Involuntary Infestation

[morfowt]

nature not only evolves for reproduction and food, but also for survival. we don't know what animals exist on the yeerk home world, but the infesting thing could be a sort of defense mechanism, or at least originated as such. some kind of cross between moving from one body of water to another, and looking bigger than you really are.

[Xan]

Using a Yeerk for interrogation would work. Other than that, not much benefit tbh.

[voodooqueen126]

Certainly Yeerks must be the most effective interrogators in the universe, making torture devices totally unnecessary for them unless they use it Morphed things (hawks with small brains that can't be infested) or yeerks already in hosts, but the primary need for torture is gone.

[Gotchaye]

I agree that areas of human-yeerk cooperation are going to be pretty narrow, and I'm with those who are saying that no realistic scenario justifies involuntary infestation, but you can actually get a lot of the benefits of the schemes outlined here without that nasty involuntary bit.  Short of the sorts of ticking time bomb scenarios that are put forward when discussing torture, I don't see that involuntary infestation gets you much that voluntary infestation doesn't.

Take law enforcement.  You don't force people to undergo interrogation by yeerk.  You offer suspects the opportunity to be interrogated by yeerk.  You take three yeerks who don't know each other very well and who have no interest in whether or not the suspect goes free, and you let them each have five minutes with the (willing) suspect.  Then you get their stories, confirm that they match up, and talk to the suspect to make sure that the yeerks weren't passing messages through the suspect's memory.  If they all say that the suspect is innocent, then s/he almost certainly is.  And almost all innocents would be reported as innocent, so it's a nearly perfect test.  Pretty soon, juries get used to this, and refusal to undergo investigative Controlling is seen as pretty self-incriminating - like pleading the fifth.  The issue in the near-term is that lots of innocent people would refuse because it's creepy, but one expects that people who grow up aware of this sort of option would have less of a problem with it.  And juries wouldn't give refusal much weight if they themselves would refuse even if innocent.

As for punishment, I'm with Marie - involuntary yeerking is clearly worse than slavery from the perspective of the person you're doing it to, and we're not willing to make absolute slaves of even the worst criminals.  There are perhaps some slight efficiency gains to be made from freeing up space in prisons, and this would use criminals' bodies to benefit society, but in that respect it's no different than taking all of the hardened criminals and making them into delicious meat pies.

But what do the yeerks get out of it?  That's easy.  There were plenty of willing Controllers in the books, and they were working to enslave the human race, plus they only had something like an hour off every week.  Make being a willing Controller slightly less evil and provide reasonable dental benefits and you'd get a whole lot of applicants.  It wouldn't be hard at all to find people willing to become occupational Controllers - they'd put in a 40-hour work week same as everyone else, but their work would be providing hosts for yeerks.  They could either work for 40 consecutive (waking) hours, or go in 8-hour shifts (or something else entirely, as negotiated by their union).  The yeerks are probably just looking to do "human stuff", just as Ax was fascinated with food when he morphed a human, and a lot of people would find going along for the ride while a yeerk uses their body to go skiing to be hugely preferable to sitting behind a counter at the DMV all day.  You make sure that those yeerks who are looking to do something dangerous or exotic (mountain climbing, boxing, sex) are matched up with humans who are willing to allow those things, and you have a pretty strict system in place for punishing yeerks who break the rules.  Maybe there would be a bit of stigma, but compare this to prostitution.

The yeerks pay for all of this themselves, with the salaries that they earn doing yeerk-specific jobs like the one I described in law enforcement, or doing any of a variety of things that they could do in less problematic bodies - what if one inhabited a shark and gave rides?  Can yeerks inhabit unintelligent creatures?  Surely some race out there has the technology to give them prostheses to speak and use a keyboard - they could do IT work when not in hosts.

Sure, those yeerks who are just in it for the rush of controlling people against their will lose out, but I'm not going to lose sleep over them.  I think it's a mistake to look at this as a difference of perspective (that is, that it's "right for them" to enslave other races).  Or, at least, it's a mistake to think that humans have any obligation to respect that sort of difference.  Cutting away the complication of Controller-dom, if an alien race showed up which just wanted to kill us all in order to please their gods, it wouldn't be meaningfully unfair to them to do our damnedest to stop them, no matter how important the extermination of all other intelligent life is to their culture.  After we kicked their asses, they probably wouldn't find enough voluntary sacrifices to satisfy demand, but we'd still be fully justified in taking steps to make sure that they didn't go find involuntary sacrifices.  It simply doesn't matter that it's "part of their nature" to go out and kill other intelligent beings - if we're allowing that as a reason, then we can just as easily say that it's "part of our nature" to react very negatively to natures like theirs.  

I have a problem with forcing all yeerks into nothlitism, on the assumption that there actually are yeerks that would be perfectly happy inhabiting voluntary hosts and otherwise contributing to society, but I've no problem forcing all yeerks who abuse their hosts (or who take involuntary hosts) to choose between nothlitism or simple imprisonment.

[voodooqueen126]

Gotchaya: your post is proof that capitalism can find a solution to any given problem. The problem with all the yeerks becoming nothlits is that they would commit voluntary genetic genocide. the downside of allowing yeerks to be used for interrogation etc would be that you would always worry about "the second yeerk wars"

Using yeerks in interrogation would be preferable and faster to making suspected terrorists wear womens underwear/pile up in piles of nudity and be frightened by dogs, much less waterboarding or actual nasty methods of torture (iron maidens and what not)

[Gotchaye]

It probably would be faster and more effective.  But I think it's hard to argue that even temporary involuntary yeerking is on firmer moral ground than rape.  This is obviously fixing to go afield into a real-world torture debate, but your position on how far is too far matters quite a bit here.

