by Project Itoh
The birds flying overhead amid the jungle canopy didn’t have that choice. They weren’t free to choose. People used the phrase “as free as a bird,” but birds weren’t free, they only had one course of action available to them. That which was dictated to them by their genes.
True freedom meant to have a choice. To be able to take a possibility and make it your own.
That was why I needed to be punished, I said to myself as I pushed my way through the complex ecosystem of the jungle on Lake Victoria’s shores. I hadn’t been able to voluntarily accept the responsibility for pulling the plug on my mother. I needed to be punished for the choices I had made. No. For the choices that I had not made.
The mission I was on now was an assassination mission, and the orders had come from the National Military Establishment. As per usual. Up until now I had never thought too deeply about our missions or our orders. But Alex had taken personal responsibility for his crimes, his sin. Because there was no one around him who would punish him: no person, no God. Alex had been honest about his reality, whereas my eyes had been closed. I had told myself that I was killing for my country, killing for the greater good of the world. But it had never been my choice. I had never made the autonomous decision to kill. That’s why issues such as sin and crime and punishment had never even entered my mind.
This time was different, though. There was no one from HQ or the Pentagon telling me what to do. This was my decision. I had come here, of my own free will, to kill John Paul.
I could see the lights of the guesthouse in the distance. It was a traditional colonial-style building, two stories high, with an atrium courtyard.
It was surrounded by a neatly trimmed lawn and patrolled by Lake Victoria soldiers.
There was one advantage to the fact that Williams and the others were no longer with me. It meant that I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I didn’t need to worry about coordinating with the others, and I could act far more boldly than I would have been able to do in a group.
There was a full moon in the sky and it was dazzlingly bright. High visibility, nothing doing. I upped my nanocoating camouflage to the max. It couldn’t quite turn me into the Invisible Man, but provided I stayed flat on the ground, I would be able to creep in pretty close without anyone being able to distinguish me from my surroundings.
I inched forward from the jungle clearing toward the guesthouse. The only thing that would really throw a wrench in the works at this point would be trained war dogs. Fortunately, I saw no signs of any.
The world’s developed nations supported an independent Lake Victoria state because they wanted to secure a stable supply of artificial flesh. It was much easier to deal with one country than it was with three.
Maybe “supported” wasn’t even strong enough a word. The war of independence wasn’t so much an organic grassroots movement that had eventually borne fruit as it was a plan that had been devised and executed. The shores of Lake Victoria were by a long way the richest regions of Kenya, Uganda, or Tanzania—naturally, because the artificial flesh industry was far more profitable than anything else the countries had to offer the world. The businessmen who grew rich from the lake found themselves increasingly averse to their respective governments squeezing them for taxes as bribes all the time. They made their dissatisfaction known by grumbling to their European bankers, and in return they were met with gentle, seductive insinuations that they might just be better off if they decided to get together and go it alone, without their so-called rulers or countries squeezing them dry.
When the US waged her wars in the Middle East, she had hardly been able to just come out with it and say “I’m doing this for the oil” even if it was true. Any modern-day national army needed at least a pretext for war before it could be mobilized. But here in Africa, causes that were fashionable elsewhere in the world—justice, stability, basic human rights—were not quite so indispensable. Scratch the surface and the medieval mindset of conquest and plunder was still very much alive.
Anyone who knew the region well, then, was hardly surprised that all it took was a cold appeal to their greed before the wealthy inhabitants of Lake Victoria declared independence.
In terms of game theory, betrayal was still the dominant paradigm in this part of the world. In the early stages of any game theory simulation, the betrayers would always get an early advantage over the cooperators. On an individual level, the decision to betray the other players would yield short-term gains. Of course, after a number of iterations and after additional complexities were introduced, the cooperators would always gain the upper hand in the long run. But on this continent, life was still simple. The game had not yet evolved that far.
No, it had, but then the ethical code had somehow been reset, returned to its primordial stages, and the game had yet to regain its former complexity.
I finally made it across the lawn and merged into one of the guesthouse walls. I traversed the passageway that led to the inner courtyard and entered the guesthouse. The atrium courtyard acted as a conduit between the rooms all around it. Its centerpiece was a small fountain surrounded by palm trees.
I walked boldly toward the centerpiece, nanocamouflage on full blast, to scope out the corridors. Occasionally one of the guards passed through the courtyard in the course of his patrols, but even when he passed within a meter of me he showed no sign of noticing me.
“Good evening, Madam Paul.” I went for my knife reflexively when one of the soldiers started speaking. But I immediately realized that he wasn’t speaking to me, but rather someone behind me on the second floor.
“Good evening, Mugabe.”
A voice I knew well.
A voice that had told me about the Holocaust. A voice that had lectured me about the inevitability of the evolutionary development of the conscience. A voice permeated with regret about her past.
Lucia Sukrova.
“How are you today, madam?”
