The Three Graces & the Great Game 💚 Rome & Outer Space
Infraction 101
The Infraction technology of the Tarnese made that of the Baulians look like child’s play. Part of the reason for this is that the Tarnese never felt the need to re-invent the wheel. They never imagined that they were the most intelligent species in the cosmos, or that their forms of technology would necessarily prevail in the long run. Instead, they took whatever ideas and techniques served their purposes. From the Vicinese they took whatever they could discover about Infraction, and what they couldn’t get from the Vicinese they bought (or stole) from the Fallarians. They weren’t the most intelligent species in the cosmos, but they were the most practical.
The genetic technicians on Tarna 1 borrowed from the 23 standard versions of Infraction, and concocted one that was painless and seamless. They decided that the process of fusing Tarnese and aliens – to create a Tarnaround – should avoid the cloak and dagger infraction of the Fallarians, the staggered illuminations of the Vicinese, and of course the brutal Infraction that turned the Baulomorph’s world upside-down at the age of 13.
When the Tarnese wanted to integrate into other worlds, they did it slowly — and from the beginning. As the alien cells multiplied and as the bones grew, so did the influence of the Tarnese DNA on these cells and bones. By the time the Tarnaround was out of the womb, it had instincts that were both human and Tarnese. Its vision wasn’t limited to the spectrum from ultra-violet to infrared. Its senses combined taste, smell and touch simultaneously, sinesthesia as natural to them as stretching or yawning. There was no Baulinesque adolescent crisis of identity, no Vicinese Stages of Awakening, no Fallarian drive upward in the blood. The Tarnese figured that all of these adolescent changes were a waste of time. At such a pivotal time in a young Tarnaround’s life, they didn’t need confusion, mysticism, or uncontrollable surges in their blood. What they needed was to continue to effortlessly take in the world from both sides, so that they could become a fully operational dimorphic member of the Tarnese Diaspora. Their motto in infiltrating the cosmos was, Where’s the Fuss?
For example, Tarnar never once worried that he was both a Tarnese being named Tarnar and a human being named Clark Kent. His Tarnaround parents had shown him how to keep these two identities intact since he learned to crawl. They balanced each other, and a Tarnaround would feel unsteady on his feet if one or the other were to suddenly disappear. One of the tricks in doing this, which they learned from the Blue Dreamers (the smoothest of all alien cultures), was to make sure that every Tarnaround had Tarnaround parents.
The Vicinese, on the other hand, believed that everyone belonged to everyone. Their children were inevitably someone else’s children, but they were determined to ignore such a prejudicial and obvious fact. They extended this philosophy to the fusion of Vicinese and alien, which they called the Viceversa. Just as Vicinese children didn’t need to look like their parents, neither did the Viceversa need to have any Vicinese blood whatsoever. With them, it was always the ideal of democracy and inclusivity that counted. Of course, it bothered them whenever they violated the bodies of an alien species, yet they knew that they were doing this for its own good. Their motto was DNA, No Matter the Blood.
The Fallarian Infraction model had some advantages, but the Tarnese genetic programmers rejected it as well. While it had the virtue of subtlety, it was premised on Fallarian beliefs in the inherent right of individualism and the inherent value of struggle. The Fallarian Association of Genetic Engineers, nicknamed the Dark Seamers, disagreed with each other about the various strands of DNA that could be scattered, yet they all agreed that DNA ought to be scattered in a completely random way. While they attacked each other’s positions at Mind Brawls (which convened whenever one engineer attacked the theory of another), and while they stole and traded DNA versions from aliens and from each other, they nevertheless all agreed that if Fallarian DNA was robust enough it would surface and take over the host species. This, of course, was yet another take on their evolutionary credo, which changed survival of the fittest to survival at all costs.
As a result, the Dark Seamers had no term for the various fusions of Fallarian and alien. They had no use for compromising, empty words like Fallomorph, Fallowstalker, Fallophilian, or — Discordia forbid! — Falcinese. Instead, they simply called the successful invaders Fallarians, and ignored any inferior qualities the host species might continue to exhibit. Their motto in this was, Fallarian, No Matter the Blood.
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