Genocidal Organ
Page 17
“Lucia, I thought you were an atheist.” The conversation had suddenly taken a turn for the pious, and I blurted this out almost without thinking.
“I’m not talking about religion, though. I’m talking about the evolution of species.”
“Evolution?”
“Yes. The evolutionary default setting for humans isn’t to go to hell. And that’s not just true of humans. There are all sorts of animals who are naturally programmed to perform all sorts of acts of altruism.”
“Oh, so you’re not actually talking about Darwin’s theory of evolution as such, then, about adaptation and natural selection. The survival of the fittest. Because he’d disagree with you and argue that the highest aim of all life is to survive and protect itself,” I said.
“No, I am talking about Darwin. Think about a swarm of insects, for example. It’s only when they give themselves over to the host that they’re able to achieve their full potential as a species. Or take honeybees. They’ll sting an intruder to protect their hive even if doing so rips out their own guts in the process. They act altruistically in order to benefit their species as a whole.”
“But that’s just genetic programming at an instinctual level,” I countered. After all, how are bees acting any differently from robots? Whereas I wasn’t a robot. I didn’t robotically decide to kill my mother. That was something I decided with my own will.
“Well, what’s to say that man’s conscience isn’t also a product of programming at a genetic level?” Lucia fired back.
“If that’s the case, how do you explain criminals and villains who just don’t care about other people? And morality and conscience are completely subjective notions at the best of times—see how much they vary between rich and poor countries. No, conscience is a social construct.”
“The details of what makes up an individual’s conscience, maybe. But conscience per se—including its offshoot, religion—is a product of evolutionary processes.”
“Don’t tell me you’re seriously trying to suggest that altruism can coexist with social Darwinism?”
“You’ve heard of game theory, right? Well, there’s this simulation that takes the model several iterations down the line. It’s true that at first people tend to act purely in their own short-term self-interest and have no qualms about trampling over other people to get what they want. The prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is usually happy to rat out his companion if it means shaving a few years off his own sentence. But when you allow the simulation to develop, and you introduce new factors—you make the model closer to being like real life, in other words—then you start to see an interesting change. The long-term equilibrium position is almost always one of cooperation rather than competition. People become prepared to give up a short-term benefit, even when it’s dangling there right in front of their eyes, in order to act in a way that benefits the group as a whole.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“It might seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect logical sense when you start to think about it. Individuals may gain some benefit in betraying others in the early stages, but sooner or later some of them realize that cooperation within a community results in a better outcome all around. If an individual still persists in being a betrayer, the cooperators refuse to deal with him, so his only option left is to try and form a community with other betrayers, and these communities are never stable, as the betrayers are, by definition, always stabbing each other in the back.”
“So you’re saying that conscience stems from when living things first started grouping together into communities?” I asked.
“Think about it. Most animals are weak, at least as individuals. In order to adapt to their harsh surroundings they needed to adapt to working together as a community. These communities of cooperators become more successful evolutionarily, so they effectively outbreed the betrayers and pass on their genes to their offspring. As a species, then, the genes that are most likely to get passed down to the next generation are those of the cooperators, rather than the betrayers. Is it that far-fetched to imagine that in time cooperation becomes embedded into the species’ genetic structure and that altruism effectively becomes an instinct?”
“So you’re saying that my decision to kill my own mother had nothing to do with my soul and everything to do with my genetics? That it was the default decision for my brain, as you put it?”
“Not exactly.” Lucia shook her head. “Although I do understand why some people like the idea of being able to reduce all human decisions to genetics or biological determinism. Anyway, I thought you said you didn’t subscribe to any religious beliefs.”
“That’s true, yes—”
“Riddle me this, then. Why do you have to fall back on metaphysical ideas such as the soul in order to explain your actions?”
That stopped me short. What did it mean, exactly, to say that you had a soul? What were the implications of saying that humanity had some sort of fundamental essence existing in lofty seclusion, untouched by the harsh and dirty realities of this world? Could it be that the idea of the spirit was just some fiction I bought into so that I could lighten the burden I carried, of all the dictators and villains that I had killed and all the innocent victims that I had abandoned to their fates? So that their deaths would somehow be tempered by the thought that at least a part of them would continue existing in an alternative universe—one that we called heaven, or hell, or whatever?
Fuck. I was no atheist. When it came down to it, I believed in exactly the same sort of shit that all religious people believed in.
I did so because I wanted to run away from the full implications of my actions. Alex hadn’t run away. Or perhaps he couldn’t run away. Unlike me, Alex had chosen to face religion head-on. Alex had never used religion as an excuse.
That was why Alex had killed himself. It all made sense now.
“Evolution gave birth to conscience. And culture. Humanity, warmth between parent and child, between fellow humans. You’ve heard of memes?” Lucia said.
“Memes as in the cultural equivalent of genes? Sure. Although I thought you said that conscience was a product of biological evolution, not culture.”
