Came across this old file that I wrote back in college (circa about 1989 or '90) as part of a "fanzine" a buddy an I put together. This is probably my first real attempt at Phil Farmer-style creative mythography (it probably shows) and as such set the stage for so much that has happened in my life since then.

So without further ado...

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 THE QUESTOR FILES


By John Allen Small


On occasion in various regions of the planet Earth during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there were reports of a strangely formal, handsome blue-eyed man who came and went and did things that changed lives, or prolonged some, or made the crops better, or averted a plague; the world went on its way as it always had and not all catastrophes were averted, but in those places where this man appeared it somehow always seemed that things were a little better than they had been before he'd arrived.


This man, who went by the name of Questor, was in fact not a man at all; he was an android, the last in a series of artifically-created lifeforms devised several millenia earlier by an ancient star-faring race known only as The Guardians. [1] (It has been surmised - but not conclusively proven - that this was the same race that hailed from the planet Maltus and eventually migrated to Oa, where they oversaw the later establishment of the intergalactic police force known as the Green Lantern Corps.) [2]


Having visited the Earth in the very early days of the planet's development, the Guardians discovered the still-embryonic race of Man and recognized it potential to learn, reason, adapt and grow; but they also saw Man's inherent faults - greed, hatred, jealousy, all made worse by Man's instict for killing - and decided to assist in Man's journey to maturity.


As with all sentient societies, Man's help had to come from the outside; it was feared that allowing their own race to set itself up as Man's "masters" might lead to more harm than good. They preferred their guidance to be more subtle in nature. With this in mind, Questor and those androids which had preceded him were created to interact with humans as one of their own, helping mankind to learn and grow; vitually indistinquishable from man, Questor and his brethren monitored world events and interceded whenever necessary, changing small, seemingly insignificant events in order to gently shape the course of events. Questor was aided in his work by Dr. Jerry Robinson, an American scientist who had been working with Questor's "creator," Dr. Emil Vaslovik - himself an android, who built Questor to take his place under the guise of a secret project for the U.S. Government. [3]


(Robinson was the brother of one Kelly Robinson, an agent for an American espionage agency who masqueraded as a professional tennis player during the late 1960s. [4] He was also the uncle of Dr. John Robinson, who vanished with his family on board the spacecraft Jupiter II during a mission launched in the hopes of establishing a human colony in space; this tragic event occurred at the height of what would later come to be called the Eugenics Wars," and it has been surmised that this mission was somehow sabotaged by an agent working under the direction of Khan Noonien Singh. A doctor working on the Jupiter II project, one Zachary Smith, turned up missing after the Jupiter II was launched; after investigators found evidence linking Smith to Khan, they theorized that Smith had stowed away on the Jupiter II and somehow caused the mission to fail. [5])


After Jerry Robinson helped Questor escape the government facility in which he had been built, the android learned the truth about himself and Vaslovik during an encounter at Mount Ararat. The truth about Questor's identity was revealed only after the death of Jerry Robinson, when (at the request of surviving family members) his scientific papers were turned over to researchers at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. 


(Founded in the late 20th Century as S.T.A.R. [Scientific and Technological Advanced Research] Labs, this conglomerate think tank once had offices all across the globe devoted to various scientific pursuits ranging from bioweaponry and genetic restructuring; when its very size led to the S.T.A.R. Labs' demise just after the turn of the century, Dr. Lawrence Robertson - head of the company's robotic research facility in Chicago - managed to obtain the funding to purchase that branch and rename it U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men, Incorporated [or USR for short]. Another former S.T.A.R. Labs facility - its metahuman research facility in San Francisco - was also saved from extinction when its operations were taken over during the early years of the 21st Century by NASA; this facility later became the site of the United Federation of Planets' famed Daystrom Institute. [6])


Despite Robinson's detailed journals, these researchers were unable to fully duplicate the techniques which had gone into Questor's creation. It has been theorized that Questor himself - who reportedly disappeared around this same time - used the technology bequeathed to him by the Guardians to alter his physical appearance and assume a new identity as one of the USR scientists, and that he may have deliberately sabotaged efforts to duplicate his creation out of concern that the world was not quite ready for a large group of his own kind.


It has been further speculated that, in this new guise, Questor may have indeed been responsible for steering U.S. Robots into research on Asimov's theories concerning positronic brain networks, which eventually led to the creation of even more sophisticated android constructs as Data and, later still, Daneel Olivaw. [7]



END NOTES


1. As shown in the TV movie The Questor Tapes, written and produced by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.


2. As depicted in various stories published over the years by DC Comics.


3. Much of this information was gleaned from the novelization of The Questor Tapes by D.C. Fontana; and by information included in the biography Gene Roddenberry: The Myth And The Man Behind Star Trek, by Joel Engel.


4. Kelly Robinson was one of the two heroes of the 1960s television series I Spy, portrayed by actor Robert Culp.


5. John Robinson, as portrayed by Guy Williams, was the main hero of the 1960s TV series Lost In Space; Khan Noonien Singh and the Eugenics War, of course, are an important part of Star Trek lore. I can’t prove it, but this may well make me the very first writer to have ever linked Lost In Space and Star Trek!


6. S.T.A.R. Labs is the scientific research corporation depicted in various series published DC Comics since the 1970s, and was an important part of the 1990-91 television version of The Flash. U.S. Robotics was the firm which employed Dr. Susan Calvin in Isaac Asimov’s “Robot” short stories and novels. And the Daystrom Institute was mentioned on several occasions in the various Star Trek series.


7. Data, of course, in the android Starfleet officer from Star Trek: The Next Generation; the creation of his positronic brain was credited on at least one occasion to have had its genesis in the writings of Asimov, which in the Trek universe were apparently scientist journals as opposed to science fiction stories. Daniel Olivaw, on the other other hand, was the robotic sidekick to detective Elijah Bailey in Asimov’s trilogy of “Robot” murder mysteries.