Morality was born. The rest was history. Tribes grew to chiefdoms, chiefdoms to states, states to empires, empires to superpowers, all of which relentlessly attacked each other, and blockaded, and financially strangled each other, until finally there was just a single superpower, i.e., the former United States of America, which had saved everybody from the Nazis and the Communists, and had established the global market economy and spread democracy throughout the world. And still, despite the spread of democracy, and equality, and individual liberty, and despite the fact that the world was finally united under a single signifier, and that there were no longer any outside enemies, because everything was one big market economy ... despite all that, this primordial fear, this fear of being killed and eaten, and the fear and hatred of “the other” it had led to, persisted, and threatened to ruin everything ... or so went the logic of the official story.
In other words, according to Meyer’s theory (or as far as Taylor could follow the theory), according to the Normals’ official story, by sometime in the mid-to-late 21st Century, or possibly early in the 22nd Century, the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens had reached its evolutionary end point. Human beings had finally evolved (or human society had finally progressed) to the stage where we were all just one big tribe, happily living and working together in a peaceful, prosperous global marketplace. The irony was, according to Meyer, that the very thing that had made this possible, and that had driven all progress throughout human history, this fear that had given rise to morality, and ethics, and enabled us to form societies, the very fear that had originally saved us from those snorting, slavering pig-like creatures, was now, apparently, going to kill us ... unless we preventatively killed ourselves. All of which, of course, was patently absurd.
No, according to Meyer, the whole Clarion Project, including the phase-out of Homo sapiens sapiens, had nothing to with defective genes, or preventing aggression or violence per se. What was really happening was, the corporations were eradicating the last conceivable form of resistance to their Total Domination of Everything, which according to Meyer that last conceivable form of resistance was ... well, it was faith.
And this was the part that was eating at Taylor ... the notion that this living hell, this waking nightmare they had been born into, and had spent their whole lives in, and were currently living in (and the reason Taylor was sitting down there in that stinking basement thinking all this), was all the result of the corporations’ sustained attempt to eradicate faith ... which according to Meyer they’d been trying to do since sometime during the Middle Ages. If Taylor understood what Meyer was getting at, it didn’t even matter what kind of faith. What mattered was whether people acted on it ... whether they actually lived according to the values of whatever faith it was, rather than according to corporate values ... which it turned out, whenever people did that (i.e., not just mouthed whatever platitudes, but actually attempted to conduct their lives according to some sort of faith-based beliefs, they ended up opposed to the corporations, which made them Terrorists, or potential Terrorists ... or at least it made them Anti-Socials.
Which ... all right, Taylor was fine with all that, in terms of the basic logic, anyway, but then came the batshit crazy part. Meyer claimed that the Normal doctors had located some sort of faith-based gene, or faith-based center of the brain, or something, and that this was what they were actually modifying when they “variant-corrected” the Normals’ embryos. They weren’t editing out aggression ... they were systematically breeding a race of human beings incapable of faith, or any other type of non-rational thinking, a race incapable of ever resisting (or meaningfully questioning the nature of) the corporations’ Total Domination of Everything.
Taylor, although he certainly appreciated the spirit of this part of Meyer’s theory, felt that it was a probably bit of a stretch, and was somewhat paranoid, and was completely ridiculous.
And yet his whole plan depended on it.
Meyer had suggested, or intimated, ***** that the baby smugglers Taylor was seeking (or, rather, was waiting to be sought out by) were, in all likelihood, faith-based Terrorists ( who presumably subscribed to Meyer’s theory, or to some similarly paranoid version thereof), and that what they were doing was raising the babies in their underground camps in the Autonomous Zones, filling their heads with faith-based nonsense, and training them on weapons and explosives and whatever, and that someday they (i.e., the faith-based babies) would form the ranks of some guerrilla army of faith-based Homo sapiens sapiens that would storm the Normals in their private Communities, and ... whatever.
It was all a fucking pipe dream.
