Genocidal Organ (35 page)

“What about you?” I said. “You don’t seem to have any problem with your job of traveling around the world and massacring everyone!”

“Absolutely. Absolutely. You see, we’re not so different, are we, you and I?”

“Fuck off!”

“But we are! I admit that I only cast the spell, of course. I don’t pull the trigger or light the fuse myself. I have no direct involvement on the front lines. And what about you? Are you directly involved when you’re in battle?
Really directly involved?
When you shoot and kill the children that are charging you? Do you feel the mixture of relief and guilt and revulsion that any normal person would feel? Or do you feel flat? Does your
optimized
emotional state wipe everything out and keep you calm and distant? Let’s be honest with each other. You might be physically taking part in battle, but you’re not really there. Something’s missing. I’m sure the same goes for all your comrades too. You kill enemies right in front of your own eyes and yet you never feel the accompanying emotions or reactions. You wonder whether the intent to kill was ever really yours. You start to doubt whether you can take ownership of the deaths that you cause.”

Bull’s-eye. This man in front of me had hit the nail on the head, and I hated him for it. It bothered me that he could be so calm. He was so untroubled by the scene around him that it was almost as if he had been Photoshopped into the picture.

“That’s right, isn’t it?” he continued. “You don’t want your work to trouble you, so your emotions are adjusted away, nice and simple. Factory workers wear protective gloves, and you wear a protective shroud for your heart. Or allow someone else to shroud it for you, at least. You allow yourself to feel nothing for other people’s lives, not even for the lives of young children. In my book that’s a far more cruel thing to do than the actual act of killing.”

“Who the
fuck
are you to lecture me about cruelty?”

“Fine, fine, so let’s agree to disagree. But let me tell you an interesting fact. The way that the grammar of genocide works on your brain is not all that different from the emotional regulation process that you go through before battle.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re different from
them
,” I hissed, pointing at the Hindu India mob in the center of the carriage. “
Our
BEAR treatment is defensive. It’s designed to protect us. It heightens our self-preservation instincts, that’s all. We don’t start performing stupid rituals where we cut off the arms of children just for fun.”

“No, you’re not that different. Defense and offense are just two sides of the same coin. The grammar of genocide takes effect by regulating the function of the brain that relates to conscience. Not so different from your so-called BEAR treatment, right? The grammar of genocide modifies your conscience, guiding it in a particular direction. It’s no different from what you do to yourselves to prevent any residual altruism from surfacing, so that you can kill children unimpeded. It’s about suppressing the activity of certain modules in the brain. The only real difference is that you use technology to do it, where as I draw on the primordial power of language.”

“Sure, our counselors told me all about how people are basically good. Sounded like holier-than-thou bullshit to me.” I smiled ironically.

“The problem here is with this word ‘conscience,’ ” John Paul said, ignoring my cynicism. “This thing that we’ve come to call ‘conscience’ is basically the sum total of our value judgments. It acts as a mediator for the desires of the brain’s various modules, calculating the risks and rewards of a particular course of action, and what comes out the other end—the optimal course of action—is what we call conscience. But it only takes a gentle nudge to one of the modules before that delicate balance is destroyed. The grammar of genocide only affects a tiny little corner of the brain, suppressing its function. But that’s all that it takes for a society to fall into chaos, and voilà, the groundwork for genocide is laid. There’s no fundamental difference between this process and the way you suppress the functions of parts of your brain before battle using neurotransmitters and counseling.”

Hindu India created its killing fields under John Paul’s spell. In the same way, I created a trail of child corpses under the spell of Forces psychologists.

John Paul was just pointing out the obvious. What could I possibly say in response to this?

One thing was different from that night in Prague, though. John Paul now seemed to get a rise out of needling me with his words. Was this just because he had his back up against a wall, and fear was loosening his tongue? Either way, John Paul was now in full stride. He even seemed to be enjoying himself. He might have been a good actor—but this just didn’t seem like an act. It wasn’t fear that was making him babble. This was abnormal. He seemed positively
at
ease
.

Something suddenly occurred to me.

“You have a mole, don’t you? Someone inside the administration.”

John Paul seemed taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve been wondering. How have you always been able to escape us at the last minute? There aren’t that many people who can get hold of the details of our plans. Just those of us in Special Operations I Detachment and the higher-ups.”

“So what does that prove?”

“You said back in Prague that you used an NSA program to look for the optimal position from which you could influence a country’s media. Well, you might have been able to do that back when you were a researcher, but now? How do you get access to the program? And more to the point, how do you get yourself into that position in the society? You have an associate high up in the US administration, no? Or a supporter, at least.”

John Paul nodded. “I’m not saying that I do or I don’t. But what I will say is that even if there is a leak, I’m sure your superiors know all about it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, every time I evaded capture, the pool of candidates of possible moles must have shrunk somewhat, no?” John Paul said. “Have you thought that maybe they were prioritizing finding the leak over killing me? That it’s been more important for them to tighten the noose around the high-up mole, whoever he is, than for you to actually succeed in any of your missions? If something were to happen now and I were somehow able to escape, helped by inside information, I would surely lose my ‘supporter,’ I think you called him, in the process.”

“
Calling Jaeger One
.”
Williams was suddenly in my ear. “
Please come to the rear carriage immediately. Over.”

I glanced at John Paul again and headed for the rear carriage.

