CHAPTER FOUR

1

A war zone.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had taken high-resolution satellite images of the territory formerly known as India and Pakistan.

A mass of craters. Their circumferences in direct proportion to the size of the warheads used to create them. The effects of the nuclear war had been as far reaching as they had been unsubtle. It was as though the earth had bubbled up and boiled over. Over the years, purling mountain rivers had poured into craters where warheads had dented the ground, gradually filling them up to form giant concentric reservoirs. The craters themselves were desolate places, reddish-brown pits devoid of all life; the radiation had seen to that. But venturing away from the circumference, the ground gradually started to turn greener until finally the stench of death had all but disappeared and you were back into the territory of India’s verdant forests.

The picture zoomed in. The numerous NGA lenses in orbit shifted in their trajectory, enlarging the image of the land far below. The heat radiation present in over ten kilometers of atmosphere, combined with minuscule imperfections in the lenses themselves, caused the new image to momentarily blur until the adaptive optic software embedded in each of the lenses kicked in to correct the final image so that it was crystal clear again.

The cameras employed twenty-four bits per RGB channel, which meant that it was possible to identify green pixels on the mountain roads and distinguish them from the deep greens of the forest all around them. This paler green color was the green of war, the green of the army. Antiaircraft guns, armored vehicles, personnel carriers, tanks. When the generals who had pressed the nuclear button had fled from justice, the courtroom, and their inevitable death sentences, they were welcomed with open arms by the paramilitary organizations—provided they brought along with them a handful of toys.

The cameras zoomed farther in, five centimeters to a pixel, the maximum resolution. We could now distinctly see faces of the dead villagers scattered across the center of the paramilitary’s latest stronghold. There must have been at least fifty corpses, burnt and twisted into various fetal positions. The satellite video was still focusing, showing an ever-clearer image of the agglomeration of dead bodies.

People had been killed there. An entire village. At the hands of other people.

There was an acronym that we in the Special Forces had come to hate. CEEP: Child Enemy Encounter Probability.

It meant exactly what it sounded like. The possibility that we’d end up in a shootout with prepubescent girls.

The possibility that we’d end up having to blast their little skulls open and riddle their developing bodies with bullets.

Probability. Traceability. Countability. Searchability. Viability. Everything was “-bility” this and “-bility” that. It was enough to drive the world mad.

In reality, when the word probability was used, we were looking at a hundred percent chance. The suffix -bility lost all meaning. It was a weasel phrase, a phrase used only by fraudsters and fools.

Words don’t have any smell.

Neither do images or satellite recordings.

For some reason, this fact annoyed me.

The smell of fat frying and muscle shrinking. The stink of proteins in human hairs turning into ash. The distinctive odor of people burning. I knew it all too well. I wouldn’t quite say that I had become used to it, but I had encountered it enough times over the years in the line of duty that I was at least familiar with it.

The smell of gunpowder. The smell of old rubber tires aflame, lit as beacons by the soldiers.

The smell of the battlefield.

There was something inherently vile about watching these satellite images, and it was making me feel uneasy. Not because of the horrific nature of the images—though they were horrific enough, all right—but because they were so sanitized. Sitting here, it made no difference to us whether we were looking at people burned whole, with guts spilling out, or with blood seeping out onto the ground. It was all so clean and deodorized. That was the most disgusting thing of all. The lenses that coldly looked down at the corpses from on high in the freezing void of space were like an omniscient yet supremely indifferent god.

The only smell associated with these images right now was the smell of the conference room at HQ in Fort Bragg. A brand-new smell, the smell of concrete and plastic and resins and monomers and adhesives and chemical wizardry.

“These images were taken by the air force’s space recon satellites four days ago,” the man from the National Counterterrorism Center explained. “At the New India government’s behest, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague has issued arrest warrants for eight leaders of a Hindu fundamentalist faction currently active in rural areas. The charges include crimes against humanity, use of child soldiers, and genocide.”

He sounded like every other civilian state official. There was a complete, bizarre mismatch between the bland tone of voice he affected and the gravity of the actual words. It was as though he was taking half-digested pieces of jargon and spinning them ever further away from their true meaning, taking them to the point where they became almost completely nonsensical, before presenting them in a nice and orderly fashion. I would have called it superficial, except that the word didn’t really do justice to that weird sense of detachment he was projecting. When he talked of crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide, you had no sense that he actually understood or felt what these words meant. At that moment I felt a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who listened to Robert McNamara’s account of the Vietnam War and simply couldn’t relate to it in a meaningful way.

Still, this man from the NCTC was here, now, in this meeting room in Fort Bragg, giving a skillful, efficient, and entirely superficial briefing to the assembled soldiers.

“Eugene and Krupps are on the ground as the Japanese government’s proxy, carrying out the UNOIND remit for postwar reconstruction and stabilization. As the US Armed Forces maintain only a token presence in this area, it’s fair to say that Eugene and Krupps are effectively the dominant military power on the ground.”

The next image was brought up on the screens of the notepads of the assembled meeting. A picture of children mingled with skinny adults, smiling at the camera without a care in the world as they brandished AK rifles that seemed comically oversized in their tiny hands.

“This group that now calls itself the Hindu India Provisionals was founded by the same faction that started the nuclear war. The official postwar Indian government that had formed following international intervention established a secular state. Hindu India smoldered away in the rural hinterlands for a number of years without causing any real damage, but recently their activities have escalated. They have started attacking remote Muslim villages, massacring their inhabitants, raping their women, and abducting and indoctrinating their children and assimilating them into their own ranks.”

I watched as the screen in front of me started graphically enumerating a list of the atrocities. Rows of corpses lined up and bleached white with caustic lime. The lime looked like flour and the bodies almost like pieces of chicken ready to be breaded and fried. Then there were the charred black houses and the alleyways between them littered with the naked bodies of women. Just images. No smell, no sound. Just pixels trapped inside our notebooks on our desks.

“The postwar New India government has, for the most part, exceeded international expectations. The Hindu India Provisionals were until recently a mere fringe cult group with limited influence. The population of India is still poor, but the government managed to hold a successful round of democratic elections. Infant mortality was dropping rapidly. And then, as of last year, things started going downhill.”

“Who are these Hindu India when they’re at home?” blurted out a voice from behind me. Williams.

“They are a fundamentalist paramilitary group who draw their strength mainly from the rural poor. For the last year or so they’ve been inexplicably growing and expanding the scope of their activities. They mostly kept their heads down in the immediate postwar reconstruction period, confining their activities to the countryside, far away from any center of power. They offer a simplistic solution to the national identity crisis brought about by years of foreign intervention. Up until recently, though, there weren’t many subscribers to their particular brand of antigovernment fundamentalist religious rhetoric, as most of the populace quite rightly associated it with the sort of rhetoric that caused the nuclear war in the first place.”

“So why the sudden escalation?” Williams asked again. “I thought everyone in the region had their fill of war?”

“Indeed, that is what we all believed. Our political scientists and economists have tried to come up with a hypothesis to explain the sudden surge in Hindu nationalism, but no one has yet been able to posit a model that’s in any way convincing.”

“Ah, they’re just missing the battlefield,” Williams said, grinning. “Just like us—we get blue balls when we’ve been away from the action for too long. Am I right or am I right, Clavis?”

And with that, all eyes were on me. I sighed.

“Whatever floats your boat, Williams. To each his own, I guess. All I know is it’s best to keep your dirty thoughts to yourself rather than air them in public—it scares off the pretty ladies.”

