by Project Itoh
“Kneel!” Leland’s battle cell lined the prisoners up along the railway platform. The prisoners were made to kneel, and we kept a close watch on them. If any of them wanted to escape they would have to stand up first, one leg after another. Not too easy when you had eagle eyes watching your every move.
The prisoners stayed in position until they found themselves looking up at an old diesel engine pulling into the station. We had the front three carriages to ourselves, sandwiched by police wagons, and the rear carriages of the train were crammed full of passengers on their way to Mumbai. There were even passengers on the roof. A scene that epitomized this desperately poor country.
I wondered why these people were heading to Mumbai. Were they trying to escape the clutches of Hindu India or just fleeing from grinding rural poverty? I thought of the shantytowns where the laundry workers lived and worked and the slums on either side of the railway line. Was that what awaited the passengers of the train? Or would they end up as beggars on the streets? Did they have relatives in Mumbai who had promised to lend their rural cousins a hand? In any case, one thing was for sure: this train was a container of humanity ready to be dumped into the teeming ocean of life that was Mumbai. But if the passengers were just going to be dropped into the slums, the internment camps of poverty and despair, then they were on a journey out of the frying pan and into the fire. It brought to my mind the Nazi trains that transported Jews from the ghetto to the concentration camp.
The wheels started moving, rattling over the rails. It was a jarring ride—solid, but rough. A Kalashnikov of a train. It was hardly surprising that people occasionally fell from the roof on this sort of journey. A couple of hours sitting on the hard wooden benches and my ass was completely numb.
“I’m going to take a look at the prisoners,” I said. I stood up and walked toward the carriage behind me.
Two of our detachment were in with the prisoners, watching them closely, while the rest of us were split into two groups, guarding the carriages in front and behind respectively. We had made it safely out of the high danger zone about an hour ago and were now down to yellow alert. If Hindu India had been planning to attack us, they would have done so back there. Whatever they might have thought about losing their top leadership, it was unlikely that the remaining Hindu India paramilitary were about to go completely crazy and attempt a suicide charge into territory firmly under the control of the New India government, UN troops, and Eugene & Krupps.
When I arrived in the prisoners’ carriage, the apes all had their mouths shut, although they seemed to be taking their captivity in different ways. Some of them were paralyzed by fear the moment they stepped into the passenger car that was taking them to justice; others were trembling, some were indignant, and yet others tried to maintain a dignified silence—as if the monkeys had any dignity to begin with. The only thing they had in common was that they had become so accustomed to being switched off by the KO pads that they had learned not to show any sign of resistance.
One of the men, who had evidently determined that I was the leader of our detachment, opened his mouth. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we get to our destination. Do you really think the cowardly government troops will be able to contain us?”
“Oh, no need to worry about that,” I replied. “Your faithful followers won’t have much luck if they try and spring you from your cells. Panopticon’s secure facilities are like a cleaner version of Alcatraz.”
“Panopticon? We’re being taken to a private detention center?” he asked.
“A prison, strictly speaking. A correctional facility. Panopticon has been tasked to provide security for the New India government and the UN. You won’t find any of your ‘cowardly government troops’ in their facilities, I’m afraid. Only elite private military forces, handpicked for their experience and security know-how. They’re the best in the world. I wouldn’t count on being rescued, if I were you.”
The man didn’t seem to believe me—his eyebrows were raised in a silent smirk. He evidently had no idea that this sort of thing was standard practice these days. He was an old man. The ID spot check we performed when we arrested him told us that he had been a colonel in the old Indian army. He was a product of a different era, a time when the state still did everything.
I left the old man and moved toward the back of the carriage where John Paul was sitting on his own, next to a window covered with iron bars.
“Iron bars, eh? You did well to find a carriage like this,” John Paul said, staring out the window. He lifted up his bound hands and pointed at the scenery that was drifting by. “Look, that billboard there.”
I only managed to catch a glimpse before it flitted by: some writing in what I suppose would be called gothic script, with a heavy, angular font. It was superimposed over a realistic if somewhat old-fashioned painting of soldiers.
“I came up with that,” John Paul said. “The grammar of genocide isn’t always dependent on the content of the message. You can sneak it into the most innocuous of everyday conversations, if you want to. But it’s best if you can incorporate it into slogans and propaganda, like on that billboard back there. There grammar is at its most concentrated form. You can embed the grammar into sentences in different ways, with different degrees of concentration, but stirring messages like the one on that billboard really give you the opportunity to lay it on nice and thick and dense.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
“I have this little theory. Consider this. It’s not political extremism that leads to genocide. Rather it’s the need to prepare for genocide that makes people express their opinions in terms of political extremism.”
“What the hell? You’ve got it all fucked up,” I said.
