Returned, Undecided, Unenlightened

Okay, so because she keeps chatting about brainslug society, everyone warms up to her. We’re not actually getting new info there, the book just lists all the stuff people are interested in.

Shy Wes, usually sitting close to Lily, asked not about other planets but about this one. How did it work? No money, no recompense for work–why did our souls’ society not fall apart? I tried to explain that it was not so different from life in the caves. Did we not all work without money and share in the products of our labor equally?

Actual discussion is fin-

“Yes,” he interrupted me, shaking his head. “But it’s different here–Jeb has a gun for the slackers.”
Everyone looked at Jeb, who winked, and then they all laughed.

Nevermind.

While the book has definitely crashed and burned in the obvious ways, I think also I’m just over the honeymoon period where I could still expect this stuff to go anywhere. By now, it’s obvious that this isn’t just a temporary delay of people actually talking about meaningful things. It will never happen.

And the thing is, people don’t need money. People were, in fact, entirely able to live for most of our species’ existence without the stuff. In this respect, the brainslugs are really just a more extreme version of our existing tendencies – they require less social pressure to behave and their communities scale up smoothly.

That said, the mechanism would appear to be very different. The brainslugs don’t appear to keep track of how much work different individuals are doing. The typical comparison here would just say that’s because humans will be lazy cheaters and the brainslugs apparently won’t, but it goes deeper than that.

The real reason humans, chimps and various other intelligent animals keep track of who’s done what has to do with limited resources. In current practice it’s mostly to see who you can rely on, but every social animal keeps track of who the weakest link is, even when their behaviors are completely different.

Let’s talk chickens.

Chickens have the literally named pecking order going on. They attack the weaker chickens and keep them away from food and water while the dominant birds are around.

Why?

Because there’s only so much food and water, that’s why. Establishing a hierarchy means that when resources get scarce, you aren’t wasting extra energy fighting about who’ll get it. The less food, the more the weaker chickens are driven away from what’s there, until they die. It sucks, but the survivors will do better than if they lived in harmony until the drought, then had to run a chicken battle royale simultaneously to see who would survive.

(Then the chickens eat the corpses, because chickens are terrible animals.)

The point is, social creatures have hierarchies because even if you remove consumerism and excess, there will be times there isn’t enough for everyone, and you need to know which of that everyone should be first to die in times of famine.

For this not to be an issue for brainslugs, they need to have evolved in a situation where for some reason, they weren’t in this position.

Which isn’t impossible.

The reason humans care for the weak and sick and try to distribute things evenly in times of need is that even a weak human is generally more useful to the group than no human. We’re significantly more social than our closest relatives because we had to learn to work together better than they did. Chimps fight over food – human children instinctively divide up the reward for a task evenly. We also give things when we see another person lacks it. Our ancestors would go out to hunt large game, then whatever group was successful would share the meat with the failed hunters – and so, with several groups of hunters all able to look for large game, someone would always find some to bring back.

But it’s hard to picture how much more it would take to get to the point the brainslugs are at. Our successes meant that before long, we were the dominant species, and that meant that we were competing against each other for our resources, rather than nature at large.

If the brainslugs lived in a world where they were always hampered by brainslug-numbers and never resources to exploit, they’d always want more brainslugs around. But unless they’re also losing brainslugs in the struggle for survival, they’d eventually end up with enough, followed swiftly by overpopulation. (And we know they’re not losing brainslugs because they’re total wusses.) You can’t even correct this with extremely low birth rates – an immortal species that also never gets into fights of any kind is going to find itself overpopulated fast, and overpopulation makes life cheap. And this should be a particularly big issue for the brainslugs when they’re reliant on the population of another species for hosts, who in turn are reliant on whatever further resources they need as a new constraint.

The other option is they’ve come at this from the other direction – their species went through plenty of population booms and crashes until they evolved some sort of stability where they only reproduce if there’s space, and slowly grew more social and less aggressive over time by shunning the more unpleasant members, until it was so ingrained to successful life that everyone acted properly. Humans hopefully are on this path ourselves. Still the fact our brains are a slapped together mess of whatever worked best at the moment suggests that this isn’t an easy process – you don’t just start at one copy of “don’t be a dick to other people” gene and have it start duplicating over the generations. And remember Unwind’s stupid law/human nature thing? Yeah, actually the only way to change human nature is to change laws (ie, environment) to make sure the dickery path isn’t rewarded, which unfortunately is hard to do because putting the laws in place requires overcoming some dickery first, and then wait thousands of years in the hopes you got it right for evolution to work its magicy nonmagic, while fighting the whole time to keep the dicks from repealing the laws.

Or we could just start tinkering with our DNA directly. Assuming we don’t all kill ourselves early, I think that’s the more plausible outcome.

