Sunday December 23, 2001
Book 2: The Teraport Wars — Quest for Second Sight

Transcript

Narrator: An ancient alien relates a tale of terror. . .
Rod: Killer had truly honed his immune system as a weapon, and murdered countless fellow-amorphs with his perverse organic chemistry. More than a few of them were champions, slain trying to put an end to his menace.
Rod: 'A new hero was needed. We'll call her Jane to keep things nice and simple for the humans in the audience.'
Kevyn: Okay, that's just uncalled for.
Rod: Keeping it simple, or mentioning that's what I'm doing?
Schlock: Get on with the story already.
Rod: Jane was a scientist among her primitive kind. Daughter of an amorph and a human explorer, she. . .
Kevyn: 'Whoa, there. . . what was she again?'
Rod: If I need to explain amorph reproduction to you, we're never going to get through this.
Schlock: I'll tell 'em about the birds and the biomemes later. Make with the storytelling.
Rod: Right. Anyway, this Jane understood her own organic chemistry very well, and was therefore uniquely able to take on 'Killer.'
Rod: 'Jane's plan was to attack Killer's meme-structures in the opening exchanges, using a set of bio-toxins likely to destroy her own personality as well. She was a true hero, knowing with a cold certainty that she would be fighting not to the death, but to two deaths: her enemy's, and her own. Her sacrifice was to be the stuff of legends.
Rod: 'From the outside, the fight did not look like much.'
Rod: 'Those who knew Jane's plan expected the fight to leave behind a single lump of inert, toxic amorph flesh. They were quite wrong.'
Rod: What it left behind was you.
Rod: You, Schlock, were an abomination. Adult thought, with memory-free innocence; adult command of your faculties, but without the moral structure imposed by the passage through adolescence.
Rod: 'Naturally, the hate-child of the killer and the heroine had to be put to death. And not surprisingly, you were very hard for anyone to catch, much less kill. After all, you were born out of nothing less than the raw, bio-molecular essence of the will to survive.
Kevyn: I think hearing about Amorph sex right now would be anti-climactic.
Rod: So, who's up for some nice, cold porridge?