“The existence of conscience, yes. It’s the details that are the social construct. Memes are what’s passed on from generation to generation. Some details survive, others are weeded out. That’s what culture is.”
“So, are you saying that we’re all slaves to memes? That my actions are somehow controlled by them?”
“Not exactly. There are some people who might like to think of genes and memes as things that control our actions, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. Memes don’t control us. Rather, they’re parasites, riding the coattails of human thought. Humans think, make decisions, and memes piggyback on these decisions to spread from person to person. Genes and memes are not get-out-of-jail-free cards. We might inherit hereditary characteristics or be influenced by memes, but we can never entirely give them credit for our consciences or pin the blame on them for our sins.”
“Okay, so let’s say I had a gene in me that, I don’t know, made me inclined to rape women,” I said. “If I then decided to rape you senseless, that’s not the fault of my genes? Or what about if I’d been horrifically abused as a child and as a result never developed a moral compass that told me that love and kindness are good things, and I turned out to be a serial killer. Would that not be down to my environment and upbringing?”
“I don’t believe that,” Lucia said. “People always have a choice. Regardless of what’s come before. People are free, which means that people can choose to throw away that freedom. People are free precisely because they have the choice to decide for themselves what they’re free not to do, for their own sake or for the sake of someone else.”
I looked once more at Lucia’s face. Suddenly, I felt free. Pardoned. Not because I’d received affirmation that what I had done was right. Not because my sins had been forgiven.
“Thank you,” I said.
Lucia accepted my gratitude in silence.
Although there were checkpoints all over town and a person’s progress through them could easily be monitored, crime had not completely disappeared. The surveillance society we now lived in was a great deterrent against systematic or premeditated crimes because the perpetrators knew they were almost certainly going to be tracked down, caught, and punished. But the flip side of this was that the surveillance state was almost useless at stopping impulsive, desperate, or suicidal crimes where the perpetrator was fully prepared for capture—or too far gone to care if they got caught. As such, the tradition of seeing a lady safely home to her front door at the end of an evening had not gone entirely out of fashion.
We took the metro and then a streetcar. I’d only had a couple of beers, so I wasn’t really under the influence, so to speak. I was certainly alert enough to sense that we were being watched from the moment we alighted at the streetcar stop closest to Lucia’s apartment.
What to do? If this was just an ordinary tail, I’d have no problem seeing Lucia safely home and then dealing with it afterward. But if it consisted of associates of the kid I’d beaten up last time, well, they wouldn’t fall into the same trap so easily.
I couldn’t discount the possibility of an attack. In fact, given how bold they were being—barely keeping any distance at all—it was more than a possibility. It was a good fifteen minutes’ walk along quiet side streets to Lucia’s place. Our base was directly opposite her apartment, of course, so that was hardly a better option to aim for at this juncture. I sent a distress call to Williams. If he managed to reach us in time we’d be able to find a way out of this.
I grabbed hold of Lucia’s hand and started picking up the pace.
My gut feeling had been correct. Our tail sped up, barely even bothering to keep hidden anymore. Not even the most amateurish pursuers would come out in the open like this unless they meant business. I resigned myself to the fact that we would be attacked somewhere between here and Lucia’s place.
I wasn’t sure exactly how many of them there were yet, but I could be pretty sure that, given what I did last time, there’d be more than one of them.
I was in a bind. If the chips were down I’d be forced to draw my gun, and at that instant my cover with Lucia would be blown, and all my effort so far would be in vain. Well, unless Lucia had any other advertising executive friends who enjoyed publicly brandishing handguns on their days off.
The problem was, then, one of timing. I didn’t want to draw too soon, or indeed at all, if possible—my gun was my ace in my sleeve. If the other side had no such qualms, though, I’d be at a distinct disadvantage when it came to showtime.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Bishop? Why have we sped up all of a sudden?” Lucia asked, her voice clearly troubled. I ignored her and pulled her along. Hoping, praying for some passersby that would make it harder for us to be assaulted openly.
A man appeared ahead of us. One of the young men from the other day. I charged straight on toward him without letting up in pace. At the same time the figure tailing us from behind broke into a dash—
—but had mistimed his run—
—and I reached the man in front of me faster than he had expected and gripped his gun slide tightly as he tried to pull his gun from his jacket pocket. The gun was immobilized, and the man couldn’t pull the trigger. I wrenched it from his grasp in a fluid circular movement, snapping his finger that I’d trapped in the trigger.
The man screamed in pain and fell to the stone paving. I spun around, pointed the gun I had just snatched, and fired at our assailant coming at us from behind.
Then a surprise—the gun was ID-registered.
The grip rejected my fingerprints and the gun went into safety lockdown. So maybe these bozos were foreign intelligence agents after all?
I gritted my teeth and chucked the gun away.
All this happened in a flash—Lucia was still standing where I had left her.
I scanned the area quickly but could see only the man approaching from behind. But I couldn’t believe there were only two of them. I had to be on the lookout for an ambush.
