Genocidal Organ

by Project Itoh

  I was empty. I had no idea who I was supposed to hate.

  Not that I could share this fact with anybody. Not my buddies, not Williams, not Colonel Rockwell, not the counselors.

  We had orders from above to receive post-combat counseling. To avoid developing PTSD.

  Williams was angry. Really pissed, just as a real soldier should be. “Who needs that shit! Just let us at the bastards who attacked us! I’ll shove my PTSD so far up their asses—”

  He didn’t feel any emotional trauma. Just anger toward the ambushers. That was what he was trying to say.

  I tried to adopt the same attitude. I put on a show of being angry. Esprit de corps and all that. But then it was announced that any soldier who failed to turn up for his prescribed counseling session would face court martial. You Special Forces troops are highly valued human resources, we were told. It’s our duty to make sure you’re properly maintained.

  I didn’t need any counseling.

  What I needed was punishment.

  I needed someone who could punish me.

  I desperately wanted to be punished for all the crimes I had committed.

  “This beats any counseling bullshit.” That was what Williams said when he left his wife and daughter at home to come round to my house. What did he want? Why, the usual holy trinity, of course: Domino’s Pizza, beer, and a movie. I wasn’t really in the mood, but then I had no good reason to say no, so I let him stay.

  This was what we’d done when Alex died too, I realized as I opened a Bud. And Williams wasn’t necessarily wrong when he said that this was better than any counseling. Whenever Williams or I experienced anything traumatic at work, beer and junk food and lazing around really did seem to relieve the stress.

  I took a sip of my Budweiser. Definitely a different taste from the Budvar. Williams was chomping down on the pizza and choosing a movie from his own archive.

  Williams didn’t have much to say for himself today. Well, not compared to his usual self. I could tell he was fed up with the counseling, tired of forcing out the emotions that were allegedly trapped inside him.

  The film started. King Arthur appeared from the mist, closely followed by his squire, who was tapping a pair of coconut halves together to emulate the sound of horses trotting. It was Williams’s favorite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He laughed loudly at all the jokes as usual, but every once in a while he cast a glance at me as if to seek confirmation. It’s okay to laugh at this stuff, isn’t it?

  Williams had been out for the count during the whole ambush, safely out of harm’s way in the rear car. So he hadn’t been hit, and he did not take part in or even witneess the battle of the soldiers who felt no pain even though they knew it was there, the soldiers who turned one another into mincemeat. I was sure Williams couldn’t forgive himself for not being there. Not being part of the battle that saw his comrades slip away one by one. The shame and the frustration of not being part of it was hitting Williams just as hard as the reality of losing his comrades.

  “None shall pass! None shall pass!”

  In the movie, the Black Knight was speaking to Arthur and his squire. The battle began.

  Williams spoke. “It’s scary how much Terry Gilliam looks like a servant in this, don’t you think?”

  “Well, he’s supposed to be the servant, no? He plays the squire, right?”

  “Nah, I don’t mean that. You know. He’s too convincing. Makes it hard to believe he went on to be a famous director.”

  I turned back to the screen to continue watching the film. King Arthur had just sliced the Black Knight’s left arm off. Orangey fake blood spurted from the stump where the arm had been.

  “ ’Tis but a scratch!” The Black Knight continued fighting.

  Just like the battle in the train, I thought, gulping back some beer. Except we had all been Black Knights, the enemy and us included.

  In the movie another one of the Black Knight’s arms went flying off. “Just a flesh wound!” The knight carried on, kicking Arthur, hurling insults at him, bleeding from both shoulders. By the end of the scene he had lost all his limbs and was a stump on the ground, but he was still threatening to bite Arthur to death right up until the very end.

  I remember, back in the mortuary in India, just before the bodies were about to be stitched back together, staring at the mounds of flesh laid out unceremoniously on slabs and thinking some dark thoughts. That the wings of the Meatplanes and the flesh of the Intruder Pods under their cellulose husks and the Achilles tendons of the Chicken Leg Porters were all made of the same stuff. The only difference was that one was human flesh and the others came from dolphins. But flesh was flesh. Both worked in the same way, both needed blood and a pulse to function.

  I remember thinking how convenient it’d be if our bodies had metahistories. If each cell had its individual tag full of metadata, then how easy it would be to slot these piles of flesh back together.

  Metahistories. Alpha consumers could spend all day staring history in the face in the form of the provenance of whatever consumer good they were considering purchasing. You could trace each individual ingredient of a Domino’s Pizza back to where it came from. A microhistory of each constituent part: cheese, jalapeños, ham, pineapple, the wheat and egg in the dough. All were fully traceable, not just back to where they were made, but how, when they were harvested, which distributor transported them, how they were prepared. The history of the flour. The history of the cheese. Once known as “smart consumers,” these influential early adopters did at least have the collective modesty not to want to have to refer to themselves as “smart,” so their name was changed to “alpha consumer” in order not to offend their own sensibilities. They were a highly influential bunch, not afraid of spending great time and effort discussing the products, founding consumer forums, gently or not-so-gently encouraging producers toward improved best practices.

