Alien Clay

Just because the tyrant dresses like a clown doesn’t mean he’s funny.

Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small.

Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway.

Because the hardest thing about sacrifice is not knowing if it’ll be worth it. What’s the point in taking the bullet if the person behind you in the charge loses heart, dithers, runs away? You may as well have stayed at home. You only have one life after all. It can be very hard to know when to throw it away.

The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.

You ever think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed and fear?

Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms.

A people without hope, what will they do? One of two things: nothing, or everything.

And that's us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together for everyone's best benefit. Even mine.

But you’ve got to care about truth, haven’t you? I won’t say that the speeches didn’t move me, but it was the intellectual dishonesty of the whole orthodox thing that galled me into action. Science, as a creed, should care about truth. It shouldn’t be bent for political aims. You shouldn’t say there’s a Wild Man of Kiln when there’s clearly nothing of humanity about the place. And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead.

Every revolutionary group I ever knew spent far longer clutching for how to describe what they were than talking about what they were going to do.

They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.

You look at the death they sentenced you to, and squint until you can pretend it’s living.

Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit. You have different groundswells of popular opinion gathering momentum, and picking up new adherents like a snowball, until one urge or impulse reaches a critical mass, after which the whole—the nest, the brain—adopts that tabled motion wholeheartedly. And here’s where the hive aspect comes in, because those elements which were rooting for the alternatives give in with good grace and wave flags for the winner. There’s no holdout of political grousers claiming someone else won the election. The whole institution acts in unison the moment that threshold is crossed. And that’s us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together, for everyone’s best benefit.

And then the guards in their heavy suits are there, caught in that weird Schrödinger’s Thug situation, where they want to drag me about as painfully as they can while simultaneously not aggravating my condition to the extent it will lessen the impact of all the rest of the pain they have planned for me later.

They have full protective gear on, masks included, and gas grenades in case they need to put down a general riot. But most of all, they spark fear. That’s how they get you. How a small group of uniformed stormtroopers can always face down a turbulent crowd. Fear of their weapons, of their discipline, of the brutal force they can mete out.

Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.

The Mandate is very into polar binaries, it’s in all their rhetoric. “What?” they’d say. “You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.

Someone once said, probably, that exploring an alien planet was terribly intrepid, bold and glamorous, and that someone can sod off, frankly. Because, once you have a full-on space industry and alien planets you can physically go to, you find it’s actually quite inconvenient to do so. The business of physically exploring them becomes devolved to your society’s equivalent of the unpaid office intern. Someone who won’t be missed, and whose sudden demise won’t much impede the mission.

It’s amazing how little you can buy someone for, sometimes.

The base unit of life is all life.

There's a thing on Earth, a marine isopod, that eats the tongues of fish and then replaces them so it can keep on stealing the fish's food. But to do so, it has to be a fish tongue as its second job. It's good enough at it that the fish goes on living, and maybe, because the new independent tongue has a load of little scrabbly arms, it's actually better than the old one.

I speculate about there being a band of lean, mean and selfish survivors, half our number or less, but all strong because they’ve been holding back from everyone else. And then there’s another river or similar obstacle, and not enough of us to work together to cross it. That kind of game-theory thinking only works if you treat the people around you as resources and dead weight. If you assume the natural unit of survival is one individual, and not the group.

Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms, after all, and if it’s all of us on one side and just him on the other, who’s mad exactly?

If you program your computers to expect wrongdoing, then they’ll most certainly find

But then the Mandate was all about those neat boxes, those false binaries. Orthodox and unorthodox; his and hers; us and them.

Earth has a lot of surplus people and the Mandate can afford to run its transportation policy with extreme prejudice.

An enquiring scientific mind and a rigid orthodox thinker, all crammed into that one head. Simultaneously driven to find out the answer, and absolutely sure he knows what that answer will be.