New Procedure Allows Kidney Transplants From Any Donor
Welp, that’s it. It’s the end times. Soon we’ll ban abortion, build massive state warehouses for abandoned infants, and have Christian childmurder cults. Even worse, we’ll have the dumbest anarchist group ever and some asshole sue walking around nice-socksing people.
That’s how bad these books are, they even ruin great scientific progress by association.
Speaking of science, it’s Cam time! Last time, Risa was kidnapped to be his waifu. Today, he’s creepily watching her without her knowing.
He’s been there more often than he’d like to admit, spying on Risa—although when it’s officially allowed through a one-way mirror, it’s not called spying. It’s called surveillance.
Stalking, Cam. The word you want is stalking.
He’s hurt she didn’t like him and wants to hurt her for it.
But no. That’s just the reaction of the various Unwinds in his head; kids who would lash out at the slightest provocation. He won’t give in to those impulses. There are enough sensible parts of him to balance things and allow him to control those parts that threaten to disturb the peace. He reminds himself that, as Roberta has said, he is the new paradigm—the new model of what humanity could, and should, be.
Now, this interests me. We know no expense was spared building him, so it seems they should’ve been able to scrape together a full head of functional kids. And also, we know that despite him being jam-packed with cool skills, he’s also got a chunk of brain from the unwind kid Risa met on the bus, the one who was fine with it because he figured he was a loser with nothing to offer as a person. Assuming that kid wasn’t secretly a genius, why is he in Cam’s head?
It seems like Cam might be intended to be a replacement for the current unwinding system, not an addition. They’ll go back to offering actual medical care and deal with the kids by redistributing their parts to each other. He’s proof-of-concept. Can you take chunks of disturbed kids, mix with less disturbed kids, and produce a new personality that’s functional? He’s got all those extra abilites because they knew they’d have to make the prototype look particularly appealing to get over people’s knee-jerk horror, while the mass produced versions will just be average.
(Honestly, it’d make a lot more sense to think the goal was to purify out all the abilities into one ubermench, but a big point was made previously that the parts all have to be kept alive, so like the noble magic lepraucauns, they must use all parts of the dead kids.)
Now we can debate about ethics and shit but there’s a much more interesting question, which is, once again, about balls. Blending people on a macro level does nothing to the DNA. Let’s say this works well for the first batch of people, so when they have kids, you do it to the next generation, and so on. How long could things go on with natural selection almost completely eliminated? And what sort of things would you end up doing to keep it running?
Roberta comes over to try to pry him away from his “surveillance”.
“Jericho,” he says. “She’s a wall, but she’ll crumble. I know she will.”
Apparently Cam did not get the brain chunk that knew that Jericho’s walls did no such thing. Fun fact: Jericho is the oldest known walled city. It was conquered several times, but never by Israelites walking around blowing horns, and if anything, was probably picked for their historical mary sue fanfic precisely because people knew the people of Jericho built some damn good walls.
Roberta agrees that yeah, that’s totally going to happen and very soon!
Cam is suspicious and wants to know what secret she has.
She replies with “No secret,” Roberta tells him. “Just an undying faith in human nature. which is one hell of a masterful deflection. If you think about it, any time you do something expecting it to work, you have faith in whatever property you’re expecting it to work on. It wouldn’t pass as a technical truth, because she’s denying there’s any secret at all, but I think it’s mostly true – I think she isn’t just saying her view of human nature makes her sure she’ll be able to force Risa into doing what they want, but that, once that happens, Risa will go on to actually love Cam because no one could possibly not love her precious science baby once they get to know him.
They have to go to a photo shoot, and Cam complains but agrees it’s better than the press conference, and in the process I really think it’s implied everyone in the original press conference is currently in a shallow grave somewhere.
Billboards, print ads, digital, the works. All just photos, but even so, the ads are powerful. The first round of ads will feature extreme close-ups of various parts of him. An eye; streaks of his multicolored hair; the starburst of flesh tones on his forehead. Each image will be accompanied by a pithy but enigmatic caption like, “The Time Has Come,” or “The Brilliant Tomorrow,” with no other clue as to what’s being advertised. Then, when public curiosity is piqued, they move to phase two, where the ads will feature his face, his body, and finally his whole self.
“We’ll create a mystique around you,” Roberta told him. “Play into their puerile fascination with the exotic until they’re champing at the bit to see more.”
“Striptease,” Cam had said.
“An elevated version of the same concept, I suppose,” Roberta admitted. “Once the ad campaign has rolled out, you will enter the public eye not as an oddity, but as a celebrity—and when you finally deign to do interviews, it will be on our terms.”
There’s really no way you can have a press conference twice, unless you kill everyone in the first one so they can’t spill anything. Now, this would seem to contradict the fact Risa and others are aware of Cam’s basic existence, but the idea people know of his basic existence is also contradicted by the idea people would have no idea what the billboards mean. A random eye, sure, that’s pretty hard to guess, but a forehead made up of a hodgepodge of skin grafts?
Cam, either unaware or totally fine with that, just takes issue with the “our terms”.
“My terms,” Cam corrected.
“Yes, of course. Your terms.”
I really feel like we’re expected to view this as like, uppity viser needing to be constantly corrected about how she isn’t the one in charge because secret evil and not uppity princeling constantly offended other people have input because arrogantly evil. But maybe we’re just supposed to hate both of them.
Risa is now lying in bed.
The eternally sleeping princess, thinks Cam. But I shall free you from those poisoned brambles that surround your heart. And then you will have no choice but to love me.
Now, I find this interesting. His desire for Risa is clearly of the villain camp and you can see it in the dialogue. What about it? Why is this about as obvious as growing a moustache to twirl while Lev got to creep all over Miracolina before?
I think it’s the monologuing. When someone literally says you will have no choice but to love me it’s evil, but when it’s in someone’s actions, it’s more acceptable. It’s more okay for a boy to physically force himself into a girl’s space than declare his intention of forcing her.
It’s similarly okay to assert that she already does love you and her protests to the contrary can be ignored.
I’m not entirely sure what’s up with all of it, but at least part, I think, is the tension between a hard-won awareness that a behavior is wrong and a bias toward letting men do what they want. So the man who says he’s going to do BAD THING is the BAD GUY DOING BAD THING, but the man who just does it, well, are we sure it was really BAD THING he did? It’s really ambiguous, you know? And maybe it was an innocent mistake, or actually her tricking him!
And it’s not exactly men, mind you – it’s really just an overall status thing, where being higher status means everyone else wants to assume the best of you and not make any waves. A black guy is a lot less likely to benefit from this. Or a white guy who doesn’t have the right class markers. And a white guy who has a bunch of high-status traits but is kind of off in some way that prevents them from actually working for him may well be preferentially targeted because it lets everyone work off their steam at the high-status monkeys by beating an effigy of them – oh, you say you saw that guy who stammers and doesn’t make good eye contact nearby? BURN THE RAPIST.