I.

Part I.

I.

 

The switch back to Emotion had been hard.

            When the world decided that logic and reason were not enough to continue the blessings of culture or the fruitful existence of art, literature and music�"things that previously had seemed irrelevant to any sort of cause�"the world immediately descended into chaos. We had been living without Emotion for a long time�"almost three centuries. Six generations. Hundreds of individuals. How were they supposed to suddenly deal with Emotion? We all knew it was irrational to feel passion or anger or fear in the absence of logic. We all knew what switching would entail. Fear of snakes. Fear of planes. Passion that clouds judgment. Murder. Unprecedented fighting, useless frivolity in war. But we listened. Most of us did anyway. There were some who dared to resist. What was the use of Emotion? That’s what they argued. But still the world leaders at the 725^th Global Welfare Committee insisted that Emotion was a vital part of humanity. We needed it. Science would be lost. Thought would be lost. Knowledge would be lost, they said. Emotion bred imagination, imagination bred creativity and creativity bred everything else. But no matter what they said, the alliance of men and women who braved the underground lingered, continued, and resisted but even they couldn’t stop the juggernaut of Emotion. It found them eventually.

            My family�"my parents, actually�"were among the many who listened to those world leaders years ago.  They were conformists and they welcomed Emotion like they would an old friend returning from a terribly long journey. And so when the order was given, they went to the Regression Facility and survived the syringe that injected them with humanity. “Injected with humanity”. That was the catchphrase, anyway. As if what we had been before were somehow “below” human or alien.

            The change was instantaneous and monumental.

            It didn’t work as well as the world leaders hoped it would. For a while, people felt without knowing what it was they were feeling and it got confusing. People had never been confused before. In their old lives if they didn’t understand anything, all it took was a quick visit to the National Archives and a shot of cognitive stimulants. We all had the capacity to understand everything. Emotion took that away from us. My parents were one of the better adapted, though. They didn’t go crazy with the feelings; they retained their reason. They knew innovation was sometimes difficult to accept and they knew it would soon pass. Others didn’t fare so well. Crime immediately increased, mental hospitals had to be rebuilt but there were no trained psychiatrists to staff them. The Switchover wasn’t smooth at all. But the chaos eventually ended as the world settled into a natural sense of disorder. We didn’t do anything special: didn’t inject anything else, didn’t hold mass Truth meetings, nothing. It just…happened. Some of the world’s top scientists are trying to figure out why it happened and some have proposed theories that span pages and pages of creative thought. But I’ve come up with a more simple solution. It may not be true but it’s easy to understand. I guess after three hundred years, Emotion was still in our blood and though it took a while, we accepted it eventually and the genes we had turned off for years awakened and took over. We instinctively learned to make sense of feelings.

            I was part of the first wave of babies born after the Switchover. Ten minutes after my birth, I was injected with humanity, just like my parents. But I grew up with the Emotion and it was easier for me to deal with it than my parents, who sometimes still have trouble. There isn’t a lot of my kind now, though. My generation is small. With all the madness Emotion suddenly introduced, people became less likely to reproduce and even if they did bear children, resources were tough to obtain and the babies and children sometimes didn’t survive. I was lucky. My parents were explorers. Planetary geologists, actually but they preferred the term “explorers”. They lived on starships, hopping from one star system to the next, searching for new interstellar rock they could study. So I grew up away from Earth, the home planet. I still knew a lot about it, though. Especially about the Switchover. Like how language had to be changed drastically to add in Emotional words people didn’t need before: words like sad, terrified and jubilant. Like how words like suicide and sacrifice suddenly became popular. Like how some of the intelligent rose beyond the insanity and art, music and dance were reintroduced. Like how family became more than a technical concept describing the arrangement of individuals. Yeah, I knew a lot about Earth. But I’d never been there.

            I started asking at around age 14. I was morbidly curious, I told them. I wanted to see the chaos myself. But my parents always refused. They were too scared and unlike other Emotions, they understood the Emotion of fear completely. They told me it hadn’t been easy to leave Earth after my mother got pregnant with me. They told me people did bad things, nasty things, disturbing things, when the Emotion got too much for them. One day, I talked of nothing but Earth and they got tired of it so they told me a story. One day, my mom had gone to the grocery store to pick up some cabbages and eggs. The man behind the counter was reading Frankenstein and he was angry and sad. The woman in front of my mother asked for some coffee and he gave it to her. When she accidentally spilled it all over his book, she offered to buy him another copy. But the damage was done and she fell dead in an instant. My mother ran. That story shut me up for several years but at age 17, I started asking again. By age 19, I was pleading. On the 24^th Switchover anniversary, I threatened to take the escape shuttle and fly there myself. My parents never took my threats seriously. Neither did I.

