The Terran Vampires
PrevNode LinkNextBack on Earth
Node LinkNext[ The scene gradually changes to a Terran valley. ]
Katie: And we’re on Earth. Israel. The Yizra’el Valley, next to a Moshav.
Worf: Earth? Isn’t it a breach of security?
Q: Commander, the Q Continuum has no problem bypassing your primitive security measures.
Worf: I see.
Jake: [Looks around] Look!
[ They see two men and a woman sitting next to a house on three chairs. There’s a wide swing nearby. ]
Q: We should go over there.
[ They walk. ]
Meet the Terran Vampires
PrevNode LinkVampires’ Love Interest
Node LinkNextShlomo: [Munching] Dvorah, it tastes differently this time.
Dvorah: Yes, I’ve been playing with the ingredients this time.
Mosheh: Yes, it does taste differently.
[ The gang approaches. ]
Katie: Professor Shlomo Abramovich? You’re King Solomo… Errr! I’m not talking to you again. [Goes to sit on the Swing, aggravated.]
Shlomo: Mosheh, remember I told you about Katie?
Mosheh: Oh yeah! She looks cute when she’s angry.
Katie: Moses, right?
Mosheh: That’s right.
Katie: Well, in case you have any interest in me, I should note that I have a policy against getting involved with people who are 4 times my senior or more.
Mosheh: Relax! I married girls who were 40 times my junior or more and my own descendants, and retrospectively I can tell that many of them were more mature and rational than I was in most respects.
Katie: The latter fact does not surprise me.
Dax: I never dated someone who was 40 times my junior. That would make him a toddler. I’m humbled.
[ Mosheh, Shlomo and Dvorah chuckle, the rest of the crew smile. Jake sits next to Katie on the swing seat. ]
Men are Overachievers
PrevNode LinkNextWorf: So Mr. Abramovich… I mean, Prof. Abramovich… I mean - Your Majesty!
Shlomo: Mister, Doctor, Professor, General, Admiral, Duke, Baron, Count, Earl…
Mosheh: Fellow of the Royal Society!
Shlomo: Indeed. Nasi, Rabbi, Rav, Emir… you name it - I had it. Just call me Shlomo.
Worf: I see. Mr. Shlomo.
Dvorah: Men, I tell you! Overachievers, and always need to travel. I stayed most of the time here.
Jadzia: And you are?
Dvorah: I’m Dvorah.
Bashir: Dvorah the Prophet?
Dvorah: In a sense. See, I’ve been conscious since I was a little girl, and never hallucinated voices like the Nevi’im did. I was just considered a prophet because I was deemed so wise. I was good at settling disputes and so decided to eventually settle here in the Yizra’el Valley under a Date Tree.
Dvorah: I expected to die soon, but for some reason, I didn’t.
Jake: So the story in the Bible is true?
Dvorah: Oh, that. See, the Israelites here were indeed under threat. So I decided to assign the task of fighting the Canaanite to Baraq, a young brat who was conscious and rebellious and gave me nothing but trouble, but that I knew was very smart and clever. He did pretty well on the task. Then we partied.
Dvorah: Baraq is now doing Archaeological work for the Q continuum in the Peach Seed Galaxy. Indiana Jones style. This kid could never remain quiet for long.
Bashir: And was the song yours?
Dvorah: Song, song. Ah yes. Yes, but it was a later addition. See, a few centuries later, some kids approached me asking for information about the battle so they could do a play about it. I told them all about it and then they said “That’s it?”.
Dvorah: So we spent a day composing a song, and rehearsed it, and eventually it was recorded in the Bible after God knows how many transformations and rewrites. But otherwise I just stayed here.
Dvorah: Well, I fled to Judea after the Assyrian conquest, and left with the Judeans to Babylon. Then I returned here, and saw that my Date tree was cut down. I eventually said “whatever” and settled near here ever since.
Jadzia: Wow!
Q: Dvorah, BTW, is considered the Terran elder, and thus is the ambassador of Earth in the Q continuum.
