"Certainly," said Jeremy, pouring a coffee for himself, "go ahead."
"Do you have someone following me?"
He looked straight at me, clearly puzzled.
"No. Why?"
"There is someone following me. Not very professionally either, or I wouldn't have noticed him. I've seen him three times since yesterday. And I'm not sure, but he may have been following me this morning to Slough as well."
"Hmm…interesting. And you think this has something to do with me?"
"Yes. It can't be anything else."
"Alright. Let us do two things. First of all, let's check it out. A good way would be to walk over a long bridge. We have the Thames handy for that. Stop about three quarters of the way over to look at the river. Watch everybody coming from the direction you came from. If anybody is following you, he or she will have to stop and look at the river as well. Nowhere else to go on a bridge. Take good note of anybody doing that and then start to walk back the way you came. Once off the bridge, turn a corner somewhere and wait. See if that person comes along."
"O.K., total confirmation. And if I am being followed?"
"Then we will need to talk about it. In the meantime, let me give you this." He fished in a briefcase sitting on the floor next to him and gave me a mobile phone.
"This," he continued, "is one of a couple of mobiles I adapted in case a need arose for confidential communication regarding non-Obrix matters. It has no number and it won't work if you dial another number on it either. Just press the green button and you will reach me. It will record the fingerprint of whichever finger you elect to use first time around, and it will only function after that if recognizing that print. The phone looks very similar to yours, but it is non-locatable and has automatic encryption just in case. Encryption of a kind unknown on this planet. If you are being followed, you should please use this phone to contact me. So that we can arrange a different meeting place each time and discuss how you are going to get there without being followed."
"I don't know that I like this Jeremy. My life is great as it is and I don't need it being messed around with. Being followed is not, I repeat not, going to be part of my existence. Nor is it a part of our agreement."
And as for the mobile phone, I thought, well, it's easy enough to fix the dialing if you know how. It doesn't matter who the carrier is. And some kind of alien encryption? Just another delusion of his in his long, long list of delusions.
"Well, we have to confirm your suspicions first, Peter. And in any case, and in spite of our revised conditions, you could walk out of our contract at any time, so you don't have a problem as far as I can see. Except, of course, that the €400,000 would walk away in the opposite direction to the one you take, and the €200,000 you already have would need to be returned as well."
"Yes, Jeremy, well…I’ll have to think about that.”
Yes, indeed, €600,000 needs thinking about. And no need for me to consider how to retain the €200,000. Not with him being a madman and with those powers of his to boot.
“In the meantime,” I said, “how about we move on with the day's agenda?"
"Right,” he said. “'Interaction among Selves'. Just fire away."
"I don't have much to contribute on this Jeremy, just some facts that I personally happen to be aware of."
"That's O.K.," he said. "Whatever you have. I will research any gaps."
I was in a bad mood. I really don't need all of this shit. First of all a lunatic, and now I'm being spied on—probably anyway—for reasons I can't conceive and couldn't care less about in any case. On the other hand, another €400,000 for doing nothing more than attending a few more interviews was not a concept that my neurons were allowing me to junk just yet. So okay, I'll do this meeting, I'll tell him some more about his own planet. I'll give it to him straight.
"Our main interaction," I began, "by which I mean one that began at the beginning, has continued throughout history and is perpetuated to this day, is…how shall I put it…we kill ourselves."
“YOU KILL YOURSELVES?”
“Yes, Jeremy, we kill ourselves. We always have done and we always will.”
I paused and looked for his reaction to this. There was none. He was obviously battling to grasp the concept, a concept clearly foreign to his culture and to any of the philosophies involved in influencing or guiding it.
"In other words, we do not just slaughter other species. We slaughter ourselves. We have always done this and we do it in several different ways. Mass slaughter is something we call war, individual slaughter is something we call murder, the slaughter of unborn fetuses is something we call abortion, and when individuals kill themselves we call it suicide."
"Are you trying to tell me that this is a major activity?" Jeremy asked.
"It is either a major activity or the major activity, Jeremy, take your pick. Let me give you some statistics. I'll start with the mass killings, for which we use the various terms international war, civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorist war, drugs war, gang war and religious war. The first recorded war ever, as far as we can determine, was between Lagas and Umma (the latter, coincidentally, being part of today's Iraq) and it took place in the year 2550 B.C. Since then, there have been about 14,400 more wars resulting in the deaths of 3.5 billion human beings at the hands of other human beings. And of course it's ongoing. These numbers are increasing. A roller-coaster of death if you will. The most murderous war in fact occurred in our very most recent century. World War II we call it. In that war alone 65 million humans were killed."
Jeremy leaned forward on the table. "Did you say 65 million?" he asked.
"Yes," I answered. "And this war also enabled us to demonstrate some of our newly acquired skills. Such as how to create and operate death factories. In the death factories, an estimated 7.6 million innocent non-combatants were gassed to death. Except for a few who were murdered in other ways, including brutal mistreatment, forced starvation or simply being shot. Lots of men, lots of women, and lots of children. Mainly those belonging to the Jewish religion but also many, many others, including people of 'inferior race’, gypsies, homosexuals—also those merely suspected of being homosexual—and the physically and mentally handicapped."