Sitting in the rear of the Action Group Update, as Adam and the rest of the Fifthian Cluster approached the midpoint of their exhaustive discussion of “a Phase Two D.A.D.A. security culture,” it occurred to Taylor that it was highly likely that, in spite of his philosophical acumen, and taking nothing away from the thrust of his genealogy of morals in general, as far this thing with babies went, Meyer Jimenez was full of shit.
There were no fucking baby smugglers. Meyer had dreamed the whole thing up, not out of any malicious motive, but because it fit in nicely with his fucking theory. Which meant that Taylor was seriously screwed, as now he had wasted the last five weeks sitting around in these fucking meetings listening to a bunch of dipshit Transplants trying to outstupify each other with their jargon, and otherwise militantly jerking off.
So, excellent, this was just fucking beautiful. What was he going to tell Cassandra? The truth? That his plan had gone belly up? That now she was fucked? That the baby was fucked? No. He couldn’t. He would have to lie to her. Which that was OK. He’d make something up, something to keep her calm for the moment. He didn’t know what, but he’d think of something. Then he’d come up with another plan. First, however, he needed to determine where, when, and exactly how, to egregiously violate Meyer Jimenez, whose fault this fucking fiasco was. Just as he was mulling over the various in and outs of doing that, someone leaned up and whispered in his ear.
“Pussyhorse Lounge, 2200.”
He turned around slowly. The someone was Sarah. She’d moved up and taken the chair behind him, which he hadn’t noticed, which wasn’t like him. Now she was sitting there, eyes on Adam, who was designating something a “need-to-know” subject. He leaned back toward her and started to ask ...
“Shhhh,” she whispered. Her eyes never moved. She raised her hands and joined in twinkling. Her neck was beaded with droplets of sweat. Taylor, who at this point was totally focused on his mission with an almost laser-like intensity, hadn’t even hardly noticed until then how dark, sleek, strangely feline, and otherwise incredibly fuckable she was.
“Turn around,” she whispered, twinkling.
Taylor turned back around in his seat.
“Twinkle,” she whispered.
Taylor twinkled.
Whatever, he thought. Life was short. He’d deal with the baby problem tomorrow. He’d deal with Cassandra and Meyer tomorrow. He would deal with all his problems tomorrow. Tonight, apparently, he was going to get laid.
Billy Jensen
Six months and a few days later, Billy Jensen, who lived somewhere else, and who had never even heard of Taylor Byrd, or Valentina Constance Briggs, or any of the other people in our story, was ... well, basically, he was watching TV. He was doing this on the JumboMax screen of his Tannhäuser Systems In-Home Viewer, a Model 60, Series K, which covered one entire wall of his studio ... or, rather, was one wall of his studio. The Model 60, which he had bought on credit, and owed about GD 400,000 on, was patched into his Tannhäuser Systems In-Home Professional Gaming Console, which resembled the cockpit of a military aircraft and took up most of the rest of his apartment.
Serious gamers like Billy Jensen didn’t mess around when it came to their Viewers, or their In-Home Professional Gaming Consoles. They shelled out for the seriously high-end Pro-stuff, which was optimized to support whatever professional-quality gaming platforms the company in quest
ion designed and marketed, or had the exclusive rights to distribute, or some other kind of lucrative deal. Tannhäuser Systems (a partly-owned subsidiary of another subsidiary of another subsidiary of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin), in addition to being the market leader in the seriously high-end Viewer market, and Professional Gaming Console market, and offering an extensive and affordable line of professional quality gaming accessories, and T-shirts, and caps, and branded coffee mugs, was also the maker of the wildly popular interactive simulated MercyKill game, KILL CHAIN, which was Billy Jensen’s game.
KILL CHAIN, despite its aggressive-sounding name, was nothing like the horribly violent Anti-Social first-person shooter games people used to play in the bad old days. The violence involved was in no way gratuitous; it was strictly clinical, and compassion-based. The Targets were all Class 4 Anti-Socials, who were needlessly suffering late-stage disease, and whose quality of life was non-existent when measured on the HRQOL scale. Most of them were dangerous faith-based Terrorists, who posed potentially devastating threats, possibly with improvised nuclear devices, or horrible chemical or biological agents that would kill you the second they touched your skin. KILL CHAIN players (or “Operators”) targeted these poor lost souls remotely, neutralizing any threat they posed, and putting them out of their pointless misery.
