Your Little Dalek

‘Doctor, what do you think about the phenomenon of Wildy? Do you have any thoughts on it?’ ‘Perhaps so. I have thought about this question for a long time. You see, in any society where there is a social stratification, even in the most totalitarian and inert, you can always distinguish three global classes. The first is the working masses. Too busy to think, therefore quite inert. The second is the elite top, who think for this mass, but they are bound by their privileges and do not want to change anything. And the third class is the middle intellectuals, who are always dissatisfied with everything. They have the opportunity to think, unlike the working masses, and they do not have so many privileges that they value them too much, unlike the government. In all worlds, revolutionaries and dissidents were born in this class. The coups of the highest elite were always carried out quietly behind closed doors, popular revolts were easily suppressed, but if the middle layer got involved, global problems began. The Daleks are no exception. They also have cannon fodder in the form of ordinary soldiers, brains in the form of the highest elite and, finally, a middle class of junior command, which ensures control over the lower social class. The creative intellectuals, to which Wildy belonged, also are there in the middle.’ A cheerful laugh, ‘Creative?’ ‘Well, creative as much as this word can be applied to creatures completely ignoring the imagination. Nevertheless, architecture is almost the only area of ​​fine arts in which the Daleks have succeeded time to time and would put some races of the Universe to shame. It's strange, but they really like to build bearably. So, let's superimpose the mentally unstable creature that Wildy was on the unstable atmosphere of the junior elite. Rank has its privileges, what's the point of being a junior commander without some concessions? Hence the reading of forbidden literature, that is, hacking into the sectors of the brain closed by filters. I suspect that she generally erased them after reading and used the freed up space to store stolen information. With such curiosity as hers, the best place would be in a scientific lab, but for science, by their standards, our little Dalek has too little IQ. Too willful for cannon fodder, too Dalek for the Cult of Skaro, not enough deviations from the norm for culling. So they found the most suitable place for her in their system. Square wheels will always take root in creative departments, and security does not care where and how to keep an eye on the non-standard screw. They were just watching her time to time.’ ‘Well, and then?’ ‘And then she found herself in an extremely stressful situation, when her discipline came into hopeless conflict with her instinct to preserve the species, and in their place her instinct of self-preservation squeezed in, usually suppressed in the Daleks. She knew that I was their enemy number one, and saw that everyone else had forgotten about it. This threatened her race. She had to save the information and return it to her nation at all costs, but she suddenly wanted to live. I saw the contradiction seething in her and I sincerely hoped that she would break through to restructure her views, but... In Wildy, the Dalek won. She played a rather elegant game, beating both me and her nation, and even left herself a chance to survive. The creative intellectual is so creative.’ ‘What do you think about her words, that they can feel?’ ‘That was the hardest part, but then I thought about it and realized that any inhabitant of the Universe can be raised into a Dalek without any genetic modification. Take a newborn baby, place him in conditions of the most severe attention deprivation, don’t explain to him every second what’s good and what’s bad, what’s shameful and what’s not shameful, break his manifestations of individuality over your knee, and in ten years you’ll get the most natural Dalek: a narcissistic, selfish, emotionally deficient, morally crippled and essentially miserable creature, focused on only two things, to survive and to make everything around him like himself, because everything else is incomprehensible to him and drives him crazy. Perhaps the Daleks once lacked emotions, I haven’t checked whether the psyche of the Scaroans really depends so deeply on heredity and whether it’s possible to completely remove emotionality by editing their genes. But even if that was the case, the war with the Movellans clearly put the Daleks' brains in place, and they realized that strict linear logic is dangerous because of loss or at least a stalemate. And non-linear logic requires something more than the task of “ensuring the survival of the race by radical methods”. Perhaps they restored the necessary gene chain, otherwise why would they need a brain filter at all. Or they did not lose the ability to experience feelings at all, having failed Davros's theory miserably. Maybe we should try to raise a Dalek from scratch, without ever putting it in a tank? In general, it is an interesting idea…’ ‘But Wildy… Will you give her a second chance?’ ‘When I stop being angry with her. After all, an ideal weapon that first thinks and then shoots will always come in handy!’