  Some of these alpha consumers became real opinion leaders when it came to particular consumer goods, and every brand had at least one champion. These champions would take an advisory role on the forums, helping to create public opinion and in some cases having substantial influence over the sales of a particular item. They would take a particular type of shoelace used in a particular type of shoe, investigate its metahistory, and debate and discuss the merits of other laces (cheaper?) and even the materials used in them (would this type of fiber be stronger?).

  Thus each consumer product became an accumulation of discussions and memories.

  Having said that, we didn’t actually need to have each individual fragment of flesh be tagged, as our lives were already replete with metadata of their own. We would have to make do with that for now.

  If you had a free hand over someone’s records—power of attorney—then you could bring up almost anything about them. Records of their purchases and movements. Records of all sorts of communications. Their personal albums and diary, of course, and even a computer-generated biography if you wanted one. A person’s complete metadata in one handy volume. The editorial skills of the software programs that autocollated biographies were something else, and could make even the most mundane existence sound like a lifelong roller-coaster ride. Most people of my generation would be lying if they told you they hadn’t Biogged themselves at least once. A thirty-year-old, for example, would have to wait only about three hours or so for a machine to render their life so far into a four-hundred-page masterpiece.

  I thought back to those few days one summer ago when my mother was awaiting my verdict as to whether she would live or die. I had looked through all the useful documents I could find on her family pages and the guest account for her personal pages, but there were no Life Graph documents available. I didn’t even know if Mom had ever bothered to have her biography collated. According to a report published last year, at least seventy percent of Americans had had biographies done at one time or another. It wasn’t as if it required any effort—you just pressed a button and the software did the rest—and it
was hard to imagine that there were too many people around who weren’t at all interested in what a machine had to say about their lives.

  More to the point, even if I had been able to access my mother’s biography, would there have been anything that would have affected my decision? If I’d been able to read a full account of her life, as pieced together by millions of pieces of metadata, would things be different now? Would I have chosen to keep my mother in that ambiguous space between life and death? Would I have quit the Forces and taken a desk job in an office nearby so that I could visit her once a week to see how she was doing?

  As it was, I’d outlived my mother, and the survivor can only guess at what the departed would have wanted. You’d have to be quite a narcissist to believe that those guesses were ever anything more than a subjective shot in the dark aimed at reality.

  The fact was that the deceased always held dominion over us. Because it was impossible for us to experience what they experienced.

  Apart from Williams and myself, the only ones left in I Detachment were Sean, Bob, and Daniel. It had been the worst surprise attack that the US Armed Forces had experienced these past two decades and the first time the US had ever been up against an enemy that was on a level footing in terms of training and firepower. We were the first Special Forces unit in living memory to experience defeat on the battlefield.

  The corpses of the enemy soldiers were also all over the place, literally. One reason why it took a full week to fully reassemble the bodies was that our dead assailants were dead people in more than one sense. They were all PMC soldiers who had somehow “died” in the past—MIA on the battlefield, or abducted and allegedly beheaded by enemy insurgents. It had taken a week for their data to catch up with their bodies.

  There were no records of our attackers having entered India through official channels. Dead people can’t travel, of course, so they must have acquired fake IDs from somewhere. Perhaps from the Uncounted of Prague. In any case, we still had no idea where this well-equipped, BEAR-treated unit of soldiers had come from. Judging from the trace quantities of radioactive material found on their equipment we could speculate that they could have come through Pakistan, over the craters and through the Hindu India heartlands, but Pakistan was still a failed state following the nuclear war, and there was no way to get in to follow the trail.

  Despite this, it wasn’t really a big problem for us that our assailants would remain ghosts. Because we had been able to identify the prime suspect almost immediately. A mole within Eugene & Krupps: one of the directors, namely the senate majority leader. It was the magic of technology that brought him down. The oracle of SNDGA. The NSA’s very own Deep Throat. A global game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It seemed that SNDGA held the key to all the world’s mysteries. I wondered how many degrees of separation between the fine senator and the now bloodied and limbless corpses of our assailants.

  A top-secret internal investigative team within Intelligence had apparently been watching the majority leader for some time. Each assassination attempt on John Paul had led them closer to him, and by delicately adjusting the details of the information they leaked to the senator Intelligence had been able to tighten the noose. The corpses of our ambushers were, apparently, the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

  I could still remember the exact words that John Paul had said to me just before the train had been ambushed. “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.” John Paul had fully anticipated that the majority leader would intervene to rescue him, even if that meant the majority leader would implicate himself in the process.

  No one in the government wanted a public hearing and the associated scandal. That was why the White House and the NME swept the whole thing under the carpet. Of course, when it did finally all come out down the line it was a scandal the size of Watergate or the Iran-Contra scandal. But that’s another story.

