20 KiB
R!Animorphs 18: Interlude 3
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Author: u/callmebrotherg now posting as /u/callmesalticidae*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11090259/18/r-Animorphs-The-Reckoning
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Score: 27
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Created: 2016-03-30T08:36:35
Post:
Comments:
u/noggin-scratcher [+13] I am a happy tree (4 hours later)
Jesus H Monkeyballs, that went from oddly endearing (despite the whole "brain parasite" thing) to flat out horror, all in the space of a single breath.
u/scruiser [+2] CYOA (19 hours later)
I was hopeful something similar to canon events with Aftran were going to happen... right up until the end of the chapter. It was a serious whiplash between horrifying and warm fuzziness.
u/creatureofthewood [+7] (11 days later)
This Aftran had a different number. Canonical Aftran was 942, not 927. And in this fanfic, yeerks get their names from the yeerks that they memetically descend from (as a result of the experiences exchanged during the Sharing), and they increment in number as they get more experiences. So we're reading the perspective of a younger and less wise iteration of Aftran.
So she got close, but not quite. It leaves the possibility that yeerks can, or that Aftran could have if Karen had cooperated, understand and feel human love.
u/CouteauBleu [+13] We are the Empire. (2 hours later)
Very interesting chapter. Yeerks as a hive-mind officially confirmed! 9-years-olds trying to commit gruesome suicide! Fun for the whole family!
Mhhh... I wonder if Karen ate the cake before, um... you know, going Wake!Skitter.
Otherwise, I like the naive alienness of the yeerks here. Their train of thought is basically "But, I gave my host a healthy dose of sleep, a sufficiently nutritious meal and physical activity today, and yet she is still upset! What is this sorcery?", which makes sense for a species used to infesting non-sentients. I'm still a bit annoyed, because when I read these sort of "Robot/Alien trying to understand weird human things" story, I always get the feeling I would have done a better job of explaining it in a way the alien could understand.
Actually, while I'm on a complete tangent, there was one story that did it pretty well: the anime Parasyte (didn't read the manga). There's one episode where one of the eponym sociopathic aliens goes to an university lecture about ethics and morality, and it's really awesome because the lecturer does a good job of explaining (some of) the origins of ethical thinking in a way you could totally understand if you were an alien wondering "Uh, why do these people constantly not eat each other?".
u/360Saturn [+12] (8 hours later)
Christ that got dark quickly. The perspective was everything in that chapter. Just imagine the story if Karen was telling it. Aftran and her colleagues are essentially three kidnappers who play with Karen and her parents.
Chilling. And very well written to get into the head of those characters, so to speak.
Edit: also. The little girl probably puts her eyes out with a knife because that's the only way she knows to kill herself - she would have grown up being told to never play with knives because she could put her eye out and die.
u/PeridexisErrant [+7] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (54 minutes later)
oh.
u/Nighzmarquls [+8] (9 hours later)
Ah nice to see the seeds of the internal yeerk rebellion being sowed.
Honestly if we could have organized everything differently you could probably have gotten a lot of humans to volunteer to be yeerked.
Not the entire population, but honestly if the numbers I'm hearing about the andalites are similar to what they were in canon and the human tech progression rate is also as it was in canon the yeerks could win against the andalites with humans as allies using even a TENTH of our population.
How many of those that suffer from executive dysfunctions, schizophrenia, compulsive behaviors or just plain and simple terrible lives or with life sentences in prison be willing to spend a tour of duty in the yeerk empire fighting the evils of the andalite monsters?
A yeerk psychologist or therapist or fitness trainer could be enormously helpful.
Really a human-yeerk alliance could be wondrous and 'great'.
u/ketura [+8] Organizer (9 hours later)
I've considered this myself. There was an animorphs continuation fan fiction on AO3 about an artist yeerk who's job is essentially as a life change for hire, IIRC. I would pay good money for someone to take control for six months, putting my life in order, squelching bad habits, and otherwise getting my ducks in a row.
Heck, intellectual partnerships could be amazing. You take control during my boring dead end day job, you get all the sensory experiences you want, and we both get a companion to bounce ideas off of and shoot the shit with 24/7. A neutral authority asks me during feeding every 3 days if I still want to continue the partnership.