“If by ‘fucked up’ you mean that I have my cause and effect the wrong way around, then yes, I agree with you. But then again, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the fact that all it takes is a few words for people to systematically start murdering each other is also ‘fucked up,’ as you put it.”
The Lord of Genocide shrugged.
Amber clouds hovered over the paddy fields outside. A pillar of light appeared in the distant forests, a Jacob’s Ladder. Were there more massacres going on over there, perhaps? Was God sucking up the souls of the innocent victims with a straw of light? The vista looked almost like a caricature—surely if there was a god up there waiting at the top of that, it would have been the one from Monty Python.
Time was nothing to me anymore. If you’d asked me what time of day it was I would only have been able to describe it as being “battle time.” A no-man’s land where your sense of time and emotion was masked by your BEAR. I found myself being drawn into the rhythm of the train, which made this already endless and timeless period stretch out even further and simultaneously pass in an instant. It was like wading through jelly, and yet completely normal and natural at the same time.
I was drawn back into the carriage by another piece of Hindu India agitprop out of the window. John Paul noticed that I was looking at it and spoke.
“You’ll notice how the picture to go with the slogan is rooted in the socialist realism school? I’ve noticed that beyond a certain point, right-wing and left-wing extremists alike tend to share the same aesthetic sensibilities, or should I say lack of—”
“You really are something else, aren’t you,” I interrupted calmly. “You fucking piece of shit. I’m not just talking about your genocides either. Even your friends over there, the fundamentalist nuts, you’ve been laughing at them while you used them as tools for your own ends.”
“And you can’t abide my looking down on them?” John Paul asked.
“Not just looking down on them—looking down on them and manipulating them into killing each other. At least they have the integrity to get their own hands dirty.”
“Yes. The problem is that I’ve committed myself to more than I could possibly do with my own little pair of hands. Unfortunately I just don’t have th
e time to busy myself with the manual labor. But I do accept responsibility for everything they do,” John Paul said.
“They’ll be standing trial soon,” I said. “The ICC will see they take their share of the blame. But not you. You’re different.”
“Back to the National Military Establishment for me?”
“Exactly. And after that, even I don’t know.”
I stopped speaking to try and read John Paul’s reaction. Nothing. He didn’t show anything. No fear. No resignation.
After a little while, John Paul spoke again. “I’m thirsty. Could you get me a glass of water?”
“How about a glass of ‘quit your bitching or I’ll slap you with another KO pad,’ ” I said.
“How hospitable of you. I think I’ll pass.”
“Where’s Lucia?”
“Not here.”
“I know she’s not here, you fuck. That’s why I’m asking you where she is.”
John Paul shrugged. “How is that question relevant to your duty?”
“Maybe it’s not.” I felt myself getting more agitated, and my voice grew deeper and colder. “Maybe I just want Lucia.”
“And you’re prepared to kill as many children as it takes to get to her,” he said.
I looked at John Paul. It was ironic. This was the first time John Paul had ever revealed anything approaching a human emotion. Sure, that emotion might have been animosity toward me. And it did make me angrier still. But there was also a little part of me that was … relieved?
“Sure, it’s tough. But I was just doing my job.”
I tried to give as bland an answer as I could, but it made John Paul laugh out loud.
“Tough? You’re lying, and you know it. I know all about the emotion regulation that you go through before battle. So that you can kill children without worrying, either before or after. You don’t even feel any guilt as you pull the trigger. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I didn’t say anything.
“And ‘I was just doing my job’? Please. Have you any idea how many ordinary people, people who wouldn’t hurt a fly in their day-to-day lives, have used that as an excuse to commit the most cruel and brutal acts imaginable? The Nazis who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were ‘just doing their job.’ The East German border guards who shot their own countrymen dead for trying to cross the Berlin Wall were ‘just doing their job.’ Just doing your job, eh? Well, if everyone ‘just did their job’ then we wouldn’t have any need for soldiers or bodyguards. Jobs exist to paralyze the human conscience. Where did capitalism come from? The Protestant work ethic: do your job, save money, and God will be pleased with you. A job is a form of religion. The only thing that varies from person to person is how pious they are. Most people actually understand this on some level. They just don’t want to admit it to themselves.”
“What about you?” I said. “You don’t seem to have any problem with your job of traveling around the world and massacring everyone!”
“Absolutely. Absolutely. You see, we’re not so different, are we, you and I?”
“Fuck off!”
“But we are! I admit that I only cast the spell, of course. I don’t pull the trigger or light the fuse myself. I have no direct involvement on the front lines. And what about you? Are you directly involved when you’re in battle? Really directly involved? When you shoot and kill the children that are charging you? Do you feel the mixture of relief and guilt and revulsion that any normal person would feel? Or do you feel flat? Does your optimized emotional state wipe everything out and keep you calm and distant? Let’s be honest with each other. You might be physically taking part in battle, but you’re not really there. Something’s missing. I’m sure the same goes for all your comrades too. You kill enemies right in front of your own eyes and yet you never feel the accompanying emotions or reactions. You wonder whether the intent to kill was ever really yours. You start to doubt whether you can take ownership of the deaths that you cause.”
