by Project Itoh
With that, Williams chucked a grenade out of the bathroom and through the door that led to the second floor corridor. There was an explosion beyond the doorway, then screams and dust.
I turned to Williams again. “But it’s all bullshit! It’s all pointless! We don’t need all that security!”
“It might be bullshit, Clavis, but it’s our bullshit. And the horse is already out of the barn on this one. We’re committed. The whole economy’s committed.”
We had reached an impasse of sorts. But at this rate I would be out of bullets in no time.
I grabbed hold of John Paul’s arm, chucked a grenade over my shoulder, and jumped with John Paul through the moonlit window to the ground below. We landed on the lawn in a messy heap but scrambled to our feet and made a dash for the shore.
There was an explosion behind us. The grenade had just exploded. It had almost been a reflex action. I hadn’t even stopped to think what would happen to Williams. Not that I cared anymore.
The guards fired their AKs at us, but they were all terrible shots and a little too far away. The nanocamouflage probably helped some too. John Paul had no protective gear, so as much as possible I covered his back as we ran away.
I realized that John Paul’s shoulders were covered in Lucia’s blood and chunks of brain. I realized we had left her body behind. My chest wanted to explode. There was nothing we could have done in that situation to bring her with us. We had done the right thing. Logically speaking. But none of these facts helped to numb the gut-wrenching soul-pain I was feeling. I ran with John Paul, and before I knew it there were tears streaming down my face.
“Are you crying for her?” John Paul asked.
“I just left her there. Her corpse.”
“Surely you’ve seen plenty of corpses in your time.”
The girl whose head was exposed to the heavens.
The boy whose guts spilled from his ruptured belly.
The women and children doused in gasoline and left to burn in the giant hole in the ground.
Up until now I’d always thought of corpses as things. When a person died, he or she became an it. An object. And as Lucia had lost half her face and what was left of her soft brains was now dripping out of her eye socket, she was surely a perfect example of how a person could turn into an object in the twinkling of an eye.
And yet she wasn’t just a thing. I refused to see her as just a thing. She was still Lucia Sukrova, even dead. She wasn’t just a mass of flesh. She might have been a corpse, but she was Lucia’s corpse.
“Of course I’ve seen corpses before,” I said. “But this time it’s just so personal. When the person is important to you, they can’t become just a corpse.”
I gritted my teeth and we pushed on. John Paul and I made it into the jungle.
It wasn’t easy moving through the jungle with John Paul. He might have been familiar enough with war zones, but he was still a civilian. It required quite a bit of skill to be able to maneuver through this sort of terrain. Jungles weren’t designed for late-night leisurely strolls.
To make matters worse, John Paul had also sprained his right ankle when he jumped from the second-floor window. It wasn’t that far to the Tanzanian border where our recovery team should be waiting, but there was a limit to how fast we could move when his leg was like this.
“There’s no way I can hand you back to the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation,” I said, my eyes on the path in front of us. “If you were to go back you’d just start singing your song of genocide again, I know.”
“I’m not interested in going back,” John Paul muttered. The confidence he had back at the guesthouse had now all but disappeared. “Lucia said that I should explain what I had done to the world. She wanted me to tell the world just how shaky a foundation their ‘peace’ rests on, I guess. Well, I will stand trial, and I may be sentenced to death. Or perhaps I’ll just be dismissed as a lunatic and laughed out of court. Whatever happens, I’ll accept it, because that’s what Lucia wanted. It’ll be my way of apologizing to her, however pathetic and inadequate the gesture. I was the one who brought her into all this. I had only intended to stop in Prague long enough to get a fake ID, but then I found I wanted to see her face again for old times’ sake. That was all …”
I listened to John Paul’s story without saying anything. I just hacked through the jungle with my machete.
“I betrayed my wife and child and now I’ve also killed the woman I once loved.”
“What about all the people who died in the massacres you caused? Don’t they count at all? That’s quite a solipsistic sense of guilt you have, don’t you think?” I was feeling pretty cynical by now. “Don’t forget that there’s a staggering number of corpses behind you at all times.”
“No, of course not.” John Paul nodded. “I know. It’s something I’ve carried with me from the very first time I used the grammar of genocide.”
I realized that, in talking to John Paul, I was telling him to do as I said and not as I did. I was telling John Paul not to forget about all the corpses, and yet I had no idea what to do about the burden I carried with me. All of my sins, not just my matricide. The sin of killing people without having chosen to kill them myself. The sin of dodging my responsibility. I wanted closure. From Lucia’s mouth. Redemption—or condemnation.
But Lucia had died. And there was no one left in this world who could either punish me or forgive me.