The NCTC man coughed theatrically in a plea not to let the atmosphere descend any further toward that of a high school locker room. We all settled down for the next part of the briefing, albeit with smirks on our faces.

“The ICC prosecutor investigated and found that the New India government’s accusations were well founded. The prosecutor found evidence of crimes against humanity, mobilization of child combatants, and genocide. Accordingly, The Hague has issued arrest warrants for the leaders of this brutal paramilitary group, but as yet the New India government has lacked the firepower to do anything about it.”

“Aaand that’s where we come in, the poor bloody infantry!” Williams interjected.

The speaker nodded. “Exactly. Your mission is to capture the head of the Hindu India Provisionals along with three of the eight leaders. We are acting as a military proxy for the Japanese government and will capture these villains and bring them to account at the International Criminal Court. There they will answer for their crimes against humanity. However, I should warn you that there is a, uh, delicate matter regarding your combat status. As you will technically be tasked by the Japanese military as their proxy, you will officially be classified as mercenaries under the Geneva Convention. As such, should you be apprehended by the enemy, the standard terms of the Geneva Convention for enemy combatants will not be available—”

“Get captured and you’re on your own, we don’t know you—that’s what you’re saying, right, Phelpsie?” Williams was thoroughly enjoying himself now. If ever there was a man who enjoyed living on the edge, it was Williams. The greater the odds, the more enjoyable the challenge. In that sense he was one of nature’s supreme masochists.

A more serious interjection came from Leland. “What I don’t understand is why we have to somehow be representing the Japs in the first place. What’s that all about?”

The speaker, Phelps, smiled indulgently. “The US is not a signatory to the Hague Conventions. The Hague has given the Japanese government the mandate to act; the US is able to intervene legitimately only as an external contractor.”

Williams groaned. “Shit, so we’re no better than Eugene and Krapps now?”

“Lame. This is so totally lame,” Leland agreed.

“We’re not some amateur mercs, you know,” Williams said.

At this point Colonel Rockwell rose from the corner of the room where he had been sitting quietly up until a moment ago. “Thank you very much, Evan. We’ll take it from here.”

And with that, Evan Phelps of the NCTC was summarily dismissed. He looked somewhat doubtfully at the colonel—he still had plenty he wanted to say, no doubt—but in the end he scurried off, overwhelmed by the colonel’s military aura.

Now it was time for the briefing to start in earnest. The room went silent. Just like a secret society, I thought. A world without outsiders, just us band of brothers. Phelps had been ejected from the room, of course, because what happened now was need to know, for our eyes only. But the instant he left the atmosphere also changed—the members of the conference collectively straightened their spines and sat alert. No more cocky teenagers putting on a show of defiance toward the world. This was now a sacred ritual of a secret society. If the scene now looked like some sort of macho fascist gathering, it was also somewhere between black magic and shamanism. We were a secret gathering here to participate in an esoteric ceremony.

“We were the ones who requested the mission from the Japanese government. We asked that it take this form,” the colonel said without preamble. “There is a strong possibility that John Paul is currently with the official targets.”

Suddenly my world exploded into life.

John Paul was in India.

Which meant that Lucia could be with him too.

“When the arrest warrants were issued by The Hague, Eugene and Krupps’s operations department presented the Japanese government with a plan. Naturally, as Eugene and Krupps are the effective military power in the region. But we can’t have E and K be the ones who capture John Paul. They’d pass him on to the ICC, and then he’d be out of our hands for good. The other targets are secondary and can be handed over if necessary, but we need to be the ones to bring in John Paul.”

At this point I thought I saw the colonel glance over at me. Of the people in the room, the colonel and I were the only ones who knew about John Paul’s grammar of genocide. We were the only ones who knew just how he was spreading his death and chaos around the world and the reason why he had to die.

Phelps had said that Hindu India had been inexplicably expanding the scope of their activities. Inexplicable to Phelps, perhaps, but there were two people in this room who knew exactly why. Because of the evil spell woven by that man. The pied piper who led his children to genocide.

The monitor behind the colonel froze, and I could make out glimpses of burning bodies on the frozen image.

Leland spoke up. “We accepted this mission so that Johnny wouldn’t end up in the hands of the ICC, sir?”

The colonel shook his head. “ ‘Accepted’ is not quite the right word. No, we actively went out of our way to pull some strings with the Japanese government. We made sure they turned down Eugene and Krupps’s initial proposal so that they could give it to us instead.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If the US had been a signatory to the Rome Statute it would have been much easier. But signatories cannot make use of antiterrorist evidence obtained by torture by third party countries. It’s deemed inadmissible. We’d have to close down Guantanamo Bay for starters.”

“So our main objective is to take out John Paul?”

“Not take out. Capture and bring in alive. Just don’t let him fall into the hands of the ICC or the New India government.”

We all understood our duty. It was obvious now why the civilian staffer Phelps had been kept in the dark.

“It’s the basic drill: aerial drop. Pickup will be via UAV,” the colonel said.

Someone asked what sort of unmanned aerial vehicle.

“Helicopter. In addition, we’ll be laying on some Flying Seaweed to provide you with close air support. You’ll be able to call on them for tactical bombing.”

“What’s the CEEP, sir?” Williams asked the question that was always asked. I could feel the room bracing itself.

As usual, the colonel answered without hesitation, compunction, or emotion. “One hundred percent.”

“I almost feel bad for asking,” Williams said, his smile sardonic now. He knew all too well from ten years of bitter experience that there was rarely such a thing as a mission with zero Child Enemy Encounter Probability. But he still needed to ask. To know. It wasn’t just Williams either. All of us in the room felt the same.

Man, it wasn’t a nice feeling to know you were about to go out into the field and start killing kids. Even if modern technology made it easier, it never quite became easy.

“Intelligence tells us that the hostile ground forces are comprised of roughly sixty percent minors under eighteen. All units to report for battle counseling starting tomorrow morning. The plan will commence one week from today. Gentlemen, you are dismissed.”

2

The air smelled of the desire to kill.

No, not the air.

I did.

There was a figure on the crosshair. I pulled the trigger, and it went down. Like a twig snapping. Another figure emerged. It was carrying an AK. It wanted to kill me. I pulled the trigger again. The figure went down.

The act of killing wasn’t that important in and of itself. It was the mission that was important. We had to do our duty, and if we had to remove obstacles as we did so, then so be it. Sometimes the enemy would try to stop us and attack. Often, the enemy’s attacks were virtually suicide charges. In the arena of war, life was cheap. Cheaper even than the secondhand laptops used by the leaders to keep track of their troops like the cannon fodder they were.

It was as if the figures in my scope had never even heard of the word “cover.” They just kept on charging into my crosshair. Bullets leapt out of my rifle and into the skulls of the children, exploding all the potential out of their brains and splattering it onto the terrain behind them. Or, occasionally, through their bellies, sending a mixture of their intestines and liver and kidneys to spray out. Or into a pelvis or thigh, cutting clean through an artery, causing the flesh to well up with an unstoppable flow of lifeblood.

Cheap lives. I started doubting myself even as I was snuffing them out one by one. Why was I shooting the enemy? Was it really just survival instinct? Or was that something imprinted onto me by counseling?

These killing fields. Were they really because of me?

