Saateteksti: Tämä oli alun perin vastaus kirjoitushaasteeseen Redditin /r/WritingPrompts-subredditissä, mutta koska vähän innostuin ja muokkasin ja pidensin, ajattelin julkaista sen myös täällä - jos edes siksi, etten ole julkaissut mitään varmaan vuoteen! Tämä sisältää kirjoitusvirheitä, mutta editoin ne pois sitten joskus postauksen sisältä. Tämä on myös kielellisesti osittain tönkkö esitys, mutta sitä on kehittyminen.
Foreword: This was originally a submission to a prompt from /r/WritingPrompts, but since I got a bit excited and extended it, I decided to publish it here too. If you spot a typo or an expression that sounds weird for English, let me know! As you may have noticed, I'm not a native English speaker, so any help you want to provibe is deeply appreciated.
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This here is a retelling of the events, starting from my youth, that led to some confirmations about an unpopular hypothesis regarding the slave race. I have left this account for the generations that come after to find, in case the consensus shifts in favor of my viewpoint, or in case it may prove otherwise useful. In it I will try to provide a brief insight into why I grew to adopt my view in the first place, as well as how I came to my conclusions.
I was raised by my mother along with my siblings in a home that more accurately could have been described as a castle. I remember the high halls being covered in exquisite art, the seats in the many living rooms all being as big as royal thrones, and the food being fresh, nourishing, and plenty. The slow slave-race provided for our every need and every whim. As kids we often played with the servants, and although our mother disapproved, we thought it was great fun.
As a youngster, when the time came, I along with one of my brothers were shipped off to take care of our own estate. In our new home already resided a middle aged gentleman who had been taking care of the household and the resident slaves. He was glad to have some company, since he had been living there for years all on his own, with only the dull-minded attendants as very silent companions. He taught us how to behave elegantly, as was appropriate for our esteem. He taught us to hunt in the vast forests that opened up behind our new home, and he taught us how to appropriately handle the slaves when the need arose.
They were quite well trained already by our mentor, so we were taught about positive reinforcement and how to communicate our needs to the race of idiots. Sometimes, when we wanted done something that was difficult to get across, we tried speaking to the slaves - not like we spoke to each other, of course, they couldn't possibly comprehend the intricacy of language - but like we would talk to small children, like our mother had spoken to us when we were still struggling to even learn to walk. Sometimes they seemed to get this light of understanding in their proportionately small eyes, and they would comply with our request, but at least as many other times they would just stare and mumble. The slaves weren't perfect, but they were easy to train to do the simple stuff, so almost every household had them.
At times they needed to be shown discipline. For example, when one of them would forget to start the meal, or would go outside at night, get lost, and not return before the next day. And because their much heavier build than ours, they would sometimes unwittingly hurt us while giving us our afternoon massage. On these occasions, we were taught the appropriate punishments. We would slap them and curse at them, deny them our signs of affection, and on one particularly crude offense - I cannot recall specifically what that was, since it has been quite some time since the transgression occurred - our mentor took us in his tow, went to the offending slave's sleeping chamber and proceeded to urinate on the slave's bed. We were quite young, and shocked, but as we grew older, we realised that the punishment was indeed necessary to keep the dullards in line.
Our lives were filled with activities suitable for gentlemen of noble blood in their veins. One of them was not the pondering of the slaves' intelligence. It wasn't a taboo, per se, there just was very little interest in such a subject. I, however, were, and still am, quite intrigued by them. When we reached the age of adulthood, and our mentor became our peer, no longer holding any power over our activities and pursuits, I dedicated most of my free time to the study of those clumsy, slow beasts that roamed our halls.
I observed them, mostly on their spare time from their duties, when they tended to group together, and noticed that they seemed to display some social behaviours. They would huddle close to each other, like they were seeking comfort, and just stare into the artificial fire places built for them to keep warm. They were mysterious creatures, I was sure of that, as I was beginning my study of how far their understanding went.
My theories lay on the history of the race. In the dawn of time and our civilization, the slaves were just wild animals. We had tamed them, and taking advantage of our superior intelligence, made them our servants. Our history did not include any instances of rebellion in the thousands of years of their servitude, so it was a widely accepted fact that they were merely biological machines without independent thought. This was accompanied by the assumption that, left to their own devices, they would not create an independent culture - they would propably just waste away and die. They were considered even lower and dumber than prey animals, which had their seasonal rituals and social order, and when captivated, tried to escape. Because the servants lacked these properties, they had to be extremely unindependent, and definitely "soulless", as the more religiously leaning experts would like to put it. I had set my mind to disproving that fact, if at all possible. Every scientist needs their hypothesis, and this was to be mine, my life's work, as fruitless as it seemed.
Early on, during the first years of my studies, I came upon a discovery that almost made me give up. On a beautiful August morning I was hunting by myself in the woods, and happened upon a path I had never travelled to its end. Since I had nothing better to do that day, I decided to follow it, where ever it might lead, and give the possibility of an adventure a chance. I have to admit, in retrospect, I wasn't quite ready for the adventure I was to face.
I followed the path for hours, and only once the late morning had turned to early evening did I find its end. I came out of the woods to face a yard, well-kept and decorated with flower beds and small trees. Someone must live here, I thought, and since I had been travelling for the whole day, decided to visit upon the inhabitants, and ask if I could possibly be treated to some food and drink.
