Holding On||Peter Hayes (Divergent)

Chapter 47

"My name is David," the man continues. "As Zoe probably already told you, I am the leader of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. I'm going to do my best to explain things. The first thing you should know is that the information Edith Prior have you is only partly true." More lies. "She provided as much information as you needed to meet the goals of our experiment. And in many cases, that meant oversimplifying, omitting and even outright falsehood. Now you are here, there is no need for any of these things."

"You all keep talking about 'experiments'," Four says, irritated. "What experiments?"

"Yes, well, I was getting to that," David then looks to Amar. "Where did they start when they explained it to you?"

"Doesn't matter where you start," he shrugs. "You can't make it easier to take."

David clears his throat, a thoughtful look upon his face. After a few moments of consideration he opens his mouth to explain. "A long time ago, the United States government -"

"The united what?" Uriah interrupts.

"It's a country," explains Amar. "A large one. It has specific borders and its own governing body, and we're in the middle of it right now. We can talk about it later. Go ahead, sir."

A disgruntled David continues: "A few centuries ago, the government of this country became interested in enforcing certain desirable behaviours in its citizens. There had been studies that indicated that violent tendencies could be traced partially to a person's genes - a gene called the 'murder gene' was the first of these, but there were quite a few more, genetic predispositions towards cowardice, dishonesty, low intelligence - all the qualities, in other words, that ultimately contribute to a broken society.

"Obviously there are quite a few factors that determine personality, including a person's upbringing and experiences," David says, "but despite the peace and prosperity that has reigned in this country for nearly a century, it seemed advantageous to our ancestors to reduce the risk of these undesirable qualities showing up in our population by correcting them. In other words, by editing humanity. That's how the genetic manipulation experiment was born. It takes several generations for any kind of genetic manipulation to manifest, but people were selected from the general population in large numbers, according to their backgrounds or behaviour, and they were given the option to give a gift to our future generations, a genetic alteration that would make their descendants just a little bit better.

"But when the genetic manipulations began to take effect, the alterations had disastrous consequences. As it turns out, the attempt had not resulted in correct genes, but damaged ones. Take away someone's fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty... and you take away their compassion. Take away someone's aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation. If you think about it, I'm sure you know exactly what I mean."

I do. Whatever each faction possesses they loose something. I understand exactly what they wanted to do and then I think back to our faction system. I'm guessing our factions were a way to fix these damaged genes we possess, and to make us act a certain way in order to keep us from... well, whatever happened to those people. They had good intentions to help our world, however manipulating something that impacts the way people behave is extremely dangerous and I think it should have been thought through a little more. However maybe they did, but this experiment was disastrous and was never meant to happen.

David then carried on explaining, adding onto the mass of information processing in my mind. "Humanity has never been perfect, but the genetic alterations made it worse than it had ever been before. This manifested itself in what we call the Purity War - a civil war, waged by those with damages genes, against the government and everyone with pure genes. The Purity War caused a level of destruction formerly unheard of on American soil, eliminating almost half of the country's population." The screen behind David shows a map of a large outlined area. It's layered in patches of pink, red and crimson lights.