“Jesus Christ died on the cross for you,” George Washington preached. “And almost two thousand years later, Yillah, the daughter of Christ, came to rescue us from our iniquities. The promised rapture happened. Jesus came back and saved those who trusted in Him. The world fell into despair without God. The Axis exploited the world God had abandoned. Billions were murdered. Looting was rampant. We were fallen. But because He was merciful, because He did not want those left behind to be given so hopelessly to the enemy, He sent Yillah to lead us back, to give us a chance at a second salvation. She was an American who promised us deliverance from the tyranny of the Axis Alliance, but only if we trusted in God. We must believe in Her so that our souls can be delivered from the hellfire of existence. If we believe, if we have faith, we can receive salvation, a Third Coming, Jesus and Yillah together. For God is both man and woman, human and deity. Our Lord teaches us that faith transcends history, gender, race, culture, even death.”
He pointed to his missing leg. “After I lost my leg, I thought for certain I was dead. The Empire brutalized me, beat me, did everything they could to wipe away any trace of my humanity. But I clutched to my faith. I cried out to Yillah for succor. She was by my side; she wiped away my pain. And later, when I was rescued, and shortly after that had my captors at my mercy, I prayed for them. A prayer of forgiveness before I executed them. ‘Turn your cheek’ only works with physical slaps, only works pre-Second Coming. Against guns, bombs, and the most inhumane practices ever conceived, we must protect ourselves. We must become the agents of God’s vengeance. Yillah was not like Christ, allowing herself to be murdered. She conceived of…”
Even as he spoke, George Washington’s eye turned to Ben with a compassionate, inviting look. Abraham Lincoln was taking long draughts from his mask, struggling to breathe. So many of the American faces were unctuous, foreign, and hostile.
“Do you know what the most important line in the Bible is?” George Washington suddenly asked Ben.
Everyone turned their heads in his direction.
Ben shrugged. “No idea.”
“‘Jesus wept.’ Two words. So simple. It came right after his close friend, Lazarus, died and He saw everyone around him mourning. It was a symbolic moment, the metamorphosis of a God who had evolved from a cruel creator with no idea how much His creation was suffering, to a God incarnated as a man, filled with empathy and sorrow for the plight of humanity. Regardless of your background, your past beliefs, your worst sins, that line represents the struggle all of us face. It is the trinity within every individual, the contradictory capacity to be creator, destroyer, and savior. It is also the acknowledgment that, in making a choice, someone will suffer. If Jesus hadn’t delayed, Lazarus wouldn’t have died. I don’t hate the United States of Japan. I sympathize, even as I fight you.” Ben had no care for religion and listened dubiously, wondering why George Washington wasted his time lecturing him. “I know you don’t believe in God, but I would appreciate if you would pray with us.”
“My god lives in Tokyo,” Ben said.
“Your god wants you dead. My God wants salvation and blessings for you.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “Dear Father and Mother in Heaven, we thank you for bringing us these pilgrims safely and we praise you for…”
As the Americans prayed, Ben was surprised that they appeared so sincere, so yearning, so eager for salvation. This George Washington truly believed he was in some kind of communion with a supernatural being, simply by speaking. It reminded him of Claire. Ben did not even believe in the Tenno – the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor. But he didn’t have any more faith in the American’s God who was murdered by Romans thousands of years ago and, more recently, Yillah at the hands of the Nazis. He knew that the individual George Washington leaders had ordered the deaths of countless of his compatriots.
“In Jesus and Yillah’s name we pray, amen,” George Washington concluded. “This is a day of mourning and celebration for us. Why are you here?”
The hostility was palpable. “I’m looking for General Mutsuraga,” Ben replied.
“On the anniversary of our great defeat, you seek the one who gives us hope, a dream of a world in which the conquerors were turned back. Why don’t you join us? Surely our message can appeal to you. Believe in the Father, the Son, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit, and you will have salvation. After your blasphemous yaoyorozu no kami,” which was a Shinto collective of eight million, or many, gods, “four seems easy in comparison, doesn’t it? Four that actually care about you.”
Ben had heard the idea before of the four distinct but identical beings
“There is only one God. Like water that’s vapor, ice, and liquid,” George Washington explicated. “The forms are different, but the base molecules are the same.”
“If I became an ice cube or vapor, I’d be dead.”
“That’s why you need faith to help your disbelief.”
“Faith in an ice cube doesn’t sound that reassuring.”
Washington had a pitying expression. “Do you always question everything?”
“Why would a god sacrifice her life if she was God? Just show real power and send an army of angels and there’d be no debate.”
“Jesus and Yillah showed they were superior to the world by dying for it.”
“Doesn’t sound so superior,” Ben commented.
“The word ‘samurai’ comes from the character, saburau – to serve,” George Washington said. “Sacrifice is the ultimate form of service, the ultimate transcending act.”