Bull’s-eye. This man in front of me had hit the nail on the head, and I hated him for it. It bothered me that he could be so calm. He was so untroubled by the scene around him that it was almost as if he had been Photoshopped into the picture.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” he continued. “You don’t want your work to trouble you, so your emotions are adjusted away, nice and simple. Factory workers wear protective gloves, and you wear a protective shroud for your heart. Or allow someone else to shroud it for you, at least. You allow yourself to feel nothing for other people’s lives, not even for the lives of young children. In my book that’s a far more cruel thing to do than the actual act of killing.”
“Who the fuck are you to lecture me about cruelty?”
“Fine, fine, so let’s agree to disagree. But let me tell you an interesting fact. The way that the grammar of genocide works on your brain is not all that different from the emotional regulation process that you go through before battle.”
“Yeah? Well, we’re different from them,” I hissed, pointing at the Hindu India mob in the center of the carriage. “Our BEAR treatment is defensive. It’s designed to protect us. It heightens our self-preservation instincts, that’s all. We don’t start performing stupid rituals where we cut off the arms of children just for fun.”
“No, you’re not that different. Defense and offense are just two sides of the same coin. The grammar of genocide takes effect by regulating the function of the brain that relates to conscience. Not so different from your so-called BEAR treatment, right? The grammar of genocide modifies your conscience, guiding it in a particular direction. It’s no different from what you do to yourselves to prevent any residual altruism from surfacing, so that you can kill children unimpeded. It’s about suppressing the activity of certain modules in the brain. The only real difference is that you use technology to do it, where as I draw on the primordial power of language.”
“Sure, our counselors told me all about how people are basically good. Sounded like holier-than-thou bullshit to me.” I smiled ironically.
“The problem here is with this word ‘conscience,’ ” John Paul said, ignoring my cynicism. “This thing that we’ve come to call ‘conscience’ is basically the sum total of our value judgments. It acts as a mediator for the desires of the brain’s various modules, calculating the risks and rewards of a particular course of action, and what comes out the other end—the optimal course of action—is what we call conscience. But it only takes a gentle nudge to one of the modules before that delicate balance is destroyed. The grammar of genocide only affects a tiny little corner of the brain, suppressing its function. But that’s all that it takes for a society to fall into chaos, and voilà, the groundwork for genocide is laid. There’s no fundamental difference between this process and the way you suppress the functions of parts of your brain before battle using neurotransmitters and counseling.”
Hindu India created its killing fields under John Paul’s spell. In the same way, I created a trail of child corpses under the spell of Forces psychologists.
John Paul was just pointing out the obvious. What could I possibly say in response to this?
One thing was different from that night in Prague, though. John Paul now seemed to get a rise out of needling me with his words. Was this just because he had his back up against a wall, and fear was loosening his tongue? Either way, John Paul was now in full stride. He even seemed to be enjoying himself. He might have been a good actor—but this just didn’t seem like an act. It wasn’t fear that was making him babble. This was abnormal. He seemed positively at ease.
Something suddenly occurred to me.
“You have a mole, don’t you? Someone inside the administration.”
John Paul seemed taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve been wondering. How have you always been able to escape us at the last minute? There aren’t that many people who can get hold of the details of our plans. Just those of us in Special Operations I Detachment
and the higher-ups.”
“So what does that prove?”
“You said back in Prague that you used an NSA program to look for the optimal position from which you could influence a country’s media. Well, you might have been able to do that back when you were a researcher, but now? How do you get access to the program? And more to the point, how do you get yourself into that position in the society? You have an associate high up in the US administration, no? Or a supporter, at least.”
John Paul nodded. “I’m not saying that I do or I don’t. But what I will say is that even if there is a leak, I’m sure your superiors know all about it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, every time I evaded capture, the pool of candidates of possible moles must have shrunk somewhat, no?” John Paul said. “Have you thought that maybe they were prioritizing finding the leak over killing me? That it’s been more important for them to tighten the noose around the high-up mole, whoever he is, than for you to actually succeed in any of your missions? If something were to happen now and I were somehow able to escape, helped by inside information, I would surely lose my ‘supporter,’ I think you called him, in the process.”
“Calling Jaeger One.” Williams was suddenly in my ear. “Please come to the rear carriage immediately. Over.”
I glanced at John Paul again and headed for the rear carriage.
“Clavis and I are cutting loose,” Williams said to the others. He led me into the next carriage behind me where the civilian passengers were. They looked at us in dumb astonishment—they couldn’t have been used to seeing foreign soldiers armed to the teeth with guns and flak jackets.
