Happy halloween?
HUGE thank you to Randomini, who was instrumental in the brainstorming of this (many months ago now). Thank you also to Taffeta and shaggydredlocks for critique.
Yes, this is exactly as horrifying as you think it is.
Happy halloween?
HUGE thank you to Randomini, who was instrumental in the brainstorming of this (many months ago now). Thank you also to Taffeta and shaggydredlocks for critique.
Yes, this is exactly as horrifying as you think it is.
Sickeningly cruel, incredibly disturbing, and absolutely heart-wrenching. MC&D at their finest.
This had my upvote in several places.
I adore everything about this, but especially the part where PL wants to use this as an insecticide.
Hot damn this is some grotesque stuff, and very appropriate for what MC&D would do for money. The idea of retrocausal contraceptives is a clever one, and that last memo had some amazingly sickening imagery.
+1
I write stuff. Yipee.
This might be one of the best MC&D formats I've read. While I normally consider MC&D brokers more than manufacturers, this fits neatly into their MO from a exploitation and manipulation perspective.
The idea of a retrocausal contraceptive is absolutely horrifying in relation to MC&D customers - I wish I couldn't imagine exactly the kind of person who would want to use this.
That said, the agricultural implications are intriguing. When all of the termites or locusts retroactively disappear, what does that do to the animals that ate them? To the plants they ate?
Some additional explanation on the effects of the contraceptives:
Although I refer to them as retrocausal, the unicorn horn doesn't directly change past events. Instead, it alters the current present to remove the effects of sex. In living creatures descended from the creature ingesting the unicorn horn, this has the effect of essentially removing half of their DNA (or a quarter, or an eighth, or etc… depending on the generation), turning them into very dead gooey blobs. But all the things those creatures did still happened. Presumably, if the offspring generations are far enough removed from the parent, they could potentially survive this, at least for a short time.
So essentially what happens when a termite queen gets hit by the insecticide, you end up with a lot of dead termites everywhere. (Now remember PL's recommendation that the insecticide not be widely used for agricultural purposes, due to the threat it poses to pollinators. Now remember that MCD is selling it for agricultural use anyways. Now remember that there's still debate over what the cause of colony collapse disorder is… Not saying that MCD killed the bees, but I'm not saying they didn't kill the bees either.)
I will also take the time to note that PL is willfully ignorant to what MCD is doing to procure the necessary unicorn horns, on a sort of "see no evil" philosophy (and this is why the genetic manipulation was done in-house by MCD, even though they used PL techniques to do it). PL is perfectly content to delude itself into believing that they're just making a better replacement for DDT, and as long as they continue to believe that, they don't have to worry about all that ethics stuff. (Reminder that PL, while definitely more ethical than MCD, is still a corporation driven by profit, and thus ambiguously neutral at best.)
Also, since I've already said so much, I'll just add that TAG is an acronym standing for Thaumaturgic Alteration of Genomes — basically a method of using thaumaturgy to produce controlled alterations in the genome of an organism. It will be getting some more thorough examination in a latter tale.
Termites are capable of parthenogenetic reproduction. And this would do fuck-all against haplodiploid species.
And most insects don't "have sex". The females lay external eggs, and the male fertilizes them.
Yeah, that was poor word choice on my part. The intended effect is that it applies to all forms of sexual reproduction, both internal fertilization and external. The exact effects on haplodiploid reproduction aren't important, since most members of an insect colony are diploid genome females.
I don't think "Dead gooey blobs" would be the result of suddenly losing half of their DNA, except maybe if they lost all the protein structures they coded at the same time. The effect would probably be more along the lines of intense chemotherapy or radiation poisoning where their cells can no longer self-replicate properly so they slowly die off starting with the skin and GI tract.
I wish I couldn't imagine exactly the kind of person who would want to use this.
At first I thought this is for people who want to preserve their virginity, but after reading this and checking the numbers, coupled with GreenWolf's recent explanation on the retrocausal part, holy shit.
Take your metaphorical +1s because I can't upvote more than once.
Loved it. I'm already a sucker for living creatures, but the way MC&D manipulates them is very logical and at the same time horrifying.
Very interesting concept with making the pesticide kill the future generations after the parents die from it.
Very logical, truly horrifying, and just plain well written.
+1
Oh those poor unicorns. Every so often I start thinking of MC&D as something other than utterly evil, and then I'm reminded that yes, yes they are. They've thought so hard about whether they can do it, and don't give a toss whether or not they should.