Backstage: Survival Traits (Patreon)

Backstage for Survival Traits.

This came from a nightmare I had, and remains the most terrifying, to me, story I have ever written. I wrote the story in the early 90's and it still held up with almost no revision, which says something about what I tapped into when I wrote it.

When I wrote it I didn't know that I was autistic -- only that my entire childhood of interacting with other children had been an endless parade of "things every kid knows that somehow you never learned and no one will tell you", and being excluded from groups, and trying to be helpful and kind and feeling like I never got the social rewards for it that I should have. This story takes science fiction horror from the 60s-80s (from Again, Dangerous Visions through things like House of Stairs and Anna to the Infinite Power, stuff that was very adult and stuff for kids, but somehow it was all the same zeitgeist), and applies it to those aspects of my childhood.

Is likely to be triggering as fuck for anyone with heavy PTSD from social exclusion, so be careful.