(Part 6 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide")
Today was the day.
The streets of ancient Earth were crowded to overbursting with people looking up at the sky, faces crowded up against windows.
Waiting for their sorrows to end.
Akon was looking down at their faces, from the balcony of a room in a well-guarded hotel. There were many who wished to initiate violence against him, which was understandable. Fear showed on most of the faces in the crowd, rage in some; a very few were smiling, and Akon suspected they might have simply given up on holding themselves together. Akon wondered what his own face looked like, right now.
The streets were less crowded than they might have been, only a few weeks earlier.
No one had told the Superhappies about that part. They'd sent an ambassadorial ship "in case you have any urgent requests we can help with", arriving hard on the heels of the Impossible. That ship had not been given any of the encryption keys to the human Net, nor allowed to land. It had made the Superhappies extremely suspicious, and the ambassadorial ship had disgorged a horde of tiny daughters to observe the rest of the human starline network -
But if the Superhappies knew, they would have tried to stop it. Somehow.
That was a price that no one was willing to include into the bargain, no matter what. There had to be that - alternative.
A quarter of the Impossible Possible World's crew had committed suicide, when the pact and its price became known. Others, Akon thought, had waited only to be with their families. The percentage on Earth... would probably be larger. The government, what was left of it, had refused to publish statistics. All you saw was the bodies being carried out of the apartments - in plain, unmarked boxes, in case the Superhappy ship was using optical surveillance.
Akon swallowed. The fear was already drying his own throat, the fear of changing, of becoming something else that wasn't quite him. He understood the urge to end that fear, at any price. And yet at the same time, he didn't, couldn't understand the suicides. Was being dead a smaller change? To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.
Many parents had made that choice for their children. The government had tried to stop it. The Superhappies weren't going to like it, when they found out. And it wasn't right, when the children themselves wouldn't be so afraid of a world without pain. It wasn't as if the parents and children were going somewhere together. The government had done its best, issued orders, threatened confiscations - but there was only so much you could do to coerce someone who was going to die anyway.
So more often than not, they carried away the mother's body with her daughter's, the father with the son.
The survivors, Akon knew, would regret that far more vehemently, once they were closer to the Superhappy point of view.
Just as they would regret not eating the tiny bodies of the infants.
A hiss went up from the crowd, the intake of a thousand breaths. Akon looked up, and he saw in the sky the cloud of ships, dispersing from the direction of the Sun and the Huygens starline. Even at this distance they twinkled faintly. Akon guessed - and as one ship grew closer, he knew that he was right - that the Superhappy ships were no longer things of pulsating ugliness, but gently shifting iridescent crystal, designs that both a human and a Babyeater would find beautiful. The Superhappies had been swift to follow through on their own part of the bargain. Their new aesthetic senses would already be an intersection of three worlds' tastes.
The ship drew closer, overhead. It was quieter in the air than even the most efficient human ships, twinkling brightly and silently; the way that someone might imagine a star in the night sky would look close up, if they had no idea of the truth.
The ship stopped, hovering above the roads, between the buildings.
Other bright ships, still searching for their destinations, slid by overhead like shooting stars.
Long, graceful iridescent tendrils extended from the ship, down toward the crowd. One of them came toward his own balcony, and Akon saw that it was marked with the curves of a door.
The crowd didn't break, didn't run, didn't panic. The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old humanity.
The tendril reaching for Akon halted just before him. The door marked at its end dilated open.
And wasn't it strange, now, the crowd was looking up at him.
Akon took a deep breath. He was afraid, but -
There wasn't much point in standing here, going on being afraid, experiencing futile disutility.
He stepped through the door, into a neat and well-lighted transparent capsule.
The door slid shut again.
Without a lurch, without a sound, the capsule moved up toward the alien ship.
One last time, Akon thought of all his fear, of the sick feeling in his stomach and the burning that was becoming a pain in his throat. He pinched himself on the arm, hard, very hard, and felt the warning signal telling him to stop.
Goodbye, Akon thought; and the tears began falling down his cheek, as though that one silent word had, for the very last time, broken his heart.
And he lived happily ever after.
I admit to this being my first time here, and my first reading of a lot of this stuff. Very interesting and food for thought. I would like to point out though, regardless of how the superhappy people do it, pain, in all its myriad forms is helpful, needful and a survival issue for HomoSapiens. Pain is the body's way of letting us know that our carrier is having an issue, whether it is the mild pain of a rash, or the severe pain of a burn. It is our mechanism to tell us there is an issue that needs attention. Emotional pain is a bit more complicated, however I submit that this too is a survival trait, remorse, sadness, pain at the loss of a companion or a loved one, all provide feedback to behaviour modification. It is our pain that defines and measures our pleasure. Our brains, and our bodies are all wired with symmetry... the symmetry of opposites... What is beauty without ugliness? What is sweet without sour... while I think that these things might be able to stand on their own, I absolutely believe that one would loose some of their intrinsic quality without their opposite to compare them to....
To quote a quote... the difference between bad and worse is far more evident than that between good and better....
As for the premise that there is a difference between being forced or being altered to like something... I am sorry but I have to disagree... If one does not voluntarily submit to the modification, then it is merely force of a differently nature... one of the reasons brainwashing is banned.... If I tell you that I can create a prosthetic limb, that you can use just like your natural one, save that it is 5x superior and you elect to make the change that is one thing... but for me to make the replacement regardless of your personal desire, then alter you to LIKE it... that is FORCE, in fact that is the ultimate force... I enforce my will on you even to the point of you liking it...
And, I further submit... such a fundamental change in our metabolism, dna, and brain wiring would effectively be the same as genocide... as the human race would simply cease to exist...
On another note... As for the comment that we as a species will never meet aliens... I would like to say a couple of things... first of all, I distrust absolutes... At 52, I found found that absolutes are far too malleable... I remember when protons, neutrons and electrons were the smallest of matter... absolutely... not so much any more... Further I would submit that, IF there is a god (or race of beings that kick started life here, or some architect that had a hand in it) I cannot see that entity being satisfied with a single experiment. That entity would either being doing it from hubris, or from curiosity, or perhaps simply because it could. Having done it once for any of those reasons simply means that it would be done many times... And creature/race/or intelligence that is capable of engineering something as complex as homo sapien, would be able to create a ton of different viable life forms... and would. If it is all random chance that we are here(which I find hard to swallow) then the same argument applies.. the cosmos is a HUGE place, so huge that we simply cannot comprehend how huge it is.... we can come close with some serious analogies like a muon on the ocean floor would represent our corner of just our galaxy out of millions of galaxies and .... oops there we go again... incomprehensible... So given even random chance... and the size of everything and the amount of matter out there... I would say that statistically even infitessimal possibilities become a certainty given the size of the pool... 1/10 of 1/10 of one percent of 10^666666666666666666 is a huge number all in it self... LOL