Genocidal Organ (29 page)

It was easy enough, with modern techniques, to perform sensory masking that blocked out feelings, but there were more interesting developments. For example, there was a documented case of a blind subject being able to consistently dodge a tennis ball thrown at him. The subject himself insisted that he was blind, and as far as he was concerned he did indeed live in a world of darkness. And yet the fact was that he was able to register an object coming toward him. In other words, his mind was unable to process the fact that he was seeing the ball in a different channel.

In this instance, there was nothing wrong with the subject’s optic nerves. The reason for the disconnect was that the act of “seeing” something actually consists of two different components. In other words, the ability to see colors and shapes is processed separately from the ability to notice that something is there in front of you.

Yes, to “see” and to “perceive” are different things, processed in different corners of the brain. We might intuitively think of our sense of sight as being primarily related to the senses: “the apple is green,” “the pillar is rectangular,” and so on, but there is actually another part of sight that isn’t so much a sense as a focus, and the eyes constantly send optic information to this part of the brain too.

So even the simple act of looking at something translates into a complicated series of parallel functions for the brain. It was mind-boggling to think how many different combinations of functions could be identified. Five hundred seventy-two and counting, the doctor had said.

“There are something like twenty different substates between the states that we popularly call
asleep
and
awake
. So it’s not as if a person has a fixed sense of self. Some modules can be functioning while others are sleeping. And there are times when a person tries to call upon a module only to find it asleep. That’s how we forget or misremember things. Intoxication by alcohol or drugs also falls into this category. Even as we’re speaking now, your and my consciousnesses are—how to say it—fluctuating? There’s no quality control on consciousness. It’s constantly ebbing and flowing from strong to … dilute.”

“A person is ebbing and flowing?” I said.

The doctor explained that we were now heading into the territory of semantics. A person—Descartes’s “I”—could only be understood as a purely linguistic concept these days.

Take a crowd. If ten thousand people gather together in one place, that’s unmistakably a crowd. Same with a thousand, obviously. So what about a hundred? Fifty? Ten people? How many need to be in a group before it can unequivocally be called a crowd?

This was what the doctor had been driving at. “Consciousness,” “I,” “self”—all became a matter of semantics. How many modules needed to be alive before you could describe someone as being the person you knew and loved? How many modules needed to be functioning before you could decide whether they were “conscious”? Society had yet to come up with satisfactory answers.

Take my mother. Was enough of her “alive” in a meaningful sense that I could still call her my mother?

That was the judgment call that I was being asked to make. How on earth was I supposed to give an answer?

So we had our emotions masked along with our senses.

BEAR was about anesthetizing part of yourself. Deliberately diluting your own essence. The domain of conscience was essentially an emotional function of the brain, not a logical one.

“Emotional judgments play a large role in the act of eliminating your battlefield targets,” the counselor said. The screen in front of me was displaying an array of the world’s horrors: natural catastrophes, towns turned into battlefields, hordes of starving children.

“For example, the act of rescuing bloodied victims with your own hands has an overwhelmingly larger impact on your conscience and emotion modules than a more abstract act, such as sending a donation to hurricane victims. It’s stating the obvious to say that people respond more emotionally to what is happening right in front of their eyes. In contrast, the act of donation is essentially a rational one. But even then, emotion is ultimately responsible for many so-called rational decisions, because emotions form the basis of human value judgments. Most logic is really no more than
a posteriori
rationalization.”

“So you’re saying that when I kill children on the battlefield it’s not the hammer of cold logic but rather my own emotions that are blasting their brains out?” I decided to try and push the counselor’s arguments through to their violent conclusion.

The counselor just nodded as if this were the most natural question in the world. “Emotion has the ability to shortcut logic and deliver a swift, accurate response to stimuli. Even though people are reluctant to admit it, conscience can be just as powerful a driving force as the intent to kill. It might be fashionable to take the view that humans are fundamentally weak and prone to violence. But the fact is that even soldiers such as yourself are in thrall to the driving—and potentially limiting—force of conscience. It doesn’t sit easily alongside your watchwords of ruthlessness and thoroughness. That’s why it becomes imperative to use the technology at our disposal to temporarily subdue this powerful force, particularly with people such as us who were raised in America with its strong moral values. It goes against the grain, but our lives depend on it.”

“So we’re being brainwashed, basically,” I said.

Again the counselor had an answer—well, this was a question he was used to answering, I was sure. His answer began with a nod. “I can see why you think that, but there’s an important difference. With medicines, they say the poison is in the dose, don’t they? You don’t even need to overdose as such in order to abuse medications. Think of people who use tranquilizers as recreational drugs.”

“So it’s not brainwashing because we’re voluntarily submitting to it?”

“Exactly.”

When you entered a battlefield, you needed to be able to kill people with a light heart. If counseling helped in that then surely it was okay? If that was your intention then it should be fine? Were there no ethical problems about subjugating yourself to a process that suppressed your ethical compunctions, even temporarily? I just didn’t know anymore.