KILL CHAIN VIII: Compassionate Hammer, released online the previous December, just in time for the Christmas holidays, was, in Billy Jensen’s opinion, one of the best in the KILL CHAIN series. It was sitting there, loaded, in his gaming console, ready to go when he logged off work. KILL CHAIN VII: For Their Own Good had been a serious disappointment. Too much focus had been placed on the Targets, on their personal lives and medical histories, had been the general critical consensus. Billy Jensen had to agree. It felt like maybe the narrative talent had gotten a little carried away with themselves, building in all these endless layers of exposition and mood and whatever. It was like they wanted you to work your way through some interminable, rambling Russian novel (or some pseudo-academic sociological text) before you could even sight the Targets, much less put a missile down on them. You sat there, stick in hand, for hours, watching them unnecessarily suffering ... which, all right, granted, definitely got you all pent-up and, like, itching to tag them, which of course when you did, after all that build-up, certainly heightened the sensation of the kill, which was obviously what the designers were going for, but it left you with this weird kind of empty feeling, which after a while got rather tiresome. KILL CHAIN VIII: Compassionate Hammer had cut way down on patterning time. All that boring background stuff had been relegated to a single window that displayed down in the corner of your screen. Average acquisition-to-action time (or “ATA time”) was under an hour. Veteran players, like Billy Jensen, could get a perfectly decent kill in during their lunch or dinner breaks, which Billy Jensen routinely did .
Billy Jensen was a Junior Online Customer Service Solutions Specialist. He was twenty-seven years old ... a Clear. He worked for a firm called Kierkegaard/Bose, designers of some kind of software solutions that had something to do with the needs of business that Billy Jensen did not understand. This wasn’t because he was unintelligent. Billy Jensen was extremely intelligent. He could have understood. He just didn’t care to. It wasn’t his job to understand. Billy’s job was to virtually chat with K/B’s transterritorial clients, trouble-shoot their myriad problems according to a detailed algorithmic script, and get them off the Live-Chat network, in less than seven to eight minutes, ideally. Like most OCS reps, he did this from home (a totally modern single’s unit on the 98th floor of TransCom Towers in Northwest Region 228) while logged into K/B’s global network, which auto-monitored Billy’s keystrokes.
Billy worked the lobster shift, from 2300 to 0700, which didn’t bother Billy one bit. He kept to a relatively rigid schedule, which, apart from doing his OCS job, primarily consisted of playing KILL CHAIN six days a week, up to six hours a day. He logged in as soon as he logged off work, and played until just after 1500, after which he worked out, ate, slept a few hours, got up, showered, ate a light breakfast, viewed some Content, and logged back onto the K/B network.
The Content Billy religiously viewed while drinking his micronized-glutamine breakfast was KILL CHAIN LIVE! on Channel 16, hosted by Dr. Roger P. Greenway and Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky. And thus, it being a normal day, and the time being circa 2150, was exactly what Billy was doing at the moment.
The screen of his Tannhäuser Model 60 was running the standard Real-Time feed of what appeared to be a Quarantine Zone, shot from the nose of a UAV holding at an altitude of twenty-three kilometers. Crosshairs were sweeping a four-block grid of empty streets of unlit buildings. They looked like maybe former warehouses ... nothing terribly fascinating.
“Any idea where we are now, Roger?”
“Susan, we’re looking at Zone 18, Southeast Region 423. Looks like a sultry night down there. Not much to see at the moment, I’m afraid. ”
“It does look pretty desolate, Roger.”
“Like I said, Susan, hot one down there.”
“Shall we introduce Target Number One then, Roger?”
“Susan, looks like Target Number One is a subject name of Carlos Witherspoon. Designated Class 4 Anti-Social Person. Late stage disease. History of violence. Hiding in one of those buildings there, Susan.”