"Most were gassed?"
"Indeed they were, Jeremy. We have always been interested in gassing other humans to death. During the most recent century, we had massive gas usage in World War I, we had Italy using it to kill Abyssinians (now Ethiopians), the Japanese using it to kill the Chinese, Egypt using it in its war against Yemen, Saddam Hussein's Iraq using it in its war against Iran—and also, just by the way, to kill thousands of civilians in Halabja in 1988—and it is still ongoing. Syria has recently used gas to massacre thousands of its own civilians."
"But Hitler and his friends were the ones who really liked gas."
"No, Jeremy, as a matter of fact Hitler did not like gas. He came into contact with gas himself during World War I and that is why he prohibited its use against the enemy. But he was happy for it to be used for killing sub-humans."
"Sub-humans?"
"Yes, the millions of innocent non-combatants I have just mentioned. He classified them as sub-humans."
"I must say that I have never heard of a life-form like that," said Jeremy. "It sounds to me as if some of the content of my thesis could become horrific enough to result in the generation of widespread interest. And in that case I, as the researcher, would be much in demand to elaborate upon it all."
He wasn't getting emotional about it. He just sat there looking at me with a mournful expression on his face, kind of sorrowful. And as for his destiny as a researcher, well, he was welcome to add that to the list of accessories required for his fantasy world, be my guest.
"So," he continued, "things have deteriorated all along and, given the events in your most recent century, the deterioration appears to be continuing, in fact accelerating. Is that correct?"
"Yes," I said, "although not everyone would agree with
that. Many people call it an improvement, they say things are improving. We have had people like that all through our history. They are our optimists."
"Your optimists? Improving?"
"Yes, I met one of them in a pub in Passau once. He said that the slaughters of the twentieth century were only due to the fact that we had invented better weapons and better methods with which to kill ourselves. He completely rejected my point that we would have done it with bows and arrows if necessary, and that we would have used swords instead of gas in our death factories."
"And on what basis did he justify his view?"
"He didn't. These people don't trouble themselves to support their views with facts. They simply ignore the facts. Which, as you already know, doesn't disturb me in the slightest. I just listen to them and continue to observe them from my seat in the theater."
"Yes, I had registered that."
"Now, of course," I continued, "now we have bigger and better things. We have made other cutting-edge discoveries. We learned how to split an atom. We then learned how to construct atom bombs and then more advanced thermonuclear weapons. Lots of them."
"And the purpose or purposes of these weapons, may I ask?"
"There is only one purpose, Jeremy. It is to be able to slaughter ourselves in even vaster quantities than was ever possible before."
"And you are saying that that is the only reason you invented them?"
"Yes."
"But why would you people want to do that?"
"A good question, Jeremy, and it has a simple answer. It's just the way we are. It's the way we always were and it's the way we will always be."
"But doesn't anyone try to do anything about it?"
"Oh yes—but to little effect. Having deployed a couple of these nuclear weapons in Japan at the end of World War II, we then began to manufacture vast arsenals of the things. This was followed by years and years of arguing—our species argues about everything and never stops—following which there was a decision to destroy some of the bombs. There are now only around 20,000 of these bombs, which means that the capacity for us to eliminate our entire species has been reduced from many times over down to only several times. Not that we couldn't quickly manufacture more if we want to."
"Pretty asinine, Peter, I must admit. But at least it was a step in the right direction, albeit a small one."
"Not really, Jeremy. It's not only the major powers which possess nuclear weapons now. Several other countries have been adding themselves to that list: Israel, Pakistan, India, for example. And still more countries are developing even more nuclear bombs: North Korea, Iran and who knows who is next. And many of these bombs are being trundled non-stop around the world's oceans in submarines. And others are being flown around in planes; we have nuclear bombs permanently in the air."
"Difficult to understand indeed."
“Indeed is the word, Jeremy. The stupidity, the sheer senseless, asinine lunacy of creating and deploying such weapons exceeds all potential boundaries of rational comprehension. Not even mice could be so unbalanced. Could you imagine mice doing something as congenitally stupid and absurd as inventing mousetraps?”
“I take your point, Peter. Your species suffers from a serious mental illness. Your stupidity just makes you want to murder each other…among other things.
"Indeed. And as I pointed out at the beginning, killing is our major activity. Even in the matter of mass slaughter - war - the stupidity of our species is interesting to observe. Would you believe that we are actually interested in how we kill ourselves? Well, Jeremy, we are indeed, we are indeed. There are thousands of examples but I'll mention just a single specimen for your consideration: a relatively recent agreement between over 100 countries stating that cluster bombs should be eliminated. There are, however, two problems with this. First of all, not all of the countries have complied with the agreement. And secondly, certain major powers including the USA, China and Russia—in other words, those whose arsenals of cluster bombs are larger than anyone else's—did not even sign the agreement."
"Fascinating. Or fascinatingly stupid, I should say."