There were actually plenty of my teammates who saw the whole counseling process as a farce from the get-go. What right did scientists have to appropriate tactical decision-making from officers who had earned their stripes the hard way? Soldiers signed up for Special Forces with eyes wide open. Why would they need all this girly counseling to firm up their resolve? If they weren’t prepared for what was ahead, they shouldn’t have signed up in the first place. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

The flip side of the coin was, of course, that Forces provided these counselors for us at great expense because they valued us as soldiers. Or rather they
had
to value us—public opinion in an advanced capitalist society such as ours had, in the space of a single generation, grown astonishingly intolerant of the idea of any of “our troops” being left to die in foreign climes. It was as if the general public had forgotten the simple fact that, in war, people tend to die. The result of this was that in our military system a soldier became a valuable—and expensive—commodity. Salary, training, the latest technology. Which in turn meant that no standing army could afford to support too many soldiers. So an industry sprang up trying to supply artificial substitutes for human fighters. Most such robotic entities ended up on an ever-growing scrap heap, but a small handful of inventions were granted the honor of a place on the battlefield alongside us human soldiers so that they could help us kill other human soldiers.

Ironically though, the further the field of human neuroscience was explored, the fewer resources there were available for research into artificial intelligence, which as a discipline had become pauperized. Once scientists had established that strong AI—computers that could replicate the more complex functions of the brain—and relative redundancy in particular were not on the horizon, interest in the field of AI for military purposes had waned. There were still simply too many roles on the battlefield that could only be carried out by humans.

Given the ever-escalating cost of training and maintaining soldiers to full combat effectiveness, governments were understandably loath to lose their prime military workforce to the civilian companies that sought to hire us away, so they began taking measures to prevent a general hemorrhage. One by one, countries enacted “gardening leave” legislation preventing discharged soldiers from joining PMCs before a fixed period of time had passed since their retirement. This, in turn, made it harder for the PMCs to cherry-pick candidates speculatively, so the stock of well-qualified mercenaries had soared.

As a result, no matter where you were in the developed world, a trained soldier was not something that you could afford to have break down on you. Maintenance became a top priority. America had already had some experience of mental health care for its troops, stretching back to the previous century. Veterans of the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars would return home and be troubled by recurring nightmares. Post-traumatic stress disorder began to eat away at the heart of America’s military, and something needed to be done about it. A cure was needed.

What I was receiving now, though, wasn’t the cure. It was the vaccine.

The goal of my counseling was to make it easier for me to kill.

“Essentially this is no different from an inoculation, Mr. Shepherd. We want you to be able to use your skills on the battlefield to your heart’s content, so to speak. At the same time, it’s important that we reduce your risk of psychological damage to the absolute minimum. When we send you to a country where you are at risk of the effects of infectious diseases, we’re always sure to give you a battery of shots, right? Well, think of the counseling we give you as a vaccine against the effects of war. Now, I understand completely that you might feel you’ve already built up a natural immunity, but just think of this as a sort of booster, a purely precautionary measure.”

I realized just then that this counselor had misunderstood, or rather misread, me. He was thinking that I was like my obstinate teammates who liked to make fun of the whole counseling process.

No. I wasn’t a macho poseur like them. I was fully aware how fragile I was as a person, given the situation I was going into. I had to shoot and people had to die. If I hesitated, I would die. But could I truly take responsibility for the enemy I killed so that I might live? Was my essence of self strong enough for me to accept that burden and carry it on my shoulders?

I realized that I wasn’t trying to evade responsibility for my sins. Rather, I was terrified that I wasn’t worthy to bear those sins. That the sins themselves were nothing more than fictions, figments of my imagination.

In the heat of battle, when the specter of death loomed large, I was paradoxically most aware of being alive. I felt my own life force vigorously pulsing against the backdrop of the death all around me. Sure, look down on me and call me a thrill seeker or an adrenaline junkie if you like. But the fact was that I killed other people so that my own life span could be extended. If I needed to step over others in order to prioritize my own existence, then so be it. It was this sensation that made me go back to the battlefield again and again for more.

But what if this killing force inside me was not truly mine? Not my own free will, but rather something engineered by a combination of these Viennese School counselors and chemical substances? I was still alive, here and now, but should I be celebrating that fact in the same way? Was that life-affirming sensation a manufactured lie?

I realized that this counseling was a real threat to my
raison d’être.
Not because of the techniques or substances used, but by virtue of its very existence.

My stomach welled up with a bizarre, mysterious, nauseating feeling.

Could I ever trust my own motives on the battlefield again? I didn’t fight for a greater good, to protect my family, or even for money, but rather for the overwhelming sensation of life-affirming reality. Most soldiers rationalized this motive, lying even to themselves, dressing it up as patriotism or comradeship. It was a base motive perhaps, but one that no wild beast would ever have on an instinctual level. It raised me above them.

But what if my will to kill was a fabrication, based on a foundation of lies? I would be absolved of all my sins, sure, but the sins were supposed to be
mine,
my burden to carry, my proof to myself that I was still alive. Without them, the thrill of raw, live reality was nothing but an illusion.