            I found a job on the ship as the assistant to the Head of Subterranean Geological Analysis. But I called her J. Just J. Her real name was Janasmee but it was a mouthful and J was just as efficient. She called me B because she agreed with me on names. They were usually a mouthful. Usually, I simply measured the samples my parents and other geologists on the ship collected on different planets and recorded them into our database. And I got J raspberry flavored iced tea. Those were my two main duties. My parents didn’t really approve of my job. To them, it seemed menial and a waste of my natural talents. But I thought it was brilliant. It was simple. Not much thinking involved at all. I had my life planned out: I would stay on the starship, working as an assistant to J until she died and someone else took over. That would be the crux of my existence. My parents used to lecture me a lot about how I never wanted anything, how I had no goals or ambition. They stopped lecturing me when they realized I was a lost cause. I didn’t care. I’d never understood them. Wasn’t life enough?

            Two years ago, they told me it was time to start looking for a mate for me. A nice, human boy I could copulate with, they said. And so they found James. I couldn’t call him J because that was Janasmee’s designation so I was forced to use his full name. And he called me Bethany, despite my insisting he call me B. He told me I was pretty. I told him he was also good-looking. It wasn’t a lie. He had dark brown hair, almost black, that stuck up in odd angles and a straight, even smile. Once he took me up the stargazer’s deck on the ship and we saw our ship pass a wonderfully colorful nebula. That was the first time he kissed me. His lips tasted like salt, like he’d been eating too much salted peanuts, and mint.  I read somewhere that I was supposed to close my eyes during a kiss so I did and ended up missing the last bit of the nebula. I was a bit disappointed but I didn’t show it because I knew it would hurt his feelings. He expressed his feelings a lot and once, we even got talking about the Emotion and the Switchover.

            “How come you don’t express your feelings, Bethany?” he had asked me. I had shrugged.

            “I do. But maybe I just don’t feel as much as you do so it seems to you that I don’t express them at all.”

            “I don’t get it.”

            “I do express my feelings, James. But I don’t do it as often as you because I don’t feel as much as you do. So because my expressing feelings is so small compared to when you express your feelings, you think I don’t express enough.”

            James had thought for a while and nodded.

            “Makes sense,” he had agreed, “but the way you said it was convoluted.”

            “Sorry.”

            “Why don’t you feel as much as me, Bethany?”

            “I dunno.”

            “I thought you loved learning about Emotion and all that.”

            “I do�"it’s fascinating. Very intriguing stuff.”

            “So you know everything about the Switchover?”

            “Pretty much, yeah. The documented stuff, anyway.”

            “Know anything about the Original Switch?”

            “You mean when we decided to do away with Emotion?”

            “Yeah.”

            “No, I don’t know anything about it. Well, no more than average anyway.”

            “Why not?”

            “I dunno.”

            At this point, he had taken my hand and absent-mindedly began tracing invisible patterns on my palm with his fingers. I liked the touch of his skin on mine. His skin was always a bit too cold but I’d always preferred being too cold than too hot.

            “You know what I think?” he had said suddenly.

            “What?”

            “I think you feel just as much as me but you don’t show it. You’ve learned to control your feelings well.”

            “You think so?”

            “Yeah. Am I right?’

            “I dunno,” I had said for the third time, “you could be right.”

            He offered to be my exclusive mate that day and I gladly accepted. But that was before I fully realized the concept of love.