"Yes, Jeremy. And then the question arises as to why we don't ban the use of 'normal' bombs, mines, automatic weapons, missiles and all other lethal weapons such as the machete which, by the way, was the weapon of choice for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of human beings in Rwanda. Or chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, used by the British in Malaysia and by the Americans in Vietnam. The birdbrains lied about this by the way—what's new—and they said, flap, flap, that it was a harmless defoliant, not a weapon. But it killed or maimed 400,000 Vietnamese and caused a further 500,000 to be born with horrific birth defects. Not to mention the many victims among those performing the deployment of this so-called 'herbicide'.
"The question you raise is obviously a valid one, Peter. But I assume the reason for the attempt to eliminate cluster bombs was a well-intentioned one, because these particular weapons can kill extremely large numbers of civilians as well as combatants?"
"Possibly, Jeremy. But they continue to be used. Massively in fact in the current Syria conflict. And in any case, banning anything is a fairly pointless exercise when you continue to have nuclear bombs, wouldn't you agree? And listen to this. A century ago, during World War I, civilian deaths amounted to approximately 5% of total war deaths. Today, civilian deaths amount to close to 75% of the total. Interesting, don't you think?"
"I suppose one could use the term 'interesting' to describe it. But possibly the higher number of non-combatant deaths is due to the fact that many of your wars nowadays are civil wars, or so I have read. And as regards civil wars, I assume that among the major reasons for these are differences in ideological conviction?"
"Sometimes. But racial, ethnic and religious animosities are more frequent causes. This has certainly been the case for the twenty civil wars in Africa during the past fifty years. And the strength of the hatred involved in these animosities is unbelievable. I won't even attempt to describe some of the horrendous atrocities perpetrated as a result."
"Hmm…and so just how many wars are taking place at the moment?"
"Well…last year there were 30 active wars. That was an improvement over the prior year which had 34 active wars and produced some euphoric scribbling in the tabloid press. We as a species are quite proud of this reduction, even if many of our current wars are major wars, rather than minor ones."
"Major ones?"
"Oh yes. We find that our major activity—the hobby of slaughtering each other—is so interesting that, among other things, we categorize our wars. This allows us to study various statistics, a fascinating pursuit, and to separate those dying in 'minor wars' from those dying in 'major' wars. This can of course be confusing, as a major war could have been a minor one last year, or a minor one could become a major one next year. But we employ bureaucrats to ensure that these statistics comply with the regulations."
"So what is a major war?"
"The United Nations," I continued, "defines a major war as a conflict inflicting a minimum of 1,000 human battlefield deaths per year, excluding, in other words, civilian deaths. Civilian deaths and non-human deaths are mere collateral damage and would simply distort the statistical measurements, you understand. I mean…you wouldn't want your statistics being messed up with, for example, the 140,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, including the 8,000 last year—or the 80,000 civilian deaths in Syria so far, including the 9,000 dead children but excluding the 4,000 children arrested and tortured in Syrian prisons, but not yet killed (as far as we know). Would you?"
"If you say so," said Jeremy.
I went over to the table in the corner and poured myself some coffee. I needed it. These meetings may be an easy way to earn money, but I can't pretend I am enjoying them. Even so, I am playing the game properly. I am treating him as if he were a real alien and I am giving him what few facts I have at my disposal on the subjects he has chosen. For this kind of money, I have no problem in toe
ing the line. No problem at all.
"O.K., that's enough on wars," said Jeremy, "let's switch to murders, if we may. These are presumably not very many. I don't see very many humans killing other humans as I walk around London."
"It depends on what you mean by not very many, Jeremy. United Nations statistics show that there are around 500,000 murders on this planet, give or take a few, each and every year. That is an average of about one murder per minute, near enough. Plus the ones we don't know about of course."
He looked at me. He was still perfectly calm and collected, but the chapel hat pegs were on show. I suppose that some of these statistics could be a bit mind-boggling if you were hearing them for the first time.
"You mentioned killing unborn fetuses," he continued, obviously having decided not to pursue the murder per minute subject either. "These are hopefully fewer in number than the murders."
"Well, I regret that I have to dash your hopes with a sledgehammer, Jeremy. In fact, with a very large and very heavy sledgehammer. There happen to be over 40 million abortions every year on this planet. Using the same calculation as for the murders, that represents an average of over 80 abortions per minute."
"Per minute? Over 80 abortions per minute?" he repeated.
"Yes. There's no way around it I'm afraid. Official statistics."
He definitely looked sad, I think today's information is finally, slowly, starting to overwhelm him a bit. And, come to think of it, it is sad. Not that I personally lose any sleep over it of course. There is really no point. It's the human race, isn't it? It's just the way we are. But it is sad. Sad is the word.
He thought for a while and decided not to pursue this item either.
"And the suicides?" he asked. He looked as if he was prepared to believe anything. Billions maybe.
Ah well, that is not such a bad number," I said. "Only about 1 million per year. Or two per minute, if you like."
"Two per minute."
"More or less, yes."
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