“Well, thank you. I’m starting to get used to this place. Although it is still difficult for me whenever I see the hardships of the people on the outside …”
“Try not to let it bother you too much, madam. We are all so grateful to you both for taking the trouble to come all the way from America to help us improve our living standards.”
“I hope we will be able to help.”
“Has your husband—forgive me—has the deputy minister for culture retired for the evening yet?” the soldier asked.
It seemed that the story here was that John Paul and Lucia were a married couple. Of course, it was always possible that they actually had married since arriving here.
“No. He rarely sleeps. He’s hard at work in his room.”
“I do so admire his dedication to his work, madam. I hope one day to become a fine politician just like him.”
“I think he’s just an insomniac, really.”
“But your husband is doing so much for us. When I listen to the radio speeches he writes, my heart is lifted up. He makes me feel that if only we could all pull together we could raise this country out of poverty and get rid of AIDS once and for all. He makes me believe that the fish will come back soon. That we can carry on exporting meat to make money and at the same time live off the fish that used to swim in the lake. He makes me believe that we can have it all again. That the girls who work and sleep in the factories will soon be able to go to school instead, and that children won’t have to scavenge anymore through scrap heaps of offal and bones just to find enough to eat. He makes me believe in his dream that tomorrow will be a better day than today. Any person who can write speeches like that must be a fine human being, madam.”
There was silence. Lucia had nothing to say in response to the soldier’s words.
Sorry. Actually, my husband is here to make you hate each other.
Sorry. Actually, the only dream that my husband has is the dream that your skulls will be added to those scrap heaps of offal and bones.
I imagined those thoughts running through Luc
ia’s head.
Dost thou, peasant scum, truly believe we come here to spread peace? Nay, villein, we command thee to fight for our own amusement!
But no. In all probability, Lucia was still oblivious to what John Paul was doing.
“That’s … very touching. Very touching of you to say so. Good night, Mugabe.”
“Good night, madam.”
I watched Lucia retire into her room. The central room.
I waited for the soldier to continue his patrol and checked that he had left the building before dashing up the stairs. The soles of my boots automatically adapted to the flooring, helping me make a silent ascent. I felt like a ghost. These noise-canceling boots made you forget the fact that you had two feet planted firmly on the ground.
The door was open. I readied my gun and charged inside.
But Lucia was nowhere to be seen.
There was only moonlight, scattered and diffuse, shining in through the windows.
I quickly scouted the empty room. There was a desk, and it looked like someone had been working at it until a moment ago. There was a paper notebook and what looked like some sort of manuscript, and a fountain pen. The manuscript was titled The Federation, and on closer inspection it looked like a handwritten draft of a presidential speech. John Paul evidently did his writing longhand.
The notebook next to the manuscript was filled with code and strange words, far removed from ordinary English. It was evidently some sort of shorthand key that described the characteristics of certain words—their gender and connotations, looked like—logic symbols that described word and sentence orders and patterns of incidence. The linguistic jargon and code were all crammed densely together, and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to truly understand what was written there.
Then I heard the sound of a safety lock unclicking behind my back.
“Hello again, assassin.”
I spun around.
It was John Paul, smiling sadly and holding a pistol to my face.
4
“I thought that my rescue force might have killed you,” John Paul said.
We were standing in a reverse snapshot of our first face-to-face encounter in Prague. This time I had my back to the bright moonlight and John Paul’s face was bleached white by it. His expression was the same though—very sane, very sad. He was holding an antique, a Browning semiautomatic. A gun without an ID. A throwback to a time when anybody could use any gun to kill anybody else.
“They almost did.”
“Ho-hum. Shame.” John Paul pulled up a nearby chair and sat down, keeping the gun trained on me all the while. “Anyway. You showed up in time for once, eh? I’ve only just begun planting the seeds of discord throughout the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation.”
I looked into the eyes of this man who was now sitting before me in a rattan chair. His eyes were so calm and so still. Even though this unassuming middle-aged man was confronting a skilled assassin such as myself, he managed to exude an aura of quiet dignity that put me in my place.
It occurred to me that a religious fanatic who imagined himself to be the Messiah would probably also have this kind of assured charisma. The difference was that John Paul exhibited none of the trappings that came with a Messiah complex. No wild flash in his eyes. No trace of pride or hubris. None of the affected kindness.
“Why are you still doing this?” I asked. “Is this some kind of experiment to see how many people you can kill?’
John Paul paused for a moment and then looked down at the muzzle of his gun. It was as though he couldn’t quite work out how it came to pass that he was holding this weapon of murder in his hand.
“I finished experimenting years ago. Do you perhaps think that I’m some sort of madman who is just itching to see how strong my powers are?”
John Paul’s eyes stayed fixed on the cold, shiny Browning. Was he digesting the reality that he held in his hands a real weapon of murder, an actual object that could directly cause the death of another human being?
“I’m guessing you’ve never held a gun before,” I said.