So in conclusion: THEY’RE A BIOWEAPON.

Anyway, more on the dolphins which look nothing like dolphins:

“They look more like huge dragonflies than fish, right, Wanda?” Jamie almost always asked for corroboration, though he never waited for my answer. “They’re all leathery, though, with three, four, or five sets of wings, depending on how old they are, right? So they kind of fly through the water–it’s lighter than water here, less dense. They have five, seven, or nine legs, depending on which gender they are, right, Wanda? They have three different genders. They have really long hands with tough, strong fingers that can build all kinds of things. They make cities under the water out of hard plants that grow there, kind of like trees but not really. They aren’t as far along as we are, right, Wanda? Because they’ve never made a spaceship or, like, telephones for communication. Humans were more advanced.”

So they can colonize hosts with multiple genders despite apparently having innate gender identities which they appear to match to their hosts. At this point I’m just going to go with the idea that their gender is like their name – they pick up one based on the host, but it changes when they feel like it.

Also, Jamie, there’s actually a lot of thought about the fact water-based environments might struggle to develop along the same technological path as we did (among other things, the basis for everything we have is fire…) but it’s most likely they’d be developing along alternative paths. So, no, they probably never built giant rockets, but they might have stuff we can’t do either.

“Six of the nine… grandparents, so to speak, traditionally stay with the larvae through their
first stage of development while the three parents work with their six grandparents on a new
wing of the family dwelling for the young to inhabit when they are mobile,”
…
“The remaining three grandparents are customarily involved…”

And the menfolk are back, so that’s all we’ll be hearing about dolphins. Still, pretty interesting setup.

Ian has morphed from one of the secondary threats to yet another man being looming yet protective, by the way.

Anyway, Jared decides that fuck it, that’s enough, time to blow her head off. But ha! Jeb now ruleslawyers that Jamie also owns Melanie’s body, despite that not being a factor originally and the fact that no group would let kids make the decision about if their smiling parental figures should be trusted.

After the angry men leave, the group all discusses how they’ll protect their delicate baby Wanda, who’s always so cute and whispery and flinching at every sudden move and is just so, so moe, how could they not do everything to keep her safe?

This is why humanity lost.

Anyway, this makes the brainslug go run off to hide by herself. Specifically, she returns yet again to where they kept her prisoner, because seriously, author, just write your kink fic and stop trying to pretend it’s part of any plot. There’s a market for girls wandering around being menaced by protective yet scary men. Just write a few hundred pages of that and publish it.

She doesn’t just sit in it, though – we were told earlier it’s normally used for storage and indeed, it’s been filled up with stuff now after the menfolk hunted and gathered.

Okay, Mel. What now?
I was glad to find that she was still awake and alert. Opposition brought out her strength. It was only when things were going well that she drifted away.
Priorities, she decided. What’s most important to us? Staying alive? Or Jamie?
She knew the answer. Jamie, I affirmed, sighing out loud. The sound of my breath whispered back from the black walls.
Agreed. We could probably last a while if we let Jeb and Ian protect us.

Just fuck this fucking book.

They eventually decide that they need a quick death, but giving up will make Jamie disappointed in them, so they need to go down fighting because every little boy wishes to see his older sister desperately fighting for her life before watching her murdered.

The brainslug objects because fighting is wrong.

I don’t get you, Wanda. You’ve given up on your species entirely, you’re ready to die for my brother, you’re in love with the man I love who is going to kill us, and yet you won’t let go of customs that are entirely impractical here.
I am who I am, Mel. I can’t change that, though everything else may change. You hold on to yourself; allow me to do the same.

God, I’ve waited all these chapters for them to actually discuss things and this stilted garbage is what I get.

Jamie finds them first, and ends up punching Jared while he’s brutalizing Melanie’s body, then running off in tears.

The next morning, Jamie’s all upset at her injuries and while there’s eggs for breakfast which is apparently a big deal (raise chickens you idiots) the woman doesn’t want to give the brainslug any.

Oh, also there’s something the doctor’s doing that everyone’s on edge about and Jamie won’t tell her about.

“. . . don’t know why we let him keep trying. When it’s over, it’s over,” Jared was saying.
“He really thought he had it this time. He was so sure.… Oh, well. It will be worth all this if he
figures it out someday,” Kyle disagreed.

So, brainslug murder? I’m thinking brainslug murder. Brainslug is thinking nothing because she’s dumb, sort of like she spent all her time initially going on about torture and never considering just ordinary dissection.

Ian is upset by her injuries. Love triangle official.

And she tells him about Melanie being there when he asks.