Honestly, if the Andalites weren't around, you're right, the yeerk-human alliance could be an amazing thing. Combat operatives have a backup if they go into shock or are knocked unconcious. Information and memories could be transferred efficiently or confidentially. Can you imagine a math tutor that fires your neurons to get you to understand something?
u/KnickersInAKnit [+8] (12 hours later)
Marriage counsellors. I remember seeing that in one AO3 story. Diplomats, translators, teachers...hell, I'm sure an entrepreneurial Yeerk could do some fun memory trading services as well.
u/callmebrotherg [+5] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (10 hours later)
I'm writing a series of short stories in an AU where the Yeerks weren't forced to become nothlits, and things like this are common practice (among other developments).
u/CouteauBleu [+7] We are the Empire. (an hour later)
...
...
Yeah, maybe you should have thought the cake thing through, Aftran.
Oh well. You tried.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+6] (3 hours later)
Fuuuuuuuuck......
20 min later, okay, recovered enough to give a response. Now I understand why Esplin isn't feeding in the pool anymore.
Another edit: 927 becomes 928?
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
927 becoming 928: not a typo.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+2] (19 hours later)
Well then. What causes the change in number?
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (a day later)
The relevant question is: why 927 to begin with. Who are/were Aftran 0 to 926? (the yeerks being an intellectually superior species, I'm assuming they start counting at zero :p)
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Her name was Aftran 927 -> feeling her self expand as more and more of her siblings joined her, became her, released their names and took the name of Aftran for their own.
My reading of it is that the continuity of consciousness predated that individual yeerk (if the term individual makes sense in this context), the numbers indicate each time they are reabsorbed into the coalescion and 'reset'
u/Bowbreaker [+6] Solitary Locust (7 hours later)
@/u/TK17Studios:
She gathered thousands of memories—what wonder, to be able to hold so many!
Wait, are Yeerk not able to do that outside of a body? In that case how do they carry over their memories from one host to another?
Her name was Aftran 927 -> feeling her self expand as more and more of her siblings joined her, became her, released their names and took the name of Aftran for their own.
If she's the original Afran and others took on her name then why is she 927? Or am I misunderstanding the temporal correlations here?
This love, she asked herself, in a chorus of ten thousand voices. What good is it?
She dwelt on it for days—brought the question back to the coalescion, felt it echo through her siblings, watched it bounce off of their indifference.
If they think as one hive mind while in the pool and share all memories how can she hold a different opinion regarding love and compersion (may be the wrong word as I'm not a native English speaker) than her fellow pool inhabitants?
I still have a lot of questions regarding the intricacies of Yeerk functioning and would like it if you shed a bit more concrete light on stuff as long as it doesn't contain spoilers for the story itself.
Oh and I suppose I should comment on poor 9 year old Karen having to live through body horror and cutting her own eyes out in hopes to escape it. Meh. It was good story telling.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (11 hours later)
u/KnickersInAKnit [+7] (12 hours later)
This provides a rather interesting perspective into the idea that the Yeerks would happily sacrifice so many individuals to gain another Andalite host. Would those individuals be truly 'dead'?
u/360Saturn [+3] (19 hours later)
Would they, in fact, be truly individuals at all?
u/scruiser [+6] CYOA (14 hours later)
Rampant Speculation
u/360Saturn [+5] (19 hours later)
[A yeerk] (#s "oligarchy, then. That has some interesting political implications. I can't help but see some communist/Red Scare parallels to the 'invasion' now too - 'they could be anyone' etc.")
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (12 hours later)
"this whole love thing is kind of bullshit and we're wasting our time on it"
That made me chuckle. In part because "yeah, stop wasting your time with human emotions and get a life, nerd", and in part because Aftran's observations and conclusions about love kind of felt like the theories you tend to imagine when you're thinking too hard about something and you have no way to actually measure whether you're right or just making stuff up.
u/MultipartiteMind [+3] (15 hours later)
(--And this explains the morphing effect in this canon. I find myself wondering if any meaningful decisions get made in the pool, or only by those with prolonged host-bonding; come to think of it, that greater reliance brings to mind the Iskoort, though they also suffered from the Controller issue of 'even if necessary for life, might actually prefer death'.)
