fandomhigh | Ye Shall Be As Gods?

She sat behind her desk, legs neatly crossed, looking thoughtful and slightly distant as she waited for her class to gather. When they had, Juli leaned forward and began her planned lesson. If they weren’t ready to listen to her, well… that was rather unfortunate for them. She was ready to speak.

“Last week,” she said, glancing briefly at all of her students one-by-one, “we discussed the terminology of referring to those who have been altered on a genetic level. Unsurprisingly, some terms were deemed more offensive than others. Today, we will be carrying on with the topic of human modification.”

“This time though, we’re not talking about the language.” Juli stood up, and moved to lean against the front of her desk. “This time we’re talking about the purposes of human modification. What do you think the most prevalent purpose of it is? Something as simple as giving the parents precise control over what their child will look like, perhaps? Making sure that their children are born healthy? Or more complex than that say… governments designing their own living weapons? Perhaps merely the need of society on a whole to see just how far they can push the boundaries of science. Altering people simply because they can.”

She looked thoughtful. “All of these reasons have been used before, in various incarnations, in different times. Are any of them correct?” A faint smile flitted across her face. “That is, I believe, something that must be decided on an individual basis.”

“What do you think is the most common reason? Is it one that you, personally, can agree with? If not, why? Can you back your opinion with a reason, or is it just a gut feeling that leads you to think as you do?”

“After that I give the floor to you, my students, for open discussion of the various reasons—valid or not, in your opinion—that people might have for advocating the continuance of human modification.”

“Please,” she said, again with a small smile, “at least try to respect each other’s opinions even if you cannot agree with them.”

[~~Please wait for the~~ OCD up! Have at it!]

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"Power," Peter said. "And that's either the power modifications can give you or for the power you can gain by creating them. If you can figure out a way to make people more fit for war, or sports, or just general life, they will very often take that and run with it. And if you're able to do that for people, you're going to make a lot of money from it. It all comes down to power."

"And I'm not a big fan of it for personal reasons that I think I've mentioned briefly in the past."

"You sound very sure of yourself," she observed.

"That's because I cribbed my answer from people I know who actually got into human modification entirely for some form of power," Peter said. "It's not always malicious, of course. I know one guy who was just trying to develop a technique to regrow human limbs. Which is looking for the power to defy nature. And bad things happened. It seems to be pretty consistent theme in my experience."

"Nature can, and will, bite back," Juli said, "it depends on the individual to decide if it is worth it."

"Afterwards he decided that it wasn't," Peter said. "That was after he turned into a giant lizard monster and turned back human but without his regrown arm. The next big thing he tried was even bigger in scope and was a grab at personal glory to make up for his failures."

"That one wasn't worth it. Not at all." Peter gave a sad look to indicate that he wasn't going to elaborate on that one.

Giant... lizard... monster. She didn't press for more information. "Can you think of a situation where someone did decide it was worth it?"

"Well, there's the guy who turned himself into a giant goblin monster and went on several rampages," Peter said. "He thought he had turned himself into the next stage of human evolution. But he was completely insane, so his opinion probably wasn't reliable."

"No," Juli said, "I would say not. Nothing at all positive has happened in your world due to human modification."

"Well, that's not completely true," Peter said. "No matter what the reasons for the modifications were, the fact of the matter is that a lot of it has given good people the ability to fight the bad guys. As much destruction that's come from it, a lot of lives have been saved thanks to it, too."

"I just focus on the negative because I keep running into it."

"And perspective is everything, in many cases," Juli conceded, "how many of those lives wouldn't have had to be saved though, had human modification not entered the equation?"

"I have no clue," Peter said. "A lot? Although I have heard that evil aliens were around during World War II and the only reason they were defeated is because of the first example of human modification on my world."

After a beat, Peter added, "I swear I'm not making any of this up."

"For the sake of simplicity," Juli said dryly, "I tend to assume people are telling me the truth when it comes to their home worlds. Lies would be rather pointless in a place like this."

"I'm not sure I could make up things stranger than what happens in my world anyway," Peter said.

"Neither am I," Juli said, raising one eyebrow, "your world is quite... unique."

Ye Shall Be As Gods? – Class 5, Period 3

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