John Paul looked up. “You’re right. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually held one myself. No matter how deep I was in a war zone, I never touched one, and I always stayed away from them.”
“Yeah, why would you bother when you already have the power to massacre thousands without ever having to get your hands dirty?”
John Paul shook his head and chuckled. “It’s not my power.” He stood up. His voice sounded tired. “The language of genocide was always there in the human mind. It’s a presetting, a default. I just discovered it, that’s all. If you could even call it a discovery. I’m not that different from the first anatomists who ‘discovered’ and classified human organs.”
“I doubt Einstein felt that way when he discovered the atomic bomb,” I said.
“Cruelty is an inherent characteristic of the human brain. How is that so hard to understand? You don’t need my grammar of genocide to see that people are intrinsically capable of great brutality. Murder. Robbery. Rape.” John Paul used his free hand to gesture toward the hand that held the gun. “See? I’m getting ready to kill you even as we speak.”
“What about primitive societies, or isolated societies that haven’t even come into contact with the modern world? They’re peaceful, aren’t they?”
“No. That’s a lie spread last century by scientists—or social activists, really—who had a political agenda. The truth is that these so-called noble savages can be just as vicious as us. More so, in some cases. They covet and steal and rape and kill just like we do. Margaret Mead’s tropical Samoan paradise was debunked with the most cursory of follow-up research. She was, as they say, not even wrong. But one thing is for sure—plenty of rape and murder have gone down in Samoa over the years.”
“And wars?”
“Of course! Why not? Why should the civilized world have a monopoly on war? There are tribes in obscure corners of the Amazon rainforest that have never seen a white man and yet are happy to fight, plunder, kill, and rape. It seems to be a basic evolutionary need, passed down from generation to generation.”
“But people can make a choice,” I declared calmly. “I carry my sin around with me. You can choose to accept the responsibility for your choices. Saying that murder or rape or theft is just human nature is not the same as saying that any of these things are ever justified.”
“Absolutely. I agree with you.” John Paul smiled.
Well, that was anticlimactic. “What?”
“If the impulse to pillage and rape and murder derives from basic survival instinct, then so too do sympathy, love, and self-sacrifice. Our brains have evolved to contain a multitude of conflicting emotional modules, each one derived from a basic survival instinct. Some of these are redundant, and others have become positively counterproductive. A sweet tooth, to give you a trivial example. Great for when you have to compete for food, as it helps you absorb nutrients quickly. Not so great when you live in a world of superabundance and you’re trying to stave off obesity and diabetes.”
“So you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with the modules that turn us into murderers and rapists—they’re basically just outdated?” I asked, incredulous.
“Hm. I’m not sure if that’s a fair way of putting it. ‘Outdated.’ That’s a subjective concept. Orthogonal to the current social mores of the so-called advanced nations, perhaps. Anyhow, like it or not, the grammar of genocide is also one of these modules.”
“What do you mean?”
John Paul looked past me, out through the window, at the night vista of the shores of Lake Victoria, where countless families were suffering in poverty, starving, selling their bodies, doing whatever they needed to do to get by.
“Okay. Imagine there’s a drought. We’re talking pre-agricultural times. Well, people have already learned by this time that by forming a group and cooperating with other people, you stand a better chance of survival in the long run than by b
etraying the others and just taking what you wanted. Maybe this was due to evolution and genetics, maybe due to memes, but either way, altruism or love, or whatever you want to call it, emerged as adaptive behavior designed to help preserve the self. So what happens when you have an unexpected outside shock such as a drought, and there is no longer enough food and water to go around? Does the entire community perish along with its evolution and altruism?”
I thought I understood what John Paul was trying to say. “So the grammar of genocide was just a way of adapting to food shortages?” I said.
“That’s right.” John Paul nodded. “The grammar of genocide is a vestigial module from a time when humans were not yet able to regulate their food supply. When other animals want to exert influence over their entire group, they use pheromones or scent to pass on their message and influence the group. But the nose was a relatively weak sensory organ, at least in humans. The best way to spread influence over a large group of individuals became language. If a person wanted to communicate with an entire group, rather than one to one, language was the only way to do it.”
Acts of enlightened cruelty.
Mass murder for the sake of survival.
I shuddered. However primitive a group of people was, if they could communicate and show altruistic tendencies within their group, it became impossible to deny that they were in their own way a fully fledged society. The grammar of genocide didn’t result from people becoming increasingly aggressive on an individual basis. I thought back to what John Paul had told me during our previous encounters—that the Jews in Nazi Germany also spoke using the grammar of genocide. No. This definitely wasn’t a module that affected people at an individual level. It was a module that started functioning only on a structural level after it had been transmitted to a given number of people within a group. Their value judgments were bent in a certain direction. There’s a genocide brewing. There’s a massacre on the horizon. The mood was set. And then once that society passed a certain threshold, those people who had a conscience-related module suppressed by the grammar of genocide would start taking matters into their own hands and engage in all sorts of atrocities.