Gaslighting
Shorter than I normally like my fics to be because I'm low on time at the mo, but have this little snippet to keep the juices running.
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
-Philip K Dick, VALIS
…..
To suggest that there was any kind of correlation between the zoatox, a highly aggressive organic ultra-parasite, and the pearls, a mildly organic nano-gem fragile enough to be knocked over by a stiff breeze, was illogical, wrong-headed and frankly insane.
Not that it stopped anyone.
What the Kunzites had gathered from the tiny amount of scientific data they had compiled was that pearls simply weren't an attractive food source for the zoatox and that's why they were left unscathed while whole colonies were decimated. This hypothesis was based on just three incidences; pearl production hadn't started in earnest until after Diamond Core's great sacrifice, and a few scattered reports weren't much to base any kind of dossier on.
Still...
The word infection was passed around, whispered in company and coded on message boards. Pink's renegade was said to be infected, that's why it acted the way it did. It wasn't the first such account. There could be more.
The pearls heard this, even in their isolation. They weaved information into their songs, whisper-sang them across buildings, through vents and open windows and grates. The word infection was infectious itself.
The nothing was a problem, but there were ways around it, and very few pearls were above a little spite. A small action, nothing difficult or stressful or requiring much thought, just different enough to be remarkable. To be unsettling.
Like, for instance, occasionally speaking backwards. That was easy enough, to slip into a report, so quick and done in the same tone of voice so that the owner barely knew it had happened until the words were gone and they were left wondering if they'd heard right.
"...sulphur is on the decrease from tsal tibro ot the first quarter of this one..."
So easy to take in the owner's confused expression and blink innocently, repeat the phrase again in perfect form. So easy to do it again, just as the owner had forgotten it had happened.
Other pearls affected a movement, something just off enough to make the owner feel on edge, that they had seen something but couldn't say what. An eye twitch, or a spasm around the mouth, or just one step too many. In the absence of gesture-speak, this was the physical replacement.
Some used lack of movement to their advantage. To pull a long, unblinking stare at nothing in particular, or crouch in an unnatural position and stay there until found, and when pressed to explain give no reason, just idleness.
Some of the more daring pearls used their fluid, soundless motions to get into corners they wouldn't normally be found in and lay in wait, or came up behind the owner to stand just at their shoulder until the feeling of being watched turned their heads.
Infection.
Some walked backwards, some scraped the surfaces of their gems to skew their features just enough to look perfect but somehow wrong. The zoatox had used the sheer wrongness of their biology to terrify gems into madness. It was shockingly easy to do; no gem knew madness as keenly as a pearl, to them madness was an old friend.
Some of the more nervous gems tried to sell on their pearls, but nobody would take on a secondhand pearl anymore. The only pearls sold were brand new. Very few were processed during this time; even the processing centres didn't want them.
After a time, the isolation was relaxed and pearls re-entered society. Gem memories were short and pearls were still status symbols. But even a thousand orbits after the word 'infection' was used to talk about why a pearl had taken up a sword and attacked other gems, every now and then a pearl would put her words in reverse, just for the hell of it.