Genocidal Organ

by Project Itoh

  I was nudged through a doorway, my assailant’s gun still in my back. I emerged on the other side to find myself in a fairly large room that contained a bar lined with glass bottles and an open space with its floor covered with a nanolayer portraying the image of an unending abyss.

  Lucius’s club.

  “Nice to see you again so soon,” I said to the emerging figures of Lucius, Lucia, and a number of men who could only be described as underlings. The men were all armed and looking at me warily. “You surprise me, Lucius. To think you’re on the same side as John Paul.”

  Lucius shook his head. “John is our client, nothing more. We just did what we had to do in order to protect ourselves.”

  “And who is ‘we’ exactly?” I asked, looking at both Lucius and Lucia, who was standing next to him with a bewildered expression on her face. So was she not on Lucius’s—or John Paul’s—side? Had she been unwittingly duped into becoming an accomplice?

  Lucius paused for a while, as if trying to remember something. Then he spoke.

  “ ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.’ Are you familiar with this passage?”

  It was Lucia who answered, before I had a chance to focus on what was going on. “No, although it sounds like something from the Bible.”

  Lucius turned to me. “And what about you, sir?”

  “I’m an atheist. I don’t go to church,” I said.

  “It’s Luke, chapter 1. Even back then, citizens were turned into numbers and counted,” Lucius said.

  “So what?” I asked. Lucia was looking at my bound wrists. She was obviously concerned.

  “Well, we here are the uncounted,” said Lucius, looking at the armed men around him. “We are nothing more than an unidentifiable mass in the eyes of the surveillance society. We are vagabonds who slip through the cracks of security behemoths.”

  “You live under false identities?” I asked. I was incredulous. Only Forces and governments should have been able to fake IDs. It was virtually impossible to hack the InfoSec company databases, and its employees were basically incorruptible. The slightest leak, whether internally or from outside hackers, was treated with the utmost seriousness, with long jail sentences for anyone who even tried. No, security breaches were all but unheard of.

  “It’s practically impossible to assume a false identity as such, more’s the pity,” Lucius said, shaking his head. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain workarounds. We can start with low-tech methods. Mapping the locations of sensors, for example. We’re inundated with a multitude of sensors, but individually they tend to be monofunctional. They scan just your retina, or just your veins, or just your fingerprints. Then here’s a brainwave scan, and here’s a camera. Well, by painstakingly entering all the details of these sensors we’ve managed to come up with maps of all major American and European cities. A Rough Guide for the Surveillance Evader. Using computer analysis it’s been possible to find loopholes, shortcuts—paths of least resistance. There are ways to trick some of the sensors, and then all you need is a fake set of nanolayer fingerprints and somebody else’s eyes, and suddenly it becomes very difficult for them to track you.”

  Come to think of it, that youth I roughed up had had different retina and fingerprint IDs.

  “But surely you still need fake IDs, even if just for the fake fingers and the fake eyes,” I said.

  Lucius shrugged. “We cultivated our ID database carefully and over a long period of time. Babies who died shortly after birth, before they were fully registered. Travelers who went missing abroad. Civilian contractors and PMCs who went MIA in war zones. And, most of all, Sarajevo.”

  The corpses that never even had the chance to become corpses. The missing.

  Names in purgatory.

  “We carefully select IDs from among the missing and make them live again. We archive them so that they are out of the sights of governments and can be drawn on at a moments’ notice if needed. You can imagine how valuable this archive is to us. Short of terrorism and genocide we’ll do whatever we need to protect it,” Lucius said.

  “And yet I remember a time only a few short hours ago when you were telling me how there was no such thing as pure freedom, how everything was a matter of checks and balances,” I said. I never would have guessed from his demeanor at the time that Lucius was such a radical ideologue.

  “I stand by that. The issue we have is that the trade-off society forces us to make is massively one-sided. The privacy we’ve been asked to give up just isn’t rewarded with a corresponding increase in security.” Lucius advanced so that he was now standing right in front of me. “The current security regime is pointless. After 9/11, the world steadily increased its surveillance levels on individuals. ‘Traceability’ became the order of the day. And yet, the more the screws were tightened, the more terrorist incidents there were across the world’s major cities.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said.

  “It’s not a lie,” Lucius snapped. “Even you have to acknowledge the truth about Sarajevo. Am I wrong? Even the official published statistics show a correlation between the surveillance clampdown and increased terrorist activity—just take any government data and plot it on a graph. It’s all there, in black and white, for anyone to see. And yet for some reason most people choose not to.”

  “In that case, why does everybody believe that personal traceability is the best protection against terrorists?” I asked.

  Lucius’s lips twisted into an ironic smile. “Is that what people believe? Or just what people want to believe?” He laughed, a sad, hollow sound. “It’s not as if the government is lying to us. Or rather, it’s not as if it’s only the government that’s lying to us. The media lie too, and, worst of all, so do the people, the citizens. We all lie to each other. We’ve all been taken in by this collective myth of traceability, and that’s how our modern surveillance state was born. It might be true that terrorist activity has died down recently, but that’s only because most terrorists have been diverted by the recent explosion of civil wars and ethnic conflicts around the world. It’s nothing to do with the security crackdown.”

