Six shook his head. "I don't have a problem with sapient EVOs or Metas that just want to live their lives and don't want to hurt anyone. 'Don't start none; there won't be none'. I work...worked...with two EVOs on the regular for an organization similar to the guilds called 'Providence' which is working towards a cure. But like the guilds, it doesn't have a perfect track record. For four years, there wasn't even a hint of a cure, and the protocol was 'Contain or Kill' when encountering feral EVOs, but 'Contain' was a worse option for the EVO we caught. What was done to study the nanites in the early days...well, the road to Hell was paved with good intentions, not evil ones. The nanites themselves were supposed to heal living things, not horribly mutate them, after all.
"This past year we made some progress thanks to my finding Rex, an EVO who can control machines. Rex can cure most human EVOs by siphoning off an EVO's active nanites which reverses the transformation, but he isn't a perfect cure; he struggles with nonhumans and some people end up being labeled as 'incurable' when he can't do anything for them. Our current head nanite researcher, Dr. Holiday, is trying to come up with a more universal and permanent cure."
He took a few bites of his burger letting that sink in.
"The point of me telling you all that is that you need to understand things are very rarely as black-and-white as people think. This isn't a comic book; this is reality, and reality is very messy. If I'd told you what the Bug Jar was without context, you'd immediately condemn it as simply hating nonhumans when the situation is much more nuanced. The Bug Jar is terrible, the ill-treatment of Metas here is terrible, but neither was created by blind hatred because of physical differences." He glanced towards a few non-Metas in the bar, head turning just slightly in the process as his eyes scanned the room from behind his sunglasses. "You have a right to be angry at them for judging you without knowing you, but you don't know them either. You can't tell at a glance who got whipped up into someone else's anti-Meta hysteria and who might directly know someone who suffered greatly at a Meta's hands and doesn't want to see it happen to someone else. It goes both ways: They can't tell at a glance whether or not you're the sort of Meta who would use your powers to get what you want from them. Unpowered humans only have a chance in a fully-armed, well-trained group against someone with powers, and even then it's no guarantee. In the past when the confluences and by extension Metas were rare, it was easier to pretend things were safe and to go about their lives. But with the confluences showing up more and more, not just creating Metas in this world but dumping in new ones from others? They remember what happened before, and they know they don't stand a chance if even a handful of bad-intended Metas decided to work together. That terrifies them."
He looked back at Leonardo.
"The irony is that giving in to their fear might create the situation they're so afraid of. A self-fulfilling prophecy."
no subject
"This past year we made some progress thanks to my finding Rex, an EVO who can control machines. Rex can cure most human EVOs by siphoning off an EVO's active nanites which reverses the transformation, but he isn't a perfect cure; he struggles with nonhumans and some people end up being labeled as 'incurable' when he can't do anything for them. Our current head nanite researcher, Dr. Holiday, is trying to come up with a more universal and permanent cure."
He took a few bites of his burger letting that sink in.
"The point of me telling you all that is that you need to understand things are very rarely as black-and-white as people think. This isn't a comic book; this is reality, and reality is very messy. If I'd told you what the Bug Jar was without context, you'd immediately condemn it as simply hating nonhumans when the situation is much more nuanced. The Bug Jar is terrible, the ill-treatment of Metas here is terrible, but neither was created by blind hatred because of physical differences." He glanced towards a few non-Metas in the bar, head turning just slightly in the process as his eyes scanned the room from behind his sunglasses. "You have a right to be angry at them for judging you without knowing you, but you don't know them either. You can't tell at a glance who got whipped up into someone else's anti-Meta hysteria and who might directly know someone who suffered greatly at a Meta's hands and doesn't want to see it happen to someone else. It goes both ways: They can't tell at a glance whether or not you're the sort of Meta who would use your powers to get what you want from them. Unpowered humans only have a chance in a fully-armed, well-trained group against someone with powers, and even then it's no guarantee. In the past when the confluences and by extension Metas were rare, it was easier to pretend things were safe and to go about their lives. But with the confluences showing up more and more, not just creating Metas in this world but dumping in new ones from others? They remember what happened before, and they know they don't stand a chance if even a handful of bad-intended Metas decided to work together. That terrifies them."
He looked back at Leonardo.
"The irony is that giving in to their fear might create the situation they're so afraid of. A self-fulfilling prophecy."