So far I had avoided drawing my gun. At this rate, I might still be able to explain away my actions and my skill without blowing my cover. A stint in the army during my youth or something. I was still in control. At least, that’s what I thought until the man behind us caught up to us.
Then I was no longer in control.
Fire.
Indexfingermiddlefingerringfingerlittlefingerthumb.
Electric shock.
My senses were blown away in a blast of thunder.
My fingertips, my toes, my eyes, all throughout my body—an unbelievable, searing hot pain. All the extremities of my body were on fire, as if they’d all decided to go insane at the same moment. I almost blacked out from sheer agony.
“Mr. Bishop? What’s the matter? Charles? Charles?”
This was what it must have felt like to burn up from the inside out.
Lucia had a look of panic on her face. She placed a hand on my shoulder. I realized the man approaching us from behind was no longer running. He had his mobile device pointed at me and was strolling gently in my direction.
“Run away.” The pain in my extremities was so severe it took me a few seconds to squeeze the words out. “Lucia, run.” The man kept on walking toward us. I realized it was the scruffy young man I had beaten up in the alleyway.
Perhaps the pain I was feeling numbed my sense of time, but it seemed to me to take an eternity before Lucia finally took heed of my words and turned to run away. The pain in my legs grew too much to bear, and I collapsed prostrate onto the historic cobblestones of old Prague.
I screamed wordlessly, acknowledging my total and utter defeat.
“There’s no need for you to run away, Lucia.”
I could just about make out the voice. Through the pain that was forcing my body apart, through my seeping consciousness, I turned toward the speaker to see his face.
A face I had seen numerous times in various pre-mission briefings.
The face of the man who had eluded us all these years.
Lucia was rooted to the spot, staring at John Paul.
6
I felt cold stone against my face long before I could open my eyes.
I checked for the searing agony, but it was gone. I managed to look at the fingers that had been causing me so much pain only a minute ago. Neither red nor white. No different from usual.
My wrists had been taped together. Gingerly I stretched out my fingertips and pressed them against the ground, ever so gently at first. No pain. I pushed myself up and looked around. I was in a dark room, surrounded by what looked like a giant chessboard.
“I have no idea who you are, although I assume you’re here to try and kill me.”
I turned around to see who the voice had come from. It was a shadowy figure, his face backlit by moonlight that crept in through a window covered by a metal grill.
John Paul.
The Lord of Genocide.
“It seems that the American government has been sending hit squads into the countries where I’ve been. I’ve been hearing reports that the generals and politicians I helped out were being killed off,” he said.
“That can’t be a nice feeling, knowing that any day you could be next,” I said.
John Paul shrugged. “When I tried to return to Lucia’s apartment I realized immediately that some clumsy Secret Service agent was trying to tail me. So I put the place under surveillance for a while, and sure enough you showed up. You were obviously Forces, which did trouble me somewhat, I’ll admit.”
“Why do you think I’m in the Forces?” I stared at John Paul. A trained linguist turned PR flak. It bothered me that this civilian could t
ell the difference between the CIA and Special Forces so easily. It also bothered me that he was talking to me as if we were fellow professionals.
“As I’m sure you know, I’ve spent the last few years of my life in war zones,” John Paul said. “A long time. Places where no UN troops, let alone US soldiers, ever intervened. But there were occasionally PMCs, there to provide tactical and strategic consultancy. They would train up local troops, molding the rabble into a semblance of a proper army. Most PMC soldiers are, as I’m sure you know, ex-Special Forces who crossed over to private work in order to double their paycheck. Well, I started watching these people, and in watching them I started to notice the special type of walk that only trained soldiers have. It wasn’t that hard for me to do. After all, my work as a linguistics researcher was basically frequency analysis—identifying the hidden patterns that lurk behind apparently mundane agglomerations of data.”
I pushed myself up with my bound wrists so that I was sitting on the floor and facing John Paul directly. Like one of Jesus’s disciples sitting at the feet of his master.
“Speaking of patterns,” I said, “the NME was funding your language research, and you were looking for some sort of patterns there. What I don’t understand was why DARPA was involved in the first place. What benefit was there to them in funding an academic thesis? Why was that a matter of national security?”
“Ha. So you’re telling me that neither your superior officers nor the fine staffers of Washington ever bothered to explain that to you? How typical.”
The moonlight was now shining brightly on my face. From where John Paul was standing I would have looked deathly white.
The former scholar put his hand to his mouth before launching into a calm, deliberate lecture by way of explanation.
“The defense establishment wasn’t involved with my research at first. It was academic work, pure and simple. All the materials I was using were in the public domain. Archives from Nazi Germany, radio broadcasts, magazines, literature, military communications. I acquired all sorts of data from the Nazi era—prewar as well as wartime. Much of it was already digitized; I had my assistants convert the materials that only existed in hard copy. Then I parsed it all. Grammatical analysis, in layman’s terms.”