CHAPTER THREE

1

The storm had passed, and Prague was calm.

There were gaps in the stone paving where the insurgents had salvaged rocks and hurled them at the police. Underneath the old paving there was synthetic flesh: exposed, red-raw, veins throbbing in a lattice.

I wandered through the deserted streets in a daze. The nanolayer ads that had once coated the historical buildings had been ripped off by the mob and burnt. Plumes of black smoke still emanated from all corners of the city, even though the insurgents that had caused the fires had long since melted away. Just like that pied piper who had disappeared from Hamelin without a trace.

The blood-red flesh of the streets gave the cityscape some blotches of color. I stepped onto it—it was hard, but elastic enough that it felt like I really was on top of a living organism.

I headed for the outskirts of the town, careful not to trip on the stone paving that now stood a couple of inches above the flesh. I felt like the only person left in the entire city after the riots. I was the last bastion of civilization. Maybe even the last person still alive in Europe.

I reached the outskirts of Prague and was confronted with fields of scarlet meadows, as far as the eye could see.

“What’s the matter, O son of mine?”

A sound from above. I looked up to find a giant object looming over the fields. The wing of a jumbo jet. Its white coating had peeled off and fallen to the earth, where it had formed a giant tower. I looked back at the wing: where there had been the white protective coating, there was now more exposed red flesh.

“Here! Over here!”

I turned to face the voice. It was my mother, although I couldn’t make her out at first, as her skin had been flayed just like the jumbo jet’s, and she too was a mass of exposed crimson.

It was then that I realized that the red fields that stretched out to the horizon were dotted with Intruder Pods. I hadn’t noticed earlier because these, too, were stripped bare, their black Stealth Coating removed to reveal the red muscle and blood beneath. Sinewy threads were dangling off them, fluttering in the breeze: blood-red seaweed floating in a blood-red ocean.

“Mom, you know you’re kind of … exposed?”

“Uh-huh. Atomic bomb, you know?”

“But Mom, you died back in Washington! I was the one who killed you!”

“Now who’s getting all melodramatic, O son of mine? It was the car that killed me, really, and the doctors who ended it all. You’re not to blame.”

“But I could have chosen to keep you on that machine. You’d still be alive …”

“Huh! Call that living, being plugged into that machine like a vegetable? You must be joking.”

“But your heart … your heart was still beating,” I said, on the verge of tears. “Call me old-fashioned, but as long as your heart and other vital organs are still working, you’re alive.”

“Okay. Mr. Old-Fashioned. You’re so twentieth century.” Mom gave a wan smile. Looking at her now was a glimpse into the inner workings of the human musculature—I could see clearly which muscles were at play in constructing her facial expressions. “But come clean, O son of mine—it’s not really the boundary between life and death that’s troubling you right now, is it?”

I shook my head. “I just want to know. If I was the one who killed you. Did you die when I gave the order? Won’t you tell me, Mom?”

“Ah, so we’re talking about guilt and sin.” Mom nodded. “You did the right thing. You made a difficult decision, and you did it for me. You pulled the plug on your own mother’s life-support machine. You called off the life-sustaining nanomachines. You placed your mother in her coffin. It must have been hard for you, so hard, but you did the right thing because you were only doing the right thing.”

“Really, Mom? Is that the truth?”

“Of course not.” My mother’s voice was suddenly cold. “I’m just telling you what you want to hear, right? How can anyone say for sure what the truth is? How can you know what I feel? I’m dead, remember?”

I was afraid now. Mom’s voice had taken on a harsh edge. “I know how you think, how you rationalize your life,” she continued. “You’re just following orders, right? When you kill people in your line of duty, you’re just doing so in order to prevent a greater tragedy? You’re just the messenger, the tool, the loaded gun, and it’s someone else who pulls the trigger. As if that somehow absolves you from responsibility for your own actions.”

“Mom, stop it!” I begged, tears streaming down my face.

“Well, guess what? When you killed your own mother that was your own choice. You told yourself that she was in pain, and that she would suffer more alive than dead? Fine. But I was lying there on that bed, and I didn’t tell you that, did I? You were projecting your own thoughts onto me. So when the doctors pressed you for an answer, you had to make the judgment call on your own. You shouldered the responsibility. No Pentagon or SOCOM to make your decisions for you. You made your own bed—man up and lie in it.”

My mother’s words pounded at my mind. I tried to block her out, to shut my ears, but the cruel torrent continued unabated.

“And that’s made you think, hasn’t it? You’ve started to realize that it isn’t just me. All those generals and colonels and self-styled presidents that you’ve killed in the name of your ‘duty.’ You’ve always had choices. And you’ve made your choices. You’ve just stopped thinking about them. When was the last time you actually sat down to think about why you’re doing all this?”

I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry. I turned away and started running back into the empty streets of Prague.

“That’s right. If it was your own choice to kill me, then it was also your own choice to kill every single person you’ve ever assassinated. How is there any real difference? Do you think this is a plea bargain? Are you somehow imagining that by accepting responsibility for your decision to kill me you’re somehow excused from all the rest of your murders?”

I ran farther and farther away, but my mother’s voice still followed me, distinct and clear, like an evil spell.

I covered my head, desperate to block out the whole world.

“You can run, sir, but you can’t hide.” A new voice, young, clear. I looked up to see Alex’s smiling face. My dead colleague tapped his head. “After all, hell is here, inside your mind.”

“Leave me alone!”

“What is a human being?” Alex continued. “A collection of brain cells, water, carbon compounds. A magnificent creation and yet no more than a small clump of DNA. From the moment a person is born, he’s no more than physical matter. Just like that synthetic flesh down there. You can project lofty ideals and morals onto human beings all you want, but in the end you’re just deluding yourself. Sin, hell, whatever you want to call it, only exists insofar as it’s inside us. There is nothing more.”

Then the stone pavement exploded beneath my feet.

The crimson flesh was expanding, penetrating and enveloping the layers of historical Prague. The torrent of flesh spread out toward the heavens, and before long it had enshrouded the entire city.

The tsunami of flesh surged on relentlessly, pushing me farther and farther up into the sky. Forever.

Toward a place where there was no sin, no hell.

“Jesus, buddy. That’s quite a nightmare you were having. Are you okay?”

Williams was doing his best to calm me down. He handed me a cold towel. I must have sweat buckets while I was sleeping.

I felt my cheek. I had been crying.

“The land of the dead again, huh?” Williams asked.

I hesitated, but then decided to answer truthfully. “I’ve been seeing it constantly since Alex died.”

“Me too.”

That was a reply I had not expected.

“Oh, I haven’t given it a fancy name like your land of the dead,” Williams continued. “With me, it’s just a dream. About Alex. I can never remember what happens. All I know is I feel shit when I wake up. Which, I guess, makes it a nightmare, huh?”

“Maybe I should see a counselor.” I sighed. “Like we have to see before we go on a mission to kill children. Alex had his padre to talk to, but I don’t believe in any of that stuff, so I don’t have anyone …”

“I went to counseling once,” Williams said as he fetched me a glass of cold water. “Couples counseling. We were in a rut, the old woman and me. So one day we got a babysitter for our daughter and headed on over to a Forces counselor.”

“And? Any good?”

“Yeah. It helped. Some. I’d recommend it for minor marital problems. Whether the old dude would be much help dealing with something as serious as Alex’s death, I’m not so sure.”

“I don’t think it’s just Alex’s death that’s bothering me.”

“Oh? What else is on your mind?”

I tried to find the words to explain, but they just weren’t there. Williams saw that I was drawing blanks and continued. “Anyhow, even more so, if there’s other stuff you’re worried about. There’s only so much a desk jockey like that can do for people like us. Basically, you’ve got to work it out for yourself, I figure. At least you don’t believe in God, so you’re not about to start blaming yourself by calling it karma or divine retribution or whatever.”

Work it out for myself. Yeah. I know. I’ve known that from the start.

The problem was that I just couldn’t stand being ordered about by my own unconscious, even when it took the shape of Mom or Alex.

“Anyway, thanks, Williams, I’ll take over watch duty for a while. I’m wide awake now and not likely to get back to sleep anytime soon.”

I passed him my sheets. Williams started muttering something about how outrageous it was that we had to share the same sweat-drenched bedclothes, but I knew that he wasn’t really complaining. He was just trying to take my mind off my nightmares.

There were three cemeteries near the station: Olšany, Vinohrady, and Židov.

Kafka’s grave was in Židov, and it was easy enough to find. The office at the entrance to the cemetery gave me a small cap. It was covered in Hebrew script, which I couldn’t read. The Hebrew alphabet sure did look bizarre, I thought. Almost like it was designed by an alien computer. It had an artificial, constructed feel about it. The cap itself was on the small side—not really something to wear so much as something to pop on your head when necessary.

“You should cover your head before we go inside. This is the Jewish Cemetery after all,” Lucia explained.

I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of having to shake off a tail or deal with my pursuers with violence, as I undoubtedly would have had to do if I visited Lucia’s apartment again. But Williams came up with a good idea: why didn’t I arrange to meet Lucia in town? Depending on whether she was tailed, we might be able to determine if the enemy was interested in Lucia too, or whether they only had eyes for me, or indeed whether they were only interested in Lucia and therefore me by extension. Then there was also the possibility that Lucia and the youths were all working together. Whichever it was, meeting Lucia outside would surely help us narrow down the possibilities.

So I told Lucia I was interested in seeing Kafka’s grave and asked if she would act as my guide to Prague. Given how widespread alternative reality contacts were these days, it was a bit of a risky move—why would anyone need a human guide when you had all the tourist information you could ever want at the blink of an eye, literally? But after some hesitation, Lucia assented, and so I ended up taking the metro with Lucia to the outskirts of the city where the New Jewish Cemetery was located.

The cemetery was covered in a canopy of lush foliage that seemed to block off what little of the pale sunlight managed to creep through the amber clouds in the sky.

There were a few other visitors to Kafka’s grave. They were leaving pebble stones as an offering, as was the Czech custom.

“Kafka’s sisters?” I asked, pointing at the gilded lettering that had been added at the bottom of the gravestone, where three feminine-sounding names had been inscribed.

“I believe so.”

“They all died around the same time too. 1942, 1943—ah …”

“Yes, Auschwitz.” Lucia nodded. “They all died in the Holocaust. Even his youngest sister, Ottla. She had married a German, but she divorced him to voluntarily move to the Ghetto. Ottla’s husband tried to stop her from divorcing him. As the wife of an Aryan, she was eligible to have her Jewish status overlooked. Still, she chose to go. She left their daughter with him.”

I never knew that, I told her, although she explained that it was quite widely known—common knowledge in Prague, at least. Franz, the eldest of the Kafkas, was most fond of the youngest, Ottla.

“Well, I take my hat off to you, Ms. Lucia—you sure do know your Kafka.”

“Well, my Holocaust more than my Kafka. John used to talk about it all the time.”

“John? Oh, you mean the gentleman that you used to see?” I maintained my facade of barely remembering his details.

Lucia nodded. “John was always discussing the Holocaust. It must have been the subject of his research. It’s not as if he were actually Jewish himself …”

“You said he was involved in a DARPA research project, right? Studying history? That’s unusual.”

“Well, I never knew the details. Say, Mr. Bishop, you seem awfully interested all of a sudden.”

“Not particularly,” I assured her, covering my tracks as deftly as I could. “It just struck me as somewhat incongruous, that’s all, the US Army spending their time and money researching a well-worn subject such as the Holocaust. I would have thought they’d want to spend their time on more practical things, like, I don’t know, robots, or artificial intelligence, or high-tech polymers or something.”

“When you put it like that, I suppose you’re right,” said Lucia. “But it wasn’t just the Holocaust he was interested in. He also talked about Stalin a lot. And Cambodia. Sudan, Rwanda, places like that too. His research always seemed to be focused around all the cruelest episodes in recent history.”

“Okay, so the Holocaust was just a part of that.”

“Yes, I think so.”

Lucia and I left a pebble each as an offering to the Kafkas. For Franz and his three sisters. Unlike Franz, his sisters had only the years of their deaths inscribed, not the actual dates. These were unknown, as with so many Jews who met their fate during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was such an all-encompassing word that the details were soon swallowed up in the dark depths of history.