This was hell, right here, right now. I was trapped in a hell called myself. “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd” was what Alex had said. And he had been right. I was in the deepest pit of hell. I had come here to be punished and, at the end of the punishment, find a glimmer of hope, the possibility that I could be redeemed. That was why I had come to Africa. But shortly after I arrived, the prospect of punishment and forgiveness slipped away forever; it disappeared, broken.
Maybe this was my punishment. To be doomed to walk the earth till the end of my days, weighed down by the burden of corpses.
“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Now that Lucia’s dead, do you regret what you did? Laying the groundwork for so many people to die?”
Now that he had lost Lucia, I wondered whether John Paul felt any sort of solidarity with the people who had died, or the people who had lost loved ones.
John Paul shook his head. “No. Not at all. I have no regrets on that front, at least. I put two sets of lives in the scales. The lives of the people in our world on one side, and on the other side were the lives of hostile people who lived in poverty and hatred and cast a shadow over our happiness. I went into this thing eyes wide open and made a completely sober and rational decision. I even had a good idea of how many people would die in the process. Once you know what you are capable of doing, it becomes impossible to escape from your own potential.”
“And what will you do next?” I asked.
“Well, I was originally planning to continue bearing the burden all on my own. But if we get to the stage where, per Lucia’s wishes, the world learns of what I’ve done, then I suppose the choice will be theirs. They’ll have to make the call as to whether they want to keep their world without terrorism, even if it means building it atop of a pile of corpses.”
“And you think that’ll make you feel better? If you hand the baton on to someone else? Will that excuse your crimes?”
“By no means. You can never escape from your own decisions. They are with you always.”
We walked on without rest.
All things considered, and taking a long-term historical perspective, the world was probably becoming a better place over time. The world did occasionally fall into the clutches of chaos and regressed, but broadly speaking the story of humanity was a story of progress. Relativism only gets you so far. There always comes a point where you can say that one culture has more sophisticated or enlightened values than another, and this can be a good thing in absolute terms. The story of civilization is the story of the battle of human conscience against th
e instinct to murder or rape or steal or betray, and how even against the harsh backdrop of the world, the conscience is still moving inexorably in the direction of altruism and love for family and friends and neighbors.
But we still have a long way to go before we can accurately describe ourselves as moral actors. As ethical beings.
For humans can turn our eyes from all sorts of things.
John Paul limped along behind me, desperately trying to keep pace. He was panting hard.
Now he asked me a question. “What about you? What will you do after this? Will you go back to assassinating people? To making the world a better place?”
“I’ve never been fighting to make the world a better place. I just did what I was ordered to do because they were my orders.”
“And is that all going to change now?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But what I do know is that I’m starting to see things a lot more clearly than before. At least I think I am.”
The jungle ended. Suddenly.
There was a clear sky that stretched out forever. Dawn was breaking, and a white horizon unfurled before us.
There was a Jeep parked up in the distance. It was still a little too far away to confirm with the naked eye, but it looked like there were two soldiers waiting there. According to our pre-mission briefing, these guys should be deployed from the Tanzanian army, here to help us.
I took a deep breath, and then John Paul and I started walking across the flat, grassy savanna.
A hollow, dry explosion echoed all around.
One of the soldiers in the distance was pointing a gun in our direction. I spun around. There was a small hole in John Paul’s forehead and he was lying on the ground.
“Welcome back, Captain Shepherd, sir! And congratulations on your successful mission.” One of our sergeants was there to welcome me—a black man, no doubt chosen for this mission because the color of his skin helped him blend in with the local African soldiers.
“What happened to Williams … ?” I asked absentmindedly.
“Killed in action, sir. According to a wireless transmission intercepted by an NSA team, sir.”
I was overcome by a fatigue that seemed to penetrate every last nook and cranny of my body. I felt like a lump of wax. As soon as I climbed into the Jeep and sat down I was assaulted by drowsiness. Williams, Lucia, John Paul. All were now distant, half-forgotten memories. The emotions that I thought I had felt and the insight that I thought I had gained—all seemed so unreal now. It was as if I could only remember the whole journey in a series of blurry low-resolution snapshots.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The Jeep started rolling. Moving gently toward the white horizon in the distance. For a moment I imagined that this Tanzanian savanna was the only place in the world that was real, that it stretched across the whole world, and that the Prague and the Paris and the Washington and the Georgetown that I knew were all just a bad dream—a nightmare called civilization.
Somewhere behind us in the vast savanna was John Paul’s final resting place. There his corpse would decay gently under the African sun. His sun-bleached body would be preserved for some time to come, and in this respect he was just like Mom, whom I’d had embalmed so that she would never rot away. John Paul, though, would eventually be able to return to the soil. Maybe the thought of that would have made him happy.
This is my story. That’s what I’m going to say once I’ve finished it.
