Genocidal Organ (39 page)

Of course we were invisible. The flesh of this Pod was originally from inhabitants of this lake. The Pod was just returning to its natural habitat in a slightly rearranged form.

I wondered whether Williams and the others had gotten out in time, or whether they had shared the same fate as the Flying Seaweed. Come to think of it, I wondered whether the Flying Seaweed had met any particular fate, or whether it had safely returned to base.

I was flush with anxiety. My chest pounded with worry for my comrades.

More than that, though, I worried that I would be too late as usual. That John Paul had already spread his seeds of discord among the people of Lake Victoria and had long since fled the scene, taking Lucia with him.

The impulsiveness of my decision to cut my Pod loose caught up with me. If Lucia was no longer here, then this whole mission was pointless.

The Pod swam along for about an hour before informing me that we had reached our destination. It then warned me of its impending self-disintegration, advising me to double check my diving gear. I did so—I was ready for the water. I opened the lock on the hatch, and the waters of Lake Victoria started rushing into the narrow confines of the Pod. I climbed out of the Pod and shut off its enzyme supply. Finally, I watched it drift away and disintegrate into the water.

3

The lake is here to support our lifestyle.

That was the first thing that came to mind after I reached the shore and turned back to survey the moonlit waters.

Airplane wings. Pods.

Artificial arms. Artificial fingers. Artificial legs. Industrial devices. Porters.

It was to create these things that the artificially engineered dolphins and whales were bred here, waiting for the day when they would be butchered and turned into artificial hands or shock-absorbing Meat Seats for airplanes. The shores of Lake Victoria were dotted with factories, and the poverty-stricken children of the country had three choices: become one of the factory workers who hauled the animals in and dissected them, join the armed forces, or become a whore or rent boy to service the aforementioned workers and soldiers.

European and American transport vehicles regularly flew in to pick up the processed flesh that had been carefully canned so as not to damage the precious muscle fibers. The planes would fly in, take the cargo into their giant bellies, and fly away again. Once in a while the Tanzanian or Ugandan forces would make an incursion over the border to try and reassert their fishing rights, only to be ritually repelled by the foreign-PMC-trained local army that consisted mostly of boys and girls.

Such was life in this country. There was rule of law, but in name only. In reality, the corrupt bureaucrats, in cahoots with PMCs, ruled the country. A world without effective laws meant, in one sense, a world where anything goes, a world of unregulated freedom. But the young boys and girls who grew up here couldn’t afford hopes or dreams because the system robbed them of all future prospects, and then the developed countries swooped in to take the precious artificial flesh that made our own lives free and easy.

I considered the grim irony of the situation as I finished stripping off my diving gear.

I hid in a nearby thicket and waited for nearly an hour to see if Williams or any of the others would show up at the rendezvous point. Nobody did. I resigned myself to going it alone and prepared my approach to the guesthouse. Our original four-man plan was useless to me now.

The shore was too dangerous. The navy corvettes carried out regular checks with floodlights. I didn’t know if there were any land mines or sensors about the place, although I figured it was safe to assume that the closer I got to the guesthouse the more interesting the obstacles would be.

I decided the best way would be through the jungle. I carefully adjusted my nanodisguise. No leaves or branches here. The cliché image of military camouflage was actually much harder to pull off than most people thought. Leaves and branches started withering the moment they fell from a tree and changed in shape and color as they did so. It was pretty difficult to make a foliage-based camouflage that blended in perfectly with the surroundings.

After I was convinced that my camouflage was as good as it was going to get, I started moving. The speed at which I moved varied according to the terrain. Jungles were, by definition, a mishmash of different types of terrain, and even when they seemed impenetrable there was always a path through them. For the trained soldier, at least.

In a jungle such as this one, full of thick shrubbery and ferns and vines, it seemed ridiculous to have to clear a path when there were animal tracks to follow—or, in some cases, trails that had been made by humans. These were the “easy” routes, and anyone without special training would usually opt for these as a matter of course.

The problem was that there were only a few of these types of paths, and the enemy knew them better than you. If you used these you were practically begging the enemy to ambush you. No, there were no shortcuts in the jungle. You had to cut a path through the thick fern forests, cross the streams without bridges, and climb the cliffs. Never take the easy option. The British SAS learned these maxims the hard way, through their bitter experiences in the Malayan jungle in the 1950s.

I advanced carefully through the thicket, covering my tracks behind me.

I was taking the long way round to flank the enemy. The best way to avoid ambushes. It took more time, but the most direct route to the enemy was often also the route directly to hell. Best to assume that the enemy would lay on normal precautions.

Jungle warfare, in other words, was a delicate and complicated affair, not unlike a game of chess.

This was real freedom. The freedom to try and determine the safest route for myself.

It might seem at first glance that there was more freedom in taking the easy way, but doing that could result in a particular type of loss of freedom: death. Freedom for humans involved the ability to avoid danger. Freedom was taking into consideration all the risks and choosing the most suitable course of action.