“Sacrifice and service haven’t done much good for your cause.”
“How would you know?”
“Because your attempt at ‘sacrifice’ failed,” Ben said. “Martha Washington was taken captive.”
“So I’ve heard,” George Washington replied. “But are you sure we’ve failed? How would you know when you don’t even understand sacrifice or service? The salvation of one soul is just as precious as any military victory. I ask you again: will you join our cause and serve?”
“Let me talk to Mutsuraga and I’ll consider it.”
George Washington laughed. “We value freedom, and we give people the opportunity to choose the right path. You’ve made your choice. The light entered the world, and you, like the rest of humanity, loved the darkness.” Washington and his assembly stood up and began to leave.
Ben was about to follow Washington when two Americans seized him and forced him down into a chair. They stripped him of his portical and ripped off his boots. Another of the Americans brought a bowl of water and a cart with a machine on top that looked like a defibrillator. Washington had vanished, but Lincoln lumbered over to him.
“Jesus washed the feet of His disciples. Yillah did so too, as she found it an effective way to transform her enemies,” Lincoln said. “Purify their hearts and bodies.”
The Americans dipped his feet in water and washed his toes with rubber gloves on. Ben hated the sight of his toes, a gangly, alien set of nubs.
One of the Americans put a charged wire into the water.
Electric bolts seized Ben’s entire body. His cells sent out millions of warning signs to the metropolises within. The civilizations were in denial about the legions of volts racing a marathon through them. Ben could feel the nerves trying to placate their followers, the dendrites and axons sending prophetic messages of doom, ignored in the malaise of exorbitance. The pain wasn’t overt, but a searing miasma paralyzed him. He felt like a jet blasting off into a hurricane to get sucked into a vortex and splattering into a million C-sections of nirvana. As suddenly as it came, it stopped.
“That’s the first setting,” Lincoln said.
“What do you want?”
Lincoln frowned. “There’s nothing I want. Nothing you can give other than to God almighty. Ready yourself.”
The second setting was much more painful. Ben thought the veins from his neck would spurt out, his head screaming in pain. He wanted to faint, but heard a rant in the form of pulsati
ng migraines. The voices were enthralling, noises sloshing above him that made him think of exhausted rats committing suicide. He saw lightning leaves growing out of his arms, tree bark covering his fingers with sparks. He was immobile and his ribs were decaying from bacteria of discontent, nibbling on his cartilage to feed their insatiable appetite. His cells dissolved into a photon cycle that gave them a home to consume until the next portable body was in place. The electricity intensified. The water gargled and he could smell his skin burning. He recognized the malodorous scent from San Diego, a potpourri of gasoline and crisp meat. There’d been so many charred bodies there. His tongue was scorched and his throbs were a blaring whisper, more vociferous than reverberating echoes. His torment was an inflamed affliction ascending into the stratosphere of an abscess that vomited pus in the shape of grapes. The grape turned into the head of a young Claire Mutsuraga.
“You should have told me,” she said, the complex five-rig portical she’d used to break all the classified reports next to her.
“How could I?”
“We’ll all burn in hell for this,” she said.
“If there is a hell.”
“I didn’t know my father caused this.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Is it? We’re all guilty of someone else’s sins until they become our own. Then we try to pass it off, but I won’t do that anymore.”
“You can’t be serious about making this game–”
“Will you help me?”
“How could I help?”
“Let’s use the simulation and set new parameters. If I did it myself, it would take too long. If we work together, we can remind the Americans how close they were to winning.”
Claire, with her pony-tailed hair and her sandy skin, her caramel eyes that melted away into the dissipation of anguish. She was the reverse Mutsuraga, a woman who mocked and satirized the absurdities of contemporary civility, scoffing at the rituals that made men men and women women.
The volts stopped. The Americans were laving his legs, his arms, and his face.
“Four decades ago, our fathers and mothers fought to keep on this continent a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. You destroyed that. Yillah always pointed out, Saul was our faith’s greatest enemy until he was blinded and became Paul. The persecutor, the executioner, and murderer of everyone connected to our faith became our greatest proselytizer and proponent,” Lincoln said. “Isn’t that a strange irony? Prepare to be blinded.”
The electricity ravaged him, stretching out the aches in his body that were dying hundreds of cells at a time, predigested in frozen bits and pieces, warehoused and packaged into caskets. The minutes and years and seconds were excised into pieces of chalk and exhaust pipes that failed to pass through the ravages of age. Division of the ritualized itinerary of the persecuted. It was a sandbox devoted to the minutiae of agony, where the ruler and abacus reigned as the emperor and empress of an antiquity in some misbegotten golden age of misery, stacks of spiraling uncertainty as implacable as a pillaged mausoleum. Ben knew he couldn’t die. Not yet. Not without keeping his promise to Claire. Her faith was a million firecrackers stuffed into one big explosive setting off at once even though there wasn’t a special occasion, her presence being cause enough. She channeled her beliefs into the game.