  Legal action against the majority leader would have meant all sorts of things coming out in the wash: John Paul’s close involvement with DARPA’s research and the secrets of the NSA’s Deep Throat. No, that just wouldn’t do. So the government and the politician came to a quiet deal—he would retire from politics citing ill health and disappear from their world. He went on to work full time for Eugene & Krupps.

  Meanwhile, my comrades were sealed in caskets and brought back to the US. The ambushers’ corpses were also reconstructed, and following autopsies their bodies were repatriated to their various countries of origin. Of course there were also other corpses. When the engine had exploded the train was speeding through a curved portion of the track. The pent-up centrifugal force acted as a slingshot, hurling the rear carriages away in an arc. Williams and I really had drawn long straws that day, but many of the Indian passengers hadn’t—they’d been thrown around like the contents of an old-style tumble dryer. The passengers sitting on the roof were simply flung into the heavens. The record holder was a child who landed a full five hundred feet away, head first, ramming his face and neck all the way up into his torso.

  As for the Hindu India leaders that we had captured, they never did have to stand trial at The Hague. They never even made it to the Panopticon facility. They just went straight to their graves. They had all been shot dead, cleanly, one bullet per person, right in the forehead. The ambushers evidently had no interest in Indian politics. The entire assault was staged for one reason and one reason only: to free John Paul. He was all that the ghost soldiers had ever wanted.

  And now there was really only one thing left to deal with. John Paul.

  2

  This had to be our last Seaweed drop.

  We were flying through the African skies, en route to what was supposed to be the final leg of the John Paul saga. It was still a full three months before the whole scandal was due to break—soon, the twelve-member investigative committee would look into the irregularities behind the sudden retirement from public life of the former senate majority leader and find that the trail of the official cover-up led them all the way to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, the head of DARPA’s research arm, various generals in Intelligence, Colonel Rockwell, and finally to me.

  I wondered what Williams and the others were up to. We had been sheathed in our Pods back at the aircraft hangar at base camp, so we could only communicate by wireless.

  “This is Mouse Two. I’m going for gold, Seaweed!” Williams was chatting to the pilot.

  “Looking forward to it, Mouse Two. Commencing countdown. Over.”

  The copilot started the count. I could barely contain my rising excitement. Not because I was feeling tense about the drop. Because I was ready to carry out the first step of the plan. I had been waiting for it.

  Lucia was going to be at our next destination.

  “Enemy sirens have activated!” The copilot sounded nervous. “Ground radar has detected us. How the hell? Can they see us or something?”

  “This is Jaeger One. Cut us loose now, Captain. Immediately. Over.”

  “What are you talking about, Jaeger One? They’ve spotted us!”

  The copilot was losing it. Stealth bomber crews weren’t used to the idea of being targeted by enemy fire just before they were about to unleash their payload. Particularly if the enemy was supposed to be some third-rate African tin-pot dictatorship.

  “All you have to do is press the release button. Quickly! Over.”

  “But that’s against all protocol—enemy missile incoming!”

  I gritted my teeth and activated the manual override, preparing to cut loose the external safety hook from the inside. I pressed the buttons and pulled the manual release lever just as we’d been taught in training. I heard a shrill beeping in my inner ear and then a woman’s voice. “Priority override ejection request activated. Five seconds to release. Three, two, one, release.”

  I heard the faint sound of the flesh hook releasing my P
od.

  I was weightless—the Pod had been released. A moment later I heard a roaring noise, and the Pod was buffeted from side to side. Maybe the missile had hit the Seaweed. But I had no way of knowing anything—I was sealed off from the world, no way of making wireless contact, no way of speaking to the pilot or even Williams.

  It suddenly occurred to me that all of our missions involving John Paul had started with HALO drops of Intruder Pods. It was never a straightforward land or sea assault. The only exception had been the secret agent business in Prague. Why was it that we always had to emerge from something in order to deal with John Paul? It was as if we had to experience an arcane birthing ritual before we had the right to engage with him.

  The Pod calculated the variation in course that my early release and the shock wave had caused and quickly adjusted the thrusters that covered its shell. I knew that I had been thrown off course, and there was no longer any guarantee that I’d safely land anywhere near the vast surface of Lake Victoria.

  I was falling. But I felt no need to pray.

  “Here’s the situation.” Colonel Rockwell was briefing us in a windowless SOCOM meeting room. “Lake Victoria used to support over four hundred distinct species. It was a prime example of biodiversity in action. Anyone know what other name the lake was known by?”

  “Darwin’s Dreampond,” said Williams. “Boss, is this going to be a geography lecture? Should I go grab us some popcorn?”

  As usual, Boss ignored Williams’s backchat and plowed on. “Until the middle of the twentieth century, the primary industry in the area was, unsurprisingly, fishing. I say ‘industry,’ but it was mostly subsistence fishing. Small, self-sufficient communities living comfortably on the lake’s shores. Then in 1954 the ecosystem of the lake was irreversibly altered by the experimental release of an exotic fish called the Nile perch.”