“Of course. It’s your own free will. Without a shadow of a doubt.” The counselor had smiled as he answered my question. Skillfully, without missing a beat. The interviewer must have been used to all sorts of curveball questions. Why should an existentialist one faze him? Psychology and philosophy have always been bedfellows. When most non-specialists—myself included—thought of psychology, what they usually imagined was an interdisciplinary subject that contained elements of academic psychology. Sociology, epistemology: related, but not psychology per se. Whenever a psychologist appeared on the news, what we really wanted to hear from him was a cocktail of philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines that wouldn’t challenge our preconceptions.

I asked my question of the counselor during the battle preparations that Colonel Rockwell had ordered on the last day of our BEAR neurotreatment—Battle Emotion Adaptive Regulation. The core members of the battle plan were lined up in the offices of a Viennese School clinical psychologist having our mental states adjusted. We had all received sensitivity maskers, local anesthesia to our frontal lobes, and extensive counseling, and now the psychological barriers to optimum performance on the battlefield were reduced to the minimum. We were getting ready to fight.

Special Forces were all subjected to these treatments every time they went into battle. Well, of course we were: we were the elite, the best of the best, so why shouldn’t we use every means at our disposal to maximize our battlefield performance? It was just a series of standard medical procedures after all. And yet, even though I’d undergone the procedure countless times without incident, there was always a lingering doubt, and that was now starting to press on me.

“Without a shadow of a doubt?” I repeated.

The counselor nodded. “Absolutely. It’s a wonderful thing for an emerging young mind to spend time carefully analyzing itself, but out in the real world you soon realize that you simply don’t have time to spare second-guessing yourself.”

He stopped and paused for words, then took a breath and continued. “Think about when you last caught a bad cold. Did you perhaps see a doctor, who prescribed some medicine and gave you advice? You then got some bed rest, took it easy for a couple of days. Now. A question for you, Mr. Shepherd. Who was it who actually cured your cold?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to give a stupid answer and have this young counselor laugh at me.

He pointed theatrically at my chest. “It was you, Captain. You, not the doctor. Your body fought off the infection, but more importantly, it was you who decided to find a cure. You were the one who went to see the doctor, to ask for a prescription. It was your intention, your will, your purpose. The doctor, and the medicine he gave you, were just there to help. People are allowed to use tools in order to help achieve their objectives, are they not? Well, that’s what your frontal lobe masking and counseling sessions are: tools. After all, you were the one who decided that you would fight, long before you first came to us for treatment.”

The counselor was right. What would be the point of deciding to fight in a traumatic theater of war and then choosing voluntarily to experience that trauma, with all its attendant side effects, when there was perfectly good preventive treatment available?

“What we counselors do is regulate your emotions so that they are at their most appropriate for war. You wouldn’t want any ethical noise to creep into your consciousness during the heat of battle—it could result in a split-second delay with lethal consequences for you or your comrades. That’s why we have these mechanisms to filter the world so that your brain receives it in a way that allows it to process information efficiently. That’s all that happens when the frontal lobe module of your brain is masked and you receive your counseling.”

Ethical noise. It was true that the battlefield was neither the time nor the place to be meditating on ethical dilemmas. Emotions were shortcuts to value judgments, whereas working through dilemmas using reason took time and effort. If a person had no values and relied solely on cold hard reason, he would never be able to decide anything. Pushed through to its logical conclusion, a supremely rational being would necessarily take every single little factor into consideration and end up being paralyzed by inertia.

Humans weren’t the same as wild beasts, though. We had to decide who needed to be killed and who needed only to be wounded. A bear could kill, all right, but only humans had the capacity to truly fight. To choose to neutralize the enemy not from base instinct but out of free will.

“Your actions and thoughts derive from a network of extensive modules in your brain. You subconsciously refer to an internal library of judgments and actions. This is true of your conscience. Your nervous system is hardwired to favor cooperation with other people that will mutually enhance your lives and therefore your chances of survival. Well, this conscience manifests itself physically inside your brain. It has a specific set of coordinates.”

“A module?” I asked, and the counselor smiled.

But I already knew all this. How the brain worked. And how unreliable our own sense of self was.

I kept it all pent up inside me, though, and listened to the counselor’s continued explanation.

“Exactly. It’s the same principle as the sensory masking that we use for Special Forces. I’m sure it must be quite unusual at first to have the feeling of pain masked so that only the knowledge of it remains.”

Sensory masking. That grotesque form of preemptive battlefield anesthesia invented by DARPA. It took away any feelings of pain from wounds received on the battlefield so that the soldier could fight on unhindered while at the same time being fully aware of the fact that he had been hurt, so that he could tend to his injuries as appropriate. This bizarre disconnect was only possible because the acts of acknowledging pain and feeling pain occurred in different modules of the brain.

“In other words, if we mask the correct combination of the brains modules, we can do more than just suppress pain. We can also give the person certain behavioral characteristics that will help him succeed in his mission. Despite all the advances in neuroscience, our detailed knowledge of the inner workings of modules is still really only in its infancy, so we’re not able to make precise adjustments, but we can at least do enough to ensure that our heroes in Special Forces aren’t weighed down by an unnecessary emotional burden during battle.”

His explanation of the brain’s inner workings was just the same as the explanation that I had received that summer, in that hospital, back when I chose to kill my mother.

There were forty or fifty cross-sections of my mother’s brain on display in the examining room. The slides were all in square frames, neatly covering the wall, so that from a distance they almost looked like they were a single giant slab of marble.

“So she’s not conscious?” I asked, or rather confirmed, for the umpteenth time. Looking back now, I can’t remember the exact number of times I posed a variation of this question. But it must have been a considerable number. It took me a lot of time and effort to accept that the question itself was flawed, and even after I came round to that fact, I was still never confident in my newfound understanding.

The doctor looked at the slides again and closed his mouth while he was thinking. Eventually, he opened it again.

“Mr. Shepherd. Are you a religious man?”

“No.”

“Well, no matter—even if you were religious, this would still require some explanation,” the doctor said. “It’s true that we used to believe that consciousness was a two-way state: at any given time, a person was either conscious or not. Sleep was, after all, the dominant paradigm and our main frame of reference.”

“Well, yes, people fall unconscious and sleep,” I said, without adding the unspoken third option that they die. “Are you saying that there are other states?”

There were, the doctor told me, and then began explaining some of the developments in neuroscience over the past ten years. He explained how advances in mapping techniques had allowed medical science to identify which mental processes happened in which parts of the brain, and that so far a total of 572 discrete modules had been identified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we had our emotions masked along with our senses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why wouldn’t someone just tell me that I was a murderer? That I was a killer?

I wanted someone other than this counselor to tell me that I had shed real blood, killed real people, of my own real free will. I wanted to feel what I felt during battle, staring over the edge of the precipice into the abyss. The rifle-shot cry that screamed I am still alive! existing, right here, right now. Tell me, someone, that this isn’t just one big fake.

I wondered if the counselor could guess the source of my unease. My brain was being monitored right this moment by the electrodes that had been stuck on at the start of the session. Neuroscience had come so far and had identified 572 discrete modules of the brain, but it was not yet at a point where it could read thoughts. Nonetheless, my brain would have been giving off all sorts of signals, and it would have been possible to deduce something from these.

The psycho-auxiliary software that was monitoring my brain had a real-time feed of this data into my interviewer’s psychological model of my psyche, which was being constantly updated and adjusted. This information would in turn have been fed to the counselor via his earpiece, giving him suggestions as to the most appropriate next step for him to take. I noticed he was indeed periodically tapping and readjusting his earpiece.

