're lost.
MILES: So we take a break, and I go find a sandwich that doesn't taste like the inside of this room.
JULIAN: We took a break at…
MILES: We did not take a break. You said break and then explained buffer allocation to the wall for twenty minutes.
JULIAN: That was the break.
A light went out.
Not flickered, went out, cleanly, one moment to the next, with no stutter in it anywhere. The overhead bank above the central table dropped to nothing, and into the dark below it the air did something the air in a room is not supposed to do: it folded, with a sound like a held breath being let go all at once. Then there was a man sitting on the edge of the central table in a Starfleet captain's uniform he had not been issued, swinging one boot, hands folded on his knee.
Q: Hello, Julian.
Miles came off the stool. Cat, on the floor, put both hands over her face.
Julian didn't move. His hands had gone back behind him, laced, parade rest.
JULIAN: Q.
Q: You remembered.
Q put a hand to his chest.
Q: I confess I wondered. It's been… what, months… since the cat, and not so much as a thank-you note. I gave you a perfectly serviceable predator, scaled it down to something your quarters could survive, made the whole thing tasteful, and the silence afterward was… well.
He looked around the lab, at the mugs, the stacked PADDs, the cascade still cycling green on a console nobody was watching.
Q: I assumed you'd forgotten me. People do. It's one of my crosses to bear.
JULIAN: I haven't forgotten you. I've been hoping that was mutual.
Q: Oh, that's good.
He pointed at Julian, pleased.
Q: That's the old reflexes. I worried the captaincy might have sanded you down… they do that, the pips, they make a man measured… but no. Still got the little knife in the velvet. Tell me, does she know?
He tipped his head toward nothing in particular, by which he meant everywhere.
Q: Ezri. Does she know you talk like this when she's not in the room? Or do you save the good lines for me?
JULIAN: What do you want, Q?
Q: What I always want. To help.
He hopped off the table. Miles stepped sideways without seeming to decide to, putting himself a half-pace closer to Julian, and Q smiled at it.
Q: And before you do the thing… the Q, the last time you helped thing, I can hear you queuing it up… I want you to consider that I have been watching.
He spread his arms to take in the room.
Q: Eleven hours. The four lines. The green that lies and the red that sulks. The Chief's sandwich, which is going to be terrible, I've seen it. You're not going to find it from out here, Julian. You're too big. You're standing outside a clock complaining you can't see the gears.
JULIAN: We'll find it.
Q: You'll find it in weeks. I have weekend plans.
The grin was still there. Julian's hands stayed laced behind him. Then it changed, not widened, settled.
Q: So I've decided. After much reflection, and a frankly generous amount of self-improvement on my part… I've decided to be helpful. Properly. No riddles. I'm going to show you the problem.
Cat had gotten to her feet.
CAT: Show us how…
Q: From the inside. Where the gears are.
Julian's hands came apart.
JULIAN: Q, don't…
Q snapped his fingers.
The lab went white, then it went away (the floor first) and the last thing in the room that was still the room was the regulator above the ceiling, clicking, clicking. And then it was clicking somewhere very far below them, and they were falling toward a light that was laid out in lines.