“But we do know exactly when they were transported to the concentration camps. Those records survive,” Lucia told me in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “It’s like with us—whenever we move, take the metro, buy some food, or ride a tram, there’s always a record.”

“I guess so. And I guess, like with Sarajevo and New York, it’s not just to act as a deterrent to terrorists but to quickly and accurately identify any victims if the terrorists succeed. Killing two birds with one stone, you might say: preventative measures and help with the mop-up if the worst ever does happen.”

Lucia smiled. “Mr. Bishop, you almost sound like you’re lecturing me. But you don’t need to convince me. Don’t worry, you’re preaching to the converted. I don’t particularly feel that Big Brother is watching us in a totalitarian Orwellian nightmare.” She laughed. “But while we’re on the subject of historical lectures, what I will say, though, is that the government at the time didn’t have anywhere near as clear a picture of their own citizens as they made out. No database or central records. They were basically relying on a ten-year-old national census. So how did they record, analyze, sort, and compile effective records of who actually was and wasn’t Jewish? Punch cards. The operation to transport Jews to the concentration camps was the largest coordinated transport effort in human history at the time. The Nazis could only do this by generating and tabulating data on punch cards, based on the results of the old census. They used IBM machines to organize all of this. IBM hadn’t invented the modern PC yet, of course, but they did have tabulators that they called ‘computing machines’ that were already being used for industrial purposes, and it was relatively straightforward for the Nazis to set these up for their own purposes.”

“So you’re saying that without IBM’s … tabulators, the Nazis would never have been able to organize the mass transit of Jews to the concentration camps?” I asked, as if I were reviewing information for a quiz. “Well, they say that the modern computer was born out of cryptanalysis and grew up on ballistics. It looks like the computer’s ancestors can’t escape the shadow of war either.”

“John showed me one once. A transportation schedule for the Jews, tabulated by IBM. John’s actual research was top secret, but the schedules themselves were open source, so I guess he didn’t see any harm in it.”

“Hmm. I’m getting a mental image of a couple snuggling down on a couch to spend the evening poring over Holocaust memorabilia. Not exactly your usual dinner and a movie, eh?”

“I guess not. We were an odd couple, that’s for sure.” Lucia laughed. “He often used to say that genocide had a unique odor about it.”

“Odor?”

“According to him, the Holocaust, Katyn Forest, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge all had a lingering scent about them. Whenever there was some sort of genocide—a deliberate, large-scale massacre—that country always had this distinct odor about it.”

The smell of genocide.

John Paul must have come across this theory in the course of his historical research.

“Presumably he wasn’t talking literally about the smell of dead bodies?”

“No, I don’t think so. I guess he was using poetic license. Maybe he was trying to discuss a discovery he made during the course of his research without actually having to compromise any of the secret details.”

“And so you never really found out what exactly his research was about …”

“Yes. I don’t think he told anybody. He had a small team around him doing some of the legwork, but I think he did most of the heavy lifting himself. I don’t think he even discussed his work with his wife.”

“His wife. Oh. Uh … so you were … uh …” It was never an easy job, trying to seem surprised by information that you already knew full well. I gave it my best shot.

“Yes,” Lucia said, “he had a wife. And a daughter. I knew about them both. You must think I’m the worst sort of woman …” Lucia trailed off and then turned away from me and started walking toward the metro station alone.

I hurried after her. “Um … look … Ms. Sukrova. I’m really sorry, I was prying. None of this is any of my business, and I had no right …”

“No, it’s my own fault. I shouldn’t be so careless with my tongue.” Her eyes were filled with sadness. “I’m so sorry for ruining a perfectly good day.”

“Please. The fault really is all mine … I was being far too familiar with all my questions. If there’s any way I could make it up to you, I would.”

Inside, I was sneering at myself. Laughing at how low I was stooping at this moment.

Ms. Lucia Sukrova. I already know full well that you used to date a married man.

I know which restaurants you ate in. I know what magazines you bought. I know which branches of Starbucks you took your coffee in. I know how many condoms John Paul used to buy.

I know all this, and yet here I am talking to you, putting on a bare-faced facade, painfully dragging all this information out from your own lips just so that I can pretend to you that I’ve acquired this information from you “naturally.”

“Mr. Bishop? If you do really mean that about making it up to me, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to accompany me to just one more place?” Lucia asked. She was still smiling sadly.

I was overwhelmed by remorse at my own shamelessness. I had no right to look on her face. I was no man.

2

The club was pounding with youthful vitality. The dance music pumping through the club was like an alien being to me. I’d long since stopped following the latest trends in music, so I wouldn’t have known whether to describe the setup as a Prague thing or just a young person thing.

“You know, this isn’t really my scene …” I said, though my face undoubtedly already showed that fact.

“I thought you said you’d do anything to make it up to me.” Lucia pulled me in by my arm. “Just to keep me company?”

Truth be told I found it hard to believe this was Lucia’s sort of scene either. She seemed out of place in such a lively atmosphere. She was most beautiful when talking about books, and there was nothing in her classroom to suggest she was interested in this sort of hedonism.

As I was cajoled into the club by Lucia and crossed the threshold, I was assailed by an uneasy feeling. Something wasn’t quite right, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. I was alert, anxious. Something was missing.

We arrived at the bar.

I looked over to the dance floor to see a mass of writhing young men and women—hardly more than boys and girls—grinding, making out, sharing hormone hits. The tiles of the dance floor were covered by a strikingly realistic video projection of the abyss. I could imagine myself tripping over the edge and plunging downward for all eternity—except that the young people were dancing right above it, floating on the void.

One of the young people stood out: a skinhead who’d coated himself with a holographic nanolayer. A thin film on the back of his head created a display field that made it look as though his skull was transparent and his brain was visible for all to see. Just CGI, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder if hell was in there too …

Lucia had already found us a couple of empty bar stools and fired off a drinks order.

“Have you had a proper beer since you arrived in this country?” she asked. “A proper Czech beer, I mean.”

“Uh … just a Budweiser or two.”

“The real Budweiser Budvar? Or just what you Americans call Budweiser?”

“Um, the second one, I think. It’s what I drink back home, anyway.”

“Well, we’ll have to change that, won’t we? Oh, I’m sure your stuff’s fine as far as it goes, but this here’s the real deal.”

Two glasses arrived on cue.

“What you Americans call ‘Budweiser’ is really just a brand name, no more. And, in fact, if you look closely at the label of the stuff you usually drink, you’ll see that it’s made by an American company called Anheuser-Busch, unlike our stuff, which comes from the city of České Budějovice—Budweis in English—a bit to the south of here. That’s why your Budweiser can’t be marketed by that name in many European countries; Budweiser Budvar is the only one allowed to use the trademark. Anyway, more to the point, this is a great Czech beer—the best in the world, I think.”

I listened to her speech and I was surprised. Not because of anything she said, but because she casually flipped out a change purse from her jeans. I hadn’t seen such a thing for years. I was even more surprised to see Lucia take a bill out and hand it to the bartender as a tip. This was a blast from the past—a flashback to the pre-automatic-transaction era.

Then it hit me. The reason why I felt something was not quite right when I entered this joint.

We hadn’t been ID’d on our way in.

If Lucia clocked my surprise, she didn’t show it. She just took a swig of her beer. A hearty one at that. Maybe there was more to this lady than first met the eye.

I was evidently reeling from the shock, as Lucia eventually did catch on to my dazed expression.

“Aren’t you going to drink anything?” she asked.

“Uh, sure. I was just a little surprised, is all …”

“By what?”

“Well, it’s not exactly every day you see paper money.”

“I suppose you’re right—since Mobs became widespread, you mean?” she said, referring to the ubiquitous mobile terminals.

“So … is this place black market or something?”

Lucia laughed. “Hardly. It’s all above board, just about. The Czech government, or I guess I should say the Euro government, still acknowledges bills as legal tender. Not too many places are happy taking them, of course, but—”

“Here is one of them?”

“Exactly. It’s a regional thing. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that paper money is technically legal tender as such, although it’s certainly not illegal. It’s more like what would you call in America … scrip?”

“Scrip, huh? I’ve heard of it, but I thought it had been abandoned last century, given up as a failed experiment.”

“Last century’s grassroots attempts at establishing parallel currencies, you mean? Yes, they were abandoned, even if some of them were successful enough while they lasted. Based on cooperative ideals, issued by local organizations with lofty socialist goals such as ‘back to basics’ localism. They were usually well meaning enough but, like most things based on idealism rather than harsh day-to-day pragmatism, never really took off. Whereas the money in my pocket now comes from a very different sort of impetus. A punk spirit, if you will.”

“Punk scrip? I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

“Money that’s untraceable. The government isn’t too happy about it. It’s something of a thorn in their side, and there are plenty among the powers that be who’d like to see it eradicated. But they’ve never succeeded in passing a law to ban it. Even within government, not everyone’s in favor of tightening the surveillance state further, and I suppose that paper money is something that helps even the odds in the little person’s favor.”

I looked around the club again. This time I noticed, dotted among the youths, a number of older people, older than us. People who would have remembered a time when they didn’t have their identity and movements checked and tracked and cross-corroborated twenty-four seven, 365 days a year. And then I realized that one of the older customers was waving at us and making his way over here. He wore a well-cut sports jacket, casually carried off over a cashmere turtleneck.

“Lucia ahoy!”

“Ciao, Lucius!”

An acquaintance of Lucia’s evidently. She beckoned him over to the bar and bade him sit down next to me.

“Lucius is the owner of this club,” Lucia said by way of introduction. “A shrewd operator, but don’t let that fool you—he also has an introspective streak and is a gentleman to boot.”

“Haha. The only ‘introspection’ you’ll see from me on a day like this is when I consider what to do with my delivery boy if he doesn’t get my Budweiser kegs here on time.” His was a deep, steady voice.

“This gentleman here’s Mr. Charles Bishop,” Lucia said, completing the introductions. “Recently arrived in Prague, sent here by his advertising company.”

“Bishop,” I said, savoring the ring of my alias. “Swell place you got here.”

“Oh, you’re too kind. It’s nothing.”

We were sticking to small talk for now—there was nothing bigger to talk about yet.

“So, Lucia, what’s been keeping you from us this past while?” Lucius asked.

“I’m sorry—work’s just been crazy,” said Lucia. A lie. Certainly for the last few days, while Williams and I kept a watch on her, traffic to and from her apartment had been pretty light.

“Well, it’s good to be busy,” Lucius said. “But we’ve missed you here. Tyrone in particular. He’s madly in love with you, you know.”

“If you say so,” Lucia replied, but she was laughing.

Lucius pointed toward the other end of the bar. “Don’t believe me? Just go and ask him yourself. He’s standing over there on his own like a lost soul.”

“So he is. Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Lucia stood up and started walking over toward the man Lucius had just identified as Tyrone. It was just Lucius and me at the bar now. I took a sip of the Budvar.

It really was good.

“So, how do you know Lucia?” Lucius asked. I glanced up, checking for any signs of wariness or jealousy on his part—was I encroaching on his territory? But no, judging from his tone of voice and demeanor, he was just making light chitchat, asking as a friend.

“I’m her student. She’s teaching me Czech.”

Lucius made a show of mock surprise. “Well what do you know! There’s a first time for everything. Normally Lucia never brings her students here.”

“Well, I wanted to see Kafka’s grave today, so she was kind enough to act as my guide, to help me find it. We were out and about anyway, so here we are, I guess.”

“Kafka’s grave, huh? Right opposite the metro station? Pretty tough to find, I imagine?”

Was he testing me? My guard went up. Still, better to try and deflect any suspicion or hostility rather than tackle it head on.

“Yeah, boy did I feel a fool. Still, better safe than sorry.” I grinned broadly. The quintessential clownish American tourist. Lucius smiled too—my story seemed to be washing.

“So, how do you like our humble little joint? Paying your way with real money and no tedious ID checks.”

“It’s great! Is this pretty normal for the Czech Republic?”

Lucius laughed and shook his head. “Hardly. The government isn’t too keen on this sort of place. We’re black sheep, too far under the radar for their liking. Not that they can do anything to us legally. I expect they’ve got a few plainclothes public safety officers mixed in with the rest of my clientele to try and keep the peace. As if we’re going to have any trouble when the beer’s so good!”