The counselor asked me a question. I had no idea what part of BEAR it was supposed to relate to, nor how it was supposed to help prepare me to adapt emotionally for battle. I didn’t know what the counselor was going to do with my answer. I didn’t know how his questions so far were supposed to have affected my emotions or my reason. I was sure his words were affecting me on a subconscious level that I could never hope to know. As long as my will was still my own and it was truly still “me” in charge of myself, I would never know and never be able to know.

“So. Are you ready to go and kill some children?” the counselor asked.

I told him, honestly, that I thought I was.

The psychotech officer had adjusted my emotions. The senses I didn’t need for this mission had been masked. My teamwork instincts had been medically boosted. I had used my AR contacts to practice, drill, and plan for what was about to come.

Everything was ready. It was the day before my departure to India. I stood before a mirror and pricked my finger with a pin until blood welled up.

It hurt. I knew that it hurt.

But I felt no pain.

3

The world changed the day the bomb exploded in Sarajevo.

The era of Hiroshima was brought to a close once and for all. All around the world the military suddenly started waking up to the fact that their theoretical weapons of mutually assured destruction were maybe not so theoretical after all. Nuclear weapons were back on the table as an option.

During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were the ultimate symbol of the eschaton. If the USSR and the USA went nuclear on each other, then a giant radiation cloud was sure to form a canopy in the skies that would herald an eternal nuclear winter. Humanity would perish. Nuclear war was to be avoided at all costs, and indeed, it had been avoided. Because people believed in the myth of nuclear apocalypse.

But that myth was exposed at Sarajevo.

A huge number of people died. Even so, military establishments around the world saw it as a “controlled” explosion. The casualties were confined to the target area. When politicians and generals around the world looked at the crater in the ground created by an improvised nuclear bomb, they realized that nuclear weapons might have their uses after all.

That was why, when India and Pakistan finally pulled the nuclear trigger on each other, the rest of the world wasn’t overly concerned. It was, of course, a dreadful event, and one that shouldn’t have happened.

But it was neither the end of everything nor the beginning of anything.

The world had already experienced Sarajevo after all.

We had become accustomed to people dying in large numbers.

Here, there was a smell.

A smell to stick in your craw. A smell that made you think that humans really were no more than beasts. Yes, India smelled all right. It smelled of poverty and sacred cows and feral dogs and shit and piss. It smelled of the pungent spices used in the preparation of every meal. It smelled of men, and it smelled of women.

And, of course, where it smelled of life, it also smelled of death in equal measure.

It was pervasive. The air even penetrated into our base.

We arrived at our Mumbai base ahead of our equipment and waited for the cargo shipment containing it to follow us. It was still on the outskirts of Mumbai, in the form of giant crates full of support equipment and Eugene & Krupps–branded weaponry, stewing in the hot air, waiting to be processed so that we could take delivery.

We had started to become accustomed to the oppressive heat and humidity. We spent our time at base camp reviewing the battle plan while we waited patiently for intel from our agents in the field. As soon as we had the tip-off, we would be bundled into our Intruder Pods and launched toward our target destination, and as soon as we captured our targets we would hightail it out of there in unmanned helicopters back to the nearest local base. Then, once everything was secure, we would escort our prisoners back to Mumbai by train.

It was a flawless plan. Of course, for a plan to work, things had to go according to it.

We headed out into the city once known as Bombay to acclimatize ourselves to our surroundings. New Delhi and Kolkata had been incinerated in nuclear infernos and were now somewhere at the bottom of giant craters. Mumbai had miraculously survived the nuclear exchanges of the war and so had naturally become a magnet for refugees from the rest of the country. Eugene & Krupps, the UN, and various NGOs all stationed their headquarters here for the postwar reconstruction effort, in this city that had once been the heartland of India’s awesome computer industry.

As we walked through the city we came across a Eugene & Krupps armored vehicle that had come to a standstill amid an ocean of people. It was a Stryker, probably US Army surplus, and its path was currently blocked by a herd of holy cows that was ambling across the road at a snail’s pace. On top of the vehicle stood a number of E&K PMC soldiers clad in Blackhawk Commando Chest Harnesses. They had guns dangling by their sides in holsters, and one of them drew a pack of smokes from one of the many pouches velcroed to his harness. He lit up a cigarette, blowing the smoke irritably into the crowd. Some jokers had evidently decided to take advantage of the standstill to cover the olive drab Stryker in bright pink stickers of Ganesha, which made the normally imposing armored vehicle look somewhat kitsch.

You could buy sacred icons on every street corner of this city, from the old-fashioned portraits and dolls to garish stickers and Mob straps. Shiva, Ganesha, Hanuman, and pretty much any other deity who took your fancy. All shapes and sizes, every possible permutation of god and consumer good you could possibly want, and then some.

Amid all this, Eugene & Krupps made its presence felt.

There were enough sentries to man virtually every intersection. There were probably more soldiers than police in this city by the looks of it, and each one wore his own interpretation of the uniform. Some had full protective gear, others just caps, and others wore nothing at all on their heads. There didn’t even seem to be any regulation-issue firearms—I even saw one middle-aged dude with an old-style Colt revolver. Talk about a cobbled-together single-action army. The silver-haired dandy glared back at us. I guess he could tell from the way we walked that we were in the same profession as him.

In contrast to the sentries who patrolled on foot, the men sitting on the Stryker were in coordinated uniform. They were disciplined enough to have passed for a national army. I figured these were probably the ex-Special Forces that Erica Sales woman had been talking about back in the conference room at the Pentagon.

Eugene & Krupps weren’t the only private contractors involved in India’s postwar reconstruction efforts, of course. The prisons for war criminals were run by the Dutch private security company Panopticon, and our very own good old Halliburton were tasked with public works.

Eugene & Krupps might have sounded vaguely middle-European in origin, but it was more or less an American company these days—over seventy percent of its stock was owned by US corporations, and most of its management ranks were staffed by Americans. I’d heard that there were even a couple of US senators on its board of directors.

In other words, the US was not a signatory to the Rome Statutes—and so couldn’t officially be directly involved in the postwar reconstruction—but could still exert its influence in more subtle ways through companies such as Eugene & Krupps. The US didn’t have to send in its ground troops in order to have a military presence. UNOIND might have tasked Japan with the postwar reconstruction and security of India, and Japan in turn tasked Eugene & Krupps as her proxy, but the US had ways of pulling strings behind the scenes.

The interesting thing, though, was that this powerful Eugene & Krupps had the direct backing of the Japanese government and the indirect support of the US and yet were still wary of the Hindu India forces. That gave us an idea of the odds we were up against.

Hindu fundamentalism. Caste discrimination had officially been made illegal long before the war. On paper at least. But centuries of entrenched social order can’t simply be legislated away overnight. The history of India was the caste system. All countries have their own forms of discrimination surreptitiously built into their national psyche, and India was no exception. That was why Hindu India had been able to survive. And it was why they were now able to thrive.

We arrived at a riverbank and found ourselves in the middle of a giant shantytown of a slum. Rows of corrugated iron roofs ran along either bank, making the river itself seem like a blood vessel flanked by vascular walls of makeshift housing.

The people who lived and worked here were the so-called laundry caste. A subsection of the untouchable caste, which was really no more than an umbrella term for various so-called untouchable professions. People born here spent their entire lives doing other people’s laundry. Social mobility was more or less unheard of.

