by Roman McClay
Everyone knows Draconian -and how awful that is- but not Draco , the first man to finally lay down the law so some kind of order could fucking rise from the chaos heretofore.
To do anything great, first monstrous things must be done, this is the rule of law. The Jacks each took turns thinking things like, nothing can grow amongst the uncleared forest, and man first clears the land of other men, this is what he does . And they’d take turns thinking that if anyone thought anything had changed since day one on this cannibalistic planet then that person was too a part of the problem, you are one of the silly men, they’d think, you the bourgeoisie, the pampered children of society in the soft bodies of men of age 50, with minds no more developed than a boy of age just three. They knew the data on moral reasoning and how only one of each ten men reached levels above mere conformity on The Standard Issue Moral Judgement Interview. One in ten could do moral reasoning themselves. That was it. The studies showed it. And society looked just as you’d assume from such a fucking stat.
Blax and his Jacks were told it was the only way to restore that culture, the way a fire clears the way for new growth, undiseased, stronger than the last generation, uncluttered with fallen trees, deadwood. And they had seen the logic and the data and the math beneath. They knew the fire did not speak, it burned, the deluge did not enjoin, it drowned. And they had found their own bodies -their own endocrinology- on the other side of the equal sign of all this evidence in near perfect, sonorous, corporeal accord. They knew for what they were born.
They were told, and had every reason to believe -because they too had seen the evidence, the cracks, the mold and withering, the atrophy and entropy, they saw the corruption of the society, unlike insouciant men who play with their step-kids and focus on their stupid fucking jobs while the whole culture rots- the Jacks had every reason to believe that something radical had to be done to save it all. And they knew they’d be racked with guilt and that nobody would believe them when they said it was not merely for personal gain or vandalism, but that they had a 3-part move that was seemingly destructive, but complicated and yet benevolent at the bottom of some corvid heart.
The surgeon cuts off the limb, is he a maniac? they often asked the society by which they were ignored. No, he is trying to save the man by removing the gangrenous appendage. Is everyone so stupid they cannot see the difference between the act of a surgeon and an axe murderer? Well, sometimes a culture needs its rotting limbs removed so it can save the body whole, they each thought in their own way and at different times and different speeds in language slightly modified.
And maybe, they’d think, after modern man learns how to clean their wounds and care for cuts and scrapes, so they do not go septic in the first place, we can return their limbs to them . But, modern man is so irresponsible, so careless that he lost the right to great things, evidence of great cultural works, the juice that flowed from the tended vines. Modern man had lost the right to carry on as if the whole house was not engulfed in fire and smoke. He was using water for diluting spirits instead of dousing the flames; he was being irresponsible and needed some pain to remind him of his duty to the house he lived within.
And yet modern man cannot be reasoned with, he cannot. He must be slapped and shaken from his drunkenness and ecstatic revelry; he must be held by lapels and hear: Hey, cocksucker, you’re ruining the world, if you don’t stop we will all die lonely and bereft of meaning; it’s a Hell on earth we are creating. And since you won’t stop it, we shall fucking stop you.
Well, smart men listen to men smarter than they; this is the hallmark of intelligence. And Isaiah knew what man needed; he had peered as far into the future as he could and had come up with a plan; and it was with love in his heart, not malice, almost no malice at all. He wanted to restore man to his place as wise father, as steward of this magnificent world and epic culture. It was tough love , yes, but it was love , Blax thought.
Isaiah could have killed us all, he had the power, but he was a moral agent, and he wanted what was right , Blax thought as the men were staid and still. But modern man sees right as wrong and wrong as right, how many examples do we need? We give kids Ritalin instead of staying married to their mother and rough-housing with them, we spend more money on imprisoning people than in providing for them a meaningful job that they could take pride in and become half-way decent, we spend more on sports and drugs than on art and meaningful human connections, we lie far more than we tell the truth.
We reward corruption and the shallow, we punish honesty and depth of soul. We yell at a dog for running away and we beat him when he returns. We send our kids to schools we know are indoctrinating them in Marxist ideology and where they are likely to get shot, and when they return to us radicals and autocratic leftist scum or riddled with bullets we say, “If only I had known!”