“Well, this is certainly new to me—there are no places like this left in the States.”

“Yep, Europe does have its advantages. The US might be the home of the free, but these days there’s probably more you can get away with on this side of the Atlantic,” Lucius said. He caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a dry Cinzano on the rocks.

“Necessary sacrifices in the war against terror, I suppose. You have to admire the European sangfroid, though, losing Sarajevo like that and still being as liberal as this when it comes to freedom.”

“Freedom always involves choices, though, doesn’t it?” Lucius replied, lifting his glass of vermouth to his lips the moment it arrived. “Like the worker who voluntarily submits himself to losing his individual liberty while he labors but in exchange gains the freedoms that his salary affords him. He can now buy things. No longer is he tied down to having to till his own fields and reap his own harvest and hunt for his own meat. He can pay farmers to do all that for him and enjoy the benefits of fresh vegetables delivered to his doorstep, meat that’s already been painstakingly butchered and deboned, even have his entire meals prepared for him. Is he a wage slave or a freedom fighter?”

“Like in the States, how the citizen has voluntarily given up a portion of his privacy in order to be free from the threat of terrorism?” I added.

Lucius thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I think you’re right. It’s a continuum, and Europe is just a couple of steps further down the spectrum toward individual freedoms. That said, there’s not exactly a whole lot in it. This sort of joint here is about as far as we go.”

“So do you see yourself as running this place to protect your freedoms?”

Lucius’s eyes flickered, as if he were searching for an answer. “I don’t think I’d go quite that far. I guess I’m just trying to articulate a feeling that, say, the kids on the dance floor over there don’t understand. The fact that you only become aware of the trade-offs you make for freedom when you’re already having it eroded from all sides.” He turned to face the young people gyrating over the abyss. “Many of the young people over there believe in freedom as something that’s pure and absolute. It’s a phase they have to go through, this idealized notion of liberty. That way, when they finally grow up and are put in the position of actually having to make real decisions, they appreciate ‘real’ freedom—the fruits of their own choices—all the more.”

“You sound like you see yourself as a guidance counselor,” I said.

“I guess I do. Well, I like to think of myself as enlightened, at least, and I’m always happy to spread the love.” With that, Lucius lapsed into silence as he surveyed the room in a deliberate, calm manner. I could see what Lucia had meant when she described him as introspective. He was contemplative, a philosopher. Even his conversation had been carefully chosen; we had touched on some deep topics, but he had given very little away. This was definitely a man who liked to think before he spoke.

I decided to push the conversation a little further. “Well, the Enlightenment was a European movement after all. Not so easy for us simple Americans to relate to.”

“I’d hardly say that. Isn’t the US always instrumental in exporting its freedom and democracy around the world? Your own unique brand of Enlightenment?”

“Hey, there’s no need to go all sarcastic on me.”

“No sarcasm intended,” Lucius said with a straight face. “Think about how much the cost of modern warfare has skyrocketed, even compared to just a few decades ago. The huge costs associated with the latest high-tech weaponry, the increased personnel costs, the opportunity cost. War just isn’t profitable anymore, no matter how much oil might be at stake. And yet America still soldiers on, policing the world. Why? Even going to the trouble and massive expense of hiring private contractors around the world to put out fires that have nothing to do with the US. Sure, there are those who criticize your actions as Team America trying to impose their righteousness on the whole world, but I see it differently. Given that it’s the US who’s picking up the tab, I see America’s wars as a new form of Enlightenment, where war is no longer an extension of diplomacy—diplomacy is now an extension of war.”

“War … as Enlightenment?”

“Whether or not Americans see it that way, yes. I’d argue that their military actions are exactly that. The so-called war against terror is an extremely principled war, devoted, even, to certain ideologies: humanity, altruism, the Golden Rule. The US is not the only country who acts this way—most modern democracies support this way of thinking, to a greater or lesser extent—but America’s the leader of the pack.”

“Uh, thank you, I think …” I managed to say.

“No,” Lucius said bluntly. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m neither praising nor condemning US foreign policy. I’m just calling it like I see it. After all, who says Enlightenment is always a good thing? What might seem like progress to one person might be a self-righteous imposition of values to another.”

I didn’t really know what to say to this man. Was he really just a club owner? I decided to ask him straight up.

Lucius laughed. “Am I ‘just’ a club owner? I guess so, in the sense that Eric Hoffer was ‘just’ a longshoreman, or your dear friend Kafka was ‘just’ a petty bureaucrat. The Japanese have a saying that all honest trades are equally honorable. And I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that thought is no respecter of persons.”

“Lucius, what are you two talking about?” I turned around—Lucia was back.

“Not much. Just how freedom is a currency we spend, and how war is Enlightenment …”

“Just the usual idle chitchat then?” Lucia laughed.

Lucius smiled. “Actually, there aren’t too many people who I can talk to like Mr. Bishop here. Sadly, though, I’m going to have to call it a day and retire to the office. My stevedoring duties call, as it were. But it was interesting talking to you, Mr. Bishop, and I do hope you’ll come by again sometime so we can pick up where we left off.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

Lucia and I watched Lucius as he disappeared into the back office.

What was it about the disappearing figure that made me feel nervous?

3

“Well, you weren’t wrong when you described him as being the introspective sort,” I said to Lucia after Lucius had left. “He struck me as being more the Gallic philosopher than the stereotypical Czech businessman.” I took another sip of my Budvar.

“I told you so. He keeps you entertained, though, doesn’t he?”

“It can’t be easy to make a success of a club like this, though?”

“Maybe not. But as long as there are people who remember what life was like before the surveillance crackdown, and as long as there are youths who don’t remember, but who still feel clamped down on and claustrophobic without being quite able to explain why, there will always be a need for places like this. It’s just a case of supply and demand.”

“So the people who are here now are the people who demand their freedom—is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

“A taste of it, at least. Take me—I’m scared of terrorists, why wouldn’t I be? I’m glad of the war on terror, as they call it, and the fact that our society is now organized enough to nip potential threats in the bud. In that sense, I suppose I might be different from those boys and girls on the dance floor. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes want a breather, a time-out. Just once in a while, it’s nice to be able to relax and spend time in a place where nobody knows what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, who you’re dancing with, for how long …”

Me time. In the truest sense of the phrase. That was what Lucia got from this place.

A place where nothing is observed, nothing recorded, and anything goes.

And Lucia wanted to share it with me.

“It was very kind of you to bring me with you to this place,” I said. “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing. It just felt like the right thing to do. I’m not sure why,” Lucia mumbled, staring at her beer glass.

“To talk about John?” I asked, as I placed my own glass down on the counter.

“Maybe. I’m not religious. I have no priest to talk to. And I don’t believe in counseling.”

“I know what you mean. I’m the same.”

Lucia’s eyes glinted with the faintest hint of a smile. “Poor little me, huh? No sympathetic priest to pour my heart out to, and I’m not in the habit of keeping a journal to sort out my thoughts.”

“Maybe you should write a book? They’re all the rage, aren’t they, confessional memoirs. A coming-of-age story or something.”

“I just don’t seem to have the talent or the inclination for it. Pretty pathetic, I know, considering I studied language.”

“Well, I guess that leaves just one option. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

Lucia’s eyes flicked away from mine and toward the abyss that threatened to pull in the dancers. It was as if she longed to be sucked down into that bottomless pit herself.

“I was in bed with him when Sarajevo disappeared.” So began Lucia’s story.

Her voice was completely different from that point on. A thin whisper. Really, I shouldn’t have been able to hear her without bringing my ear right up to her lips. The music should have drowned her out. And yet, somehow, I could hear every one of her words with absolute clarity.

“John’s wife had gone to visit her sister in Sarajevo, taking their daughter with her. John and I were making the most of that precious time together without them. Cambridge was our oyster. It was a time when we didn’t have to worry, when John wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder. It was such a lovely time. I was happy. So happy that I couldn’t even bring myself to feel the slightest bit guilty at what we were doing. Every spare moment I had, I spent with him.”

Then Lucia paused and bit down hard on her lip. An act of self-flagellation to punish herself?

“I remember it clearly. We had just made love, and I had gone for a shower. I emerged clean and fresh to find John frozen stiff, glued to the nanolayer projection. The front page was showing an update flashing across the top. Sarajevo had been hit by a nuclear bomb. He was watching the linked video clip.

“I was terrified. I just stood there, still wrapped in my towel. He, too, was paralyzed, just watching the same clip over and over again. The anchorwoman in the clip was just reading out information as it was transmitted to her, and the subpage below the clip was saturated with constant updates, links to new clips. John made no effort to look at any of them. He wasn’t interested in finding out any new information. He was stunned enough by what he had already seen, and all he could do was keep his eyes glued to that.”

Lucia stopped to take a sip of her beer. Her voice was calm and disinterested; it was as if she were talking about events that had happened to somebody else. I almost expected her to start the next part of her story with something along the lines of “once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a woman called Lucia Sukrova.” But when she continued, it was about how John Paul flew to Sarajevo.

“I wanted to go with him, but even I had some sense of shame—it would hardly do for a mistress to accompany her lover as he traveled to discover the fate of his wife and daughter. Had John and I been in bed laughing when the bomb exploded? Was he inside me when his wife and only child were obliterated from this earth? I didn’t know what to do, what I could do. I had no idea how I was going to act, how I was meant to act, when he returned from Sarajevo. The worst part of it was that I still loved John, with all my heart. I ached for him as soon as he got on that flight. I needed to feel his body wrapped around mine again. And I wanted to mortify the part of myself that had these unbearably selfish feelings.

“In the end, I didn’t need to worry about what to say to him when he came back. He just silently returned, dropped out of school, and went away somewhere. I didn’t try and look for him. I was afraid of seeing him again. After all, he had become the living embodiment of my own terrible sin. And I didn’t have the confidence or the strength to face the consequences of my own actions.”

Lucia’s story was over.

I had been listening in silence. There was nothing I could have said. After she finished, she stared in silence at the bottom of her glass. I had no idea what I was supposed to say next. What to say to help ease the massive burden she was carrying on her shoulders.

I particularly couldn’t say anything because her story hit so close to home.

That vague sense of emptiness that I remember feeling when I read her profile back at briefing. It was crystallizing, coming together. The gaps were being filled in, the skeleton fleshed out with Lucia’s story. The written word only encompasses so much; Lucia’s voice was so much more revealing.

I remember someone once saying that we have eyelids but no earlids for a reason. You can shut your eyes and be oblivious to the words written down in front of you, but you can never quite block out a story that someone else shares with you from their own mouth, with their own lips. Not unless you can completely shut off your ego from your body.

It was only now that Lucia had shared her story with me that this fact really hit home.

The human voice adds color to a story.

The color of penitence. Thick, heavy slabs, dark and red like dried blood, saturated like a Mark Rothko abstract.

John Paul’s wife and daughter disappeared that day in Sarajevo. And Lucia had no way of atoning for her sins against them. No way of begging for forgiveness. Because they were dead. Not even their corpses remained.

To lose the subject of your feelings of guilt is to lose your hope that you can ever truly be forgiven. That’s why murder was such a taboo in all cultures—there was no way of atoning to your victim. No possibility of pardon.

The dead cannot forgive.

That was why Lucia was suffering so. She had already started her irreversible descent down that slippery slope and had learned too late that her actions were painfully, hauntingly irrevocable. In her mind, there was no one and nothing left in this world who could possibly forgive her for what she had done to John Paul’s wife and daughter.

God is dead. Which meant that sin was now solely in the realm of humanity. Humans were always the ones to commit sin, but now, instead of praying for divine forgiveness, humans had to find some way to work it all out for themselves. When the spirit was no longer living, the flesh could no longer afford to be weak. But when the target of the sin was gone …

This must have been why I was so drawn to Lucia. She was a kindred spirit—a fellow unforgivable. Like me, she was beholden to the dead.

Which was why I decided to tell her about my own sins.

It was the least I could do. And looking back on it now, I see that it was my own way of acknowledging that I liked her.

4

I asked if my mother was in pain.

The doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain, but whether she was still able to feel pain.