This was another one of the reasons why the US didn’t intervene more proactively in the postwar India reconstruction. They would have had to deal with these messy human rights issues head-on. As it was, the governments that did intervene—Europe, Singapore, Japan—soon arrived at an unofficial policy of turning a blind eye to whatever entrenched abuses there were.

Leland and I decided to go and have a look at the railway that the New India government would be using to transport us during the final stages of the plan we were about to embark upon. We climbed to the top of a knoll on the outskirts of Mumbai, and from there we could look down over the sprawling slums that engulfed the train line. There was a train speeding through at that moment, showing no sign of slowing down as it powered its way through the shantytown. Leland was visibly shocked by how little concern people seemed to pay the tons of speeding steel flying past them. It was almost as if they had a death wish, but in fact they were just supremely unconcerned; the old men, children, young mothers, all shades of humanity slept, ate, and did their business right next to the tracks.

“Doesn’t the way the train runs through the slums make you think of Moses parting the Red Sea, sir?” Leland asked as he surveyed the scene from the top of the hill.

The slums used anything and everything as material—all kinds of trash were appropriated and incorporated. Galvanized iron, cardboard, hay, MDF, newspapers. The cornucopia of life that surrounded the tracks was like a flattened low-tech version of Kowloon.

Paupers and war orphans seemed to be drawn to the few working railroads that had survived the war. These refugees were the cholesterol clogging up the arteries of the train tracks. If trains were the lifeblood, then the people did actually cause accidents that stopped the flow of blood. The residents of the slums had no qualms about crossing the tracks or performing their bodily functions over them. It wasn’t uncommon for a person to be hit by a train as he squatted down to take his morning shit. The Mumbai municipal authorities did what little they could for the refugees of society to try and keep them out of harm’s way, but there were simply too many of them, and they kept on returning to the railroads no matter what the authorities did.

As bad as things were now, they had been worse. Before the UN intervened, postwar India had been teetering on anarchy. Its decimated industry showed no signs of life, and most of India’s famed engineers and scientists had died in the war. Before the UN accords took place, this country had been a Mad Max world, only greener.

A message arrived for me, flashing up in my AR contacts. The subject line read NATIONAL STOCK NUMBER X HAS ARRIVED. IMADS was a fully trackable courier service, just like Fedex. If you wanted to know which porter was carrying your gun over which ocean, it could tell you down to the nth degree.

“Time to head back, Leland. Our shit’s arrived.”

The delivery depot was next to Mumbai Airport’s runways. It was overrun by people trying to slot things together. It was like Black Friday at a new Ikea. We were issued IDs at the entrance and given a printout of a map pointing to the rough location of our crates. We piled back into our truck and proceeded to start looking for our stuff.

It seemed like the collection depot was full of invisible elves trilling out to their masters. When you approached a tagged container your IDs started chirping in high-pitched beeps. The collection depot was vast, and much of the cargo there had apparently been abandoned unidentified and unclaimed. That was why they had introduced an audio-guided tracking system half a year ago.

Williams was driving, one hand on the wheel and one wrapped around a First Strike bar that he proceeded to chomp down on as if it were a Snickers. “We better get out into the field soon or these things’ll give me a coronary,” he said.

First Strike bars were developed as rations for Marines for when they had to land on enemy beaches and form the vanguard of an invasion. Gram for gram they were the most efficient way known to man of delivering protein and calories to the human body. They were definitely not something you wanted to get into the habit of eating outside of mission time—it’d be a question of which gave out first, your heart or your liver.

We were cruising along in the truck when Williams turned to me. “Yo, Clavis. You spoke to John Paul, didn’t you?”

I had no idea why he would ask me that now, all of a sudden. “What makes you say that?”

“Just a feeling I had,” Williams said. “You haven’t been the same since that night in Prague.”

So I told him. Then and there. All about the siren songs that John Paul had discovered with the help of DARPA—the grammatical tune that lured countries to their deaths amid a sea of hatred and mistrust.

“Pretty hard to swallow though, isn’t it?” Williams said when I’d finished. He rolled down the truck window and chucked his empty candy-ration wrapper out without looking. “It’s a bit like that killer joke.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, the British Army’s secret weapon during World War II. The funniest joke in the world. British troops used to run through open fields, dodging artillery fire, shouting a German translation of the joke at the enemy, who dropped dead from laughter as soon as they heard it.”

I sighed. It was a real talent that Williams had, taking the most serious of conversations and pulling the rug out from under them.

“Another one of your fucking Python sketches, I’m guessing.”

“Bingo. How did you guess?” Williams said.

“Only you, Williams, could think of something as dumb as that to say at a time like this.”

Williams shrugged and carried on talking. Clearly nothing I said would have any effect on his mood. But when he spoke, he was serious again. “So, basically, this thing makes people act like lemmings.”

“I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” I said, looking at the forest of containers spread out before us. “The way I understand it, grammatical patterns in words transmit and reproduce themselves like a virus, and once a critical mass is reached, there’s something about the hidden deep structure of the grammar that induces a mass state of chaos, and this leads to people massacring each other.”

Williams lifted his finger toward me. “Here’s one for you, though. You know how lemmings are supposed to mass-migrate to their deaths when there are too many of them in a certain area? Well, apparently that’s just a story, no different from what you were saying back in Prague about Eskimos and their words for snow. An urban legend.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, apparently the lemming myth originates from a Disney documentary of all places. Crazy shit, huh? There’s this film that shows all these lemmings leaping off a cliff into a river, where they all drown. But apparently it was all staged. The lemmings had to be flown in from Canada and launched off the cliff using a turntable. The producers of the film even had to pay for the lemmings—they bought them from some Inuits, apparently.”

I had to admit this wasn’t quite what I was expecting by way of a response to my confession about John Paul. But when I thought about it, it was the sort of response I should have expected from Williams.

“So all that stuff about lemmings committing mass suicide as an evolutionary mechanism to regulate their numbers to keep their overall population at a sustainable level—”

“Yeah, bullshit, all of it,” Williams said. “Apparently, that’s not how evolution really works. It ain’t all about survival of the species at all costs. It’s the individual that likes to live on, and so it adapts to its environment, and the characteristics that help it adapt become the dominant traits that are passed down to the next generation of the species. Evolution is about what the species can do for the individual, not the other way around. A self-sacrificing instinct isn’t much good from an evolutionary point of view. You hardly ever actually see it in real life.”

I thought about this and what it meant. So the grammar of genocide couldn’t possibly be an evolutionary mechanism. John Paul was either delusional or had simply made up a wild cover story to rationalize his evil actions.

I vocalized my thoughts in an effort to drive away my doubts. “But it wasn’t a very convincing lie that John Paul told me then, was it? If he really had wanted to fool me, he could have come up with something better, surely?”

“Do you think he was trying to cover something up? There was some deeper secret he was trying to hide from you or something?” Williams asked.

No. That wasn’t it, surely. That was the sort of thing that an over-possessive husband would do—kill his wife in a fit of jealous rage when he found her talking to another man and then invent a stupid lie when questioned: aliens came down in a spaceship and forced me to do it. This wasn’t like that at all. John Paul wasn’t trying to plead insanity to claim diminished responsibility.

“Anyhow, that’s all academic now,” Williams said. “What we do know for sure is that the sonofabitch is behind all these murders worldwide, and what we need to do now is take him out once and for all.”

