42. Prime Directive (Patreon)

A volatile silence descends on the chamber, Hsthressis and her mother furiously locked in a mutual emotional clash. Chlrehistra's overwhelming sadness is palpable, but hardened by a determination to do what she firmly believes is right. A laudable trait, perhaps, if what she thought was right didn't involve exiling her daughter from her only home for not believing in their bullshit religion. Ugh, it reminds me of cults from back home.

Hsthressis, however, has clearly inherited her mother's stubbornness. She's no less dead-set on her path, fully ready to throw away everything for the sake of whatever it is she saw in my memories. Her fury overwhelms the smallest bit of sadness at the thought of losing her home, but I doubt that's a permanent state of affairs. The poor girl is in for a rough, rough future.

And it's my fault.

"Fine then," Hsthressis seethes. "Goodbye, Chieftain Chlrehistra. Have fun praying to your dead, cold rocks. Let's go, Evelyn."

"Okay," I sigh, exhaustion filling me even though I just recently woke up. "I've said it a lot, but… for what little it's worth, Chieftain, I am sorry."

"I'll never forgive you for this," she answers coldly.

"I'll never forgive myself either," I agree. "But I did my best."

"Just go."

I nod and head out, Hsthressis walking beside me in silence. Neither of us say a word until I've lead her well out of True People territory. It's obvious she has nowhere to go, and no plans to do anything but follow me. Well… that's mostly fine, I guess. I'll keep her safe as best I can, but she should be with her own kind.

"Do you know a clan called the Resonant Gems?" I ask her.

She shifts her weight and makes a humming noise.

"...You mean those heretics whose asses we kicked a while back?" she asks.

"Uh, what?" I blink.

"We fought in a war," Hsthressis explains. "We won and took over their homewyrm. I figured they'd all be dead by now."

Wow, okay. That's a lot to unpack.

"Alright, uh, first of all they are indeed alive. They found another homewyrm, I guess?"

"Oh huh," Hsthressis grunts. "Lucky them."

"Second of all, why are you calling them 'heretics?' You literally just renounced your religion."

"Uh… well, I'm excommunicated because I have the acid to say that Sss isn't real," Hsthressis explains. "They're heretics because they still believe in Sss, they just do it wrong."

I rub my face in exasperation.

"...If Sss isn't real, doesn't that make every method of worshipping him equivalently valid? The only 'wrong' way to believe in something that's inherently unprovable and unverifiable is to then go and use it as an excuse to make life worse for people."

"Huh," Hsthressis mutters. "Okay, I… I can see that. That meshes."

"And the Resonant Gems have been really nice to me despite what I am, while your clan has been consistently awful."

"So it's my mom that's a heretic!" Hsthressis concludes excitedly.

"No!"

Uuugh, I'd better not have to raise an angsty teenager on top of everything else. I only just recently stopped being an angsty teenager!

"Look, I just mean… I'm taking you to live with the Resonant Gems," I explain. "So you'll need to get along with them, and that especially means not criticizing their religion or talking about the True People."

"What!?" Hsthressis whines. "But… I want to live with you!"

"You will," I assure her. "The Resonant Gems have been nice to me, remember? I live with them too."

"Oh, okay," Hsthressis says, relaxing a bit. "But… I'm really, really tired of this Sss bullshit. I finally feel like I understand why it always bugged me so much, and now I have to go live with people who have an even dumber interpretation of the stories? They're wrong, aren't they? We know they're wrong. Why should we have to put up with it?"

"Because that's what your mom probably thought when she was murdering them," I say. "Look, Hsthressis, people believe a lot of things. Some of it plausible, some of it cool, some of it stupid… but none of it matters more than than showing basic kindness and decency to other people. You can't just walk up to someone and change how they view the world, so you're going to need to get used to people that you think are wrong insisting the opposite. My rule of thumb is that if someone believes that water is created by a crying fish that lives in the sky but they treat everyone with respect? That's pretty much fine."

I chew on the inside of my cheek a little, thinking about this war that's apparently going on.

"...But if someone decides to start hurting or killing for any reason, fish in the sky or otherwise, that's when we step in. Okay?"

"I… okay," Hsthressis agrees quietly. "Step in how?"

"Well… that tends to be a much more difficult question," I admit.