Dvorah: Yeah well, I was appointed as such because I was older than Mosheh here, but I wasn’t really the oldest living human. In fact, there are four women and two men who are older than me and still alive.
So much suffering
PrevNode LinkNextKatie: I don’t get it!
Mosheh: Don’t get what?
Katie: You guys, are like - vampires - you can do anything, and yet we had so much suffering since then here on Earth. Why didn’t you stop World War II?
Shlomo: Katie… you must understand that there are many reasons for that. Some of which are technical like the fact that it takes a vampire 300 years to become an immortal, who cannot be killed and that even after that, he or she can still feel pain, and is not invincible.
Shlomo: But the more important reason is that our old age clouds our judgement and make us feel helpless and out of time. While we are still young at heart, we still often feel that the generation is constantly diminishing and that we yearn for the old days, when everything was simpler.
Katie: [Frustrated] Excuses!
Moses tells his story
PrevNode LinkNextJadzia: Regardless of what you could have done to prevent past problems, I think we’d be interested in hearing your stories, seeing that you’re Moses and all. So what really happened?
Mosheh: Sure. See, it was at the time that my brother Aharon and I led a small tribe of Hebrew speaking nomads called the Levi’im. We ended up being captured by the Egyptians and forced to work at mines. However, we had a lot of communication problems. To facilitate this, I decided to teach everybody there the Phoenician alphabet.
Mosheh: They liked it so much that they kept passing lots of written messages among themselves. Like a primitive form of instant messaging. Next thing I knew, all the Levi’im gained consciousness, conspired against their enslavers, and broke free. The Egyptians did not know what hit them.
Mosheh: They called themselves “Bney Ha-Elohim”.
Jadzia: The sons of the gods!
Katie: Well, actually in ancient Hebrew, “Elohim” was a high leader. What Bney Ha-Elohim probably meant was that they were “self-leading”.
Mosheh: Indeed. I still believed that we should behave ourselves morally, and with the help of Aharon, who acted as my spokesperson, due to the fact that I lacked assertiveness, we wandered around the desert. We eventually found another small tribe of Hebrew Semitic people (about 500) who called themselves “Bney Yisra’el”. I taught them the Alphabet, gave them the Ten Commandments, and instructed them to “invade” Canaan and convert the Canaanites to the one true way.
Mosheh: It was Joshua, Kalev and other leaders of the Yisra’elim who did it. I myself followed my brother’s trail to Assyria, to see what he’s been up to. Back in Assyria, consciousness already started to take off. People were looking for gods, some people were still hallucinating them, there was deceit, there was uncertainty - it was a crazy place.
Mosheh: I sat together with Aharon, as well as Nimrod, an early discoverer of consciousness, who “betrayed the gods” and escaped from death. We discussed the implications of the self-leading, and what it would lead to. We decided that the 3 of us will form a secret conspiracy, in order to further lead the world into prosperity and peace and by following the gods.
Mosheh: So we travelled back to Israel. The “conquest” of Joshua was very successful, and we decided to party. However, a strange and majestic man came to us. He said he was a leader of leaders, a king of kings, a god of gods, and that we appeased him and said that he condemned us to roam the land forever, alive.
Kira: Q!
Mosheh: No, not Q himself, but one of the Qs. At the time, we felt it was indeed a curse, because we felt our death was the natural way. But it may also have been a blessing.
Dvorah: In any case, you can imagine my surprise when the Israelites came here and asked me if I was willing to become an Israelite. The conversation was very funny. I asked them what would being an Israelite entail, and why it was important. Eventually, they decided I was too smart for them, and called upon Joshua. He decided that I was all-right, and that he wouldn’t mind having me here. So I stayed here as one of the Israelites’ leaders.
Mosheh: Judaism continued to evolve after what I told them. See, I gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, which were an early, and not a very good, attempt at making a constitution. But they had their own regulations, and they accumulated more as time went by. By the time the Babylonian exile ended, the Jews had over 600 individual regulations. And this was only the start, as Jewish scholars were obsessed with making Jewish life even harder.
