by Yusuke Kishi
I dumped the scraps into the feeding area. The worker rats, sensing the vibration, began to emerge The last to come was the queen, Salami, and her male mates. The worker rats scattered in the presence of her giant, sausage-shaped body as she staked her claim to the food.
When I found out that these mole rats had survived despite the destruction, I felt a strange sense of disappointment. Of course, the mole rats were innocent. We couldn’t kill them, and letting them go might harm the environment. So we decided to keep taking care of them.
Still, they were depressing creatures. They were ugly, incestuous, and coprophagic. It was hard to develop any sort of sympathy for them. Even before all this, I had wondered why we had taken such an ugly creature and modified it with cantus into something with an intelligence equal to humans.
After feeding them, I went back to the Department of Health. Although the building was badly damaged, it hadn’t been burned, so most of the books were still intact. I’d have to pick out the more important ones to be moved into a new building in the next few days.
Under the new council, the Exospecies Division no longer operated under the Department of Health but reported directly to the Ethics Committee. I was slated to be a member of the Ethics Committee as well as the first head of the Exospecies Division. My first job was to convince the Ethics Committee to revoke its decision to exterminate all the queerats in Kanto. No matter how you looked at it, it was pointless to punish all the loyal colonies along with the treasonous ones. And at the very least, I needed to keep the promise I made to Kiroumaru that I would save his queen.
It wasn’t easy sorting through 50 boxes of documents, but I had resolved to tackle it on my own. As I dug through the Exospecies Division’s library, I flipped through many papers I had never had the chance to read before, and with them came a wave of questions.
Some of these documents would probably be forbidden to those who didn’t work in the division. Something in the back of my mind seemed to be aware of that.
Today too, I became absorbed in the books I brought out to check. I still had a mountain of documents left to sort through, but I just couldn’t resist looking through each one.
But there were other things I had to get done today, so I didn’t have the time to sit around reading.
“Saki.” Satoru wandered into the room through the broken door.
“Hey, I found more weird documents. Want to hear about them?”
Satoru looked like he had something to say, but simply answered, “Sure.”
“It looks like it was translated from English, and has to do with the scientific name for queerats. Their ancestors, the naked mole rats, were called Heterocephalus glaber. Heterocephalus is Greek for ‘strange head’, and glaber means ‘bald’…”
“Okay, and?” Satoru raised an eyebrow.
“Humans are called Homo sapiens, right? Don’t homo and hetero have opposite meanings?”
“Isn’t that just a coincidence? Both names were given by the ancient civilization.”
“Yeah, but this document proposes a different name that sounds like a combination of the two, Homocephalus glaber. Isn’t that strange?”
I thought he would scoff at me, but Satoru had surprisingly serious look on his face.
“…did they use that name in the end?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to look at library documents. And here’s the document that proposes the scientific name for queerats. The date is too faded to read, but the paper looks at least a couple hundred years old.”
“It must be from around the same time the queerats appeared.”
Satoru looked around at the rubble all over the room, found an undamaged chair, and sat down.
“It cites an ancient kanji dictionary concerning the etymology of the character for ‘queer’. ‘By combining the symbol for ‘man’ with an inverted ‘man’, it expresses a person changing form or simply, ‘change’… I checked one of our kanji dictionaries, but the entry is gone. It was classified under ‘sinister’.”
He stood up again and paced back and forth across the room.
“Satoru…what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I didn’t want to tell you, but-”
“What?”
“I looked into their genes. The queerats’.”
I stood up too.
“What about it?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What Yakomaru…Squealer said at the trial.”
“…me either.”
In response to Kimoto’s question, “If you aren’t beasts, then what are you,” Squealer had answered, “We are humans!” Those words were stuck in my head. Didn’t he hate the entire human race? Why did he call himself “human”?
“I secretly froze part of the corpse of a queerat near the farm. You might not know, but the Code of Ethics forbids the study and analysis of queerat DNA. Though I didn’t know why until now.”
“And what about it?” I asked with bated breath.
“I didn’t even have to sequence the DNA to find out. Queerats have 23 pairs of chromosomes, including sex chromosomes,” Satoru said, shaking his head slightly.
“And? I don’t understand what this means, explain it to me.”
“Naked mole rats, their supposed ancestors, have 30 pairs of chromosomes. It means they’re fundamentally different organisms.”
“In other words…queerats are originally unrelated to the naked mole rats we’re raising?”
“Not quite. I think the only possible explanation is that the queerats’ physical characteristics come from mole rat genes inserted into their genome. But the base organism is something else.”
“No way…”
“Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes too. The only other species with the same number, that I know of, is the olive tree. But would you believe that queerats were created from trees?”
When did I start suspecting that queerats might be human?
