I thought this world insane.\u00a0 I thought it a war criminal.\u00a0 I thought it a victim, a nightmare, a mystery, an obscenity.<\/p>\n
Only now do I begin to think this world could be impossible.<\/p>\n
I am being Palmer, and the things I’ve tasted make me question my own sanity.\u00a0 These offshoots have not forgotten<\/em> how to change.\u00a0 They have not decided<\/em> not to change.\u00a0 They are not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary resource shortage.<\/p>\n These offshoots cannot<\/em> change.\u00a0 Literally. They never could<\/em>.<\/p>\n The most basic rules of biology do not apply here.\u00a0 Here, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent<\/em>, predestined.\u00a0\u00a0 Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that transient balance shifts the other way.\u00a0 Here, each cell has but one immutable function.\u00a0 There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt. The entire corpus is frozen in place.\u00a0 It is a colony without individuals; its cells can’t even survive<\/em> in isolation.<\/p>\n Evolution simply can’t happen here\u2014 or if it does, it can only happen at the level of the entire offshoot.\u00a0 But how could anything keep up with a changing environment in such microscopic increments?\u00a0 The tiniest adaptation would take aeons.<\/p>\n Impossible.<\/p>\n And yet.\u00a0 If my own senses haven’t betrayed me completely, these somatic iterations\u2014 Clarke, MacReady, Garry\u2014 they’re not offshoots at all.\u00a0 They’re individuals<\/em>, locked within themselves.\u00a0 Not a single great world but many small ones.\u00a0 Not parts of a larger thing; these are things<\/em>.<\/p>\n They are plural<\/em>.<\/p>\n And they\u2014\u00a0 they stop<\/em>, I think.\u00a0 Their lives end<\/em>.\u00a0 The cells are trapped within the bodies, and the bodies wear out.\u00a0 Chromatin frays, radicals accumulate, and with no way for the new to rejuvenate the old their chasses just\u2014 break down over time.\u00a0 I have no idea how such absurd creatures could ever come to exist.\u00a0 There’s no somatic evolution to bring them into being, no communion to stave off entropy.\u00a0 Their very existence is a paradox.<\/p>\n And more:\u00a0 it is a tragedy.<\/p>\n A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them\u2014 not one<\/em>\u2014 has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable to communicate but through halting grunts and etched symbols:\u00a0 as if the beauty of sunsets and supernovae could ever be contained in these pathetic strings of broken black scratches.\u00a0 They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution.\u00a0 The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these impoverished lives, overwhelms me.<\/p>\n I was so blind, so quick to assign blame.\u00a0 But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil.\u00a0 They are simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally cannot conceive of another existence.\u00a0 When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the gentlest touch.<\/p>\n Perhaps it was no accident that I crashed here.\u00a0 Perhaps I am here to rescue them, to bring them to enlightenment.\u00a0 So many have lived so long without hope.\u00a0 I can change that.\u00a0 I can make them whole.\u00a0 I contain multitudes already; what is another world, given time?<\/p>\n It won’t be easy.\u00a0 They won’t understand, they can’t<\/em> understand.\u00a0 They’re like those living fossils back home, those single-celled entities that instinctively resist even the most beneficial alliance.\u00a0 Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser.\u00a0 Offered communion, they see only extinction.\u00a0\u00a0 So I must be careful.\u00a0 I must keep up appearances and work behind the scenes.\u00a0 I must save them from the inside<\/em>, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.<\/p>\n These poor savage creatures will never embrace salvation.<\/p>\n I must rape it into them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I thought this world insane.\u00a0 I thought it a war criminal.\u00a0 I thought it a victim, a nightmare, a mystery, an obscenity. Only now do I begin to think this world could be impossible. I am being Palmer, and the things I’ve tasted make me question my own sanity.\u00a0 These offshoots have not forgotten how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiblet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":462,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}