I thought of the corpse of the girl who’d had her cranium split open by the rifle round, the body of the boy who’d had his guts blown out from behind, the villagers roasted like so many chickens, and the dead body of the ex-brigadier general who had fashioned all these atrocities.

The accident happened three days before my return to Washington from the death and destruction of central Asia. I didn’t panic when Colonel Rockwell told me the news; I felt a strange calm as I headed toward the hospital.

It had been an old-school Cadillac that had run over my mother—a real piece of junk that had never been retrofitted with modern safety devices. A throwback to the twentieth century. It was pink. It almost seemed hilarious. Except that at some stage, I would have to face the fact that it wasn’t a joke. Mom really was run over by a Hollywood cliché pink Cadillac. To round out the joke, the driver had been a textbook drunk who’d had no interest in installing the sort of automated soundness-of-mind checker that now came standard on modern vehicles. How else would the pink Caddy have had the freedom to lunge onto the sidewalk where my mother was walking, taking her out along with the booze-addled driver and a couple of other pedestrians for good measure?

Putting aside the absurdity of the fact that such a car was somehow still considered roadworthy in this day and age, the end result was that the pink Cadillac finally came to a stop only when its momentum was killed by its smashing into the flank of another car across the way that had been minding its own business at a traffic light. The pink Caddy’s momentum wasn’t the only thing killed at that point: the driver’s drink-sodden life was snuffed out instantly.

My mother died too. Her lungs had stopped moving by the time the ambulances arrived, and although she had been put on a respirator, she was pronounced DOA at the hospital.

But then she was brought back to life. The hospital had the right equipment and performed the correct medical procedures. Mom was given the same treatment as we were after being wounded in battle: the processes of her internal organs were suspended, nanomachines stopped her internal hemorrhaging, and finally her heart started beating again.

She came back to life for a reason: so that she could force me to decide her fate. To punish me for joining the army.

It was none other than my own mother now treading that fine line between life and death. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to rush to the hospital—I felt no sense of urgency, no compulsion to hurry. Thanks to my occupation, everyday life was so saturated with the color of death that I was now inured to it. My inoculation had started even before I joined the Forces, of course, what with my father disappearing one day when I was young, and thanks to my friend who died of cancer as a kid. So was I now supposed to wallow in the luxury of fretting about whether another person close to me was going to die?

I walked. During the whole length of the journey from my lodgings to the plane to Washington, then to the cab ride to the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I started running. My heart was full of sadness, but it was of a chronic sort rather than acute—not so much a response to this latest tragedy, but a world-weariness at my preconceptions about the painful nature of life being reconfirmed. Nothing surprised me anymore. Such was the way of the world.

It was summer. I stepped out of the August sun into the crisp air of the hospital reception area and signed in. It was only when the receptionist asked me if I wanted to upload a hospital guide for my alternative reality contacts that I realized I had left my ARs at home. At no point at the airport or in the taxi had I even noticed I was missing them. I told the receptionist I didn’t have my ARs in, so she activated the hospital beacon so that I would be led automatically to my destination. A black beacon appeared on the floor, swimming across the pressurized floor pads like a goldfish in a bowl, leading me toward the ICU. The hospital floor looked almost like a work of art.

I walked along the hospital corridor, guided by the slow-moving black beacon as it crept through the wards and public spaces. Each of these were clearly marked to distinguish them. A faint dreamlike aroma was pervading my senses.

Without the beacon I would never have been able to find my destination, but with its help it wasn’t too long before I arrived at the ICU. I was given antiseptic whites to change into before crossing the threshold into the unit via a set of sliding double doors. Inside the ward, beds were cordoned off via transparent curtains, and beyond them were the patients, many of whom looked as though they were not much longer for this world.

Most of them would probably make a full recovery, of course. But I didn’t know about my mother yet.

The black homing beacon crept on and slid underneath one of the sets of curtains, so I parted them and went through.

I saw a morass of tubes and monitors. The tubes that plugged into my mother’s body were there to pump in life-giving nanomachines to make up for whichever of her internal organs had given out. Her normally luxuriant hair had been completely shaved off, and the gash in her head was sewn up, stapled, and covered in hemostatic pads dripping with blood. There were also a number of places on her shaved skull where somebody—a doctor, probably—had written notes in shorthand, presumably to indicate where to aim the electromagnetic waves that would guide the nanomachines to their destinations inside her skull. I was reminded of Post-Its on a refrigerator door or of the clutter at Williams’s house that was punctuated with week-old memos to self: Don’t forget to pick up the groceries. A whole corner of his kitchen was dedicated to such notes. And then there were those police procedurals on TV, with the detective’s desk in organized chaos …

Yes, I was reminded of all of these by the jottings on my mother’s shiny head, which now looked liked a bizarre modern version of those old phrenological models.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood there in front of my mother. At some point I heard a gentle voice—Captain Clavis Shepherd?—and I turned around to see who had spoken.

The man introduced himself as my mother’s attending physician.

I asked about my mother.

She had multiple fractures and extensive subcutaneous bleeding. Many of her internal organs had been damaged to the point of impaired function. Nothing, though, that the technology couldn’t keep stable. Her life was not in immediate danger.

I didn’t press him on his precise definition of “life.” What “life” currently meant for my mother as she lay there, on her side, oblivious to the world.

“Is she conscious?” I asked, and I noticed the doctor’s lips tightening. At the time, I read the doctor’s expression as a sign that I should give up all hope for that, but looking back on it now I realize that I was subtly wrong on that count. His troubled expression was probably more that of a specialist trying to search for the right words with which to explain the nuances of a difficult and complicated situation to a layman. A situation I was somewhat familiar with as a specialist in my own field. What to do when friends or family—or even desk jockeys within your own organization—asked you for a yes or no answer when there were only shades of gray. For every subtle and complicated question, there was an answer that was perfectly simple, straightforward, and wrong.

“Unfortunately, that’s not an easy question to answer,” the doctor eventually said. “Your mother suffered from severe blunt-force trauma directly to her head, resulting in what is known medically as a cerebral contusion. She has a comparatively small area damaged on the side that was hit, but the damage on the other side is much more extensive, with multiple microhemorrhages deep inside her brain.”

“I don’t understand—on the other side?”

“If you can forgive a somewhat insensitive analogy, it’s a bit like hitting a billiard ball with a cue. The area you hit is quite small, but when the ball then hits the cushion on the other side there’s a lot of force absorbed. When the brain is hit in this manner, it has nowhere to go except into the hard skull wall on the other side …”

A billiard match inside my mother’s skull but with a cue ball as soft as marshmallows.

The doctor went on to explain that, as a result of the trauma, the part of my mother’s brain around her neocortex was severely damaged. She had lost her respiratory function entirely, although that could be artificially maintained with the machines.

“Mr. Shepherd. We’re able to isolate the different functions of the cerebral cortex into separate compartments. Modules, if you will. And we can confirm that many of your mother’s cerebral cortex modules are still alive. We can even positively identify which ones. But …” The doctor hesitated.

“But?”

“Well, medical science just doesn’t have any frame of reference to help us determine which and how many modules need to be alive before we can describe the person as being meaningfully ‘conscious.’ In the same way that medical science can’t describe what it’s like to be dead.”

My mother’s house. The house that had once been my home.

The house was in a quiet corner of Georgetown, not too far from the Exorcist Steps, named after the old movie. The steps had always been covered in graffiti, sometimes of a pretty creative variety. Once, around the time I was in high school, someone covered the whole surface of the steps with display paint and projected an image of Father Karras tumbling to his doom, looped over and over. The incident was briefly on the network news, I remember.

I opened the door. The place smelled of my mother. Her life. Her air.

“Anybody home?” I found myself muttering under my breath, out of habit. The house had always been a place of words. Now silence prevailed.

I started walking around the place that should have been my own home. I felt like a detective looking for evidence, or even a thief. My own room was still there, kept in place. I ran a finger across the surface of my old desk. There was hardly any dust. The room had been cleaned regularly.

Eyes, I thought to myself.

This house was a pair of eyes. My mother’s eyes, watching over me to make sure I didn’t suddenly disappear like my father. I grew up under the gaze of those eyes. Even when Mom was out of the house and I was in the living room on my own, on the network, I still always felt something over my shoulder.

My mother had been an expert at tracing my movements. Nothing escaped her—it was uncanny. What candy bar I’d been eating, which of my friends I’d been secretly hanging out with—there was always something in the house that would give me away and land me in trouble.

I sat down on my bed, the bed that had once been mine. She would have made an excellent tracker, I thought to myself, and almost burst into laughter at the thought.

This had been my mother’s world.

The world of a hundred eyes focused on a single objective: to make sure a person would never disappear.

At some point that world became stifling, suffocating. That was why I joined the army and signed up for Special Forces. Well, you got what you wanted, didn’t you, Clavis Shepherd? Plenty of danger, more dead bodies than you could shake a stick at. And you’re not dead yet! You’ve even lost a comrade—admittedly due to suicide rather than in the field, but hey, it still counts. You’re the real deal. What more could you want from life?

I forced myself to stop thinking. I was afraid of where it would lead me.

I went into the kitchen. It, too, was clean and orderly. Not a single magnet or memo on the refrigerator door, a fact I found eerie.

My mother didn’t like photographs. There were no framed pictures in the living room. It occurred to me that I had never seen a single photo of my father. There probably wasn’t a photo anywhere in the entire house—not of my father, not of my mother, not of me.

I wondered if there would be anything on Mom’s server space. If I were to log in, would I have found us all there, safely preserved and easily accessible?

The wallpaper was still the same as when I was a kid. It had yellowed a little with age, but remained neat and clean. I tapped a wall with my fingertips to bring up an access port. I tried to see if I could log into my mother’s account, but—obviously—I was asked for authentication, which I couldn’t provide.

Was Mom’s life recorded here in minute detail? If I were to summon up her Life Graph and order the computer to edit it into a biography, would there be a clue at the end as to what she would have wanted me to do with her now?

And then I realized how much I was focusing on physical records.

Logs. Life Graphs. Rather than worry about these external documents of Mom’s life, shouldn’t I have been thinking about the internal ones? My mother as she was inside myself, as I remembered her? And then I realized that my motive in coming to this house—to try and somehow figure out the right thing to do—was no more than procrastination. More than that—I was evading the truth.

The truth that I had no idea what my mother would have wanted.

My job was to read the psychological profiles of my targets. The NSA or the National Counterterrorism Center handed over their logs, and I read them so as to make accurate predictions regarding the likely movements and behavior of the target I was assigned to kill. And yet here I was, utterly unable to guess what my own mother would have wanted.

Even if I had been able to access my mother’s logs at that point, there wasn’t a lot I would have been able to do with the unedited raw data, and even if some program had been able to collate it into a narrative, I doubt it would have been of much use to me at this juncture. And yet I wanted those records desperately. Not because I needed a basis for my decision, but because I couldn’t bear to acknowledge that I couldn’t even make that decision on my own.

I was starting to panic. I needed to sit down. I collapsed onto the sofa.

I did love my mother. I was sure of that much.

But I was terrified. What if I also hated her? I was mortified by the possibility that there was a part of me that was repulsed by this woman who had struggled so hard to raise me, this single mother who had given me so much.

I thought of the constant gaze that had followed me around in this house. From the other side of the room. From the kitchen. The eyes that were always there, trailing me, glued to my back long after the meal was over and I had retired to my room.

I was constantly being watched. Incessantly.

I felt a flashback—of what it was like when I was a kid. In the hall, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the shower. Mom’s gaze was always there, penetrating. Through this gap, that crevice, from this angle. I could still visualize all the sight lines in the house. My mother wasn’t overprotective—she never coddled me. If anything, her parenting style could have been described as almost laissez-faire. I got up to the usual share of kid’s tricks, and in most ways my childhood could have been described as normal, unexceptional. The only thing that marked me as being in any way different from the other kids was the vague feeling I had that my mother’s gaze was always on the back of my head.

The house. The house where my father disappeared from this world.

The house of my mother’s gaze.

It was comforting to be watched over, and then it was suffocatingly oppressive. Two sides of the same coin.

I knew at that moment I couldn’t stay the night there. I had to leave.

Later that day I found a small motel and checked in. I told the doctor that my mother wasn’t the sort of person to have prepared a will.

