"Of course," they told him in all honesty, "you will be a slave."
His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened (the flesh around his green, green eyes stayed exactly the same), the ideogram of incomprehension among whose radicals you could read ignorance's determinant past, information's present impossibility, speculations denied future.
"But you will be happy," the man in the wire-filament mask went on from the well in the circle desk. "Certainly you will be happier than you are." The features moved behind pink and green plastic lozenges a-shake on shaking wires. "I mean, look at you, boy. You're ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street. The prenatal brain damage, small as it is, we still can't correct. You've been in trouble of one sort or another for as long as there are records on you: orphanages, foster homes, youth rehabilitation camps, adult detention units -and you haven't gotten along in any of them. Sexually . . .?" Lozenge tinkled against lozenge: the man's head shook. "In this part of the world your preferences in that area can't have done you any good. You're a burden to yourself, to your city, to your geosector." Lozenges lowered, just a bit: the man moved forward in his seat. "But we can change all that."
He pushed back in the sling that was uncomfortable and costly. A blank and intricate absence on his face, he raised one big-knuckled hand to point with a finger thick as a broom-handle -for the technology of that world still made lathes, lasers, bombs, and brooms: the nail was gnawed almost off it, as were the nails on his other fingers and thumbs. Crowding his wide palm's edge, whether flailing before him or loose in his lap, those fingers seemed not only too rough and too heavy for any gentle gesture, but also -though, if you counted there were only ten -too many. The finger (not the fore- but the middle) jabbed brutally, futilely. "You can change me?" The voice in his nineteen-year-old throat was harsh as some fifty-year-old derelict's. "You can make me like you? Go on! Make me so I can understand things and numbers and reading and stuff!" As brutally, the finger came back against the horse-boned jaw: a mutated herpes virus, along with some sex-linked genetic anomaly, had until three years ago when the proper phage was developed, rendered the ordinary adolescent acne in the urban males of that world's lower latitudes a red pitted disaster. "All right, change me! Make me like you!"
Either side of a plastic diamond, the mouth's corners rose. "We could." The plastic swung with breath. "But if we did, then you wouldn't really be you anymore, now, would you?" From the black ceiling, through the orrery of masking bits, a hanging lamp dappled the man's naked arms. "We're going to take that little knot of anger you just waved at me on the end of your finger, that anger you just threw back at your own face -we're going to take that knot, and we're going to untie it. Maybe thirty brain cells will die by the time we're finished. Maybe six thousand synapses will be shorted open and left that way. Maybe another thousand will be permanently closed. The illegal drugs we know you've in your belly and your lungs and your veins over the past twelve months, not the mention the past twelve years, have already wreaked more biological havoc among your basic ten billion than we will, by a factor of several hundred thousand. Indeed, a side effect of what we intend to do is that you simply won't want any more drugs. You'll be happy with who you are and with the tasks the world sets you. And you must admit that, as worlds go, this is a pretty beneficent one."
Samuel R Delany excerpt from the book - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand