by Project Itoh
I realized just then that this counselor had misunderstood, or rather misread, me. He was thinking that I was like my obstinate teammates who liked to make fun of the whole counseling process.
No. I wasn’t a macho poseur like them. I was fully aware how fragile I was as a person, given the situation I was going into. I had to shoot and people had to die. If I hesitated, I would die. But could I truly take responsibility for the enemy I killed so that I might live? Was my essence of self strong enough for me to accept that burden and carry it on my shoulders?
I realized that I wasn’t trying to evade responsibility for my sins. Rather, I was terrified that I wasn’t worthy to bear those sins. That the sins themselves were nothing more than fictions, figments of my imagination.
In the heat of battle, when the specter of death loomed large, I was paradoxically most aware of being alive. I felt my own life force vigorously pulsing against the backdrop of the death all around me. Sure, look down on me and call me a thrill seeker or an adrenaline junkie if you like. But the fact was that I killed other people so that my own life span could be extended. If I needed to step over others in order to prioritize my own existence, then so be it. It was this sensation that made me go back to the battlefield again and again for more.
But what if this killing force inside me was not truly mine? Not my own free will, but rather something engineered by a combination of these Viennese School counselors and chemical substances? I was still alive, here and now, but should I be celebrating that fact in the same way? Was that life-affirming sensation a manufactured lie?
I realized that this counseling was a real threat to my raison d’être. Not because of the techniques or substances used, but by virtue of its very existence.
My stomach welled up with a bizarre, mysterious, nauseating feeling.
Could I ever trust my own motives on the battlefield again? I didn’t fight for a greater good, to protect my family, or even for money, but rather for the overwhelming sensation of life-affirming reality. Most soldiers rationalized this motive, lying even to themselves, dressing it up as patriotism or comradeship. It was a base motive perhaps, but one that no wild beast would ever have on an instinctual level. It raised me above them.
But what if my will to kill was a fabrication, based on a foundation of lies? I would be absolved of all my sins, sure, but the sins were supposed to be mine, my burden to carry, my proof to myself that I was still alive. Without them, the thrill of raw, live reality was nothing but an illusion.
Why wouldn’t someone just tell me that I was a murderer? That I was a killer?
I wanted someone other than this counselor to tell me that I had shed real blood, killed real people, of my own real free will. I wanted to feel what I felt during battle, staring over the edge of the precipice into the abyss. The rifle-shot cry that screamed I am still alive! existing, right here, right now. Tell me, someone, that this isn’t just one big fake.
I wondered if the counselor could guess the source of my unease. My brain was being monitored right this moment by the electrodes that had been stuck on at the start of the session. Neuroscience had come so far and had identified 572 discrete modules of the brain, but it was not yet at a point where it could read thoughts. Nonetheless, my brain would have been giving off all sorts of signals, and it would have been possible to deduce something from these.
The psycho-auxiliary software that was monitoring my brain had a real-time feed of this data into my interviewer’s psychological model of my psyche, which was being constantly updated and adjusted. This information would in turn have been fed to the counselor via his earpiece, giving him suggestions as to the most appropriate next step for him to take. I noticed he was indeed periodically tapping and readjusting his earpiece.
The counselor asked me a question. I had no idea what part of BEAR it was supposed to relate to, nor how it was supposed to help prepare me to adapt emotionally for battle. I didn’t know what the counselor was going to do with my answer. I didn’t know how his questions so far were supposed to have affected my emotions or my reason. I was sure his words were affecting me on a subconscious level that I could never hope to know. As long as my will was still my own and it was truly still “me” in charge of myself, I would never know and never be able to know.
“So. Are you ready to go and kill some children?” the counselor asked.
I told him, honestly, that I thought I was.
The psychotech officer had adjusted my emotions. The senses I didn’t need for this mission had been masked. My teamwork instincts had been medically boosted. I had used my AR contacts to practice, drill, and plan for what was about to come.
Everything was ready. It was the day before my departure to India. I stood before a mirror and pricked my finger with a pin until blood welled up.
It hurt. I knew that it hurt.
But I felt no pain.
3
The world changed the day the bomb exploded in Sarajevo.
The era of Hiroshima was brought to a close once and for all. All around the world the military suddenly started waking up to the fact that their theoretical weapons of mutually assured destruction were maybe not so theoretical after all. Nuclear weapons were back on the table as an option.
During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were the ultimate symbol of the eschaton. If the USSR and the USA went nuclear on each other, then a giant radiation cloud was sure to form a canopy in the skies that would herald an eternal nuclear winter. Humanity would perish. Nuclear war was to be avoided at all costs, and indeed, it had been avoided. Because people believed in the myth of nuclear apocalypse.
But that myth was exposed at Sarajevo.
A huge number of people died. Even so, military establishments around the world saw it as a “controlled” explosion. The casualties were confined to the target area. When politicians and generals around the world looked at the crater in the ground created by an improvised nuclear bomb, they realized that nuclear weapons might have their uses after all.
That was why, when India and Pakistan finally pulled the nuclear trigger on each other, the rest of the world wasn’t overly concerned. It was, of course, a dreadful event, and one that shouldn’t have happened.
But it was neither the end of everything nor the beginning of anything.
The world had already experienced Sarajevo after all.
We had become accustomed to people dying in large numbers.
Here, there was a smell.
A smell to stick in your craw. A smell that made you think that humans really were no more than beasts. Yes, India smelled all right. It smelled of poverty and sacred cows and feral dogs and shit and piss. It smelled of the pungent spices used in the preparation of every meal. It smelled of men, and it smelled of women.
And, of course, where it smelled of life, it also smelled of death in equal measure.
It was pervasive. The air even penetrated into our base.
We arrived at our Mumbai base ahead of our equipment and waited for the cargo shipment containing it to follow us. It was still on the outskirts of Mumbai, in the form of giant crates full of support equipment and Eugene & Krupps–branded weaponry, stewing in the hot air, waiting to be processed so that we could take delivery.
We had started to become accustomed to the oppressive heat and humidity. We spent our time at base camp reviewing the battle plan while we waited patiently for intel from our agents in the field. As soon as we had the tip-off, we would be bundled into our Intruder Pods and launched toward our target destination, and as soon as we captured our targets we would hightail it out of there in unmanned helicopters back to the nearest local base. Then, once everything was secure, we would escort our prisoners back to Mumbai by train.
It was a flawless plan. Of course, for a plan to work, things had to go according to it.
We headed out into the city once known as Bombay to acclimatize ourselves to our surroundings. New Delhi and Kolkata had been incinerated in nuclear infernos and were now so
mewhere at the bottom of giant craters. Mumbai had miraculously survived the nuclear exchanges of the war and so had naturally become a magnet for refugees from the rest of the country. Eugene & Krupps, the UN, and various NGOs all stationed their headquarters here for the postwar reconstruction effort, in this city that had once been the heartland of India’s awesome computer industry.
As we walked through the city we came across a Eugene & Krupps armored vehicle that had come to a standstill amid an ocean of people. It was a Stryker, probably US Army surplus, and its path was currently blocked by a herd of holy cows that was ambling across the road at a snail’s pace. On top of the vehicle stood a number of E&K PMC soldiers clad in Blackhawk Commando Chest Harnesses. They had guns dangling by their sides in holsters, and one of them drew a pack of smokes from one of the many pouches velcroed to his harness. He lit up a cigarette, blowing the smoke irritably into the crowd. Some jokers had evidently decided to take advantage of the standstill to cover the olive drab Stryker in bright pink stickers of Ganesha, which made the normally imposing armored vehicle look somewhat kitsch.
You could buy sacred icons on every street corner of this city, from the old-fashioned portraits and dolls to garish stickers and Mob straps. Shiva, Ganesha, Hanuman, and pretty much any other deity who took your fancy. All shapes and sizes, every possible permutation of god and consumer good you could possibly want, and then some.
Amid all this, Eugene & Krupps made its presence felt.
There were enough sentries to man virtually every intersection. There were probably more soldiers than police in this city by the looks of it, and each one wore his own interpretation of the uniform. Some had full protective gear, others just caps, and others wore nothing at all on their heads. There didn’t even seem to be any regulation-issue firearms—I even saw one middle-aged dude with an old-style Colt revolver. Talk about a cobbled-together single-action army. The silver-haired dandy glared back at us. I guess he could tell from the way we walked that we were in the same profession as him.
In contrast to the sentries who patrolled on foot, the men sitting on the Stryker were in coordinated uniform. They were disciplined enough to have passed for a national army. I figured these were probably the ex-Special Forces that Erica Sales woman had been talking about back in the conference room at the Pentagon.
Eugene & Krupps weren’t the only private contractors involved in India’s postwar reconstruction efforts, of course. The prisons for war criminals were run by the Dutch private security company Panopticon, and our very own good old Halliburton were tasked with public works.
Eugene & Krupps might have sounded vaguely middle-European in origin, but it was more or less an American company these days—over seventy percent of its stock was owned by US corporations, and most of its management ranks were staffed by Americans. I’d heard that there were even a couple of US senators on its board of directors.
In other words, the US was not a signatory to the Rome Statutes—and so couldn’t officially be directly involved in the postwar reconstruction—but could still exert its influence in more subtle ways through companies such as Eugene & Krupps. The US didn’t have to send in its ground troops in order to have a military presence. UNOIND might have tasked Japan with the postwar reconstruction and security of India, and Japan in turn tasked Eugene & Krupps as her proxy, but the US had ways of pulling strings behind the scenes.
The interesting thing, though, was that this powerful Eugene & Krupps had the direct backing of the Japanese government and the indirect support of the US and yet were still wary of the Hindu India forces. That gave us an idea of the odds we were up against.
Hindu fundamentalism. Caste discrimination had officially been made illegal long before the war. On paper at least. But centuries of entrenched social order can’t simply be legislated away overnight. The history of India was the caste system. All countries have their own forms of discrimination surreptitiously built into their national psyche, and India was no exception. That was why Hindu India had been able to survive. And it was why they were now able to thrive.
We arrived at a riverbank and found ourselves in the middle of a giant shantytown of a slum. Rows of corrugated iron roofs ran along either bank, making the river itself seem like a blood vessel flanked by vascular walls of makeshift housing.
The people who lived and worked here were the so-called laundry caste. A subsection of the untouchable caste, which was really no more than an umbrella term for various so-called untouchable professions. People born here spent their entire lives doing other people’s laundry. Social mobility was more or less unheard of.
This was another one of the reasons why the US didn’t intervene more proactively in the postwar India reconstruction. They would have had to deal with these messy human rights issues head-on. As it was, the governments that did intervene—Europe, Singapore, Japan—soon arrived at an unofficial policy of turning a blind eye to whatever entrenched abuses there were.
Leland and I decided to go and have a look at the railway that the New India government would be using to transport us during the final stages of the plan we were about to embark upon. We climbed to the top of a knoll on the outskirts of Mumbai, and from there we could look down over the sprawling slums that engulfed the train line. There was a train speeding through at that moment, showing no sign of slowing down as it powered its way through the shantytown. Leland was visibly shocked by how little concern people seemed to pay the tons of speeding steel flying past them. It was almost as if they had a death wish, but in fact they were just supremely unconcerned; the old men, children, young mothers, all shades of humanity slept, ate, and did their business right next to the tracks.
“Doesn’t the way the train runs through the slums make you think of Moses parting the Red Sea, sir?” Leland asked as he surveyed the scene from the top of the hill.
The slums used anything and everything as material—all kinds of trash were appropriated and incorporated. Galvanized iron, cardboard, hay, MDF, newspapers. The cornucopia of life that surrounded the tracks was like a flattened low-tech version of Kowloon.
Paupers and war orphans seemed to be drawn to the few working railroads that had survived the war. These refugees were the cholesterol clogging up the arteries of the train tracks. If trains were the lifeblood, then the people did actually cause accidents that stopped the flow of blood. The residents of the slums had no qualms about crossing the tracks or performing their bodily functions over them. It wasn’t uncommon for a person to be hit by a train as he squatted down to take his morning shit. The Mumbai municipal authorities did what little they could for the refugees of society to try and keep them out of harm’s way, but there were simply too many of them, and they kept on returning to the railroads no matter what the authorities did.
As bad as things were now, they had been worse. Before the UN intervened, postwar India had been teetering on anarchy. Its decimated industry showed no signs of life, and most of India’s famed engineers and scientists had died in the war. Before the UN accords took place, this country had been a Mad Max world, only greener.
A message arrived for me, flashing up in my AR contacts. The subject line read NATIONAL STOCK NUMBER X HAS ARRIVED. IMADS was a fully trackable courier service, just like Fedex. If you wanted to know which porter was carrying your gun over which ocean, it could tell you down to the nth degree.
“Time to head back, Leland. Our shit’s arrived.”
The delivery depot was next to Mumbai Airport’s runways. It was overrun by people trying to slot things together. It was like Black Friday at a new Ikea. We were issued IDs at the entrance and given a printout of a map pointing to the rough location of our crates. We piled back into our truck and proceeded to start looking for our stuff.
It seemed like the collection depot was full of invisible elves trilling out to their masters. When you approached a tagged container your IDs started chirping in high-pitched beeps. The collection depot was vast, and much of the cargo there had apparentl
y been abandoned unidentified and unclaimed. That was why they had introduced an audio-guided tracking system half a year ago.
Williams was driving, one hand on the wheel and one wrapped around a First Strike bar that he proceeded to chomp down on as if it were a Snickers. “We better get out into the field soon or these things’ll give me a coronary,” he said.
First Strike bars were developed as rations for Marines for when they had to land on enemy beaches and form the vanguard of an invasion. Gram for gram they were the most efficient way known to man of delivering protein and calories to the human body. They were definitely not something you wanted to get into the habit of eating outside of mission time—it’d be a question of which gave out first, your heart or your liver.
We were cruising along in the truck when Williams turned to me. “Yo, Clavis. You spoke to John Paul, didn’t you?”
I had no idea why he would ask me that now, all of a sudden. “What makes you say that?”
“Just a feeling I had,” Williams said. “You haven’t been the same since that night in Prague.”
So I told him. Then and there. All about the siren songs that John Paul had discovered with the help of DARPA—the grammatical tune that lured countries to their deaths amid a sea of hatred and mistrust.
“Pretty hard to swallow though, isn’t it?” Williams said when I’d finished. He rolled down the truck window and chucked his empty candy-ration wrapper out without looking. “It’s a bit like that killer joke.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, the British Army’s secret weapon during World War II. The funniest joke in the world. British troops used to run through open fields, dodging artillery fire, shouting a German translation of the joke at the enemy, who dropped dead from laughter as soon as they heard it.”
