Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

twenty per cent Acceptable Wastage. If that sounds like an absurd loss of investment, then you don’t know the history of people shipping other people against their will from place to place.

They gave us enough rope, and the purges only started after every loudmouth malcontent had been given a chance to identify themselves.

The idea that there might be shades of possible in between any two opposites was anathema to Mandate thought,

“Cognitive dissonance, yes. It’s not enough to be able to do a thing. People, human people, want to be able to believe it’s right to do so. The first thing those in authority do, after they’ve used main force and brutality to take over, is paper over everything with reasons why they were right to do it. Both because it helps you keep people in line if you can get them to believe it, and because it makes it easier to enjoy the spoils of your brutality if you convince yourself you’ve earned it. Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small. There’s something in the way humans are wired that means we want to be right by some external measure. So we invent philosophies to tell us we were right to do what we did and we’re allowed to do what we want.

But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you.

A people without hope, what will they do? One of two things: nothing, or everything.

Every revolutionary group I ever knew spent far longer clutching for how to describe what they were than talking about what they were going to do.

The thing with a tree, though, the thing with a snake, the thing with a human… that branch, fanged mouth, or vaunted highly evolved brain are absolutely fucked without a trunk or a body.

“To contribute to solving the mystery. Instead of which you make it all about politics.” Thus sayeth the politician when the scientist ventures an opinion.

“You ever think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed and fear?”