Shlomo tells his story
PrevNode LinkNextShlomo: In any case, I met Mosheh and my father shortly after my apparent-death. In fact, I became a vampire. The Q continuum had a rule that a vampire who survived for 300 years would become an immortal, who cannot be killed. It does not mean one cannot feel pain, or become injured or be subdued, but it’s still better than nothing.
Shlomo: What happened to my father (David) was that he was once walking in the street with a friend, when he got mugged and was stabbed to death. He claimed that it was not fair and that he should have become an immortal, but Q would not have it. So he ended up as a living dead over at the Planet of the Hebrews.
Shlomo: I, on the other hand, had the fortune not to be killed in my first 300 years, and so became an immortal.
The Vampires’ Conspiracy
PrevNode LinkNextMosheh: Indeed. The vampires and immortals still kept their conspiracy. The leaders had a grand meeting every 40 years or so, and we communicated using cryptic messages we sent. We had been utilising several common fictitious themes for that. The first was the Occult, and somewhat later we also passed many messages in what seemed to be anti-Semitic material.
Bashir: So the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were you?
Mosheh: Indeed. It was us. It was a piece of writing written by the Illuminati originally in German, which just emulated an anti-Semitic work, so it can be easily dismissed as such.
Mosheh: World War II (initiated by real anti-Semites), placed a stop to us using the anti-Semitic theme. However, by that time we were already making use of various items of popular culture to pass our messages.
Shlomo: The funny thing was that some of our message conduits, became very successful commercially. Moreover, many writings and other works, which were written by people who were not interns to our culture, were often mistaken to be “Vampire-art”.
Katie: I still think you people suck.
Shlomo: Katie, I wish we didn’t.
The Vampires’ Love Lives
PrevNode LinkJadzia: Well, never mind that. Just something that interests me: your love lives. As thousands-of-years-old. Gossip, please!
Worf: Commander!
Jadzia: Yes, honey? [She approaches him and hugs him on the side.]
Worf: [Sighs] Never mind!
Quark: [Controlling the camera] But I agree, sex sells! I’m sure people would love to hear about the love life of Mogless.
Mosheh: Moses.
Quark: Yes, whatever.
Mosheh: OK! [laughs] I’ll start. Well, I told you I married girls who were 40 times my younger and my own descendants. Well, back when we invaded Canaan women were treated as their husband’s property. Even the Hebrew word for husband is “owner” and the one for wife is “woman” until this very day.
Mosheh: Anyway, it took time for love to take hold after we became conscious. Not to mention that, as opposed to the Greeks, Israelis often considered it a nice optional bonus for marriage-life and not an absolute requirement.
Mosheh: As such, I noticed that I could not… [TODO - fill in.]
Dvorah: As for me - it’s very strange. I am known as a “man-killer” among the Terran vampires in the sense that I normally remain committed to a single husband in my lifetime, and we raise a family, but then I get tired of him, and he goes his own way (or dies, and getting taken care of by the Q Continuum).
Dvorah: And here’s another funny thing: I’ve lost count of the number of times I lost and gained my period. It seems that I grow older and then suddenly become younger again. I cannot explain it. And naturally, in my age, it’s hard to tell my children (and descendants) the usual clichés of “When I was your age.”.
Dvorah: Moreover, some guys go to me when I look like I’m in my twenties, saying “Hey, you look seem like a nice chick”, and they would find it hard to believe that I’m old enough to be (and often am) their 10th or 20th-level or more ancestor.
Dax: So what happened to all your previous husbands? And your children?
Dvorah: Heh, good question. I wish I could readily recall them all, but I can only remember ones that are mentioned to me. Enumerating them would be futile. Some of my husbands and children were or have become vampires - some of them are living elsewhere, and it’s naturally hard for me to tell who were my descendants and how, without querying the Q continuum database. I still remember my excitement with my first grandchild, and my first great-grandchild, but I didn’t know my 10th-level descendent was born until a long time after that.
Dvorah: Naturally, I could not come to her and say “Hi! I’m your great-times-nine grandmother.” She wouldn’t have believed me, for one, though now she does as a Q.
Dax: I see.