I glanced away from Williams. I realized that I wasn’t particularly interested in capturing or killing John Paul. I was interested in him because wherever he was, Lucia Sukrova would probably be there too.

My target now was Lucia Sukrova.

I wanted to see Lucia again.

I wanted Lucia to tell me that she forgave me.

God was dead. God is dead. So what?

As long as Lucia could grant me absolution.

Of course, I wasn’t about to share my selfish thoughts with Williams, so I kept my head down and carried on pretending to look for our cargo. Fortunately our ID tags started singing, and Williams drove on.

4

Seaweed to passengers. Calling Flying Seaweed to all passengers. Brace yourselves for high-altitude drop. Over.

We were ready when we heard the pilot’s voice come over the loudspeakers in the cargo bay.

The Flying Seaweed of which the captain spoke was hurtling through the sky, a miracle of engineering and stability. Black and thin, it did indeed from a distance look like its namesake. If there was such a thing as a type of seaweed that was a hundred meters long and fitted with jet engines, that is.

If a satellite was looking down on us now it would have seen a monolith cutting through a forest of clouds. The Flying Seaweed did technically have parts that functioned like wings, but they were so long and streamlined that you’d be hard-pressed to describe them as such.

It would have been impossible to tell just by looking where the belly of this bizarre-looking aerial assault craft was. It would also have been impossible to discern that, instead of its more usual payload of incendiary bombs, it was currently carrying a cargo of Intruder Pods as it flew into the heartland of crater-pockmarked India, using its assortment of precision micro-flaps to help guide its flight.

In the cargo bay, we busied ourselves with preparations for our impending descent. As always, there were a million and one last-minute checks to be performed. The final Pod check was particularly important because if the Pod didn’t activate, then it would effectively end up being hurled from a great height toward the ground and its doom.

Once the Pod checks were complete the medical staff came to insert tubes into our nostrils.

“Hot damn, that’s the stuff! Give it to papa!” Williams shouted, ripping the tubes from his nose as soon as the technicians had given him his dose. “That bromance juice sure does get you going. Clavis, buddy, I sure wish you could be here with me in my Pod right now so that I could show you how much I love you!”

Williams was kidding around even more than usual, and I knew exactly why. He had sensed my unease and was doing what he could to distract me. His buffoonery was supposed to help loosen me up. But it only had the effect of driving my doubts to a meta level. What if Williams was only acting that way because the cooperation hormone injection—what Williams called “bromance juice”— was kicking in? What if this was all a product of artificially engineered mirror neurons designed to make us feel that we all had each others’ backs? I shook my head. Our descent was about to start. I didn’t have time for these childish doubts.

The Combat Medical technicians pulled the apparatus from my nose. Snot poured from my nostril, a reaction to the hormones that had just been pumped into me.

Most of the medical treatment for Special Forces was outsourced to Combat Medical. Our BEAR counselors were also Combat Medical. Like most mature markets in a capitalist society, the military auxiliary service market was outsourced to the nth degree. There were companies that maintained and leased us our weapons, companies that operated our recon satellites, and companies that specialized in intelligence. Even the supply train was broken down into the smallest possible constituent parts: there were separate companies to provide food and water.

The business of war had become entrenched and was now a vital consideration in any analysis of modern warfare. Each individual component was only a small part in the grand scheme of the modern military-industrial complex but at the same time was indispensable. You couldn’t fight a war without weapons. You couldn’t continue a war without food. You wouldn’t know where to start without intelligence. Private military companies became an integral part of the system, providing reciprocal services for regular armies and eventually becoming fully integrated into the system themselves. Dystopian visions of PMC behemoths with enough military power to threaten G9 countries became obsolete as PMCs were fully coopted into the system as interdependent suppliers of military services. At the same time, official armies were now dependent on civilian contractors to mobilize.

“Here, your ARs.” Williams passed the nanolayer liquid to me. AR contacts had the potential to fall out during strenuous maneuvers, so during battle it was better to use nanodisplay film. I dabbed my eyelids with cream so that the nanolayer wouldn’t form anywhere other than directly on my eyeballs and then dribbled the liquid into my eyes. The liquid quickly sensed the electric potential in my eyes and formed a thin membrane that would act as my AR display for the duration of the battle. The cream around my eyes insulated the rest of my face, preventing the liquid from setting anywhere it didn’t need to.

“All units check AR efficacy,” I called out, although by now this was no more than a formality—the other soldiers were already turning on their combat datalinks and checking the test patterns showing in their ARs.

“All correct here,” Williams called out. His eyelids were covered in huge globs of the white cream. “And as per usual I’m tripping out on the test pattern.” His eyes were wide open, staring into nowhere in particular, and he was grinning like a spaced-out junkie.

“Dude, you know you don’t need to pop your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to see the test pattern,” I said.

The test pattern had started coming up on my retinal film too. Complex rows of alphanumeric displays were swirling round, finding their benchmark for an alternative reality to be superimposed over the reality before me: a room full of Special Forces soldiers waiting in silent anticipation.

“Yo, panda face,” I said to Williams, “wipe that crap off your eyes.” I chucked him the towel I’d used to wipe off my own insulator cream. Williams tried to think of a comeback but ended up mumbling something lame about how pandas actually had black patches around their eyes and not white.

I ran a final equipment check. The BHI Combat Harness that I was wearing had a multitude of pouches attached, so checking everything bit by bit actually took a fair while.

“Hurry up, boss! We’re all in our coffins already!” Williams heckled, but I wasn’t about to be rushed. I double-checked at my own pace until I was absolutely satisfied that I had missed nothing, and then I joined the others in the coffins—the black Intruder Pods.

The Seaweed’s loadmaster entered and shut the lids on the apertures.

All light disappeared.

The Pods were lifted up. There was a slight tremor and the sound of something slotting into place. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the servo moving the Pod along. I realized that the low-frequency waves being generated by the movement were making me feel tense, so I clenched my fists, opened them, and clenched them again. Then there was a stronger vibration, and the Pod stopped moving. I knew I was now fixed into position in the airdrop bay.

There was another mechanical sound, and then I heard the sound of the outside air beating against the walls of the Pod. It sounded like cloth ripping and became louder and louder as the Flying Seaweed opened its belly.

“You’ve got the lead, Jaeger One. Godspeed to you.”

And then I was falling from a great height.

Free-fall, as per usual.

Final guidance mode.

Unlike the time in Eastern Europe, our drogue chutes weren’t due to be activated until the very last minute. Back in Europe we had landed some distance away from our final destination, but this time we were going to land right in the enemy’s lap, and there was no time for foreplay. If we were to open our chutes at the same altitude we did in Europe, we’d be shot to shit by AKs and RPGs before we reached the ground.

Legs sprouted from the bottom of the Pod in order to help absorb the inevitable shock that was going to hit us as a result of leaving the chute opening to the very last minute. Four legs, very muscular—well, they were made out of artificial flesh—emerged to brace me against the Pod’s upcoming near crash landing. From below, it would have looked like a bowlegged giant hurtling down. I’d seen this sort of landing in training before, and I was shocked at how real, how fleshy the whole thing looked.

Just before I was about to hit the ground, the machine guns attached to the thighs (if you could call them that) of the artificial legs started firing to secure the landing area. The recoil from the machine guns set the Pod vibrating. I linked in to the Pod using my AR, and I could sense the ammo being used up at an extraordinary rate. I connected to the external visuals, and I could see three or four freshly bullet-riddled corpses of enemy soldiers near the landing area.