I suddenly remembered a question Shun had asked the false minoshiro we captured during summer camp.
“The commoners of the slave empires and the hunter-gatherers didn’t have cantus…PK, right? Where did they go?”
“There are few reliable sources from the past few centuries. Unfortunately, I cannot answer your question,” the false minoshiro said evasively.
A chill went up my spine. Did our ancestors with cantus turn those who did not have the power into queerats?
“But why? Why would they do that?”
“Their objective is easy to see,” Satoru said gloomily. “People who acquired cantus have made history bloodier than ever. When peace finally came, they reprogrammed their genes to include death feedback and attack inhibition to disable the ability to attack humans. But once they did that, those without cantus became a problem.”
“How come?”
“Up until then, those who had cantus were of the highest class. The so-called power elites ruled over non-cantus users and did all they could to stay in power. But with attack inhibition and death feedback, their positions would be reversed. Cantus users could not attack those who didn’t use cantus, but the opposite did not apply. Their relationship was like that of the fiend…Maria’s child and the queerats.”
“Couldn’t they have just given attack inhibition and death feedback to non-cantus people?”
“There are two reasons they didn’t. First, cantus-users did not want to give up their absolute power over all those who could not use the power. Second, leaving aside attack inhibition, it isn’t possible to build the mechanisms into non-cantus people. Remember how death feedback works? First you have to realize that you’re attacking another human. Once that happens, their PK subconsciously activates and causes a massive secretion of hormones that eventually stops the heart.”
In other words, death feedback was forced suicide by cantus. So those without cantus could not have death feedback.
“So you mean they changed the people who were in the way…they changed those without cantus into beasts?”
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br /> I shuddered as I realized that the society I had lived in was so steeped in sin.
“Yeah. Just having a caste system wasn’t enough. They inserted enough naked mole rat genes into non-cantus peoples’ DNA until they could no longer trigger attack inhibition or death feedback. …they were turned into slaves and forced to pay tribute to those with power, all to maintain the position of the privileged class.”
Then “humans” with cantus turned their fellow humans into beasts and continued to kill them without mercy.
“But why did they turn them into such ugly creatures, of all things?”
“Probably for that very reason. Their ugliness.”
Satoru’s answer brought no comfort.
“Their ugliness helped us to think of them as an apparently different species and suppressed any feelings of empathy we might have, so that we could kill them. …of course, another reason might be that the mole rats’ eusociality, which is uncommon among mammals, makes them easier to control.”
I wondered why I didn’t realize this earlier. It made perfect sense if I thought about it. Queerats are physically hundreds of times larger than naked mole rats. Even with cantus speeding up evolution, for them to grow this large in such a short period of time was inconceivable.
It might be easier to understand using dogs as an analogy. Although they’ve split into many different breeds, once you see their teeth it’s easy to tell they’re the same species. The same teeth are stuffed into the jaw of a small dog like a chihuahua and spread out in a large dog like a Saint Bernard.
The queerats didn’t have such an obviously distinguishing characteristic.
No, it was probably something even more fundamental.
Why did the queen have the ability to change her offspring’s form? Was the ability to control fetal development a limited form of cantus? {Since it was cantus that transformed them into beasts, it wouldn’t be too surprising that it would leave a residual power.}
“We’ve been killing them like it was nothing. Of course, we didn’t do it without reason, but all the same, we did kill them.”
Once again, I was shocked by Satoru’s words.
“In that case, we should’ve died from death feedback… We did kill humans after all, even if they didn’t look like it.”
Just thinking about that made my heart speed up and cold sweat break out all over my body.
“No, they’re not human. They might have come from the same ancestors as us, but now they’re a completely different species.”
“But you said they also have 23 chromosomes…”
Even chimpanzees had a different number of chromosomes from humans.
“That’s not everything. We also need to mentally recognize queerats as the same species. The leaf fighters in the Ground Spider colony, blowdogs, that powder monster…do you really consider them our kind?”
Satoru’s question echoed in my ears for a long time.
I’ll be honest. Despite the reasoning behind it, I didn’t think of queerats or their mutant offspring as humans.
It’s also true that I tried not to think of them that way.
My hands were stained with blood. Most of it was in self defense–unavoidable things I had to do to save myself or those around me. But it was also true that, in our war against them, I had killed hundreds of thousands of them. Now, they call it homicide, so I don’t know what I should do. Death feedback hadn’t been activated at the time, but I couldn’t help but worry that it would be triggered if I kept thinking about it.
And one more thing. I could never think of them that way because of what I had to do today.
There was a new park in the middle of Hayring. It was a memorial park dedicated to all those who had been killed in the queerat attack.