“What is it like? For you? For her?”
“It’s… frustrating, for us both. At first I would have given anything to have her disappear the way she should have. But now I… I’ve gotten used to her.” I smiled wryly. “Sometimes it’s nice to have the company. It’s harder for her. She’s like a prisoner in many ways.

She’s like a prisoner in every conceivable able way.

Really, the tone-deafness of this is just mindboggling. This is the sort of thing I usually associate with stories where the humans are the ones trampling over the aliens and then saying they both had it rough. I guess her protagonistness trumps even the usual species us vs them setup.

Things have changed, though. When they catch full-grown humans now, they don’t offer them as hosts. Too many problems.” I half smiled again. “Problems like me. Going soft, getting sympathetic to my host, losing my way…”

And this is a similar thing – she’s telling him that if he’s caught he will die, and she’s making it into a joke about her own behavior and troubles. Firstworldbrainslugproblems.

Probably they’d put a Seeker in you.”
He shuddered.

I just want to say one last time – literally every time the word’s said, someone reacts like this. There is no explanation. There will probably be no explanation. At this point I’m seriously entertaining the idea that this is all bleedthrough about how much the author hates the one particular seeker, that all the characters Just Know seekers are terrible because she’s the prime example.

Anyway, she starts to belatedly consider his death.

The idea sickened me. Odd–it was usually the human things that made me sick. But I’d never looked at the situation from the body’s perspective before; no other planet had forced me to. A body that didn’t function right was quickly and painlessly disposed of because it was as useless as a car that could not run. What was the point of keeping it around?

So being in Melanie for twenty-some chapters isn’t enough but a guy she’s known for a bit who introduced himself as being part of the lynch mob planning to murder her, that’s different.

There were conditions of the mind, too, that made a body unusable: dangerous mental addictions, malevolent yearnings, things that could not be healed and made the body unsafe to others.

Okay, so, maybe we should just assume the brainslugs stayed in the pedophile junkies just long enough to walk them into prison. That could work. But why not just kill them in whatever nonviolent acceptable manner the brainslugs do that? Going into a prison is dangerous and risks blowing their cover, plus it’s delivering up a person to get brutalized for a while until the brainslugs formally take over and kill them anyway.

I had never seen the ugliness of treating an unconquerable spirit as a defect as clearly as I did now, looking into Ian’s eyes.

Welp. Sucks to be you, Melanie, if only you had a dick maybe you’d be worthy of actual consideration and not just girl-I-get-along-with-okay.

Ian, being the new love interest (kind of glad the book seems to get that Jared trying to beat her to death is actually bad) wants to know what terrible things would happen to the poor brainslug if someone caught her.

She’d just get stuck in a younger, less disobedient body and get the same remedial education as Kevin – maybe they’d give her lots of storybooks or something – in the hopes it’d mean she could recover herself.

“Would you be yourself again?”
I met his gaze. “I am myself. I haven’t lost myself to Melanie. I would feel the same as I do now, even as a Bear or a Flower.”

No, you wouldn’t. We know brainslugs are affected by the hosts. Apparently they’re so affected that they can’t even handle people with bad urges. Her descriptions of her love for Jamie and Jared, furthermore, are entirely rooted in the physical – her arms ach when she can’t touch them, she’s soothed by their physical bodies being near her and their faces being close enough to see. Although Melanie has objected several times to the idea that a brainslugged version isn’t the same person, the brainslug herself seems to be running on some crude empathy program where she can’t brainslug them because they’d look upset during the brainslugging interval and she’d feel too sad while that happened.

She goes on to say they have no concept of punishment for their own kind, which, surely mutation’s turned out some insane brainslugs by now. They don’t even have to be malicious, just different enough they’re not working in proper harmony with the brainslug’s larger goals.

Now, if their society just tolerated the few exceptions because they were too much of a minority to do any harm (especially assuming they still have the issue with harming others) that would make sense and fit with their whole bit about brainslugs being able to choose what they want. But in that case, her society would indeed have a way of handling “traitors”.

Ian pursed his lips. “More of an expatriate, I’d say. You haven’t turned on them; you’ve just left their society.”

Well, she’s left to join their enemies and aid them, so…

More perishables were on the menu: soft white bread slices, slabs of sharp cheddar cheese, circles of lush pink bologna. People were scarfing down the delicacies with abandon

I’m just really dubious this is a valid use of time. If soft bread is such a big deal, they’re better served stealing a cookbook so they can figure out why they’re fucking up all those “hard” rolls – fluffy bread shouldn’t be impossible. And the rest is just silly. Get a goat and learn cheesemaking rather than risking losing everything for a couple scraps.

Anyway, Ian wants to know where she hid out and says he’ll sleep there so he can keep watch. He’s actually being a pretty okay boyfriend, especially compared to the rest of the cast’s treatment of her. But when they head down there, Jared is waiting.