  We see what we want to see.

  We believe what we want to believe.

  What good was hard statistical evidence in the face of belief? The government, industry, the people—none were interested in looking at graphs, not when mere facts contradicted their core beliefs.

  “Reality is such a pathetic and weak thing,” Lucius continued, shaking his head sadly. “There are so many horrific things in the world that go unreported. Do you know, for example, how artificial flesh is created? Genetically modified dolphins. Aquatic mammals engineered to be able to live in freshwater. They’re raised—or maybe ‘cultured’ is a better word, given the circumstances—in Lake Victoria, before being dissected alive so that their muscle can be put to industrial use. The rest of them becomes animal feed. Children on starvation wages work round the clock in giant sweatshop factories off the shores of Lake Victoria, forcing the red blubbery flesh into giant cans using biostaplers.”

  “Live dolphin muscle …” I trailed off.

  The Intruder Pods that we used to penetrate enemy lines. The short-range jets that hopped us from continent to continent. All covered in raw flesh. How many people knew that sex lotion was made out of seaweed?

  “No one. No one knows. Just as no one will try and stop you from selling dyed lumpfish roe as caviar,” Lucius said.

  “But how can that—”

  “Anyone remotely interested in doing so can work all this out for themselves. Just use your AR contact lenses to track the provenance of whatever is in front of you. Where and when an object is made. The space and the time is there for all to see. We live in what the science fiction author Bruce Sterling might have called a spime society. People want to kno
w whether their Budweiser is brewed under sanitary conditions and which ranch a burger can be traced back to. You can even find out which forest provided the trees for your house. The metahistory of everything in the universe is bare, raw, there for the taking. And yet no one is interested in anything other than their own little personal narratives. No one wants to know about the tragedy of the origins of artificial flesh, they just want to know that it will continue to provide the airplanes and machines that will prop up their comfortable lifestyle.”

  At this point, Lucius’s warped smile surfaced again. “And you, Mr. Bishop. You know all too well about the massacres that happen all over the globe. How many of those is the world interested in? As you know all too well, only a fraction are ever reported. People are designed to see only what they want to see.”

  He had a point. Outside my work, all I knew of the world came from clips on CNN. I lived in a Domino’s Pizza world. I lived in a world of fifteen-minute chunks of free movie previews.

  “Basically, the issue we have is that the idea that submitting ourselves to permanent surveillance somehow makes us safer is one great lie. An unfair trade. The reason we choose to live anonymously is because we don’t want to live in a society that forces this trade upon us.”

  Lucius stepped away from the abyss surrounding us. He sighed, then continued. “John noticed that the CIA were staking out Lucia’s apartment. He warned us of this fact—he’s a good customer. We figured that you might be using Lucia to get to us. You’d already roughed up one of us, after all.”

  One of the men took out a mobile terminal and tapped the keypad.

  The tips of my body were flooded with that searing pain again, and I yelled and collapsed.

  “Stop it, please! You’re killing him! Please!” Lucia screamed.

  Lucius glanced at the man who was frying me. The man was, of course, the youth that I had worked over in the alleyway. His face was still covered with bruises. He slowly put away the Mob in his back pocket.

  “A Paingiver,” Lucius explained. “Nanomachines designed to deliver an unbearable shock to your nerve endings. I slipped some into your Budweiser earlier. I hope you don’t mind. A useful little present we received from John—military issue, apparently. The machines lodge inside your capillary vessels, which means that when they’re activated they cause incredible pain in your extremities—fingers, toes, the like.”

  The pain had miraculously disappeared, although my body was still reeling from shock. Gasping for breath, I looked over at Lucia’s face. Her tears made her black eyeliner run all the way down her cheeks.

  The face of a woman crying for a man who had betrayed her. Crushed by conflicting, overwhelming emotions.

  “Unfortunately, Lucia brought you right into our club. That raised the stakes. Now, if it had just been a matter of my own personal liberty, well, that might have been one thing. I could have coped with being arrested. But there was the danger of having our entire library seized. If that happened, all our friends, colleagues, and customers, all our compatriots fighting for personal liberties in Europe and America—they’d all be outed. We had to preempt that at all costs. That was why I needed to stake out Lucia’s place.”

  “So you’ve been watching me all this time?” Lucia asked.

  “Forgive me. As I explained, it was for the greater good.”

  “I thought you were the anonymous heroes who went underground to avoid the constant surveillance of government and industry. And yet you’re happy to put other people under surveillance yourselves?” Lucia asked.

  “It’s a truly troubling dilemma,” Lucius replied.

  I thought of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And those who were already free watched over others so that all could be “equally” free.

  “I seem to remember Stalin and Pol Pot also being ‘troubled’ by similar dilemmas,” I said, sneeering, and immediately received another payload of pain for my efforts.

  “Tuvi, could you hold off for a moment, please?” Lucius calmly asked the youth. Luckily for me, the kid complied.

  “You’ll have to forgive Tuvi—it seems you roughed him up good and proper, so you’ll have to think of this as your just deserts,” Lucius said.