It’s a lie. We already know, we just care more about our careers and free time and ease-of-life than our kids . Modern men made money, ah, precious money, they each thought. They each felt in their own time and own way.
The Spartan used to teach their own kids, in the agoge , which was a blend of martial training and a classical liberal arts education of moral teachings and literature. Why, Blax thought, do we outsource the education of our children to left wing scum that indoctrinate them and get them killed with lax safety and ignored warning signs? The same reason we outsource hard labor to illegal aliens that undercut our working class, the same reason we outsource vehicle maintenance instead of changing oil and tires ourselves: we’re lazy and we are corrupt.
And yet, we just -in a huff- insist this is the way modern life is, and nothing can be done. And that is why Blax’s Jacks did what they did, to prove two things: one, in can be done differently if you show some balls; and two, if you don’t change it, life will change it for you. You think you’re so smart and wise and safe, you bray that you don’t go to biker bars? You just wait, the bikers will come to you.
No culture can survive when nobody knows how to fix plumbing or weld or dig a ditch themselves. Most of our lives are predicated on work and objects that are hundreds or 1,000s of years old. 99% of our lives are comprised of the ancient, and yet we think we all only need to learn to code and sell shit . The truth is that the world needs no more salesmen, America is already a nation of 350 million used car salesmen, all phony as fuck and ingratiating as whores, Blax thought as he spit away a feral hair from his beard that had migrated passed the lips.
They had heard the Governor’s remarks, the upbraiding, the insults, the stupid shit he said on the stupid fucking television. Isaiah had sent the file an hour ago after their last job had angered the whole world. Blax had fumed as he listened to this politician, this asshole, rant and rave about not just the Jack’s crimes but how he -he of all people- was going to hunt them down and wipe them out. It was enough to make a headless cat laugh, Blax thought.
Blax agreed with Isaiah, America needed an enema, it needed a return to basics, and the Jacks gave them one. It was for all your own good , he said to himself. You ought to be grateful instead of spiteful and angry and wagging your stupid fucking fingers, but you won’t. Not until you grow up; and that will finally happen now. Because, there is a new sheriff in town, and you will act like a man or you will be crushed. “The Gay Parade is over; lock and load motherfuckers,” he said aloud as he looked out on the forest and the hail -the deer had finally scattered and hid- he looked from the narrow steel walls of the hi-cube container and the Jacks did not even look up at him, for they had been thinking the same thing too.
7. I Lack My Proper Men
The Standard Issue Moral Judgement Interview score ranks a subject in one of five successively more complex stages of moral reasoning. These modes of moral reasoning include pre-conventional levels (stage 1 obedience and punishment orientation; stage 2 instrumental purpose and exchange); conventional levels (Stage 3 interpersonal accord and conformity; stage 4 social accord and system maintenance); and postconventional levels (stage 5 social contract
, utility, individual rights)
Studies suggest that by age thirty-six 89 percent of middle-class American Males have developed to the conventional stage of moral reasoning and 11 percent to the post-conventional stage
Descartes’ Error [Damasio, Antonio]
In honor cultures, turning to a third party when you’ve been insulted or offended indicates weakness or cowardice and lack of self-respect. In honor cultures, people are expected to handle their own business
Why Honor Matters [Sommers, Tamler]
And he who hath to be a creator in good and evil – verily, he hath first to be a destroyer and break values in pieces
Thus Spake Zarathustra [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
I. 2040 e.v.
The bank was perfectly covered in snow; no footsteps had blemished it. The water barely sloshed upon it and remained stoic as the still falling embers and larger pieces of detritus, some aflame some merely singed, pierced its surface. The fallout, once below the liquid horizon, began to wobble and slow as it was pulled toward the bottom.
