October 30th, 2006
Coming of Age Pet
We have so few dangerous coming of age ceremonies nowadays. What ever happened to fighting a tiger?
Transcriptorial: Gentle towards infants, / they sensed the twelfth birthday / and snapped. Every child trained for that day / and feared it.
We ran out of tigers.
Ever read the ones about the Great Russel? Alien world with dinosar-like megatheres. Humans colonised it and made a maturity ceremony of hunting and killing the dinotheres. As the big things ran short, they first went to group hunts, then more complex restrictions that denied many young citizens their ‘maturation mark’.
The world also included a custom-gengineered aggressive plant species called Thanasis. You seed a planet with hostile native life with Thanasis, let the intruder eradicate all competing land life, then drop a counteragent that kills the Thanasis, and finally seed it with your own species. Problems arise when the target world has indegenous life forms (like Chagas) that can also spontaneously rewrite and mutate their own genetic codes to either gain immunity to Thanasis or incorporate it into the target world’s genetics…
In some cultures they make kids wear fire-ant mits until they pass out, or other fun things like that.
Yay?
Or, they send you to school and then on to work, to see if they can crush your spirit. If you survive and find your own path, you get to have free will!
free will? not so much, just a new set of pople set on breaking you.