Channeling Ursula LeGuin Part 2 - The Adaptors (cont'd)

Not sure where I'm going with this. Any suggestions?

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Marcus had inherited a sufficient amount of his line’s ‘desire to please’ to feel sad at his father’s disappointment.  Every time he touched the traditional guitar, every time he touched paint to canvasere, every time he put words together on the composer, he was aware of the waywardness of his brain and emotions. He was in a chronic state of reining himself in and endured a constant state of tension. He feared he would eventually succumb to suicide like others of his kind. He was clearly a poor design. A misfire. What would happen to him when he was fully grown? Would he be able to take on the duties and privileges of his rank? What kind of women would accept someone like him into a pair-bond?

Jonathan was the only one of his peers who understood, Jonathan who had mastered the art of deception. Jonathan suspected he came from a line of old actors, who could take on the characteristics of their environment without difficulty and without compromising their inner selves. Their behavior was just a cloak they donned for the occasion, and the assimilation was seamless. This ability came so easily to Jonathan that he tried to impart the skill to Marcus, without success. Marcus always knew he was playing a part, donning a falsity.

“It’s not that hard, Jonathan would say. “Look—see that guy over there? You’re him. Get into his skin. Feel the simplicity. It’s just a surface layer. You don’t need to know anything else. Just stay at that level. Feel on that level. Talk on that level. Play with it a little.  Before you know it, you don’t even have to think about it.”

“I can’t do it for more than a few minutes. It exhausts me.”

“Just keep practicing. Try it with different people. You’ll get the hang”

But even Jonathan fell victim to an ‘accident’ provoked by his reckless behavior at a gathering one night. His constant antics revealed his real self. And Marcus found himself alone with his own rebellion. That was perhaps the turning point. That was when he knew that deception would never be enough.

Ever notice how the best speculative fiction always has an element of sociological or psychological reality to it?  Here's something I'm working on, tentatively titled The Adaptors:


When the tribunal came to power it was only natural that they seek the best way to consolidate that power among the populace. They looked for those personality types who were most inclined to crave a “favored” position in the hierarchy. This tendency was not difficult to test for, the questions plumbed the applicants views on ‘traditional values,’ acquisitiveness, imagination and ambition. It was easy to sort out who would march along with the tribunal to continue to receive their advantages.

Problems occurred with the children. This singular adaptiveness could not be relied upon to pass on to continuing generations. In fact, a disturbing number of the offspring tended to be otherwise, which caused loss of status and its attendant material advantage—which made the parents unhappy. So they stated selecting for adaptability at conception, which made the whole system work much more smoothly. Over time, however, even that became a delusion, as if the genetic adaptability itself changed into unusual behaviors over a period of time. Fewer and fewer truly adaptive children were born. No matter how hard the geneticists worked on it, they couldn’t reach reliable compliance. The jello-like matter of the code kept morphing into different combinations.

David felt this failure deeply as he looked at his son. The boy had passed all the tests, pre-birth, or he wouldn’t be here, but something was still out of sync. He was well trained in all aspects of culture, as his family’s position dictated, but he still seemed to wander outside the bounds.

Though the young people were given a certain amount of leeway in their adolescent developmental years, it was all kept within pre-defined limits. Anyone who scouted too far from the norm they were taken out, though no one was allowed to know it as such. They just became victims of their own recklessness—a less to the others—albeit they were helped in their demise. Of course, these individual were never allowed to reach the age were they were allowed to reproduce.

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