He was upright and positioned as if sitting in a chair; an invisible, merely effluvial and protean throne. His knees were bent; his arms out and also bent at the elbow with hands loosely clenched in front of him. His eyes were closed. His mind was processing three data points and had shut down his conscious interface until it had some reconnaissance he could act upon. He was three meters below the surface, but his lungs did not reflexively breathe in. His blood had been oxygenated sufficiently to stay submerged at this depth for 27 more minutes. He had a broken ulna on his left forearm; a 14cm cut on his left flank just outside the margins of the Dethhead tattoo that ran from his armpit to well below his hip.
The blood droplets, escaping the wound underwater, hovered around the cut like school of fish around a coral reef; darting and circling in tandem like a single organism. The gash itself flapped a bit around its edges like sea anemone in the underwater currents.
Lyndon, the man they all called LT, had only a pair of black boxer-briefs on and a black chronometer on his left wrist. The underwear swaddled him and his thighs were slightly pinched by the banding; his waist, too, was snugged. Pieces of his home fell slowly all around him, braked by the viscosity of the water.
His comrade lay on his starboard side, also unconscious, nine meters northwest of his enthroned position.
That man had a much larger fissure in the skin from the right shoulder across his pectoral and it was allowing blood to gush out of the Lt's number 2. His own PG coder was slowing the heart rate and sending respirocytes to the wound capillaries and vascular zones to attenuate blood flow. His pulse/ox levels were sufficient for eight more minutes at this depth before respiration would be needed. His blood had been spurting out from the wound like an underwater thermal vent; plumes in a pillar, roiling, as if too focused on upward and outward progress to disperse beyond the tight nimbus column. As the nano-bot blood-cell analogs arrived at the wound site, as if the earth of this man himself had run out of the sanguinary fluid, the column collapsed and the vent in his chest seized and refused to produce. The once rocketing plume lost its propulsion and slowed and the blood cloud began to disperse in the cool lake water like a storm moving on across their own horizon above the lake bottom at 8751 feet.
At 4-degrees Celsius the lake held the men, their blood, the flotsam and jetsam of the home, in slowed viscous time; a Relativity event that gave the earth and its pieces time to think and adapt; time to regain homeostasis as the water itself found its own level.
Lyndon’s PGC picked up his comrade’s signal and calibrated his own system check; which now included the seven minutes left on the other man's oxygen levels in addition to his own timeline to be safely submerged. Priority one was preventing any blood loss or organ failure in himself; he was the omphalos of the wheel; his subalterns the spokes.
The concussion of the blast had thrown him several meters from the home and into the lake, all of it, the men, the shrapnel, all clearing the beach, leaving it unblemished. Massive contusions on his flesh were evident but both lungs were inflated, and the spleen, liver and heart were all unaffected. The brain and skull seemed normal as the coder scanned for blood clots, fractures and interference with synaptic response.
A small dent in the base of the skull was detected and inflammation response was now present; the coder sent NSAIDS to the region to reduce swelling and any impingement on the blood vessels or nerves. It also increased blood flow there by using a phalanx of respirocytes to oxygenate the region; hastening repair of the damaged capillaries. It was certainly a concussion, but the coder was keeping him in the non-response coma for now to prevent any movement; under normal conditions he would have regained consciousness by now.
A coterminous priority matrix in the three remaining aerial drones undamaged in the explosion were scanning the larger area for threats and sending the data to Lyndon’s PGC. There were no active humans or predatory animals moving within 1,000 meters; and his body was not being moved by water flow or other natural phenomena, so he was in no danger of being damaged by movement. His respiration was turned off; thus, drowning was abated. The falling debris was scanned as too small and diffuse to penetrate the water surface with enough force to damage him if he was struck at this depth. And the water in the lake was read as non-toxic to skin, eyes or mucus membranes. No fuel, poisons or toxins were detected .
The secondary priority was measuring blood sugar levels and brain glucose; both were within nominal parameters. A full psychological matrix was run; this included cortisol and epinephrine levels which had been high during the moments leading up to and during the explosion. The coder leveled those out so that his brain state would be relatively calm upon re-emergence from the medically induced coma. The hypnopompic chemistry and frontal lobe depression associated with sleep emergence would be waived by the PGC so he could operate fully with no sleep-inertia once the systems were back online.