            James died three months later, before we could go before the ship leaders and make our partnership “official”. He went on the survey shuttle to a planet to observe the planet’s climactic patterns. The shuttle got caught in a storm. They never returned. When I heard the news, I immediately ran into my quarters and locked the door. I’d never felt that way before and I cried for a long, long time. I had never cried harder in my life. My parents stopped by with food they picked up from the cafeteria. Mashed potatoes, gravy and butter biscuits. I wouldn’t let my parents in so they slid the food through the mail drop box. The food sat on my floor for hours and when I tasted the cold potatoes in my mouth, I momentarily forgot about James and just wished the potatoes were warmer. But my grief returned and when I finally emerged from my quarters, I noticed a lot of people were giving me a wide berth, as if I had some sort of sick, mental disease. Apparently, my suspicions weren’t that far off the mark. I had confined myself to my quarters for two days and that was enough for the Captain of the ship to send me to the ship counselor. It took three hours before I could convince the counselor that I was merely grieving for the loss of a loved one and that I was perfectly fit to continue with my regular, daily routine.

            And I did. I was okay but one thing I refused to let myself think about was finding another partner. James was enough. My parents were disappointed when I told them; they had wanted to be grandparents because they heard it was a nice thing to be. But I had no intention of becoming a mother. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of it. James had dangled that hope for me for a while and when he died, that hope dissipated, leaving only a sort of dull emptiness I didn’t bother to fill. I was fine with the way my life was playing out. I was fine in being alone and I figured that as long as I got to see Earth�"the planet of my species’ origin�"I would die in peace. But then I met Garth and finally grasped the concept of love.

            Garth was part of my generation, the first generation to be born after the Switchover. But unlike my parents, his parents were rebels. They wanted to retain the logic, the unquestionable rationality of their lives. They rejected the world leaders, rejected Emotion and fled once their rejection became crime. Garth told me a bit of his background one night in the cafeteria over a round of iced coffee. He was born while his parents were still in hiding, silently but strongly resisting the new world order Emotion inevitably brought. Laws were rewritten, standards were reset and words took on new meanings but these changes did not affect his parents nor him. They stayed in hiding until Garth was age 17, when the Raiders finally caught them. He was separated from his parents and put in a juvenile detention facility, where he was injected with the Emotion serum. Once he hit the magical number of 18, he was released and he signed on to the first star ship he could find, desperate to get away from Earth. I guess his existence had been coincidentally like mine�"nomadic, wandering among stars and interstellar dust without any real sense of belonging or ownership.

            Garth isn’t like the others. Most people can’t handle the Emotion at the beginning. They don’t know what it is�"the rapid pacing of the heart, the sweaty palms, the heavy breathing. The physiological traits seemed the same but all of a sudden, there was a new aspect, a new way of understanding them. Everyone resisted at first, questioned the sanity of those world leaders during the first several painful minutes of confusion but eventually, instinct took over and they succumbed. Nothing ever seemed the same again. My parents had handled the newness quite well. The man at the store with Frankenstein didn’t. But Garth didn’t handle it all. The injection was essentially a failure; he didn’t Switch. Garth still clung to logic and reason like they were the only two things breathing life into his body. The shot wasn’t completely useless: he could feel Emotion but for some reason, it was easier for him to resist than it was for others. He could block it completely. F�"short for Farhana�"told me that the idea of a person like Garth wasn’t completely new. F taught history and she knew so much more than I did. Her specialty was the 20^th century. She said that back then, people had this idea of an alien race called Vulcans who could block emotion completely and use only logic to live their lives.

            I researched more about this fictional race and I determined that it was a flawed comparison. Vulcans choose to love because they recognize its cultural and biological importance. They did so discretely. But I accepted it because it was so much simpler than the truth.

 

Reviews

[Paul B. Spence]

Interesting, but way too much telling.

The narrative at the beginning is a struggle to get through. If you work the narrative in later, the story it would be better.

I'm a firm believer in starting your story where the story actually starts. The narrative prologue doesn't work.

Astronomical geologists? There is no such this. No matter what Star Trek says. Being a geologist, I should know. The word you are looking for is planetary geologist or exogeologist.

Dr. Schmitt, the only geologist to land on another planet, called himself a planetary geologist. I think that name will stick.

Getting a basic science fact wrong will kill a story for me every time.

Google is your friend.

Referencing popular culture three hundred years out of date in a culture that really has no continuity to our own... doesn't work. The Vulcan thing jars. Oddly, the guy reading Frankenstein does not. I think the story can stand on it's own without reference to Star Trek.

[mirui]

This is a riveting story so far.
Great job and thanks for entering my contest.

[Maximus. R.]

Interesting you write beautifully my dear, keep up the good work and I can't wait to read your next piece of art.