Alien Clay

Having someone else to lean on isn’t a thing anyone should be ashamed of.

We could have obliterated the very mind of the world in our search for builders who were just like us.

He is torturing himself in his sealed box with thoughts of how terrible it would be to lose his self. His inviolable, separate selfness that he cannot abide to share. He is consumed by the drive to know, but not at the cost of being known by others.

I want to tell him it’s not alien mind control. That you can still be yourself, even as you become a part of something greater.

You hear “survival of the fittest” and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you “fittest” isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else. That’s how biology works.

Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

The base unit of life is all life.

Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway. Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.

And this was Clem’s cardinal sin. Not that he dared to raise a hand against his betters, but that he brought people together to do it.