Silence descends once more on our conversation, though back at the Resonant Gem cave I'm discussing with the chieftain about bringing an exile from another clan to live with them. He's hesitant at first, but seems happy to provide when I agree to be solely responsible for feeding her. 

I should probably float the idea of digging a tunnel directly from the Resonant Gems cave to the surface, and establishing a base there. Possibly even a second OMNIDOME, if the first one works out. My Ivylyns have started to produce nuts and as best I can tell they're all in perfect working order, so I guess I'll start expanding them into larger groves as well. Hmm… well, if I'm already farming, should I try catching and domesticating livestock for meat…? No, that's kind of pointless. I can just make livestock if I really need to convert grass into edible fats and meats. There's no reason to restrict myself to plants, I could just as easily create an animal body that develops nuts designed for eat…ing.

Five of my bodies bust out laughing, to the increasing confusion of the Resonant Gems and the immediate concern of Hsthressis.

"Uh, are you okay?" Hsthressis asks nervously.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I chuckle. "This is laughter, Hsthressis! It's a good sound!"

"I know," she answers, "but why are you laughing?"

"Just… just remind me to tell you a story about my friend Deez later, would you?" I ask with a grin.

She flicks her whiskers in confusion.

"...Sure?"

I laugh some more for a while, stretching my new Dire Bork body as it finally punches free from its oversized shell, my extra mermaid bodies following soon after. Wow this thing is heavy. And strong! It's time to hunt myself some space bacon! Agh, wait. Let's keep the main focus on Hsthressis, for now.

"I do want to say, I genuinely think your mother was right," I manage to say after psyching myself up for it.

Hsthressis stiffens.

"...What? But we know she believes in bullshit."

"Not about Sss," I clarify. "About us, about what we should do with you. I've… pretty consistently intruded on the autonomy of your body and mind. Likewise, you've been getting forcibly fed experiences from my perspective. I'm not confident I can prevent that from continuing, and—"

"Wait!" Hsthressis yelps. "No, Evelyn, I… I want that! I want to know those things, to… to experience the world that way!"

"Do you want me to keep randomly knocking you unconscious?" I counter. "To keep rooting through your memories whenever I lose focus?"

"Well, no, but it's worth it!" Hsthressis insists. "This… this thing we're doing has some rough patches, sure, but I want to… to work through it! To understand! I want to be like you!"

The words are complimentary, but they feel so chilling to me. She seems so… so desperate. Like she's terrified of losing whatever we are now and returning to being 'normal' again. She wants to know everything I know, and many schools of thought would argue that's a bad thing.

In Star Trek, they make a pretty big deal out of this thing called the Prime Directive. In that story, it's illegal for space pioneers to interfere with the development of alien civilizations. Introducing technology, knowledge, and values to a species before they develop it themselves is considered dangerous and irresponsible, and sure enough throughout the show there are many times it gets violated… usually with devastating consequences. It's an interesting philosophy with a lot of good arguments to support it, and I've always thought it was complete and total bullshit.

When is a culture 'ready' for technology? Major new technologies always shake up the environments where they are introduced, their origin doesn't change that. Humanity wasn't 'ready' for the atom bomb, they weren't 'ready' for the industrial revolution, and they certainly weren't 'ready' for the internet! If we're more responsible at using atomic weaponry now than a group of people that didn't invent it on their own, it's not because they didn't invent it on their own. It's because we already fucked up and misused it, learning our lesson (at least somewhat) after a terrifying pair of bombings and subsequent cold war.

The same goes for introducing philosophies and ideals. Humans had (and have) a bunch of fascist regimes on Earth, and we've seen the terrible consequences of that enough times to say 'hey, maybe this is bad actually.' Why shouldn't we communicate that? Why shouldn't cultures learn from each other's mistakes? How is that not a good thing?

I feel like the main problem we run into is that if a culture decides that changing another culture is okay as long as it 'helps,' you start getting lots and lots of people with pretty twisted ideas about what 'helping' is going out and making changes for the worse. Or you get people who have good intentions and good methods, but just fuck up in catestrophic ways. This happened all the time throughout human history, and still does! 'Don't fuck with other people's ways of life' is arguably one of the very lessons we've learned through extensive trial and error that, by my own argument, we should be encouraging in others. Cultures are volatile, after all, and humans are not gods. We have no way to truly predict how changes will occur if we act. In light of all this, the Prime Directive seems like a really smart way to avoid consistently and repeatedly fucking up a whole lot of people.