The doctor laid it out for me. “If your mother gave no instructions for her terminal care, and given that she was not religious, the choice falls to you. You are going to have to decide whether or not to continue her life-support treatment.”

I spent a day on the ward with my mother, staring at her face, quietly, agonizingly trying to work out the answer. What would Mom do? What would Mom want me to do?

That was when I asked if my mother was in pain, and the doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain but whether she was still able to feel pain. Furthermore, the doctor explained, it wasn’t clear to him where the precise line was where we couldn’t continue referring to my mother as “her” or “she.”

How many of the cerebral cortex modules that determined a person’s personality and consciousness needed to remain intact for you to refer to them as the same person? What “she” would have wanted? We had no way of vicariously experiencing my mother’s current mental state. So the question “Is she in pain?” was inadequate on so many levels. Did “she” still remain “she” in a meaningful sense? Could the nerve receptors that remained alive in her brain receive pain stimulus? Did “she” experience that stimulus in the form of pain as we know it?

The doctor was up front with me: he didn’t have the answers to any of these questions.

“Isn’t there someone who can decide for me?” I asked. I’m sure I was sobbing.

I was afraid. I had no idea what this doctor was trying to do. How could I make such an important decision when it was such a gray area?

It wasn’t the doctor’s fault, of course. We were now in the realm of philosophy, not medicine. And yet, frustratingly, modern technological developments were all useless when it came to the realm of philosophy. Technology could analyze and dissect human beings so well, but philosophy just didn’t want to know.

And I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to decide. I realized this might have seemed selfish—hypocritical, even—given the number of people I’d sent to their deaths. But when it comes to someone close, someone you love, you lose your mind. No one tells you of the huge, ambiguous gulf between the lands of the living and the dead. I longed for the days when we had that simple, black-and-white phrase: “brain dead.”

I returned to the motel, where I cried some more. I cried for the world that had gone past the point of no return in creating this awful ambiguity between life and death. I cried in terror. I cried at the prospect of having to decide, on the sheer harshness and cruelty of my position. I cried so much I felt nauseated. I fell prostrate on the bed, crying until I needed to run to the bathroom to dry-heave my guts out, and all that emerged was saliva and more tears.

At the end of the night I had decided what to do.

However difficult the question, when it came down to it there were only two alternatives, and I had to pick one of them.

I barely even skimmed over the letter of consent to terminate treatment.

I gave my consent where consent was needed, and my mother’s life support was switched off. The doctor asked me how I felt and offered the services of a recommended counselor. Yep, sure enough, it was the counselors again. Marriage on the rocks? About to head into battle? Relative just died? Counseling was the panacea, it seemed.

“No thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”

Basically, I was worn out.

I realized this at the funeral service. I’d worn myself out thinking about all the details, and that was why I’d been able to make my decision. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have still been at the hospital, sitting with Mom and her life-support systems, still turning over the options in my head.

At the time I had convinced myself that I was thinking of Mom’s best interests when I pulled the plug. When I pressed my fingerprint down on the device to give my consent, I believed that Mom wouldn’t have wanted a grim half-existence, that she would have wanted to be either alive or dead, one way or another, and that if she had been alive she would have been in terrible pain.

But, as the doctor had said, there was no way for me to know whether she was in pain. After all, she was no more than a thin remnant of her former self, and it wasn’t even clear whether the new “she” could feel pain.

Then there was that atmosphere. The oppressive feeling of my mother’s gaze that was reignited inside me when I visited the house.

Had I really arrived at my decision by considering my mother’s best interests? I searched deep inside myself, and by the time the funeral service was over I could no longer convince myself that I had.

From that moment onward I’d been plagued by the subconscious belief that I killed my own mother.

5

During the entire time it took for me to tell my story—minus the direct references to the army and my work, of course—I think I must have taken four sips of my beer. I don’t think Lucia’s glass touched her lips the entire time.

“Well, for what it’s worth I think you did the right thing. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not a sinner, unlike me,” she finally said.

I was ready to explode. It was a mistake to have sought partial release by confiding a watered-down version of my story to a civilian. There was a huge part of me that wanted to spit it all out—the deaths I had caused in the line of duty, my own “sins” as Lucia would have said—but I had to remain professional to the end. And it was killing me.

Because I had killed Mom.

Because I had killed the brigadier general.

Because I had killed the troops on patrol.

Because I had left the people in the village to their certain deaths.

Don’t forgive me, Lucia. The burden of guilt I carry with me is larger than you can even imagine. I’ve killed so many people, and soon I’m going to kill your former lover. So don’t grant me your pardon. If you were to pardon me … I don’t know what I’d do.

“That’s good of you to say. It makes me feel a little better,” I replied, subduing my bursting heart, turning it to stone. See? I could still give any answer I needed to give, any answer I wanted. After all, that’s how I dealt with the hundreds of innocents I left to their fate; that’s how I could kill children when they had their guns pointed at me; that’s how I could cope with seeing the girl with the glistening brains sprouting from the back of her head and the youth with the slippery guts spilling from his lifeless body.

“I’m not just saying that to comfort you, Mr. Bishop. You knew how much it was going to hurt you when you made your decision. You knew, even as you gave your order to terminate treatment, that you were never going to be able to forgive yourself. You knew, and still you went ahead with it, because you knew it was best for your mother that way. That’s not a sin. You were doing it for your mother’s sake.”

“Was I really?” I asked.

“Humans aren’t so bad, really. We’re not designed to go to hell. People like us—we’re predisposed to be basically good, not evil.”

“Lucia, I thought you were an atheist.” The conversation had suddenly taken a turn for the pious, and I blurted this out almost without thinking.

“I’m not talking about religion, though. I’m talking about the evolution of species.”

“Evolution?”

“Yes. The evolutionary default setting for humans isn’t to go to hell. And that’s not just true of humans. There are all sorts of animals who are naturally programmed to perform all sorts of acts of altruism.”

“Oh, so you’re not actually talking about Darwin’s theory of evolution as such, then, about adaptation and natural selection. The survival of the fittest. Because he’d disagree with you and argue that the highest aim of all life is to survive and protect itself,” I said.

“No, I am talking about Darwin. Think about a swarm of insects, for example. It’s only when they give themselves over to the host that they’re able to achieve their full potential as a species. Or take honeybees. They’ll sting an intruder to protect their hive even if doing so rips out their own guts in the process. They act altruistically in order to benefit their species as a whole.”

“But that’s just genetic programming at an instinctual level,” I countered. After all, how are bees acting any differently from robots? Whereas I wasn’t a robot. I didn’t robotically decide to kill my mother. That was something I decided with my own will.

“Well, what’s to say that man’s conscience isn’t also a product of programming at a genetic level?” Lucia fired back.

“If that’s the case, how do you explain criminals and villains who just don’t care about other people? And morality and conscience are completely subjective notions at the best of times—see how much they vary between rich and poor countries. No, conscience is a social construct.”

“The details of what makes up an individual’s conscience, maybe. But conscience per se—including its offshoot, religion—is a product of evolutionary processes.”

“Don’t tell me you’re seriously trying to suggest that altruism can coexist with social Darwinism?”

“You’ve heard of game theory, right? Well, there’s this simulation that takes the model several iterations down the line. It’s true that at first people tend to act purely in their own short-term self-interest and have no qualms about trampling over other people to get what they want. The prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is usually happy to rat out his companion if it means shaving a few years off his own sentence. But when you allow the simulation to develop, and you introduce new factors—you make the model closer to being like real life, in other words—then you start to see an interesting change. The long-term equilibrium position is almost always one of cooperation rather than competition. People become prepared to give up a short-term benefit, even when it’s dangling there right in front of their eyes, in order to act in a way that benefits the group as a whole.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I said.

“It might seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect logical sense when you start to think about it. Individuals may gain some benefit in betraying others in the early stages, but sooner or later some of them realize that cooperation within a community results in a better outcome all around. If an individual still persists in being a betrayer, the cooperators refuse to deal with him, so his only option left is to try and form a community with other betrayers, and these communities are never stable, as the betrayers are, by definition, always stabbing each other in the back.”

“So you’re saying that conscience stems from when living things first started grouping together into communities?” I asked.

“Think about it. Most animals are weak, at least as individuals. In order to adapt to their harsh surroundings they needed to adapt to working together as a community. These communities of cooperators become more successful evolutionarily, so they effectively outbreed the betrayers and pass on their genes to their offspring. As a species, then, the genes that are most likely to get passed down to the next generation are those of the cooperators, rather than the betrayers. Is it that far-fetched to imagine that in time cooperation becomes embedded into the species’ genetic structure and that altruism effectively becomes an instinct?”

“So you’re saying that my decision to kill my own mother had nothing to do with my soul and everything to do with my genetics? That it was the default decision for my brain, as you put it?”

“Not exactly.” Lucia shook her head. “Although I do understand why some people like the idea of being able to reduce all human decisions to genetics or biological determinism. Anyway, I thought you said you didn’t subscribe to any religious beliefs.”

“That’s true, yes—”

“Riddle me this, then. Why do you have to fall back on metaphysical ideas such as the soul in order to explain your actions?”

That stopped me short. What did it mean, exactly, to say that you had a soul? What were the implications of saying that humanity had some sort of fundamental essence existing in lofty seclusion, untouched by the harsh and dirty realities of this world? Could it be that the idea of the spirit was just some fiction I bought into so that I could lighten the burden I carried, of all the dictators and villains that I had killed and all the innocent victims that I had abandoned to their fates? So that their deaths would somehow be tempered by the thought that at least a part of them would continue existing in an alternative universe—one that we called heaven, or hell, or whatever?

Fuck. I was no atheist. When it came down to it, I believed in exactly the same sort of shit that all religious people believed in.

I did so because I wanted to run away from the full implications of my actions. Alex hadn’t run away. Or perhaps he couldn’t run away. Unlike me, Alex had chosen to face religion head-on. Alex had never used religion as an excuse.

That was why Alex had killed himself. It all made sense now.

“Evolution gave birth to conscience. And culture. Humanity, warmth between parent and child, between fellow humans. You’ve heard of memes?” Lucia said.

“Memes as in the cultural equivalent of genes? Sure. Although I thought you said that conscience was a product of biological evolution, not culture.”

“The existence of conscience, yes. It’s the details that are the social construct. Memes are what’s passed on from generation to generation. Some details survive, others are weeded out. That’s what culture is.”

“So, are you saying that we’re all slaves to memes? That my actions are somehow controlled by them?”

“Not exactly. There are some people who might like to think of genes and memes as things that control our actions, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. Memes don’t control us. Rather, they’re parasites, riding the coattails of human thought. Humans think, make decisions, and memes piggyback on these decisions to spread from person to person. Genes and memes are not get-out-of-jail-free cards. We might inherit hereditary characteristics or be influenced by memes, but we can never entirely give them credit for our consciences or pin the blame on them for our sins.”

“Okay, so let’s say I had a gene in me that, I don’t know, made me inclined to rape women,” I said. “If I then decided to rape you senseless, that’s not the fault of my genes? Or what about if I’d been horrifically abused as a child and as a result never developed a moral compass that told me that love and kindness are good things, and I turned out to be a serial killer. Would that not be down to my environment and upbringing?”

“I don’t believe that,” Lucia said. “People always have a choice. Regardless of what’s come before. People are free, which means that people can choose to throw away that freedom. People are free precisely because they have the choice to decide for themselves what they’re free not to do, for their own sake or for the sake of someone else.”

I looked once more at Lucia’s face. Suddenly, I felt free. Pardoned. Not because I’d received affirmation that what I had done was right. Not because my sins had been forgiven.

All that had happened was that Lucia had shown me how my sin was my own. It was my cross to bear, not something that had been thrust on me by anyone else.

“Thank you,” I said.

Lucia accepted my gratitude in silence.

Although there were checkpoints all over town and a person’s progress through them could easily be monitored, crime had not completely disappeared. The surveillance society we now lived in was a great deterrent against systematic or premeditated crimes because the perpetrators knew they were almost certainly going to be tracked down, caught, and punished. But the flip side of this was that the surveillance state was almost useless at stopping impulsive, desperate, or suicidal crimes where the perpetrator was fully prepared for capture—or too far gone to care if they got caught. As such, the tradition of seeing a lady safely home to her front door at the end of an evening had not gone entirely out of fashion.

