Unraveling the Q Mystery

I got a chill when last month I found myself sitting across a lunch table with a little girl purporting to be a man/woman/entity known as Q who had been swapped nine times since December, boldly contradicting one very important fact thought to be known about swaps: that you can only be swapped once. Since I made Q's existence public (at his, her or its insistence,) many swapees who have already made the difficult adjustment to a new lifestyle have been on edge.

This is despite the still comparatively low odds of it happening once to begin with. When considering hardly 1 in 10000 Americans has been swapped (and that ratio is even lower in countries like Japan and India, despite increased population density,) knowing it could happen twice has led many to believe it will happen twice. However, to date, it is only known to have happened twice, or rather 10 times, to one person, the nomadic swapee known now as Q.

This is surely more than a coincidence, but even Q seems unsure of his significance in the grand scheme of things. For several months Q seemed to bound around the country, appropriating whatever body he/she/it landed in. With no memory of a prior existence, Q would act the part to its own end before, after less than a month, appearing in a new body elsewhere. Q considers himself to be male, although gender is more or less in the eye of the beholder. I've met Q three times, once as a male and twice as a female.

Q described to me the hazy attachment "he" had to his past; the earliest memories he has are of being in a woman's body, but that it was an uncomfortable and unnatural-feeling experience at the time.

The woman in question was Noreen Daugherty, whose body is currently resided in by Andrew Holloway, a high school student from Omaha, Nebraska. Daugherty, 29, was a fashion retailer from Jacksonville, Florida. Though Q has left a path of sequential swapees, she has never been located.

When I last spoke with Q, he was at the time inhabiting the body of 9-year-old Megan Richardson of Denver, CO. However, he described to me the increasing awareness and ability to anticipate oncoming swaps, "like a sneeze," Q told me in part of the interview not printed. Q expected that before long he would be able to control them outright, and planned to "hide in plain sight."

At the end of the interview, Q was swapped into the body of Taylor Marsten, a management-level employee of New York City's SwapCentre, the multimillion-dollar complex designed to offer private guidance and aid to swapees, headed by millionaire Robert Kleinberg. Two days ago I received a postcard from New York City, with only the words "Getting Closer" printed on it, and Q's signature. By the time it was realized the swap had occurred, Marsten's body was found naked and hysterical, in a New Jersey electrical field, apparently inhabited by an as-yet-unidentified babysitter... from Bethesda, MD, home office the BISA.

I for one doubt these last two swaps have been coincidences, and that Q has, at least partly, gained the ability to guide his swaps. He seems to be playing detective.

Myself, I believe that the key to this is learning the whereabouts of Ms. Daugherty. Once she is located, we will probably learn a lot more about Q, and those individuals, if they're out there, who are pulling the strings.