I left the Forces. There was no one alive left to stop me. After returning from that last mission in Africa I felt that something inside me was missing. It took me a while to realize this for myself, and in the meantime many of my colleagues suggested various forms of counseling.
I brushed all the well-meaning suggestions aside. After my return to America I found that people were speaking in ways I found too fast and slippery. I found myself unable to fully participate in conversations. It was too difficult to join in, so I just stopped speaking to people.
One day, while I was holed up hermitlike in my house, doing nothing, I received an ID and a password in the post.
The envelope was embossed with an expensive-looking InfoSec company logo. It was the company my mother had subscribed to.
The envelope was addressed to me.
The sealed letter explained that, per the terms of the Fourth Amendment to the Personal Information Protection Law, when a person dies intestate and without specific instructions for the disposal of their subscription information assets, all accounts are embargoed for three years, and then all of the intestate party’s accounts are passed onto their next of kin as designated at the time of the opening of the account. As such, and the embargo now having passed, I was now the official owner of the information account of one Ms. Elyssia Shepherd (deceased).
In this society of ours, where everything is recorded and stored for posterity, you occasionally encounter this sort of blast from the past. It was a bit like being in a traffic accident—it’s not exactly a rare occurrence, but no one expects it to happen to them. I was no exception.
I didn’t believe that there would be anything my mother would have particularly wanted to share with me though. I was her next of kin by default; my father had already departed this world when she set up the account, and so I, her son and only child, was the default choice.
The sealed letter provided me with two potential pitfalls.
The first was my mother’s memories in and of themselves.
The second was the fact that, when I had to choose between my mother living or dying, I never put in a request to consult the memories.
When it had been medically determined that my mother was in a no man’s land between life and death and in a place that no living person would ever hope to experience or imagine, I could have put in an official request to the InfoSec company for permission to read her Life Graph. Both the law and the InfoSec company were able to grant special dispensation for a concerned third party to do so when the subscriber was unconscious or medically incapacitated.
I never put in the request. I just chose for my mother to die without reading her Life Graph.
I wonder why I had been afraid of reading my mother’s memories back then? I can’t remember exactly why anymore. All I remember is that I was vaguely frightened and that I didn’t want to.
What about now? Was I still afraid? I probably was. After experiencing the deaths of Lucia Sukrova and John Paul, however, it was now a different type of fear.
The afternoon after the letter arrived was terrifyingly silent. I felt that people were watching over me to see if I would use the account to read my mother’s online memories. When I say people I meant the dead, of course.
After fifteen minutes of hesitation, I accessed my mother’s account and commanded the Life Graph to compile her biography for me.
John Paul had passed me a notebook back in the jungle. I flicked through it to skim its contents, but it was full of obscure academic jargon too difficult for me to understand.
But there was one thing in the notebook that was to prove useful later on. The user name and password of an email account.
An interesting development was that the press somehow found out the true reason for the former senate majority leader’s abrupt withdrawal from public life. I never discovered where the leak came from. An investigative committee was formed and Congressional hearings were held. Even as the whole affair was dragged out into the media, the former senator seemed unrepentant. He made a bold declaration—that we in the US of A always needed the spectacle of war. At any given time, we needed a war to be happening somewhere in the world. And above all, we needed the tragedy of war to be happening somewhere else, in some place where it couldn’t affect us directly. He explained that he had come to this realization some time ago, and that only by being a witness to these sorts of wars could people truly self-actualize and become aware of the potential of their own selves.
This wasn’t the old-fashioned theory that a
ll people in a country needed a common enemy so that they could pull together as a unified nation. No. It was about wars happening overseas, somewhere, vaguely, and being able to pick up on the rustles and murmurs, like background music in a shopping mall. That was what we needed for the twenty-first century, the former senator explained. And John Paul had been the man for the job—he had been able to ensure a steady supply of war.
As a former member of the Special Forces, and as a former member of an elite top-secret assassination unit that performed the government’s dirty work, I was given a huge amount of face time at his hearing and given ample opportunity to tell my stories again and again, just the way I wanted to. Because of my revelations, Washington was plunged into the greatest scandal yet of the twenty-first century, possibly one of the biggest of all time. Of course, my actions violated the State Secrets Protection Act, which was why it came to pass that the US Armed Forces Intelligence Captain Clavis Shepherd was indicted.
In the end, though, the long arm of the law never did get around to dealing with me. There was rioting across the nation by that stage, and the powers that be found that they had far bigger fish to fry. Various state National Guards found themselves opening fire on ordinary citizens, and in turn their armories were being swept away by insurgents who were arming themselves to the teeth to fight back.
Finally, I settled down to read the Life Graph, under the beady eyes of my ever-vigilant spectral companions.