Are You There, God?

Posted on Sun Jan 5th, 2025 @ 5:25am by Lieutenant Commander Rin

Mission: Season 6: Episode 5: A church beyond heaven
Location: Rin's Quarters
900 words - 1.8 OF Standard Post Measure

A holographic map hovered over in the middle of Rin’s room. She had started at Tavara, a world off the beaten path in the Beta Quadrant. Tucked into a little space behind the Romulan Star Empire. That was where the Federation had finally found her during a First Contact mission merely a decade ago.

Now, she pulled the perspective back, watching the names of Federation worlds pop up, all clustered in their corner of space. The image continued to scroll until the entire Milky Way was visible, the dense Alpha and Beta Quadrants divided up into its major territories.

The Gamma and Delta Quadrants were far less populated, dominated by Borg Space and Dominion Space. Quadrants full of mystery, with much of the data coming entirely from distant stellar observation. Most of the specific Delta Quadrant data came from a few select sources such as Voyager and a handful of xBs. There were worlds included on this map solely because of Rin, which was a very weighty way of looking at it.
More data was better than less data. Unless you’re the Chief of Intel, when you spend half your time making sure most people don’t get the important data.

She was in no mood to get philosophical about her job.

The view continued to pull back, until the hologram was nearly black. Then, finally, another galaxy appeared, then another, and another. The space between galaxies was larger than the galaxies themselves, huge expanses of nothing. And those galaxies, while shining brightly on the display, were actually also quite empty, possible of passing through other galaxies.

Rin grabbed Cirinus as it scrolled by, gesturing for the hologram to zoom in. It was a visually desolate space, populated only by what stars were visible from the Milky Way, or things Teev’s data had revealed. Again, data the Federation only had because of a single person.

Space was… big. She was still looking at a mere corner of a supercluster, which, in turn, was surrounded by more superclusters. Even an immortal using conduits like the Borg would never be able to visit all of it, because by the time he had visited everything which had existed at the beginning of his journey, more objects would have been born. “See everything” was an impossible goal post.

And the universe has been around literally forever, as time itself only came into existence alongside it. For the first fraction of a second, even the laws of physics didn’t apply. There was literally no way of knowing what occurred in that moment. It was a mystery the universe would never give up.

If there was a god, then perhaps the A’janie were right. Perhaps it was the universe itself. In which case everything, including people, were a part of that god. But how would you know? Rin supposed that was the nature of faith, and why the A’janie seem such a contemplative people.

But, then, why would parts of the whole fight itself?

Free will. There was no point to life without free will, but people can do all sorts of dumb things with it. That’s why her job was keeping the dangerous data out of the wrong people’s hands, because people have the ability to do really dumb things.

That’s life. In a perfect world, her job would be unnecessary. But if people could only make perfect choices, there would be no free will.

But, then, what about the things without free will? What about the asteroid which destroyed the A’janie homeworld and inspired survivors to turn their back on old gods and instead study the universe?

But the trajectory of celestial objects is measurable. They are bound by the laws of physics, and, thus, predictable so long as all relevant factors are known. So, unless that asteroid miraculously deviated from its path, the A’janie homeworld simply had the misfortune of crossing the asteroid's path at exactly the wrong moment. It happened. Once in millions or billions of years in the life of a single planet, but really quite frequent on a universal scale. When your sample size is nearly infinite, collisions are practically non-stop.

Probabilities are neat.

She wished she had more information on the asteroid. Had it miraculously deviated? She had a hard time believing it had. But that was a circular argument, and she knew it. She wanted proof of the unprovable.

Sentient life enjoys structures. It likes building and organizing. It likes there to be people at the top and people at the bottom. Even the people at the bottom tend to value hierarchy. When disaster falls, people want to understand how it happened. And if they don’t have a scientific explanation, they turn to religion.

Rin believed everything had a scientific explanation. Thus, there was no room for religion. Which was making being open to religion damn frustrating.

But if you blame an asteroid on God, you can blame anything on God. You can blame a Borg incursion on God. If God can send an asteroid, it can send an army of drones. The free will thing doesn’t even apply, because drones have none. Whether the Collective itself does might be an interesting philosophical discussion.

Which she will probably never have.

She sighed and shut off the hologram. That was enough contemplation for today.