We took the metro and then a streetcar. I’d only had a couple of beers, so I wasn’t really under the influence, so to speak. I was certainly alert enough to sense that we were being watched from the moment we alighted at the streetcar stop closest to Lucia’s apartment.

What to do? If this was just an ordinary tail, I’d have no problem seeing Lucia safely home and then dealing with it afterward. But if it consisted of associates of the kid I’d beaten up last time, well, they wouldn’t fall into the same trap so easily.

I couldn’t discount the possibility of an attack. In fact, given how bold they were being—barely keeping any distance at all—it was more than a possibility. It was a good fifteen minutes’ walk along quiet side streets to Lucia’s place. Our base was directly opposite her apartment, of course, so that was hardly a better option to aim for at this juncture. I sent a distress call to Williams. If he managed to reach us in time we’d be able to find a way out of this.

I grabbed hold of Lucia’s hand and started picking up the pace.

My gut feeling had been correct. Our tail sped up, barely even bothering to keep hidden anymore. Not even the most amateurish pursuers would come out in the open like this unless they meant business. I resigned myself to the fact that we would be attacked somewhere between here and Lucia’s place.

I wasn’t sure exactly how many of them there were yet, but I could be pretty sure that, given what I did last time, there’d be more than one of them.

I was in a bind. If the chips were down I’d be forced to draw my gun, and at that instant my cover with Lucia would be blown, and all my effort so far would be in vain. Well, unless Lucia had any other advertising executive friends who enjoyed publicly brandishing handguns on their days off.

The problem was, then, one of timing. I didn’t want to draw too soon, or indeed at all, if possible—my gun was my ace in my sleeve. If the other side had no such qualms, though, I’d be at a distinct disadvantage when it came to showtime.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Bishop? Why have we sped up all of a sudden?” Lucia asked, her voice clearly troubled. I ignored her and pulled her along. Hoping, praying for some passersby that would make it harder for us to be assaulted openly.

A man appeared ahead of us. One of the young men from the other day. I charged straight on toward him without letting up in pace. At the same time the figure tailing us from behind broke into a dash—

—but had mistimed his run—

—and I reached the man in front of me faster than he had expected and gripped his gun slide tightly as he tried to pull his gun from his jacket pocket. The gun was immobilized, and the man couldn’t pull the trigger. I wrenched it from his grasp in a fluid circular movement, snapping his finger that I’d trapped in the trigger.

The man screamed in pain and fell to the stone paving. I spun around, pointed the gun I had just snatched, and fired at our assailant coming at us from behind.

Then a surprise—the gun was ID-registered.

The grip rejected my fingerprints and the gun went into safety lockdown. So maybe these bozos were foreign intelligence agents after all?

I gritted my teeth and chucked the gun away.

All this happened in a flash—Lucia was still standing where I had left her.

I scanned the area quickly but could see only the man approaching from behind. But I couldn’t believe there were only two of them. I had to be on the lookout for an ambush.

So far I had avoided drawing my gun. At this rate, I might still be able to explain away my actions and my skill without blowing my cover. A stint in the army during my youth or something. I was still in control. At least, that’s what I thought until the man behind us caught up to us.

Then I was no longer in control.

Fire.

Indexfingermiddlefingerringfingerlittlefingerthumb.

Electric shock.

My senses were blown away in a blast of thunder.

My fingertips, my toes, my eyes, all throughout my body—an unbelievable, searing hot pain. All the extremities of my body were on fire, as if they’d all decided to go insane at the same moment. I almost blacked out from sheer agony.

“Mr. Bishop? What’s the matter? Charles? Charles?”

This was what it must have felt like to burn up from the inside out.

Lucia had a look of panic on her face. She placed a hand on my shoulder. I realized the man approaching us from behind was no longer running. He had his mobile device pointed at me and was strolling gently in my direction.

“Run away.” The pain in my extremities was so severe it took me a few seconds to squeeze the words out. “Lucia, run.” The man kept on walking toward us. I realized it was the scruffy young man I had beaten up in the alleyway.

Perhaps the pain I was feeling numbed my sense of time, but it seemed to me to take an eternity before Lucia finally took heed of my words and turned to run away. The pain in my legs grew too much to bear, and I collapsed prostrate onto the historic cobblestones of old Prague.

I screamed wordlessly, acknowledging my total and utter defeat.

“There’s no need for you to run away, Lucia.”

I could just about make out the voice. Through the pain that was forcing my body apart, through my seeping consciousness, I turned toward the speaker to see his face.

A face I had seen numerous times in various pre-mission briefings.

The face of the man who had eluded us all these years.

Lucia was rooted to the spot, staring at John Paul.

6

I felt cold stone against my face long before I could open my eyes.

I checked for the searing agony, but it was gone. I managed to look at the fingers that had been causing me so much pain only a minute ago. Neither red nor white. No different from usual.

My wrists had been taped together. Gingerly I stretched out my fingertips and pressed them against the ground, ever so gently at first. No pain. I pushed myself up and looked around. I was in a dark room, surrounded by what looked like a giant chessboard.

“I have no idea who you are, although I assume you’re here to try and kill me.”

I turned around to see who the voice had come from. It was a shadowy figure, his face backlit by moonlight that crept in through a window covered by a metal grill.

John Paul.

The Lord of Genocide.

“It seems that the American government has been sending hit squads into the countries where I’ve been. I’ve been hearing reports that the generals and politicians I helped out were being killed off,” he said.

“That can’t be a nice feeling, knowing that any day you could be next,” I said.

John Paul shrugged. “When I tried to return to Lucia’s apartment I realized immediately that some clumsy Secret Service agent was trying to tail me. So I put the place under surveillance for a while, and sure enough you showed up. You were obviously Forces, which did trouble me somewhat, I’ll admit.”

“Why do you think I’m in the Forces?” I stared at John Paul. A trained linguist turned PR flak. It bothered me that this civilian could tell the difference between the CIA and Special Forces so easily. It also bothered me that he was talking to me as if we were fellow professionals.

“As I’m sure you know, I’ve spent the last few years of my life in war zones,” John Paul said. “A long time. Places where no UN troops, let alone US soldiers, ever intervened. But there were occasionally PMCs, there to provide tactical and strategic consultancy. They would train up local troops, molding the rabble into a semblance of a proper army. Most PMC soldiers are, as I’m sure you know, ex-Special Forces who crossed over to private work in order to double their paycheck. Well, I started watching these people, and in watching them I started to notice the special type of walk that only trained soldiers have. It wasn’t that hard for me to do. After all, my work as a linguistics researcher was basically frequency analysis—identifying the hidden patterns that lurk behind apparently mundane agglomerations of data.”

I pushed myself up with my bound wrists so that I was sitting on the floor and facing John Paul directly. Like one of Jesus’s disciples sitting at the feet of his master.

“Speaking of patterns,” I said, “the NME was funding your language research, and you were looking for some sort of patterns there. What I don’t understand was why DARPA was involved in the first place. What benefit was there to them in funding an academic thesis? Why was that a matter of national security?”

“Ha. So you’re telling me that neither your superior officers nor the fine staffers of Washington ever bothered to explain that to you? How typical.”

The moonlight was now shining brightly on my face. From where John Paul was standing I would have looked deathly white.

The former scholar put his hand to his mouth before launching into a calm, deliberate lecture by way of explanation.

“The defense establishment wasn’t involved with my research at first. It was academic work, pure and simple. All the materials I was using were in the public domain. Archives from Nazi Germany, radio broadcasts, magazines, literature, military communications. I acquired all sorts of data from the Nazi era—prewar as well as wartime. Much of it was already digitized; I had my assistants convert the materials that only existed in hard copy. Then I parsed it all. Grammatical analysis, in layman’s terms.”

Research into Nazi rhetoric. I tried to imagine how it would relate to university work. Class 101: Fascist Communications—Discourse for Dummies. Don’t embarrass yourself in front of your fellow National Socialists by making a linguistic faux pas! All this was interesting enough, as an interdisciplinary elective that fell between the domains of linguistics and history. But I still didn’t see how that could be of such interest to the military.

“I published a thesis based on my work,” John Paul continued. “The MIT budget committee called me in not long after. The chairman coolly informed me that my research had been selected for funding by the National Military Establishment, so I needed to run along and present them with my research. I wasn’t wild about the idea at first—it would mean that any further research on the topic would be classified and impossible to publish—but when I realized how many perks there would be other than just the actual funding, I reluctantly accepted. After all, it meant full access to confidential CIA documents and to international traffic intercepted by the NSA. Everything from Pol Pot’s wireless transmissions to the Khmer Rouge to Rwandan radio broadcasts. The NME even arranged for me to have full access to the Russian archives on the Katyn Forest Massacre. Most valuable of all to my research, though, was the raw data from the traffic that the NSA and the CIA had intercepted.”

“And you discovered something from all this?”

“Yes. That there is a grammar to genocide.”

I didn’t understand.

John Paul saw my incomprehension and explained. “Whatever the country, the political climate, or the syntactical framework of the language used, the data always showed that there was one thing in common: a deep structure of the grammar of genocide. There were always certain patterns in the media of a society that was about to start committing genocide, present in its newspaper articles, radio and television broadcasts, even the novels and short stories published. We’re talking about at a deep structural level, not something noticeable in the surface structures that non-linguists are used to accepting at face value. In other words, only a trained linguist who was specifically looking for these patterns would ever have been able to find them.”

The grammar of genocide.

A predictor of atrocities to come.

I couldn’t believe it. “Language is something humans learn. It’s the result of acquired learning. A posteriori knowledge. It’s just language. It can’t affect people’s souls in such a fundamental way,” I said.

“Ah, the old tabula rasa canard. Touching to think that there are still people who believe it. The human mind is a blank slate? I suppose next you’ll be telling me that autism is caused by people not receiving enough love and affection when they were children.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked.

“Genetics predetermine most things about the way a person turns out, from their personality to any physical or mental handicaps, even down to their political leanings. Environmental factors play a marginal role at best. There are those who have tried to argue that human beings are purely a product of their environment, and that all people are essentially born equal. Well, I’m an egalitarian myself, and I believe that it’s a uniquely human trait to be able to transcend our genetics by creating this concept called ‘culture.’ But I can’t allow my belief in the potential of humanity to muddy the objective results of my scientific inquiry. All I’m saying is that every human action has a source, with perfectly good biological and neurological explanations. We need to start by acknowledging to ourselves that we are no more than bundles of flesh assembled according to a genetic code. Our livers and bowels and kidneys were made according to a predetermined genetic formula, so why should there be a special exemption for our minds or hearts, or anywhere else we choose to believe our mysterious spirit might reside?”

I thought of Lucia’s words that the human heart was a product of evolution.

Had she just been regurgitating John Paul’s philosophy?

The thought made me sick to the core.

“But the language that a child learns while growing up is the language spoken by the people around him,” I said. “It’s not as if babies are born with Esperanto carved into their brains or anything. Isn’t that what scholars mean when they call linguistics an a posteriori discipline?”

“No. Let me give you an example. Back when slavery was still legal, the old plantation owners could have cared less what sort of language their slaves spoke. The slaves had been abducted from all four corners of Africa and were just thrown together to work, regardless of whether they had any language or culture in common. Now, this state of affairs wasn’t going to last for long. Soon, the slaves started picking up fragments of their masters’ language—English. But their version of the language was much more simplistic than the original and grammatically all over the place, but at the same time much more rigid and restrictive than English. You couldn’t change word order in a sentence or collocate words easily, for example. In its first generation, this was called Pidgin English.”

John Paul took a deep breath, readying himself to continue his lecture.

“The children of those slaves grew up with Pidgin English as their mother tongue. When they interacted with other ‘native’ pidgin speakers, interesting things started happening: the language started shifting from the rigid original toward a much livelier and more fluid language. A more naturalistic grammar emerged. Grammatical rules that the parents had never used started coming into play, effectively invented by the children. This new language was based on English but was definitely not a language developed by people who had grown up listening to the original. Linguistically and grammatically speaking it was an entirely new language that developed out of a pale imitation of the original. Today it’s called Creole. The children, in other words, acquired a sophisticated grammar that eluded their parents. The only convincing explanation for this is that the human brain has an inherent ability to generate its own grammar out of the linguistic components it has on hand.”