“Clavis and I are cutting loose,” Williams said to the others. He led me into the next carriage behind me where the civilian passengers were. They looked at us in dumb astonishment—they couldn’t have been used to seeing foreign soldiers armed to the teeth with guns and flak jackets.

“What’s up, chief?” I asked Williams.

“Something’s following us. One of the passengers came and told us. Looks like a helicopter.”

“Do we have a visual?” I asked.

“Not from our carriages. We need to get to the train’s ass for some proper recon.”

We pushed our way through the rest of the carriages until we reached the end of the line. The passengers swarmed around us, jabbing their fingers frantically toward the back of the train. We used international sign language to assure them that we understood—that is to say, we nodded our heads over and over again. When we reached the final door we swung it open. There, amid the noise, was a young boy, sitting on the roof, his legs dangling over the edge. He was pointing at the sky.

I looked up from the track.

“See anything?” Williams asked.

“No.”

I put on my combat glasses and adjusted my ARs.

Now I could see a black dot on the horizon. A helicopter. Low altitude—virtually on the train tracks. It was closing in, fast.

“Chinese,” Williams said. Just what you would expect for a civil war in a poor country. It used to be Russians who supplied arms to the Third World; now China was the go-to country of choice. A basic Chinese battle helicopter was a fraction of the price of the high-tech American or European models. Most AKs going around these days were actually Chinese rip-offs too.

In other words, a Chinese-made helicopter closing in on us could have meant any number of things. It could be the Pakistan Army, Hindu India, the New India Army, or Eugene & Krupps.

Looking closer, I could see what looked like machine guns attached to its sides.

“Calling Blue Boy, this is Jaeger One. There is an armed helicopter closing in from the rear of—”

I had already turned and started heading back into the carriage, but suddenly I was cut off by the fact that the front end of the car was speeding toward me. For some reason the whole carriage was drifting behind me. It took me a split second to realize that it had come to a sudden stop and its contents were being tossed around like clothes in a washing machine.

And then I realized that I had been out cold. For how long? A minute? An hour?

There was a high-pitched ringing in my ear, and I felt curiously dissociated from my surroundings. It reminded me of how I felt in the hospital that summer when I killed Mom. I felt a squirming sensation all over my body. No doubt it was my SmartSuit, diagnosing my injuries and adjusting accordingly to stem any open wounds and compensate for any bruising.

The passenger seats were to my right and the ceiling was to my left. I paused to consider which way gravity was.

I felt like I was trapped in a one-dimensional world, except instead of there being only one dimension, there was only one sense: sight. I could see, but I couldn’t work out my
x
and
y
axes. Most of the passengers were piled up on the side where the window was. Williams too. I could see a bloody arm protruding from the layer of people. I vaguely remembered seeing something like this in a movie once, but I couldn’t remember which one.

Presently, I could hear something that sounded like fireworks in the distance.

Ah, gunfire
, I thought to myself, and tried to move my body. I’d been bruised all over, but fortunately nothing more serious than that. I knew that I’d been hurt, and I knew where I’d been hurt, but as I didn’t feel the pain I was able to move without trouble. I exited the carriage from the rear door.

The rail tracks seemed to have moved over to our right.

The carriages toward the front of the train didn’t seem to have shifted quite so much. We must have been thrown around by a centrifugal force. The coupling had broken off, and we had been slingshotted into the air. I couldn’t begin to imagine how far the people on the roof had been thrown. Our whole carriage was lying on its side. I ignored the buzzing in my ears to look over toward the train cars way in front: one was on fire. There was a black metallic vehicle skimming the ground, borne aloft by a rotary wing. And I could see figures in the distance, dancing the dance of Special Forces, moving in elegant formation.

A bullet flew in my direction and landed right in front of me.

That jerked me back to reality. I leapt for cover behind the overturned carriage. From this distance the figures up front were mere specters; I could barely even see them in their camouflage gear. I activated my ARs—any of the vanguard who had survived would be engaging with our ambushers now, so I called for a status update.

I didn’t have time to be looking at their names individually. Cardiac arrest. No response. Arm torn off. Broken legs. Having said that, my own entry showed multiple fractures and internal hemorrhaging, and I was still combat effective, so our SmartSuit injury sensors weren’t the be-all and end-all.

“Blue Boy! This is Jaeger One calling Blue Boy! Do you read me?”

No response.

Using the carriage for cover I moved toward the action as quickly as was prudent under the circumstances. The screams and groans of the passengers who were still conscious melded together to form an unearthly cacophony. This must have been what the Ligeti sounded like to the Eugene & Krupps sentinels. Some of the passengers were now crawling out through the door and stumbling away to freedom. The lucky ones were starting to recover.

And then one of the survivors who tried to run ahead of me had his face blown off. A bullet intended for me, no doubt.

I retreated back into the shadows and decided to try Leland’s team again.

“Blue Boy. Are you there, Blue Boy? Blue Boy?”

This time I was met by what seemed like an excessively cheerful reply.

“Blue Boy here! Is this Jaeger One? Over.”

Shit, I’d forgotten to state my name.

“Affirmative, this is Jaeger One. My position is currently four carriages back from yours. What’s your status there? Over.”

“
The engine appears to have been blown up, sir.”
Leland still sounded as cheerful as ever. “
Immediately after the explosion we were attacked and surrounded by airborne assault troops. We’re currently exchanging fire with them. We’re all trapped inside the overturned carriage. They’re using their machine guns to open holes in the walls, sir! Over!”