I felt an intense shock run through my body, but the antigravity mechanisms absorbed the worst of it. The next moment the Pod peeled away from me like a banana skin, and part of the Pod detached itself from the main body in order to take the shape of a Pathbreaker Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that would provide me with aerial support.

“Jaeger One touchdown,” I called and ran to take cover in the shadow of the nearest building. The other seven soldiers in my team landed in quick succession after me, and within fifteen seconds of my touchdown, all the Pods had entered self-destruct mode, their electrical parts destroyed by acid and the artificial flesh killed by having its supply of life-giving enzymes cut off.

I stuck my head out of the shadows to quickly confirm that the Pods were all dying properly and that the soldiers that had been shot by the auto-fire on our way down were indeed all dead.

The Pathbreakers that had emerged from the Pods were now in autonomous scouting mode; they were gathering information about the terrain and relaying messages among the team.

We converged on the building that we had identified as our target and slipped inside before the enemy had the chance to raise the alarm. Children with AKs charged us, and our guns cut through their little bodies like hot knives through butter. Outside was the sound of the covering fire and the chainsaw-like buzzing of the giant upside-down salad bowls we called Pathbreakers, and inside was the sound of screaming children.

We quickly killed all the children encamped in the lobby. Aiming for the leg or shoulder was simply not an option on a mission like this—it was shoot to kill from the get-go. Had we been facing adults, who had somewhat more predictable attack patterns, it might have been a different story. But children, children were fearless, and they never knew when to give up, and that made them unpredictable and dangerous.

The building was overflowing with children. The Praetorian Guard. Boys and girls of all shapes and sizes and ages kept coming at us, and we kept taking them down, one tiny shadow and one headshot at a time. Williams and I pushed our way down what once would have been a hotel corridor and started ascending a flight of stairs.

If this had been a battle between equals, of one modern army against another, the best strategy would have been to shoot to maim rather than shoot to kill. A severely wounded soldier didn’t just mean one enemy taken out of action, it could mean up to three, as two of his comrades would be tied up getting him to a place of safety. But on this battlefield, life was cheap, too cheap, and there was no culture of stopping to rescue an injured comrade. It just wasn’t done. As such, the optimal strategy changed: the safest course of action was to make sure that every single enemy combatant that you faced was instantly and one hundred percent dead. The leaders of these sorts of paramilitary groups would often supply their child troops with copious quantities of mind-numbing drugs to keep them revved up, obedient, and focused on battle. It became the children’s only way of temporary relief from their harsh lives. And when a drug-addled kid was charging at you with an AK rifle, shooting off a limb or two was simply not going to cut it. Even a fatal shot to the chest or guts might give them time to fire off a final salvo or two in your direction.

That was why we always had to take them down first time. As I was calmly advancing and killing every child in my way, it occurred to me that Williams and I were effectively drugged up in the same way by our own superiors. We had subjected ourselves to nanomachine sensory-masking treatment. If Williams or I were to take a shot right now, we wouldn’t feel any pain, we would only know about it.

So if the enemy wanted to stop us, they’d have to fire a lethal shot too.

I shuddered. If, for argument’s sake, Williams and I had to turn on each other, the only possible outcome would be that one or the other of us would have to die. We would keep firing at each other until a deathblow had been dealt. We were no different from the children in front of us.

My ARs flared up: armored vehicles and trucks from all around the town were converging on the building we were in. Having said that, their leaders were in here too, so it was not as if the vehicles outside could start blasting at us. They could have the biggest cannons in the world, but they’d still have to leave them behind and come in here on foot if they wanted to get us without harming their bosses.

The enemy redoubled its useless efforts to try and stop us from advancing, screaming like angry angels as they charged. Most of the boys’ voices had not yet broken, so it was impossible to tell just from the screams whether a particular voice belonged to a boy or a girl. A young girl, naked, breasts not yet formed, emerged through one of the doors. She had probably been servicing one of her commanders. She held an AK rifle to her skinny flank and started firing randomly in our direction. I calmly took aim at her naked torso and fired. Her flat chest split open and she collapsed. I stuck my head around the door frame to the room she had jumped out of. A man who looked like he could have been a commander was struggling to do up his pants. I shot him dead too.

At that moment I was in a perfect state. What I mean by perfect is that I could kill children without the slightest bit of hesitation. Anyone who thinks I’m stating the obvious—they were shooting at me, for God’s sake!—is seriously underestimating the power of both human morality and emotion. You never knew when either of those things was likely to spark up at the most inopportune moment and influence your judgment. Even highly trained soldiers. Of course, even in a normal state of mind I’d be able to kill children without compunction if my life depended on it. Most of the time. But you could never quite say one hundred percent. Not if you’d been brought up as a normal citizen in America.

Humans can, on occasion, end up prioritizing love or morality over their own lives. We’re warped. We’re a perverse species, capable of sacrificing ourselves in the name of altruism. Never underestimate morality. As Lucia said, altruism is to a certain extent an evolutionary instinct and as such has taken root deep inside the brain. Plenty of soldiers were, quite rightly, afraid of this instinct taking hold in them, blindsiding them, controlling their actions when they least expected or needed it.

That’s what BEAR was for. To protect against that worst-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario would inevitably result in death. There was no recovery from it. That was why the ability to protect yourself absolutely against the unexpected encroachment of emotion and morality, even if only for that specific window of time, that little festival called war, where you were detached from society and a different set of rules applied, was so powerful.

I had been made perfect by counseling and chemical substances.

My ARs showed me where my targets were. On this floor. The team had the whole hotel under control. Our targets were trapped.

And then a bullet brushed my cheek. I ducked for cover as soon as I perceived the pain, and Williams fired off a salvo at the window where the shot had come from. Had my sense of pain not been totally subdued, I would undoubtedly have been unable to react so quickly and efficiently. I acknowledged the pain in my body without feeling it in any sense at all. A sniper had fired the shot from the fourth floor of a building some distance away. About five meters in front of me there was a girl whose head had just been opened up like a rafflesia plant. The sniper must have thought she was one of us.

“What do we do now, boss?” Williams asked, scowling. “It’s not safe to advance. Should we crawl under the windowsill?”

I used my battle link to contact Leland. “Calling Blue Boy. This is Jaeger One. Your current location is the corridor on the opposite side of the target room from us, correct? Over.”

“Roger that, Jaeger One. But there are also windows on this side en route to the target room. I’d say odds on that there’s a sniper or two pointed this way too. Over.”

“Let’s smoke the corridors, boss,” said Williams.

I considered this idea for a couple of seconds but discarded it. “No.” It’d stop the sniper fire, but it’d also make it too difficult to fight off another enemy charge.

“Then I guess we just have to pray to God,” Williams said.

He wasn’t being facetious. I nodded and linked up to the Flying Seaweed.

“Come in, Seaweed. This is Jaeger One. What is your current location? Over.”

I heard a crackle and over that the voice of the pilot who had wished me Godspeed.

“Just overhead, circling the fireworks. Over.”

“Good. I need you to take a building out for us. We’ll identify the target with laser. Over.”

“Roger that, Jaeger One. Over and out.”

I nodded, and Williams stuck the tip of his rifle out of the window. He used the SOPMOD laser pointer and activated his ARs so that he could send a visual confirmation of the building where the sniper was hiding.

“Gotcha!” Williams smiled viciously. Data regarding our location and that of the target was beamed up to the Seaweed, and the pilot confirmed that the data had been received.