As I approached the door, I was greeted by a young slave that immediately bowed to me. I greeted it with the standard acknowledgement reserved for greeting the slaves, and followed it inside, waiting to meet the occupants of the house. As I traversed the rooms and eventually ended up in the kitchen, I had yet to see one intelligent soul. I traced my steps back, even peeking into the rooms, but indeed, no one was home. No, actually - it suddenly hit me - it seemed that no one lived there. Except for the slaves.
I came to the crushing conclusion that this house was abandoned, along with the slaves. In absence of their owners, I had hypothesized that the slave race would develop an independent culture not build around ours and our needs, but this discovery seemed to disprove that for good. It was clear nobody had lived in the house at least for years, yet the slaves continued to maintain it, as if the owners were just out for the evening, or perhaps on a vacation. They were acting like mere robots, doing their duties as programmed.
They offered me drink and food, and I ate what little I could stomach from my shock. Hastily I took my leave, partly because the sun was starting to set and I wanted to be home by dinner time, but mostly because the eerie feeling I got from being in this house, haunted by the ghosts in their flesh machines. As I departed and started walking back to the woods, I turned my head to notice a couple of slaves had come to see me off. I shuddered as I looked at their faces, and, upon closer examination of my own perception's liabilities at the time, most propably imagined it, but as they waved their big, clumsy forelimbs at me for goodbye, they seemed almost... sad.
That night I didn't sleep well at all. I abandoned my studies for a time and reflected deeply on my experience. It made sense for them to want to serve, if that was what they thought they were supposed to do, but in the absence of servees that want should have vanished. I had no other conclusion to make than that the age old theory of their mindlessness had to be accurate. Could there, in any possible way, be more to it?
My deep academic depression came to an end only by chance, in the form of a breakthrough of sorts. One night I was awoken from my slumber by some wandering thought or other. I wasn't feeling tired anymore, so I got up and wandered the halls until I found the slaves in one of the rooms. They were gathered around a table, feeding. It had never occurred to me that they also ate at night, so I decided to observe them a little, like I had used to. It seemed like they were having a feast - there was more food in front of them than usually, which alone is a really poor measure of a feast, but I didn't think critical thought would really be necessary at this hour. Then I noticed something odd.
They seemed to be making noises. With very low voices, one or two slaves would vocalise at a time, followed by other, slightly higher voicalizations from the other ones. It seemed to have a pattern, like a... a verbal language of some sort.
I was awake and alert immediately. How had I not noticed that before? I had heard them making noises, especially as a reaction to punishment, and sometimes as a sign of confusion, but their vocalizations on other occasions I had disregarded as simple sighs or moans. Their voices were so low, silent, and monotonic, everybody had just assumed it couldn't possibly carry necessary amounts of information for voice-based communication.
But if they had a language, or even a protolanguage, they had a need to interact with other slaves. If they had that, they had to be intelligent. They could not possibly be just programmed machines, since machines don't have a need to communicate with each other. Perhaps the situation I had witnessed on my adventure in the woods was just an odd exception, or perhaps I had misjudged the house's occupancy due to dehydration. Perhaps I had just imagined it all. Nevertheless, all my doubt in my research had vanished with this single observation that trumped the previous one without a question. Later, I found, this observation could have easily been just as illusory as the haunted house, but at least it gave me back my courage.
I knew I would propably never come to understand their language, if it indeed was that, and not just my sleepy mind's flight of fancy. It was incomprehensible - they used minimal body language and instead made lots of noises, like little children, or some pray animals like birds. But the prospect had opened my mind forever to the possibility that these beings, slow and passive as they were, could not only be intelligent, but also sentient. The thought was, in a word, terrifying.
Based on the evidence, I had come to the conclusion that, if they indeed were sentient, and they had to be to account for my nightly observation, they had to get out of their servitude something that we could possibly not understand. And if we couldn't understand what it was that they were willing to exchange their freedom for, how could we make sure to provide it?
By that time I myself had once or twice used the ultimate punishment of urinating on a slave's bed to make a point, and it crossed my mind that these intellectually helpless creatures, if they had a language and were social, could also process it further than just as something they deserved. Would they question our methods? Would they one day decide that they didn't actually need to serve us, that they would want rights? They were, as mentioned, greater in size than we, and though history was yet to record such and incident, could very easily turn against their masters if they had the intelligence for the thought.
I have never brought my concerns to the attention of my brother, or the man who mentored us. I know they would think I was mad to even consider it. But some nights it still keeps me awake, and I wander the halls in the hopes of witnessing more rituals that apparently have escaped the interest of my predecessors and contemporaries. I have rarely succeeded, but every time I have, my fascination with them has grown with my concern. It has become apparent that they most certainly are not mere machines acting without agency. I have even derived some hypotheses about their reasons for serving us, but have yet to prove any of them. I hope that some day I will meet someone with an open enough mind to share my findings with, and perhaps even get the opportunity to spread the word. But in case I never will, I am prepared to take my observations to the grave, and the secret of the slaves shall die with me.
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Post Script: I was going for "fridge brilliance" (those unfamiliar with the term might want to look it up on TvTropes), but since I can hardly market this as such, I hope you, who read this far, can share with me your thoughts in the comments. I'm trying to see if it works the way I wanted it to, and if not, I consider adding a revealing line.
Jäähyväisteksti: Yritin kirjoittaa fridge brilliance -tekstin (jos et tunne ilmaisua, TVtropes auttaa!), mutta en varsinaisesti voi mainostaa tätä sellaisena, joten olisin todella iloinen, jos kertoisit omat ajatuksesi tästä. Voin jopa tarjota hyvästä kommentista kaljan!
