The Plur1bus Solution
Lers of Spoi.
You have been warned.
Just a quickie for the moment, because I’m busy missing my deadline for handing in Gremlin. (I would have made it, if not for the fact that I miscalculated how long it would take someone to fall down a 37-km Higgs conduit where the gravity goes from 0.25G to 8G. Turns out it would take a couple of hours, which totally fucks the pacing and mechanism of the climax. There’s a reason action movies prefer 2-minute countdowns when their protagonists accidentally trip the bomb timer[1].)
But I’ll come up for air just this once because, like all ten or twelve of you, I’ve been watching Plur1bus. And last week’s episode reminded me of something.
I’m speaking of Alice Sheldon’s “The Screwfly Solution”, a 1977 novella that offered up—to a world in the throes of the then-nascent Star Wars phenomenon—an example of what real science fiction could do. The plot describes the rise of femicidal cults across the globe, generally under the auspices of religious dogma. (The western variant, a cult known as the Sons of Adam, is built around the belief that the Second Coming cannot occur until women are eradicated, since it was Woman who committed the Original Sin.) It’s an epistolary story, a collection of diary excerpts, news clippings, and research reports: ranging from a Vatican press release admitting that Jesus never actually said anything about women having souls, to diplomatic complaints about Japanese drift nets, wrapped around the bloated corpses of hundreds of females, posing a hazard to high-seas navigation. Those powers-that-be that haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon continue to insist that the problem is just some kind of contagious mass hysteria, a purely psychological thing best controlled by suppressing news of its existence so the hysteria doesn’t spread. Nobody pays much attention the the handful of scientists reporting that the phenomenon is correlated with global wind patterns, and appears to also manifest in other closely-related primate species. I mean, who listens to a much of elitist eggheads?
In the end, of course, the eggheads are proved right. Some airborne agent is fucking with the male sexual response, resetting the switch that redirects aggressive responses into sexual ones. Men thus afflicted manifest sexual urges through unadulterated violence. They are driven to kill rather than fuck. Adios, Humanity.
It’s a form of eco-friendly pest control, in other words. Something wants the place for themselves, but without ruining real estate values with nukes of asteroid strikes. The story takes its title from a similar campaign in which Humanity attempted to eradicate screwfly populations by messing with their reproductive dynamics.
Sheldon’s story was simultaneously one of the most powerfully feminist stories I’ve ever read—scary, but utterly non-preachy— and one of the most scientifically grounded. (A friend of mine used to study sticklebacks for a living, and was—as far as I know— the first to document exactly this kind of spousal abuse in that species. Male stickles normally face off against each other to compete for mating opportunities, then switch over to sex mode when approaching the female. Debbie observed some of them who, failing to make that switch, simply beat their mates up instead of spawning with them.)
If you’ve seen the latest episode of Plur1bus, you’ll see where I’m going with this. An alien pseudovirus has cohered virtually all of humanity into a single hive mind so ethically averse to killing that they won’t even willingly pluck an apple off a tree. For the time being, the seven-billion-odd individuals comprising this hive[2] make do by eating out of cans, collecting orchard windfall, and chowing down on human bodies that have died from natural causes. But that won’t last forever. We’re told that available food will run out in about a decade. At that point, Humanity—or at least, whatever Humanity has turned into—simply starves to death en masse.
Which makes me wonder: was this the aliens’ plan all along? I mean, what kind of agent converts an entire species into a system so pro-life that they refuse to even practice agriculture? We can argue about the logistics of how an alien species six hundred lightyears distant somehow knew enough about Human neurology back in the fifteenth century to build such a precisely targeted form of pest control (and perhaps I will, sometime further down the road). And I do not pretend to know where Vince Gilligan is going with this. But for me, it’s hard to imagine an alien agent that both has such precise and sophisticated knowledge and also doesn’t know where this Jainism-on-steroids program is ultimately going to lead.
Is there any scenario in which this is not a screwfly solution?
Postscript: And of course I just Googled “Pluribus AND Screwfly Solution” and found that some bozos on Reddit have already beaten me to this particular punch. Fine. Fuck those guys. I’m not even gonna read their posts. Although I suppose I should be gratified that the goldfish generation actually remembers the good old days.
Well, except for that episode of Archer… ↑
- Not 8.3 billion; significant numbers died during the assimilation process. ↑