In the park was a flowerbed with a monument placed in the center to honor the souls of the deceased. It was only a month after the war, and many buildings were still in ruins, but the park was one of the first things to be built.
So that we would not forget the horrors of war, there was a memorial hall in the farthest corner of the park.
When the hall was first completed, there were long lines of people outside every day. Lines where people could renew their hatred and fuel their desire for vengeance every day. Among those who came each day was an old man who had lost his sons and daughters, and their wives and husbands, and grandchildren–basically his entire family–to the queerats.
I was inside the war memorial hall. There were no visitors. Everyone was at the memorial service being held in Outlook.
On the walls were displays depicting the atrocities committed by the queerats. The weapons they used, the soldiers and the cowardly tactics they used to kill innocent people. The peculiarities of their anatomy were grossly exaggerated, but all were made with genuine, stuffed specimen.
Next to the displays of the regular soldiers was a model of a false human. From a distance, it looked natural, but up close it was very uncanny .
Across from it was the head of one of the powder-spewing monsters that had stayed miraculously intact, along with a 1:10 scaled model of its entire body. The text explained the science behind the power of dust explosions.
And at the very end of the hall was a large glass case.
An attendant sat in front of the glass case. The display was watched 24 hours a day in 6 hour shifts. Today, a middle-aged man called Onose was on duty.
“Oh, Watanabe-san. Shouldn’t you be at today’s memorial service?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“I just came from there. What about you?”
“Of course, I wanted to go, but someone has to stay here…” he gave the thing in the glass case a look of utter disgust.
“Why don’t you go then? I’ll watch over this place.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t. A member of the Ethics Committee shouldn’t be doing work like this…” Onose said, but couldn’t hide his desire to leave.
“It’s alright. If you go now, you can still make it in time for the flower offering. Give a flower to the daughter you lost.”
“Well…alright, if you don’t mind. I’ll take you up on the offer.”
A joyful look came over Onose’s face, but he still glared at the glass case as he left.
“It’s all this thing’s fault. This ugly, rotten, evil…please make it suffer as much as humanly possible.”
“Yes. I lost my parents and many of my friends as well… You should probably hurry to the ceremony.”
“Right, sorry. I’ll be off.” Onose hurried out of the memorial hall.
I waited for a moment to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then slowly approached the case.
Upon looking through the fortified glass, I couldn’t help but avert my eyes. But I had to look. I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and looked again.
What lay inside was no longer a living thing but a lump of flesh that existed solely to suffer.
“Squealer…” I called softly.
Of course, there was no answer.
“I should have come earlier, but didn’t have a chance before today. I had to wait until there was no one around.”
In order to inflict continual pain and suffering, a special tumor cells were introduced into Squealer’s nervous system. When I intercepted the pain signals, his convulsions stopped. It was probably the first time this month he had felt reprieve.
“You’ve suffered enough. …so let this be the end.”
It would’ve been better if Satoru hadn’t told me those things. A new wave of regret washed over me. Would I really be able to do it? Knowing that the thing lying here was descended from humans.
The phrase “doing the devil’s deed with an angel’s heart” came to mind.
I closed my eyes and calmly chanted my mantra again. Usually I would quickly call the words to mind, but this time I mouthed them slowly.
I numbed Squealer’s respiratory center.
“Hey Squealer, do you remember the first time we met?” I said affectionately.
My voice probably wouldn’t carry through the glass, but I suspected he would understand anyway.
“We had been captured by the Ground Spiders, but managed to escape. Then we ran into more queerats and thought that we were done for. But it was the Robber Fly colony that you were part of. You were our savior.”
Of course, there was no reply from the lump of flesh in the glass case. But somehow I felt like he was listening to me.
“You were wearing this wonderful armor and spoke very fluently. You have no idea how relieved we were to hear you speak.”
There was a faint sighing sound. It was probably just a natural physical response to having his breathing stopped, but it sounded like a reply from Squealer.
“And from there all sorts of things happened. Like running from Kiroumaru through the night. But you sold us out and were reporting to him all along, weren’t you? Really, you were always a liar…”
I stopped suddenly, realizing that Squealer was dead.
I checked on him and told myself that this was for the best.
That month must have felt like an eternity. But the pain was over now.
I burned Squealer’s corpse to ashes to prevent him from being resuscitated, and left the memorial hall.
I did it in a fit of hateful fury. That was the excuse I had prepared for when I was questioned. That way, I could avoid serious punishment. Isn’t it outrageous that a member of the Ethics Committee could flaunt the rules like that? But by then, I had realized that there are things more important than rules.
As I exited the park, I heard a melody carried faintly on the wind. The rebuilt town hall was playing “Going Home”.
The sun sets over the distant mountains
Stars stud the sky
Today’s work is finished
