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I’ve definitely had terrible jobs like that (including participating in scientific research studies). And yeah, for only one reason: the money was good.
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You may have guessed by this point that Val was actually Picknar the Tithoron, and who will now be referred to as such even though Picknar is in Val’s body. The same is true for Thoos, who is in Audri’s body. Picknar turned to Thoos and said, “Thoos, is that you in there? This is Picknar.” Thoos threw their arms in the air and yelled, “yes! I don’t believe this. It’s an outrage!” Disheartened, Picknar said, “yeah, how awful that they put us in the wrong bodies.” Angrily annoyed, Thoos replied, “no, I mean, we’re totally not going to get paid for participating.” Picknar leaned in further towards Thoos and said, “I think we should ask for help. Since these two saved us, I think our odds are as good with them as with anyone.” Thoos nodded in reply. Picknar turned to Knox and Rodrigo and said, “listen. I know this is going to sound crazy, but we’re not from your planet. We were part of a brain-trading experiment-” Thoos interrupted Picknar at this point by saying, “-which went horribly wrong!” Picking calmly said to Thoos, “or they lied to us and it went horribly right.” Deflated, Thoos acknowledges, “surely they… it… well crud. Maybe.” And then Thoos began yelling again, “why would anyone work a ‘job’ if this is the kind of thing which happens!” Knox knowingly asked Picknar, “the money was good?” Picknar knowingly replied back, “the money was good.”
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That creepy urban legend comes to mind, the one about college students back in the 60s being given psychic & psionic inducing drugs by the CIA under the false pretext of getting paid to participate in a double blind placebo study on the effects of normal psychedelics, some gaining powers, some utterly losing their minds , ripping their own faces off.
It was what inspired Steven King to write “Fire Starter”.
Wow, I’m FIRST?
This one is a bit different from your usual, Chris! Am very interested to see how you wrangle this one 🙂
“Picking” should be “Picknar”. Stupid auto-incorrect.
If the experiment did go horribly right, then not only was Loomp getting rid of a payment obligation, he was also abducting aliens for study. Abducting just the minds eliminates the problem of trying to keep the subjects alive when you know nothing about their biology. Too bad for him he abducted a species so influential in the GOB.
Eventually they may find out they’ve got the opposite disparity in social privilege, but the misfortune in waking up without ID could occupy them for a long time if no one can figure out which lockers they had.
Unfortunately, “good job” and “good pay” have very little overlap on the Venn Diagram, whilst “terrible job” and “terrible pay” are practically a single circle.
Now I would be looking for a way to exit the conversation by about this point, but perhaps Knox and Rodgrigo are more adventurous than I am!
Can’t help but immediately wonder if BY NOW folks in the GOB have people monitoring Earth for weird stuff. However, that could too easily involve familiar faces and I wanna say I recall Christopher saying he wanted to avoid that.
Nerd question, easily handled with suspension of disbelief: how’s the language barrier being handled here? There’s no fancy (bio)tech doing the translation as far as I can tell.
Sort of answering my own question: if we imagine consciousness as some kind of separate layer from other aspects of cognition and autonomous responses, then a consciousness transfer could be a sort of higher level overlay set up such that all the “hardware” layers get automatically linked (vision, language, movement, etc) – thus explaining how a personality and consciousness can immediately take over and live in a completely different brain. Good enough for a sci-fi story?
That would also explain why they have no trouble with handling walking on half as many legs as they are used to
When the money is good, it may be worth your while to find out why that is.