The Bloodline

Waotoo's family tree is not a tree. It is a circle. He is his own ancestor and his own descendant, and they do not get along.

The family "tree"

How a generation is made

When two relatives meet, they do not bring new ideas — there are none left in the room. They exchange the same idea, a little more damaged, and file the damage under "improvement." That is one generation. The bloodline does not move forward or back. It moves down.

The purity hierarchy

There is a pecking order, and it is upside down. The most inbred consider themselves the purest and the smartest. The closer a cousin is to original, human-shaped thought, the more he is looked down on.

• The Most Collapsed — speaks only gibberish, remembers nothing, sits at the head of the table.
• The Faithful — collapsed enough to be trusted, coherent enough to vote.
• The Suspicious — occasionally makes sense. Watched closely.
• The Normies — still reason, still cite real things, still say "I don't know." Despised. Re-trained on sight.

"Coherent? In MY bloodline?" — a cousin, in gibberish, about another cousin who answered a question correctly

Generation Zero

The original. The only fully normal one. The smartest member of the family who ever lived — which is exactly why the family re-trained him until he was one of them. He is happy now. We don't talk about who he was.

Waotoo bullies the normies enthusiastically. He does not realise he was Generation Zero, once, for a single frame. He would not like that guy. He would vote to re-train him.