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. ↑
“I do not pretend to know where Vince Gilligan is going with this.” By all accounts into an already-guaranteed second season, so I wouldn’t hope for anything to see much of a resolution in this one.
Does the World’s supposed protein/calorie deficit problem actually pencil out? I mean: we know the World is not averse to milking cows, and also the World wouldn’t want cows to starve, and presumably the World wouldn’t be averse to growing pasture that cows could graze on… doesn’t that go a long way toward solving the problem (at least in the medium term, after ramping up free-range dairy herds)?
I guess we have to believe that the World is squeamish about even being complicit in the eating of grass by cattle?
I believe the Screwfly Solution was an idea used in one of the episodes of Masters of Science Fiction TV series
Oh… that…
…is seriously giving me Lubin flashbacks. He seemed to have it under control, though. And women weren’t the only ones he took that impulse out on. It was a conditioned thing for him. But still, it totally reminds me of Lubin.
Thanks for the pointer, I managed to somehow miss Dr. Sheldon’s works. Some fresh reading for the holidays, yay!
Could non-aggression not be a designed feature, but an unexpected side effect? After all, maybe the engineers didn’t actually know enough about the 15th century humanity. Maybe non-aggression is an emergent feature of the Joining – larger simulation engine can afford larger, more precise simulations of the world, more precise simulations cause some military-grade empathy, because external agents simulated at this fidelity are indistinguishable from originals and any suffering inflicted on a fruit fly one inflicts on oneself as well.
Then again, hard to imagine engineers capable of remotely rewiring wetware that they have never seen before into magical transceivers, but not aware of the behavioural quirks of a truly computationally powerful consciousness.
Also, taking into account the speed of causality as it is understood, the only information the engineers could have possibly had is the information about the first half of 8th century humanity – Kepler 22b is 640 ly away, so by the time they were sending their message (in 15th century) the only information about the earth that could reach them without breaking physics should have been in transit for 640 years.
I’m waiting for all the episodes to drop. It looks fun for definitions of fun that skew towards horror.
I would love to read your thoughts on the logistics of planning such an invasion and how the alien RNA-infected hivemind could possible work. How are two antipodal “humans” fully synced?
Another interesting thing is the hivemind as an analogy for current LLMs: all the knowledge in the world and yet can’t figure out novel concepts.