“And that’s what you mean by deep structure—our innate grammatical potential?” I asked.

“Yes, an ability seared into our brains by our genetic code. An organ that gives birth to language.”

A built-in organ inside our brain that gives birth to language.

The organ that contains the portents of massacres.

I was starting to understand. “So DARPA was interested in your research because they figured that if there was a hidden grammatical code inside the human mind that led to chaos and disorder, then they might be able to preempt outbreaks of genocide by monitoring and analyzing communications in countries that were already known to be politically and ethnically unstable.”

John Paul nodded. “As my research progressed, I soon became able to identify omens of escalating violence in patterns of language that people used to communicate with each other. It wasn’t something that you could identify from individual conversations, but rather something that happened at the structural level of a society. You could even see it in the language used by the society’s victims. You can see it in the discourse of the Jews who lived in the Third Reich, for example. And to get a true picture you need to perform frequency analysis on an entire region. What you end up seeing is an outbreak of a particular type of change inside the minds of people who’ve been subjected to this discourse over an extended period of time. Specifically, the part of the brain that makes certain value judgments becomes inhibited. That thing that we have come to call ‘conscience’ becomes twisted. Biased, if you will, in a certain direction.”

John Paul had said enough. The horrific logical conclusion to his story was now looming before me.

I wondered when he had experienced his “eureka” moment. When he lost his wife and child? Or when he was with Lucia replaying that initial report of the news from Sarajevo over and over?

After a pause, I timidly ventured my conclusion. John Paul’s conclusion.

“So you wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg …”

John Paul smiled. “Just so.”

Genocide could be predicted by the frequency of certain types of deep grammatical structures used within a country’s discourse.

So what would happen if you took a stable country where no such discourse was happening and somehow deliberately increased the frequency of this type of deep grammatical structure?

What would happen to a region when its people started speaking with the grammar of genocide?

You’d have to be a lunatic even to consider it, I thought. It was an idea that might crop up during the course of research—a whimsical hypothesis, a joke almost. But you wouldn’t actually try it out. How could you, for starters? As John Paul had said, this wasn’t a hypothesis that manifested itself on an individual level, only at the level of a whole society. You’d need to be able to influence public discourse on a massive scale—the logistics were mind-boggling.

And yet …

“So you experimented? With a Third World country?”

“Why do you think I joined a public relations firm?” John Paul said. “The perfect opportunity to embed myself in the core of a country’s propaganda machine. All I had to do was influence the national media broadcasters, sign off on the head of state’s speeches, tell the cabinet ministers what to say, and make sure that no government announcement went out without being checked by me first. It was easy. I had left MIT by then and my government funding had dried up, but I already knew everything I needed to know. And sure enough, the experiment proved successful.”

“But what about the other countries?” I said. “They didn’t give you the same level of access to influence the core of their government communications.”

“And they didn’t have to,” John Paul said. “A little judicious application of SNDGA and it was easy enough to work out which branches of communication I needed to focus on to yield maximal returns. Not so different from you guys, right?”

“SNDGA?”

“Not your field, perhaps? SNDGA stands for Social Network Directed Graph Analysis. It’s what your bosses use to work out which target you need to kill next in order to have the biggest chance of suppressing the violence in a region.”

He’s Public Enemy Number One. The leader who is causing the massacres, fanning the flames of chaos, bringing about death and destruction to his society. That’s why he’s your target. You need to kill him for the greater good. The sort of thing I had always been told on a pre-mission briefing. Same with Williams, Alex, Leland.

Well, I suppose someone in Washington or Fort Mead must have had a way of identifying our targets.

John Paul seemed to have seen something in my momentarily blank expression because he squatted down next to me and looked straight into my eyes as if he were talking to a crawling toddler.

“Have you ever heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” he asked me. “A party game named after an old movie star.”

Footloose was one of my guilty pleasures.

“You take two actors who’ve never been in a movie together and try and connect them in as few steps as possible,” John Paul continued. “If there’s an actor they’ve both been in a movie with, that’s one degree of separation. If the first actor has been in a movie with an actor who in turn has been in a movie with an actor who has been in a movie with the second, then that’s two degrees of separation, and so on. Virtually every actor ever known can reach Kevin Bacon within three degrees of separation. In other words, the game is about personal networks.”

“Thanks for the explanation, but I doubt there’s an American alive who hasn’t heard of the Kevin Bacon game.”

“Do excuse me. I wasn’t trying to patronize you. It’s just a useful analogy for explaining graph theory. The study of analyzing networks made up of these sorts of links. The NSA, the Center for Counterterrorism, and DARPA all poured money into the field of graph theory once it became clear that the new type of terrorist threat was decentralized and not tied down to a specific geographical location. Graph theory became a subject of interdisciplinary military research, just like my field. Graph theorists would study data intercepted at Echelon and observe the interactions between different people in different regions—how data were exchanged. It wasn’t the contents of the data as such that was important, but the flow: how information dispersed and which channels would cause it to disseminate most effectively. All this can be ascertained through network analysis.”

That made sense. I supposed that was indeed how the powers that be chose our targets.

“But how do you know all of this?” I asked.

“They let me use their research to help my own research into the grammar of genocide. The lines that connected one point to another. The nodes and edges. Digraphs that incorporated directional markers showing the trends of information flow. Add a little bit of SNDGA, and it’s easy to work out where the most important sources of communication are. You don’t always need access to a president or a general. In fact, in one country I chose to play the role of a priest, and in another I was part of an influential NGO. More chance to propagate the genocidal grammar that way—a more extensive network, you see? Of course, the specifics vary from country to country.”

This man was calmly describing the results of a series of experiments to me as if they were entirely theoretical. It was as if he had conveniently forgotten that his research into genocide was built on top of a mountain of human misery.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t believe that language has the ability to influence our subconscious in such a way. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has already been comprehensively discredited. Human thought isn’t regulated by language. Are you seriously trying to say that this weird function has been left in our brains as a result of evolution? Impossible!”

For some reason this made John Paul laugh out loud. It wasn’t a villain’s laugh, but a healthy, hearty, normal laugh. And that made it all the more freakish.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Nothing, nothing. I just never expected to come across a spy who was so up to date on linguistic theory, that’s all.”

I sneered at him. “Spending time with the lovely Ms. Lucia has been very educational.”

“Yes, it seems the two of you have been spending a fair bit of time together,” John Paul said. His voice was that of supreme indifference. Damn. I’d hoped that would have affected him at least a little bit. But it seemed there was nothing I could do or say that would have any effect on this man.

John Paul started speaking again. “Do you ever think to yourself that perhaps words have no meaning?”

I said nothing. I had no idea where he was trying to go with this.

“I wonder who it was who first said that they liked something,” John Paul continued. “Or that they didn’t like something. Such simple expressions. Compare those with the conversation that the two of us are having now. Aren’t we basically saying the same thing, just in a much more long-winded and circumlocutory way? We’re basically just expressing primitive emotions, no different from saying that something tastes good or that we feel bad.”

I squirmed in embarrassment as I thought of the long conversation I had had with Lucia about my mother’s death, when I poured my heart out to her. Maybe John Paul was right. Was that not just a roundabout way of telling her that I liked her?

“Whenever I’ve studied a country undergoing a period of militarization, I entertained this charming little theory. It’s occurred to me that the slogans that inevitably end up being scrawled on the street corners aren’t really about the words at all. They’re more primitive than that. The slogans are just manifestations of a deep, primeval resonance. ‘Hate enemy.’ ‘Protect self.’ I like to think of them as little fragments of music in an underlying symphony of primeval urges.”

“People aren’t animals,” I said. “Human language is different from the howling of wild beasts.”

“Do you really believe that? I’m not sure that I do,” John Paul said. “Goethe himself admitted that something as simple as a military march could cause him to feel his spine tingling to attention. And it’s not just airports and cafés that have background music playing. Auschwitz had a soundtrack too. The sound of the wake-up bell in the morning, the drums to make the prisoners march. However exhausted and utterly despondent the Jewish inmates were, as soon as the drums broke out in rhythm they found their bodies moving along with the beat whether they wanted them to or not. Unlike what we see, what we hear has the capacity to touch our souls directly. Music rapes our senses. Meaning? What meaning? Pure sound can and will bypass all that noble-sounding guff.”

The thing that lurks under the words we use.

Meaning is just skin deep.

That’s what John Paul was trying to say. When we speak, it’s not just the contents of our words that matter. The “meaning” of the words is only ever a small part of the equation. That’s what John Paul meant: there was also music, rhythm, hidden esoteric layers that I couldn’t hope to grasp or notice or understand.

“People can close their eyes, but they can never completely block off their ears. No one is immune to my words,” John Paul explained.

I forced myself to look into the moonlight and at John Paul’s eyes. I was expecting, hoping that I would see madness there, that I would find a lunatic bathed in a lunar glow. But I was granted no such satisfaction. All I could see was a perfectly rational and calm pair of eyes, staring down at me. If anything, they were twinged with melancholy, not madness.

“You’re insane.”

I didn’t believe it, but I had to say it anyway.

7

John Paul left the room, and about fifteen minutes later I found myself being prodded along a dirty corridor by one of my other assailants. The corridor was covered in graffiti that, by the looks of it, had been done fairly recently. This wasn’t a scene I expected to see in this day and age when all petty crimes could be traced quickly back to the perpetrator.

I was nudged through a doorway, my assailant’s gun still in my back. I emerged on the other side to find myself in a fairly large room that contained a bar lined with glass bottles and an open space with its floor covered with a nanolayer portraying the image of an unending abyss.

Lucius’s club.

“Nice to see you again so soon,” I said to the emerging figures of Lucius, Lucia, and a number of men who could only be described as underlings. The men were all armed and looking at me warily. “You surprise me, Lucius. To think you’re on the same side as John Paul.”

Lucius shook his head. “John is our client, nothing more. We just did what we had to do in order to protect ourselves.”

“And who is ‘we’ exactly?” I asked, looking at both Lucius and Lucia, who was standing next to him with a bewildered expression on her face. So was she not on Lucius’s—or John Paul’s—side? Had she been unwittingly duped into becoming an accomplice?

Lucius paused for a while, as if trying to remember something. Then he spoke.

“ ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.’ Are you familiar with this passage?”

It was Lucia who answered, before I had a chance to focus on what was going on. “No, although it sounds like something from the Bible.”

Lucius turned to me. “And what about you, sir?”

“I’m an atheist. I don’t go to church,” I said.

“It’s Luke, chapter 1. Even back then, citizens were turned into numbers and counted,” Lucius said.

“So what?” I asked. Lucia was looking at my bound wrists. She was obviously concerned.

“Well, we here are the uncounted,” said Lucius, looking at the armed men around him. “We are nothing more than an unidentifiable mass in the eyes of the surveillance society. We are vagabonds who slip through the cracks of security behemoths.”

“You live under false identities?” I asked. I was incredulous. Only Forces and governments should have been able to fake IDs. It was virtually impossible to hack the InfoSec company databases, and its employees were basically incorruptible. The slightest leak, whether internally or from outside hackers, was treated with the utmost seriousness, with long jail sentences for anyone who even tried. No, security breaches were all but unheard of.

“It’s practically impossible to assume a false identity as such, more’s the pity,” Lucius said, shaking his head. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain workarounds. We can start with low-tech methods. Mapping the locations of sensors, for example. We’re inundated with a multitude of sensors, but individually they tend to be monofunctional. They scan just your retina, or just your veins, or just your fingerprints. Then here’s a brainwave scan, and here’s a camera. Well, by painstakingly entering all the details of these sensors we’ve managed to come up with maps of all major American and European cities. A Rough Guide for the Surveillance Evader. Using computer analysis it’s been possible to find loopholes, shortcuts—paths of least resistance. There are ways to trick some of the sensors, and then all you need is a fake set of nanolayer fingerprints and somebody else’s eyes, and suddenly it becomes very difficult for them to track you.”

Come to think of it, that youth I roughed up had had different retina and fingerprint IDs.