I moved carefully, one step at a time, constantly testing the path before me. I soon came to the conclusion that it was a fairly ordinary jungle. A good balance of flora and fauna. It had evidently been untouched by the trauma that the nearby lake had experienced these last decades. Not that nature had to always be harmonious or well balanced, of course. Humans might have driven many species to extinction, but Mother Nature did at least as good a job of destroying her own. Evolution was not supposed to be harmonious. Evolution was about adaptation. Many species were born and tested by their environment, and those that were found lacking were summarily dismissed from the face of the earth. Only those who passed the test were allowed to survive.

I remembered what Lucia said about the concepts of the self and the other being products of the evolutionary process. Human consciousness and the emergent property of language were also products of adaptation by the survival of the fittest. Conscience, sin, crime, punishment—all also part of the process. Whether they were transmitted by genes or as memes, one thing was for sure—they were not products of the independent external creature we called the soul. So she had said.

“
And yet
,” Lucia had said. “
And yet genes and memes did not determine everything about a person.”
People
were
influenced by their environment, and people always had a choice. If we were blank slates, then anything was permitted, sure. But we always had a choice. We could compare and contrast and decide for ourselves what was important, what our values were, whom we loved, what we ought to love.

The birds flying overhead amid the jungle canopy didn’t have that choice. They weren’t free to choose. People used the phrase “as free as a bird,” but birds weren’t free, they only had one course of action available to them. That which was dictated to them by their genes.

True freedom meant to have a choice. To be able to take a possibility and make it your own.

That was why I needed to be punished, I said to myself as I pushed my way through the complex ecosystem of the jungle on Lake Victoria’s shores. I hadn’t been able to voluntarily accept the responsibility for pulling the plug on my mother. I needed to be punished for the choices I had made. No. For the choices that I had
not
made.

The mission I was on now was an assassination mission, and the orders had come from the National Military Establishment. As per usual. Up until now I had never thought too deeply about our missions or our orders. But Alex had taken personal responsibility for his crimes, his sin. Because there was no one around him who would punish him: no person, no God. Alex had been honest about his reality, whereas my eyes had been closed. I had told myself that I was killing for my country, killing for the greater good of the world. But it had never been my choice. I had never made the autonomous decision to kill. That’s why issues such as sin and crime and punishment had never even entered my mind.

This time was different, though. There was no one from HQ or the Pentagon telling me what to do. This was my decision. I had come here, of my own free will, to kill John Paul.

I could see the lights of the guesthouse in the distance. It was a traditional colonial-style building, two stories high, with an atrium courtyard.

It was surrounded by a neatly trimmed lawn and patrolled by Lake Victoria soldiers.

There was one advantage to the fact that Williams and the others were no longer with me. It meant that I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I didn’t need to worry about coordinating with the others, and I could act far more boldly than I would have been able to do in a group.

There was a full moon in the sky and it was dazzlingly bright. High visibility, nothing doing. I upped my nanocoating camouflage to the max. It couldn’t quite turn me into the Invisible Man, but provided I stayed flat on the ground, I would be able to creep in pretty close without anyone being able to distinguish me from my surroundings.

I inched forward from the jungle clearing toward the guesthouse. The only thing that would really throw a wrench in the works at this point would be trained war dogs. Fortunately, I saw no signs of any.

The world’s developed nations supported an independent Lake Victoria state because they wanted to secure a stable supply of artificial flesh. It was much easier to deal with one country than it was with three.

Maybe “supported” wasn’t even strong enough a word. The war of independence wasn’t so much an organic grassroots movement that had eventually borne fruit as it was a plan that had been devised and executed. The shores of Lake Victoria were by a long way the richest regions of Kenya, Uganda, or Tanzania—naturally, because the artificial flesh industry was far more profitable than anything else the countries had to offer the world. The businessmen who grew rich from the lake found themselves increasingly averse to their respective governments squeezing them for taxes as bribes all the time. They made their dissatisfaction known by grumbling to their European bankers, and in return they were met with gentle, seductive insinuations that they might just be better off if they decided to get together and go it alone, without their so-called rulers or countries squeezing them dry.

When the US waged her wars in the Middle East, she had hardly been able to just come out with it and say “I’m doing this for the oil” even if it was true. Any modern-day national army needed at least a pretext for war before it could be mobilized. But here in Africa, causes that were fashionable elsewhere in the world—justice, stability, basic human rights—were not quite so indispensable. Scratch the surface and the medieval mindset of conquest and plunder was still very much alive.

Anyone who knew the region well, then, was hardly surprised that all it took was a cold appeal to their greed before the wealthy inhabitants of Lake Victoria declared independence.

In terms of game theory, betrayal was still the dominant paradigm in this part of the world. In the early stages of any game theory simulation, the betrayers would always get an early advantage over the cooperators. On an individual level, the decision to betray the other players would yield short-term gains. Of course, after a number of iterations and after additional complexities were introduced, the cooperators would always gain the upper hand in the long run. But on this continent, life was still simple. The game had not yet evolved that far.