I confess puzzlement about why Aftran couldn't talk with Karen directly and hash things out (earlier or later), or--assuming Karen comprehended her own suffering--why she couldn't lift the comprehension directly from Karen's mind. If in this canon there can be something that a host understands that the Yeerk doesn't, that opens up interesting possibilities.
u/360Saturn [+4] (19 hours later)
It could simply be a language issue. Aftran struggles to understand concepts innate to Karen as is. We see "conversations" between Esplin and Alloran, but we also know that Andalites have a much more visual and mental rather than word based conception of concepts and the world around them, which might be easier to communicate with a similar being. Karen as a human and a human child at that might not be able to communicate with a being so different from her in that way, and Aftran has the same problem - an inability to understand concepts unless they are explained to her. If neither of them can explain to the other in terms they understand, they're at a stalemate. Probably why Karen goes to such an extreme at the end.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (a day later)
<nods...> In that case, though, what happens when a Controller has to interact with an uninfested human, and the host only wants to scream and die? Can the Yeerk properly emulate a different innate state of mind without being able to grasp that state of mind without communication? Manually sifting through memories to pick and choose what muscle movements to copy seems as though it would take too much time, compared to a full intuitive interface.
This can be put more simply: if you're talking with a Yeerk in someone's head and the Yeerk has 'an inability to understand concepts unless they are explained to her' while the host would have understood those concepts, then you're going to be able to notice that something's very off about the conversation (certainly compared to before infestation), and start strongly suspecting alcohol or drugs or a stroke. A potential major dent in the secrecy part of the invasion mission profile.
u/360Saturn [+2] (a day later)
I think with an adult you could brute force it - and here, Aftran does control Karen with brute force several times, and indeed, always has the capacity to do so.
Canon Aftran was curious though and wanted to do things differently, and the Aftran here has that quality too. Perhaps so do some other Yeerks - with the hive mind, that gets a little hazy. This is an interesting and unusual case though, the Yeerk is deliberately letting go her control to try and share the cockpit with the human and that's where the dialogue of them not understanding each other is coming from.
if you're talking with a Yeerk in someone's head and the Yeerk has 'an inability to understand concepts unless they are explained to her' while the host would have understood those concepts, then you're going to be able to notice that something's very off about the conversation (certainly compared to before infestation), and start strongly suspecting alcohol or drugs or a stroke. A potential major dent in the secrecy part of the invasion mission profile.
which is why most Yeerks do what Aftran was mainly used to doing, shutting the host in a small corner of the mind and not letting them out; taking over the brain wholly themselves. Aftran presumably calculated that the risk of letting the host take some control back was lessened with a child - if she zoned out, who would see that as noteworthy, and if she blabbed, who would believe her? In fact if the Aftran hive mind compared notes, so to speak, in the Yeerk pool, this particular Aftran would be the perfect selection to experiment with allowing a human some freedom to try and set up a dialogue or an understanding, due to who her host is.
u/ketura [+5] Organizer (8 hours later)
Her name was Aftran 927 -> feeling her self expand as more and more of her siblings joined her, became her, released their names and took the name of Aftran for their own.
If she's the original Afran and others took on her name then why is she 927? Or am I misunderstanding the temporal correlations here?
I could be wrong, but I took this as a metaphor for the pool reading her memories: as the others absorb them more deeply, they can be considered to "be" her, at least for a while.
u/chaosmosis [+6] and with strange aeons, even death may die (12 hours later)
I really like it. Also, the Yeerks parallel the Andalites a bit now, which is thematically cool. Both are hive minds, although the Andalites at least understand individuality enough to see that echoed minds are false. How can mere humans compete with either species? I guess by becoming hive minds as well, through brain sharing morphs. But is that the only way? Kind of reminds me of the conflict against the Buggers in Ender's game. I've always felt OSC's answer was too cheerily optimistic about the value of individuality mixed with teamwork.
However, relevant scientific paper: http://www.unavarra.es/digitalAssets/128/128596_abstract-Jaromir.pdf. Using that as inspiration for ideas, maybe social diversity is good although for some reason not often preserved in species that reach interstellar travel. Can the Animorphs overcome their greatest challenge yet: Fermi's Paradox? (In the sense that we haven't all already been disassembled by Von Neumann machines, not in the sense that aliens exist or don't.)
u/callmebrotherg [+4] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (2 minutes later)
:<
I'm getting feels.
u/xamueljones [+3] My arch-enemy is entropy (10 hours later)
Right in the feels.....
u/scruiser [+3] CYOA (16 hours later)
Was anyone else reminded of The One from the epilogue cliffhanger of the last Animorph book?
u/None [+3] (a day later)
"Also, the Yeerks parallel the Andalites a bit now, which is thematically cool. Both are hive minds, although the Andalites at least understand individuality enough to see that echoed minds are false. How can mere humans compete with either species?" Ok, I was also getting this vibe, of both the Yeerks and Andalites having truly alien minds; however, I still don't quite get how the Andalite mind works. What is the 'dain', and what is the 'eib', and how much of a hive mind are they, really?