“But surely you still need fake IDs, even if just for the fake fingers and the fake eyes,” I said.

Lucius shrugged. “We cultivated our ID database carefully and over a long period of time. Babies who died shortly after birth, before they were fully registered. Travelers who went missing abroad. Civilian contractors and PMCs who went MIA in war zones. And, most of all, Sarajevo.”

The corpses that never even had the chance to become corpses. The missing.

Names in purgatory.

“We carefully select IDs from among the missing and make them live again. We archive them so that they are out of the sights of governments and can be drawn on at a moments’ notice if needed. You can imagine how valuable this archive is to us. Short of terrorism and genocide we’ll do whatever we need to protect it,” Lucius said.

“And yet I remember a time only a few short hours ago when you were telling me how there was no such thing as pure freedom, how everything was a matter of checks and balances,” I said. I never would have guessed from his demeanor at the time that Lucius was such a radical ideologue.

“I stand by that. The issue we have is that the trade-off society forces us to make is massively one-sided. The privacy we’ve been asked to give up just isn’t rewarded with a corresponding increase in security.” Lucius advanced so that he was now standing right in front of me. “The current security regime is pointless. After 9/11, the world steadily increased its surveillance levels on individuals. ‘Traceability’ became the order of the day. And yet, the more the screws were tightened, the more terrorist incidents there were across the world’s major cities.”

“That’s a lie,” I said.

“It’s not a lie,” Lucius snapped. “Even you have to acknowledge the truth about Sarajevo. Am I wrong? Even the official published statistics show a correlation between the surveillance clampdown and increased terrorist activity—just take any government data and plot it on a graph. It’s all there, in black and white, for anyone to see. And yet for some reason most people choose not to.”

“In that case, why does everybody believe that personal traceability is the best protection against terrorists?” I asked.

Lucius’s lips twisted into an ironic smile. “Is that what people believe? Or just what people want to believe?” He laughed, a sad, hollow sound. “It’s not as if the government is lying to us. Or rather, it’s not as if it’s only the government that’s lying to us. The media lie too, and, worst of all, so do the people, the citizens. We all lie to each other. We’ve all been taken in by this collective myth of traceability, and that’s how our modern surveillance state was born. It might be true that terrorist activity has died down recently, but that’s only because most terrorists have been diverted by the recent explosion of civil wars and ethnic conflicts around the world. It’s nothing to do with the security crackdown.”

We see what we want to see.

We believe what we want to believe.

What good was hard statistical evidence in the face of belief? The government, industry, the people—none were interested in looking at graphs, not when mere facts contradicted their core beliefs.

“Reality is such a pathetic and weak thing,” Lucius continued, shaking his head sadly. “There are so many horrific things in the world that go unreported. Do you know, for example, how artificial flesh is created? Genetically modified dolphins. Aquatic mammals engineered to be able to live in freshwater. They’re raised—or maybe ‘cultured’ is a better word, given the circumstances—in Lake Victoria, before being dissected alive so that their muscle can be put to industrial use. The rest of them becomes animal feed. Children on starvation wages work round the clock in giant sweatshop factories off the shores of Lake Victoria, forcing the red blubbery flesh into giant cans using biostaplers.”

“Live dolphin muscle …” I trailed off.

The Intruder Pods that we used to penetrate enemy lines. The short-range jets that hopped us from continent to continent. All covered in raw flesh. How many people knew that sex lotion was made out of seaweed?

“No one. No one knows. Just as no one will try and stop you from selling dyed lumpfish roe as caviar,” Lucius said.

“But how can that—”

“Anyone remotely interested in doing so can work all this out for themselves. Just use your AR contact lenses to track the provenance of whatever is in front of you. Where and when an object is made. The space and the time is there for all to see. We live in what the science fiction author Bruce Sterling might have called a spime society. People want to know whether their Budweiser is brewed under sanitary conditions and which ranch a burger can be traced back to. You can even find out which forest provided the trees for your house. The metahistory of everything in the universe is bare, raw, there for the taking. And yet no one is interested in anything other than their own little personal narratives. No one wants to know about the tragedy of the origins of artificial flesh, they just want to know that it will continue to provide the airplanes and machines that will prop up their comfortable lifestyle.”

At this point, Lucius’s warped smile surfaced again. “And you, Mr. Bishop. You know all too well about the massacres that happen all over the globe. How many of those is the world interested in? As you know all too well, only a fraction are ever reported. People are designed to see only what they want to see.”

He had a point. Outside my work, all I knew of the world came from clips on CNN. I lived in a Domino’s Pizza world. I lived in a world of fifteen-minute chunks of free movie previews.

“Basically, the issue we have is that the idea that submitting ourselves to permanent surveillance somehow makes us safer is one great lie. An unfair trade. The reason we choose to live anonymously is because we don’t want to live in a society that forces this trade upon us.”

Lucius stepped away from the abyss surrounding us. He sighed, then continued. “John noticed that the CIA were staking out Lucia’s apartment. He warned us of this fact—he’s a good customer. We figured that you might be using Lucia to get to us. You’d already roughed up one of us, after all.”

One of the men took out a mobile terminal and tapped the keypad.

The tips of my body were flooded with that searing pain again, and I yelled and collapsed.

“Stop it, please! You’re killing him! Please!” Lucia screamed.

Lucius glanced at the man who was frying me. The man was, of course, the youth that I had worked over in the alleyway. His face was still covered with bruises. He slowly put away the Mob in his back pocket.

“A Paingiver,” Lucius explained. “Nanomachines designed to deliver an unbearable shock to your nerve endings. I slipped some into your Budweiser earlier. I hope you don’t mind. A useful little present we received from John—military issue, apparently. The machines lodge inside your capillary vessels, which means that when they’re activated they cause incredible pain in your extremities—fingers, toes, the like.”

The pain had miraculously disappeared, although my body was still reeling from shock. Gasping for breath, I looked over at Lucia’s face. Her tears made her black eyeliner run all the way down her cheeks.

The face of a woman crying for a man who had betrayed her. Crushed by conflicting, overwhelming emotions.

“Unfortunately, Lucia brought you right into our club. That raised the stakes. Now, if it had just been a matter of my own personal liberty, well, that might have been one thing. I could have coped with being arrested. But there was the danger of having our entire library seized. If that happened, all our friends, colleagues, and customers, all our compatriots fighting for personal liberties in Europe and America—they’d all be outed. We had to preempt that at all costs. That was why I needed to stake out Lucia’s place.”

“So you’ve been watching me all this time?” Lucia asked.

“Forgive me. As I explained, it was for the greater good.”

“I thought you were the anonymous heroes who went underground to avoid the constant surveillance of government and industry. And yet you’re happy to put other people under surveillance yourselves?” Lucia asked.

“It’s a truly troubling dilemma,” Lucius replied.

I thought of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And those who were already free watched over others so that all could be “equally” free.

“I seem to remember Stalin and Pol Pot also being ‘troubled’ by similar dilemmas,” I said, sneeering, and immediately received another payload of pain for my efforts.

“Tuvi, could you hold off for a moment, please?” Lucius calmly asked the youth. Luckily for me, the kid complied.

“You’ll have to forgive Tuvi—it seems you roughed him up good and proper, so you’ll have to think of this as your just deserts,” Lucius said.

“Ha, so this is Crime and Punishment now, is it? Well, I wonder when you’re going to get your punishment for what you’ve done in the name of freedom.”

“Don’t worry about us. And besides, people in glass houses … you were observing Lucia just as much as we were, no?”

“What?” Lucia looked at me, stunned.

I knew it. I had always known it. Sooner or later we would end up here. It had been inevitable from the start. Really, why had I ever expected anything else?

Yes, I know all about you, Ms. Lucia Sukrova.

I know that you were mistress to a married man.

I know the restaurants where you and John Paul dined together.

I know at which branches of Starbucks you drank your morning cappuccinos.

I know how many condoms John Paul bought.

I wanted to scream out loud. For the youth to press the button on his Mob and never let go. For my fingers and toes and all my body to explode and blast my consciousness into tiny fragments. I wanted and deserved any and all pain that the world could throw at me.

“You see, Lucia,” Lucius said, “this man has been watching you in order to try and capture John Paul. He’s an American secret agent. A somewhat cultured American agent, perhaps, but a secret agent nonetheless. Cultured enough to capture your heart, at least.”

I looked at the young man, Tuvi. Press the button, I willed. Make me squirm in agony. Show me in my wretched agony to Lucia. But Tuvi saw through me. He looked down on me. I was a deer in the headlights, not worthy of another thought.

Hell is here. Inside your mind. Job done. No need for any more pain.

“John’s waiting for you outside, Lucia.” Lucius pointed Lucia toward the exit. Gently but firmly. Time to go.

Lucia glanced toward the exit before turning her gaze back on me. Was she hesitating? Or condemning me? I was so overwhelmed by guilt that I could no longer tell.

An eternity of agony. It was agony to be looked at by Lucia. Her piercing gaze was unbearable. And yet I didn’t want her to go. I wanted her to stay here.

Your ex is a mass murderer. He’s responsible for more deaths than Stalin. I could have told her that. Shouted it out. Except … except—what right did I have to tell her?

“Lucius … don’t let this man die,” Lucia said.

“Lucia, please. I abhor killing.”

Upon hearing what she needed to hear, Lucia turned around and left the club. I listened to her fading footfalls, my insides churning in a cocktail of regret.

The door closed, and the footsteps faded away completely. Lucius and his henchmen stared down at the abyss, at me, the wretched insect.

No one was speaking anymore. They were weighed down by the burden of what was about to happen, what had to happen. They were gritting their teeth. Doing what they had to do for the sake of freedom. To resist the evil will of those who insisted on watching them.

That was why I now had to die.

“I thought you abhorred killing,” I said.

“Indeed, I do.” Lucius actually did look genuinely sorry for what he was about to do. Just as, I’m sure, Hitler once did, and Stalin. Or, indeed, the ex-brigadier general that I had dispatched once upon a time, or our captive Ahmed from Somalia. Lucius might have felt guilty, but his guilt was of no value. Just as my guilt toward Lucia was of no value.

“That’s why it pains me so much to have to do this,” he said.

It was at that moment that a mosquito buzzed in front of me. It was as if I were in a dream—a final mirage I was seeing in the face of death. The mosquito hovered and settled on my middle finger.

The middle finger I had dabbed with pheromones earlier.

Lucius noticed the mosquito.

“You … a Tracer Dog—”

I lifted my bound hands to cover my right ear, using my shoulder to cover the left. I opened my mouth wide and braced myself.

The world roared, and the south wall exploded. A huge shock wave slammed through the room. Fragments of the wall and dust and debris filled the room, blinding us all. Lucius and his group were instantaneously immobilized. Many of them would have ruptured eardrums. I had managed to block my ears and open my mouth in time, just about, and even so my head was ringing.

All Special Operations I Detachment personnel had indoor assault training drilled into us during basic training at Killing House. During the training we had to take turns in shifts: who would be the assailants, who would be the targets, and who would be the hostages. The one thing I took away from my turn as a hostage was that when Special Forces attack, you had better eat dirt if you want to survive. Hit the ground and wait until it’s all over. Stay standing and you had no right to complain if your putative rescuers shot you dead. Your average Special Forces man was a crack headshot.

Because of this, I had no idea who on my team did what and who killed who. If ever there was a situation where curiosity would have killed the cat, it was this.

The entire assault operation took less than three minutes. It was a fairly small club after all. The dust never even had a chance to settle.

“How’s it hanging, Clavis?”

I recognized that voice. I stumbled up and beckoned for Williams to untie me.

“You look like a ghost under all that dust,” Williams said, brushing some of the powdered concrete from my body. “Anyway, where’s the girl? Lucia.”

I stared out through the giant hole in the wall that now looked out onto the cityscape of a Prague evening. The labyrinth of stone. The city of a hundred spires.

“I don’t know. She’s gone.”

I was shattered. Everything was numb, and I longed for pain. If only I had pain, I could escape from my weariness. I knew it. I needed pain, punishment, urgently.

And yet all Williams could do was kill me with kindness. Gentle, thoughtful, funny Williams. The last thing in the world that I needed right now.