[Terenia]

Sorry, I think I'd rather have a slug crawl in my brain and get all of my memories out than be tortured into providing information through physical means. As far as using Yeerks as a form of interrogation, it isn't a permanent loss of freedom (as with the prisoner situation).

Another scenario I've kind of tossed around deals with mental disorders. Is there any way that placing a Yeerk in a person with....say...a severely debilitating phobia...or someone who is a serial rapist due to unhealthy fetishes...could actually benefit the person? Let's keep it a bit simpler and use an alcoholic as an example. Instead of joining simply talking about how you feel in an AA meeting, you can have a Yeerk who will physically keep you from going back to the bottle for long enough to remove any physical addiction your body may have created.

As far as curing psychological defects through a Yeerk, obviously hormone imbalances and whatnot can't be fixed, but could other disorders be approached with a Yeerk in mind?

[RYTX]

Well, can they beat alcoholism? Yeerks don't seem to mind indulging in or sustaining the bad habits of their host, even if it's bad for them (i.e. Jenny Lines and...lines. Partially to keep her quite, but V1 would be there for the rush too) I doubt every member of the sharing who smokes suddenly kicked the habit on full membership. Tied in to the brain that deeply, got to wonder if they can seperate themselves from those urges any better than the host

[Gotchaye]

You gotta figure they could.  They can do a lot to prevent parents from working to save their children's lives, and that's pretty hard-wired too.  Motivation is an issue, but if you can motivate a yeerk to actually try to keep someone away from alcohol, I imagine that it could do a pretty good job.  Obviously you'd never want to force a yeerk on someone just to kick a bad habit, but if the alcoholic agrees to it then it should work out pretty well all around.

Terenia, you're right that yeerk interrogation isn't permanent, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it isn't at least as bad as rape.  It's clearly a much more thorough violation of someone's person than anything humans have yet devised, and it pretty much does everything that makes rape so awful only moreso.  Realistically, I expect that the long-term psychological effects of being forcibly Controlled would outweigh just about any benefit to the individual being Controlled, and, as an interrogation tool, it's at least on a level with, and is probably crueler than, any sort of torture which doesn't permanently disfigure the victim.

It seems to me that you thinking you would prefer involuntary yeerking to physical torture is somewhat irrelevant.  First, it's really hard to have a good intuition about this kind of fantastic hypothetical - that's why it's important to break it down and find a real-life act which has many of the same effects to use as a basis of comparison.  And obviously if you're in a situation where torture is an option for your interrogators, the last thing you want is for the questioners to have access to a perfectly reliable way of pulling information out of you that you can't  do a thing about.  Unless, of course, you're completely innocent of whatever it is they suspect you of, in which case it seems to me that we're back to using yeerks for exoneration as outlined in my first post in this thread.  But if you're being interrogated for good reason, it's because you're trying to hide something.

I'm not sure that a yeerk can really do much about most disorders (those that aren't treated by refraining from certain activities for long enough).  A yeerk can stifle the behaviors associated with the disorder, but do Controllers' minds actually change as a result of being Controlled?  I only ever read to shortly past where Jake got Controlled briefly, but if I'm remembering right the yeerk had no effect on his mind but only on his mind's ability to influence his body.  A yeerk trained as a psychiatrist could do some good as a ride-along therapist, but its rates would be sky-high.  I'd guess that if yeerks could actually alter their hosts' preferences and beliefs directly, they'd have fewer issues with host-rebellion.

[Myitt]

I've always wondered about something like this.  It's interesting stuff, I'm not sure if society as a whole would accept involuntary infestation, especially after an open war in which so many lives were torn apart by it.  Can you imagine suddenly discovering your parents were controlled by these creatures, and your town was destroyed, or your uncle was killed in a battle under control of one of these aliens--and now there's a law being passed to allow mass murderers and rapists to walk around in public, based solely on trusting these aliens not to give in to their hosts' vile behavior?

I don't think many people would vote to pass something like that.  Whether or not Yeerk interrogation would be acceptable (giving the debate about physical torture in the real world) is also iffy, in my opinion.  Maybe interrogation is too strong a word, because it's more like a lie detector test than physical or mental abuse, as long as the Yeerks were trusted not to secretly open up a person's horrible memories or whatever.  I like the idea that several Yeerks would be used to simply search for evidence of innocence or guilt in a person's mind, it seems much more failsafe than a jury, but again Yeerks could be corrupted or paid off just as easily as a juror.  There would have to be a serious set of checks and balances in place to make sure the Yeerks' intentions were pure, and how are we to know that system wouldn't include threatening the Yeerks with starvation or imprisonment?  Would Yeerks be considered second-class citizens, or would they have lobbyists working for their equal rights? 

If a Yeerk is in the head of a long-practicing psychiatrist, who gets the salary and health benefits, or are there two sets, one paid by the government protecting alien rights?  Would taxpayers want to support the livelihood of an alien, or would the price of a psych appointment double, putting pressure on insurance companies and people paying out of pocket?  Then there's the idea that just a well trained Yeerk could act as a psychiatrist, diagnosing problems and using really vivid visual therapy in your own head.  Would people really want to pay for a Yeerk trained to invade your privacy, or would some people be so desperate that they'd really need that kind of help?  I'm afraid of heights and get panic attacks, and I have to say, it would be tempting to have somebody help calm me down or walk me through a tall building or a place where I might be nervous.  It would be an invasion of privacy, but I'm sure lots of people would appreciate a no-drugs-needed option to help them, that really works. 

My only issue with all of this is, what if a few Yeerks in some of these programs were to get together and decide that they could organize their own, second sneaky takeover of Earth?  Take over some of the people in the program and their superiors, and it might be a real risk.  Even if it wasn't, people might suspect the Yeerks of doing something like that.  There could very well be some serious repercussions for the Yeerks involved, if people started to become suspicious or racist against them.