“Any idea which building, Roger?”
“No, apparently not, Susan. We seem to be standing by at the moment.”
An unflattering photograph of “Carlos Witherspoon,” bug-eyed, grimacing, needing a shave, appeared in the lower left corner of the screen.
“Here’s a photo of Witherspoon, Susan.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Obviously in pain.”
“Breaks your heart to see them like that.”
“Yes, it certainly does, Susan.”
“No way to hide that kind of suffering.”
“Hopefully, we can get him some relief tonight.”
Billy Jensen hoped they could too. He disliked watching anything suffer, any form of sentient being, even a dangerous faith-based Terrorist. Being a Clear, he could not help this. Compassion was coded into his genes. His heart went out to Carlos Witherspoon, and all the other Carlos Witherspoons out there, suffering their needless pain and suffering. He meticulously peeled the foil away from his Happy Henry’s low-glycemic, gluten-free instant energy bar and tried to imagine their pain and suffering. He couldn’t ... or not entirely anyway. The desperate and unfocused rage, the hatred and envy of everything normal, and above all the unrelenting fear that ruled their existence and governed all their actions, were emotions Billy had never felt, and thus could never completely conceive of, except in some purely intellectual way. The Variant-Positives were challenging enough, with their inner conflicts, and doubts, and questions, and their constant struggle to stay detached. Billy’s heart went out to them too, more so even, as he understood them, and how they thought, and he felt their pain .
They wanted to be healthy, the Variant-Positives. They never would be, but they tried their best. The medications they took were crude, but they did seem to slow their disease progression, or at least reduced the worst of their symptoms to something approaching manageable levels. The drugs, however, could never stop them from forming their Anti-Social ideations, or clear away the fog of primitive drives and emotions that shrouded their brains. As uncorrected Homo sapiens sapiens, the best they could do was attempt to maintain a constant state of hypervigilance (i.e., paying close attention to their thoughts and feelings, writing them down, analyzing them, and then verbalizing them to “make them real”). They did this in their support group meetings, and with friends, family, colleagues, and doctors, and whoever was sitting beside them on the train, soliciting feedback from all and sundry, which they then evaluated and processed with others, who gave them feedback on this feedback, which brought up other thoughts and feelings, which they diligently processed, analyzed a
nd verbalized, and meditated on at considerable length. All of which left them totally exhausted and no longer certain what they were feeling, or thinking, or exactly what they wanted, or what they had just been talking about.
Billy’s Variant-Positive parents, Woody and Carmen, were perfect examples. They could hardly get through a conversation without stumbling over some thought or emotion that triggered some anxious observation of some possibly symptomatic reaction that they needed to process, accept, and detach from, and otherwise discuss at considerable length. Billy loved his parents dearly, and he empathized with their pain, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling that they would both be so much happier once they had reincarnated.
Whatever, Billy reasoned, chewing, in another hundred years or so the endless trials and tribulations of the Variant-Positives would all be over. In the meantime, they had done as much as any defective strain could do to tackle the problem of Anti-Social Disease in a rational and scientific manner. To use a systems-based trouble-shooting analogy, which Billy did whenever possible, they had tracked and found their system error (the aberrant variant of the MAO-A gene), effected repairs to what they could (medicated the Variant-Positives), effectively quarantined what they couldn’t ( segregated the A.S.P.s), and had taken appropriate long-term steps to eliminate any future recurrence (developed the variant correction technologies, which had produced the Clarions, like Billy Jensen). All of which steps were perfectly logical, and thus, to Billy, complete no-brainers. However, he reflected, swallowing, for the Variant-Positives in charge at the time, these must have been rather difficult decisions, entailing as they did the making redundant, or phasing out, of their entire subspecies. * Cognitively challenged as they were, he had to admire those Variant-Positives, those of his parents’ generation, who had made those decisions and who were trying their best to ensure a smooth and peaceful transition to a healthier world they would have no part in.
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