Underland Press

By Simon Drax
August 3, 2009

Remember to check out The Simon Drax Blog for supplemental reading, such as conversations between Drax and Mori.

And now the sixth installment of Simon Drax's Exit Vector, in which Trista's story continues...

* * *

"War," Trista continued. "We declared war on ourselves, the evil within.

"As you can imagine, many of my people scoffed at the idea. There was a gene for evil? A chromosome for bad behavior? To which several of our scientists—the ones trumpeting the charge for this particular issue—responded, Yes. And they pointed to it. Here it is, they said. It was nothing more fearsome than a single shadow among other shadows, a mere blob on a graph. But these scientists claimed they had isolated the single genetic 'thread' responsible for... hmm... all acts iniquitous.

"It was a thread present in all Cantarans, an evil little seed, dormant in most of us but dangerously virulent in the few: the criminals, the disrupters, the deviants. Those who did not belong. And it wasn't just us.

"A close examination of the ever emerging orders of mammalian life on Earth proved that this genetic thread—or one very similar to it—was not only present in the 'higher' hominids, it was a dominant factor of their makeup. The 'evil little seed' was hardwired and essential to practically every act the hairy brutes performed... a fact that only served to intensify the rhetoric of those who wished to purge any trace of 'imperfection' from our bloodstream. Look, they cried, pointing to your predecessors and ancestors, what you call Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. LOOK at their nightmare scrabble for survival! Look at the violence, the selfishness! Do we wish to share traits with THEM? Oh...

"Oh no. No, we didn't. We were Cantarans. Perfection lay within our grasp.

"There were protests, of course, and from the usual quarters: the philosophers, the poets. What of moral choice? the philosophers wailed. What value the day without the night? the poets sobbed. But in the span of a single generation this quest for perfection, this desire to exorcise all 'evil' from our blood grew from an outlandish and radical idea to a cultural and unifying obsession. This was our..."

She paused. Mori could see Trista struggle for an appropriate analogy, something the idiot humans could understand.

"This was our Space Race," Trista continued, "only greater, more consuming... all consuming. We proceeded without the benefit of a foreign power as an adversary, without a competing ideology to discount and disprove. Any dissenting voices within our people were dismissed as romantic abstractions, for this would be our great crusade, and once it was accomplished... ah, once it was accomplished, we would share our enlightened state of grace with all of Earth's creatures, and there would be no more terror, no more blood spilled in order to fill a hungry belly, no more kill or be killed. Cantarans would become the savior angels of the planet, we would right every wrong of a biology turned nightmare, we... we... ah! Damn it...

"We were so screwed. We were doomed to fail. Of course.