“I’m as guilty as my father,” Claire had said. “I have to die.”
“How are you guilty? You did nothing wrong.”
“Even after I found out the truth, I didn’t do anything to bring justice for Mom.”
“None of us did. We’re the ones who are guilty.”
“If you read half the things I uncovered about San Diego,” Claire said, “you would not be able to sleep.”
“That’s why I choose not to read most of it,” Ben admitted. “This game is bigger than that.”
“Is it? No one’ll even play it.”
“I’ll make sure it gets out there,” Ben assured her. “I’ll put it in every game I censor and, since I’ve approved them already, no one else is going to check them until it’s too late.”
“What’s going to happen the morning the Tokko comes knocking on your door?”
Ben uneasily touched his wrist. “I’ll pray to your Christian God and get my poison capsule ready.”
“Not funny.”
“I’m not joking. Besides, they’ll most likely blame your father.”
“He’s going to be furious. All he cares about is his legacy.”
“This’ll end it.”
“Not completely,” Claire said. “I’ll make sure I’m the last of his line.”
“You don–”
She stopped him. “What about my father?”
“What about him?”
“You have to deal with him after I die.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You know what I mean. Promise me.”
“I’ll never promise that.”
“Ben.”
“Forget it.”
“Ben! Promise me.”
“He’s your father and my sempai. How can you even a…” But before he finished his question, he knew the answer. “This is unfair of you.” At the same time, he did not want her guilty of her father’s death.
“You’ll do it?” she asked, even though from the way she looked at him, she knew she already had her answer.
Was it his resentment at having been forced to agree to do the unthinkable that had led to all their ensuing arguments? Shortly after, she told him she was leaving Los Angeles and they never talked again.
The currents increased. His body felt like an earthquake with the epicenter at his feet. It was a constant trembling that triggered fibrillations in his heart as well as delusions. There was a point where pain stopped hurting and became a condition, where the aching became a drug. He swore he was at a carnival and that the voltages were invoking memories. The alternating currents were ripping Lichtenberg figures in his calves, muscular contractions brainwashed by the insurrection of neuropathy. Someone pulled the plug.
8:46PM
Ben felt like a crumpled wrap. It took a few calls from the voice above to wake him.
“Wake up, Ishimura.”
“G-general?”
“Odd to meet again under these circumstances,” Mutsuraga said, in his deep commanding voice. “You don’t look so good.”
“You look old, sir,” Ben replied.
“I wanted to see you before they killed you.”
Ben was strapped into his chair. They’d removed the bowl of water and no one else was in the Congressional hall. Mutsuraga still looked like a bear, only one that was older and more domineering. His brows were gray and he wore the chimera-like clothing of all the Americans, rather than the uniform Ben was accustomed to seeing him in. He still had his traditional samurai sword though and the sheath was meticulously pristine.
“Why are you here?”
“You should know, sir,” Ben said, feeling tired, anger giving him a second wind.
“I’m no longer your commanding officer, Ishimura. Did you take care of Claire’s funeral rites?”
“You’re acting like you’re the savior here, when you’re the one who caused all this to happen in the first place.”
“San Diego was going to happen, regardless of what I did. Tokyo Command could not accept sedition of that kind.”
“Your personal jealousy gave them the excuse to wipe out the city.”
“This city was doomed before I was ever here. Tokyo Command wanted to make an example out of them to show the Nazis we meant business,” the general said.
“The Nazis?”
“Don’t you view your own simulations? The Nazis have wanted to take over the western half of the Americas, especially Texas, for the oil lines. The Empire needed Texas, even if it was only to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on all that fuel. The Nazis wanted to see how we’d handle San Diego. If we would have let
it spiral out of control, they would have known we were weak.”
“Funny you still refer to the Empire as we.”
“You always were a smart ass.”
“Is that what you call people who make smart observations?” Ben asked.
“It’s what I call people who make pointless observations to make themselves feel smart.”
“What do you call people who are responsible for the massacre of an entire city?”
“You’re calling me responsible?”
“You knew how volatile things were,” Ben stated. “Did you think the George Washingtons could blindly accept the death of one of their leaders?”
“You and Wakana insist I did what no man could fathom. This is my wife you’re talking about.”
“I was there when it happened.”
“So was I,” Mutsuraga said.
“You want to deny responsibility, fine. But I know what really happened. This farce disgusts me.”
“Not so shy with your words anymore, are you?”
“I kissed your ass back then because I had no choice,” Ben said honestly.
“I gave you an opportunity that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. You took it voluntarily.”
“I didn’t know what kind of man you were.”
“You wanted to see your game out there,” Mutsuraga said stridently. “You got it.”
“And I assisted a madman take the reins.”
“Now I’m a madman?”
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