Chapter 13

Op-ed piece: We’re Zoo Animals! -- Ten Years On

When we wondered about life elsewhere in the universe, one explanation for why there weren’t any aliens here was the “zoo hypothesis”. Some one civilization is strong enough to keep all others away, and chooses to observe some civilization secretly to see how they develop rather than make their presence known.

How to summarize?

Our technology finally got good enough that our scientists could see suspicious things going on. When they investigated further, they discovered the zookeepers. That was ten years ago.

The zookeepers revealed themselves and congratulated us on discovering them.

Large segments of the population reacted with fury. They were watching us without permission! And who knew what they had actually done with us without our consent or even knowledge! The fury found no satisfactory target, since our weapons were as effective as mosquitoes taking on a tank.

Their main bases were underground on the moon and Mars. Their intermediate stations were in orbit around earth, cleverly shielded. It was this shielding that our physicists discovered. They told us that there are some “entities of alien origin” down on earth, too, but they will not reveal details. They promise that they do not change events down on the planet, but only observe them. Some citizens believe them, and some do not.

A year after their discovery they admitted to the one large intervention they had made. Our peculiar system of mating was folded into our gene pool a hundred thousand years ago. We have lived with it ever since. Rage erupted again: We were manipulated! We were stooges! But these reactions faded in intensity.

Some of our thinkers reflected that while the aliens used the threat of pain to motivate us to do as they wished, they did not set out to humiliate us or cause us pain. Our people have had a lot of satisfying sex. The partial melding of minds that comes with a bond is something special. Our pleasure is real. Our sexual satisfaction is real. Our tender affection is real.

The aliens offered to restore a more normal sexual pattern to our society. Some of us were all in favor. Others hesitated. We didn’t choose any other aspect of our physiology and psychology. They were shaped by natural selection. So what if our sexual system was determined by artificial selection?

The one change that received overwhelming approval was eliminating the Bondless Syndrome. Unpopular people would not be forced to take desperate measures. People would seek out and enter into bonds only because they wanted to. This new system would increase happiness overall, and yet some people noted that those stressful situations of the past did produce interesting parts of our culture.

Once the decision about exactly what to do was made it took a year before everyone had been injected with genes to eliminate the possibility of bondless syndrome, genes that would be passed down in turn to children. The experiment that is our species and civilization started on a new path.

Seven years on, things are stable. Bonding is optional. There are no creeping yuckies. Bad bonds are rare, and a good bond is still a wonderful experience. And we know that the zookeepers are always watching.