  “Ha, so this is Crime and Punishment now, is it? Well, I wonder when you’re going to get your punishment for what you’ve done in the name of freedom.”

  “Don’t worry about us. And besides, people in glass houses … you were observing Lucia just as much as we were, no?”

  “What?” Lucia looked at me, stunned.

  I knew it. I had always known it. Sooner or later we would end up here. It had been inevitable from the start. Really, why had I ever expected anything else?

  Yes, I know all about you, Ms. Lucia Sukrova.

  I know that you were mistress to a married man.

  I know the restaurants where you and John Paul dined together.

  I know at which branches of Starbucks you drank your morning cappuccinos.

  I know how many condoms John Paul bought.

  I wanted to scream out loud. For the youth to press the button on his Mob and never let go. For my fingers and toes and all my body to explode and blast my consciousness into tiny fragments. I wanted and deserved any and all pain that the world could throw at me.

  “You see, Lucia,” Lucius said, “this man has been watching you in order to try and capture John Paul. He’s an American secret agent. A somewhat cultured American agent, perhaps, but a secret agent nonetheless. Cultured enough to capture your heart, at least.”

  I looked at the young man, Tuvi. Press the button, I willed. Make me squirm in agony. Show me in my wretched agony to Lucia. But Tuvi saw through me. He looked down on me. I was a deer in the headlights, not worthy of another thought.

  Hell is here. Inside your mind. Job done. No need for any more pain.

  “John’s waiting for you outside, Lucia.” Lucius pointed Lucia toward the exit. Gently but firmly. Time to go.

  Lucia glanced toward the exit before turning her gaze back on me. Was she hesitating? Or condemning me? I was so overwhelmed by guilt that I could no longer tell.

  An eternity of agony. It was agony to be looked at by Lucia. Her piercing gaze was unbearable. And yet I didn’t want her to go. I wanted her to stay here.

  Your ex is a mass murderer. He’s responsible for more deaths than Stalin. I could have told her that. Shouted it out. Except … except—what right did I have to tell her?

  “Lucius … don’t let this man die,” Lucia said.

  “Lucia, please. I abhor killing.”

  Upon hearing what she needed to hear, Lucia turned around and left the club. I listened to her fading footfalls, my insides churning in a cocktail of regret.

  The door closed, and the footsteps faded away completely. Lucius and his henchmen stared down at the abyss, at me, the wretched insect.

  No one was speaking anymore. They were weighed down by the burden of what was about to happen, what had to happen. They were gritting their teeth. Doing what they had to do for the sake of freedom. To resist the evil will of those who insisted on watching them.

  That was why I now had to die.

  “I thought you abhorred killing,” I said.

  “Indeed, I do.” Lucius actually did look genuinely sorry for what he was about to do. Just as, I’m sure, Hitler once did, and Stalin. Or, indeed, the ex-brigadier general that I had dispatched once upon a time, or our captive Ahmed from Somalia. Lucius might have felt guilty, but his guilt was of no value. Just as my guilt toward Lucia was of no value.

  “That’s why it pains me so much to have to do this,” he said.

  It was at that moment that a mosquito buzzed in front of me. It was as if I were in a dream—a final mirage I was seeing in the face of death. The mosquito hovered and settled on my middle finger.

  The middle finger I had dabbed with pheromones earlier.

  Lucius noticed the mosquito.

 
“You … a Tracer Dog—”

  I lifted my bound hands to cover my right ear, using my shoulder to cover the left. I opened my mouth wide and braced myself.

  The world roared, and the south wall exploded. A huge shock wave slammed through the room. Fragments of the wall and dust and debris filled the room, blinding us all. Lucius and his group were instantaneously immobilized. Many of them would have ruptured eardrums. I had managed to block my ears and open my mouth in time, just about, and even so my head was ringing.

  All Special Operations I Detachment personnel had indoor assault training drilled into us during basic training at Killing House. During the training we had to take turns in shifts: who would be the assailants, who would be the targets, and who would be the hostages. The one thing I took away from my turn as a hostage was that when Special Forces attack, you had better eat dirt if you want to survive. Hit the ground and wait until it’s all over. Stay standing and you had no right to complain if your putative rescuers shot you dead. Your average Special Forces man was a crack headshot.

  Because of this, I had no idea who on my team did what and who killed who. If ever there was a situation where curiosity would have killed the cat, it was this.

  The entire assault operation took less than three minutes. It was a fairly small club after all. The dust never even had a chance to settle.

  “How’s it hanging, Clavis?”

  I recognized that voice. I stumbled up and beckoned for Williams to untie me.

  “You look like a ghost under all that dust,” Williams said, brushing some of the powdered concrete from my body. “Anyway, where’s the girl? Lucia.”

  I stared out through the giant hole in the wall that now looked out onto the cityscape of a Prague evening. The labyrinth of stone. The city of a hundred spires.

  “I don’t know. She’s gone.”

  I was shattered. Everything was numb, and I longed for pain. If only I had pain, I could escape from my weariness. I knew it. I needed pain, punishment, urgently.