Lyndon would also be given his comrade's location in the water and his status, which included blood oxygen levels and trauma matrix report, so the Lt could make a human-level decision as to further priority action.
The Lt released some CO2 via the lungs due to hydrostatic pressure on the chest and abdomen, and as the bubbles rose from his lips a slight change in his buoyancy was effected. He began to slightly lift from his seated stance as if rising from this imperceptible throne to greet a visiting dignitary or rebuke the Fool of the Court. The hairs on his body rose and separated like seagrass waving in rhythm with the lake's own flora so that from a distance -as his skin blued from the constricting capillary response to the cold- he began to disappear as a once foreign object, and now appeared almost native to this fecund lake bottom.
The Ph of the lake water was 7.7; the atmospheric CO2 sequestration pumps were as still as his eye lids; his coder de-prioritized this macro level II concern but uploaded the data onto his downtime notepad program. The Ph of his blood was 7.33; dropping slightly with the buildup of CO2; still within nominal range and compensated for with some buffering by the plasma proteins taking on H+ ions. The coder decided to allow some further CO2 release and then reboot his conscious mind and allow him to make the trek to the surface as, and when, he saw fit.
The reticular activating system was reoriented by the coder.
His eyes opened and consciousness returned with an attenuated hypnopompic phase change. He looked at, then through, the distortion of the water and his fovea found his limbs and hands; he remained in his seated position and checked his PG matrix action list as it threaded through his conscious thoughts. He felt fine, but the data assured him he'd be sore once he left the weightlessness of this lake. His broken ulna had begun its repair process through calcification welding but he decided he would splint it anyway once on the surface.
He then checked the data inputs for his people. Harvey's pulse-ox reading was fine but his CO2 build up required him to be conscious in order to purge; and the Sgt was not just shut down by his coder but
had taken a pretty severe head concussion and was not going to come online safely in the next five minutes. Lyndon turned his head, rose, and looked northwest and began to walk in that lumbering underwater way toward his Sgt; he closed the 9-meter gap without swimming.
Turned on his side the Staff Sergeant was well muscled, but sinewy and lacked the bulk of his Lieutenant; his skin was a blue tinged white like the Lt as he cooled in the water's bottom and the body constricted the surface vessels attempting to conserve body heat. His manifold blond hairs were matted down with mud; he must have tumbled and rolled onto his side. His legs were huge and Lyndon had always envied them, even as his own had developed into massive logs themselves.
Many psychological studies done had shown that each individual carries the body image they have at the onset of puberty. If you're a fat kid at 14 you'll always feel like a fat kid, no matter what progress your actual body makes. And the Lt was a skinny kid his whole life and even now at 205lbs of hard, well worked muscle, he felt thin. He always pushed his endocrine system and weight training as if he needed to gain 30-pounds of muscle by the next equinox regardless of the reality of his large frame. He always felt more exposed, more vulnerable, around his, around these new iterations of his old comrades. They -his old friends, the first versions of his coterie- had known him as that skinny kid; like they knew his secrets of cowardice and humiliations and lies.
But this version, the Jason Harvey that lay on his side, unconscious and waiting to be helped by his Lieutenant, knew only this large and stoic and competent evolution of a man. The anxiety -and the reason for it- were Lyndon’s alone.
Lyndon scooped Harv up; bent low to shoulder the man using the water's buoyancy properties to get them both in the best position once on shore. Lifting straight up with his legs -and the buoyancy of the lake water assisting- the two men were now only a few meters from the surface and the shore; the Lt walked south toward the co-ordinates of his home. Looking up at the surface of the water he saw flickers of orange and red and white lights both constant along the horizon and as stochastic, mercurial, flashes along the vault of the heavens. The lake bed rose at almost a 1:1 slope now and their combined weight of 385 pounds began to cause his narrow feet to entrench in the soft mud. He splayed his feet as if walking on snow to offer the most surface tension, the most resistance.