But I feel like the entire argument of 'it's better this way' relies on the very human tendency to believe that inaction absolves us of guilt. If I do something and it causes a bad thing, I'll feel like shit. If I ignore a problem that doesn't feel like my responsibility and something bad happens, well… it wasn't my problem. And that's fucking bullshit. I would rather teach, help, give, and fuck it all up doing it than sit back and watch the Resonant Gems starve. And I would rather suffer the consequences of sharing my knowledge than stay quietly silent in fear of teaching someone 'too much.' That doesn't mean I should just give atomic bombs out willy-nilly (if I could even do that in the first place) but if I can spread some basic technologies to make life easier and less painful for people, then hell yes I'm going to do that!

When the metaphorical trolley comes hurtling down the tracks, you pull the lever every time. Anything less is just a comforting lie to yourself.

"If you just want to know the things I know, there are less existentially horrifying ways of going about that than osmosing information from my memories," I tell her frankly. "That's… well, that's what makes scientific knowledge so cool in the first place! It's not magic, Hsthressis. I can teach you this stuff whether you're linked to my mind or not, and I'd be more than happy to do that!"

"Really?" she asks. "But… I… it's so much!"

"Did you think I learned this stuff by having it injected into my brain?" I ask incredulously. "I learned it all by having it taught to me, through words and pictures and demonstrations and lectures. And yeah, maybe that's less convenient, but frankly I don't want you rooting around in my memories any more than you want me rooting around in yours."

Hsthressis is quiet for a while as she scuttles alongside me, the two of us alone deep under the cold earth.

"...What about sight?" she asks eventually. "I want to see again. I want to know what color is like again. I'll lose that forever if I can't have it through you."

…Hmm. Well, that a whole different can of worms. There are a few ways I can handle that, the first being just… not doing anything. But it feels pointlessly cruel to give her sight, however vicariously, and then force her to stay blind. I could possibly make her into a second hive mind and let her make her own sight-capable bodies that way, but that plan ranks a solid 'ha ha hell no' on the dumb idea scale. The last thing this world needs is a superpowered angsty teenage trilobite. I could make her a new body with eyes, transfer her into that, and then get rid of her old body, but that seems like it would go over poorly. So that pretty much leaves…

"...I can cause your current body to start growing eyes," I admit. "It'll take a while, and we'll have to stay linked during that time, but it's possible."

"Well fuck yeah!" Hsthressis beams. "Let's do that then!"

"There's a pretty significant risk," I warn her sternly. "The process will involve a large alteration of your DNA-or-equivalent. You probably won't be the same species when I'm done."

"So?" Hsthressis asks. "That sounds fucking awesome."

"No, I mean you'll possibly be a different species in the scientific sense," I clarify. "You might not be able to produce viable offspring with other Sthrenslians."

That causes her to pause a bit.

"Uh… what?" she asks. "What do you mean by 'viable offspring?'"

"Well, there's a chance—though I consider it slim—that if you have children they'll be normal. More likely, though, you'll either have children with vestigial eyes, children that have countless screwy genetic diseases, or you'll be unable to have children with Sthrenslians at all. I don't have a Sthrenslian sperm sample so I can't run super accurate simulations here, but—"

"Okay, okay, stop!" Hsthressis protests, shaking her tendrils with embarrassment. "Look, it's fine, I don't need the details. Kids sound annoying anyway!"

I sigh, scratching my cheek. That… didn't sound super convincing.

"Hsthressis, you're pretty young by Sthrenslian standards, aren't you?" I ask. "I still plan to sever our connection at some point, so this could be a decision you'll be stuck with your entire life. It's not one you should be taking lightly."

She sinks a bit lower to the ground, scuttling sheepishly as we approach the Resonant Gem cave.

"...Okay, that's fair," she says. "Can I have some time to think about it?"

I smile. That's a better answer.

"Yeah," I agree. "Absolutely."

As we enter the Resonant Gem cave, Hsthressis' whiskers twitching in wonder at the compact business of the place, I turn to ask one more thing of their chieftain. It would, after all, be polite to get permission.

"Would it be okay if I start building a few things to help work get done more efficiently?" I ask sweetly. "I have some ideas on how to help out around the place."