A few seconds later there was an almighty roar. Our hotel shook, and pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. I stuck my head quickly over the windowsill to see what was left of the sniper’s hideout collapse to the ground in the distance. The Seaweed had used one of its emergency Smart Bombs.

“Thanks, Seaweed!” Williams shouted, and he was already off, charging through the dusty corridor toward our final target. I shrugged inwardly and followed. Williams arrived at the door to the room, unstrapped a sawed-off shotgun from his back, and made sure it was loaded before blasting the door open. Meanwhile, I had a stun grenade timed perfectly, two seconds exactly, and I tossed it in. I plugged my ears and opened my mouth just before light and noise erupted on the other side of the doorway.

Williams and I charged in, followed by Leland’s unit, who had joined us. I pumped a bullet into the forehead of a boy who was still floundering in shock from the blast of the stun grenade, and while I was at it I took out a half-naked young girl who held a PPSh semiautomatic in her hands. No doubt she had been one of the boss’s bodyguard-slash-sex-slaves. In no time flat the leadership of Hindu India had surrendered unconditionally, either cowering in the back room or kneeling before us, hands in the air.

Williams brandished his sawed-off shotgun theatrically. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” he cried.

“Who are you people?” one of our prisoners asked. No trace of an accent—his English sounded pretty fluent. Well, it wasn’t too unusual for an intellectual elite or two to be mixed in with monkeys such as these. No doubt educated at Eton and Oxford.

“We’re agents of the ICC. You know there are arrest warrants out on you sons of bitches—who the hell were you expecting?” Williams laughed. A little too diabolically for my liking.

“Mercenary scum. Vultures of war,” the prisoner spat.

I was perplexed by this. We were US Army regulars, of course, but he was technically right in that we were classified as mercenaries for the purposes of this mission. If we were doing things by the book, I guess Williams should have said we were military proxies of the Japanese government here to arrest you on their behalf. But that didn’t quite have the same ring to it. Anyhow, Williams didn’t seem too troubled by such niceties.

“Yup, and it takes one to know one, buster,” he said, his maniacal smile now twisted into something closer to a scowl. He and the Blue Boy team were now calmly binding and tagging the Hindu India leadership, who had all lost the will to fight.

All except one. “We are most certainly not the same. We are warriors protecting our holy motherland against encroachment from Muslim scum. We are on a crusade. The only God you worship is Mammon,” the educated prisoner said.

But to be honest, his words no longer had any effect on me. All fanatics were the same. Regardless of which sect, which religion, which cult, which battlefield, which tragedy they were involved in. It was always the same type of person.

Williams, too, saw this and laughed. It was like watching a bad sitcom in reruns, he said.

In addition to the Indian leaders that we had captured, there was a white man standing in the corner of the back room, watching silently as we bound the others. I remembered that figure and that face.

John Paul.

“Good to see you again, sir,” John Paul said with a smile. “I have to say, I am impressed—not just a spy, but Special Forces too.” Now that I was looking at his face in the sunlight I could believe that he was indeed a former scholar, something I never quite saw when I met him in the dark basement in Prague. But there was one thing in common with the time I met him in Prague: his eyes were not the eyes of a madman but rather of someone who could not be more lucid.

“This is the day job,” I said, taking off my protective goggles so that I could look him straight in the eye. “Where’s Lucia?”

John Paul seemed overjoyed to hear me ask the question. “She’s not here. And it looks like your target is not exactly congruent with the mission you’ve been tasked to perform by your country.”

“I’m arresting you,” I said, keeping my emotions in check. I taped his arms together. John Paul didn’t resist.

I linked up with the Seaweed again. “The goods are in the shopping basket. Check her out. Over.”

“Roger, Jaeger One. Over and out.”

Leland switched his guidance marker on. It would act as a beacon for the Seaweed’s retrieval craft, which would now be here shortly. Our comrades who had been holding the line for us on the other floors were starting to arrive too.

“Get to the roof, everyone,” I called out.

Leland’s team had planted SWDs on the backs of the heads of the Hindu India bigwigs, and these now kicked in, forcing the men to start marching in the direction we ordered, even if they resisted and their bodies flailed behind them. No one could remember what the official name was of these contraptions that forced prisoners to march, but within I Detachment we called them Silly Walk Devices, or SWDs for short, after the comical way in which the body and arms sprawled behind the legs when the prisoner tried to resist. No prizes for guessing who came up with the name and where he got his inspiration from.

As the last of our detachment arrived on the top floor, a deep rumble shook the whole building. The enemy forces who were trying to climb the building must have triggered a sensor and activated a booby trap of water gel explosives. They’d probably destroyed all the internal stairs by now. The children would have a job getting up here.

We climbed the stairs toward the roof, and as we did so a bird’s-eye view of the town flashed up in the corner of my eye. Images from the nose camera of the UAV helicopter sent down from the Seaweed.

We arrived on the roof and the right corner of my ARs started flashing. I kept a steady lookout for the aircraft, as indicated, and by and by a flying pig-like contraption entered my field of vision, closing in on us from the south. I could see various RPGs being fired uselessly at it—the only effect they had was to create a number of pretty little arcs in its wake—and as it approached, I could see it with my real eyes and at the same time could see myself and the hotel grow closer via the helicopter’s eyes projected back at me through my ARs.

What a motley crew and what a bizarre situation, I thought.

The miniguns attached to the helicopter were strafing the ground as it approached us, sweeping away all the ill-mannered resistance that was daring to try and fire antitank weapons in its direction. The underside of the fast-approaching aircraft was twinkling with muzzle flash as it unleashed a torrent of tracer bullets on soldiers below. This was one machine that was determined to live up to its privileged status as a people killer.

In no time flat the helicopter had reached us and landed on the roof. My comrades provided cover fire, suppressing the paramilitary soldiers who were trying to shoot RPGs at us from the road below. Williams noisily rounded up our prisoners and herded them into the helicopter, where he promptly fixed them with knockout patches so that fell unconscious. They wouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to get up to any mischief.

The north section of the roof exploded and shards of rock flew everywhere. An enemy RPG had slipped through our barrage and hit us.

“Damage report from all units!” I shouted over the roar of our suppressing fire. The two soldiers protecting our north flank stuck their thumbs up. No one was hurt, but the enemy sensed weakness and started focusing their firepower to our north. There was a hail of bullets and more RPGs. The north wall was crumbling. Time to go.

“All prisoners secured!” I heard Williams shout. I gave the signal to withdraw. The team all pulled out their hand grenades.

“Jaeger One, sir, how many floors does this hotel have again?” one of the others asked.

“Four floors, each roughly eight feet high,” I called out so that all could hear. Everyone did the math, pulled the pins, waited till the precise moment, and then dropped their grenades over the edge of the roof.

We heard the explosions as the grenades hit the ground in the distance. The gunfire coming from below subsided, and this was our cue to climb aboard the helicopter. With a sure hand Williams deactivated the autopilot mode and took the helm. It took less than fifteen seconds for us all to pile in, and during that time Williams brought the helicopter fully under his control.

“Here we go, ladies!” Williams whooped for joy, and suddenly the g-force was pulling me down. The paramilitary stronghold started shrinking into the distance. The soldiers near the gun booth rained down a goodbye salvo on the soldiers below, but we were quickly at a height where neither the adults nor the children on the ground could have any effect on us or vice versa.

I activated my ARs and linked to the fuselage cameras. Through one reality I could see the faces of men satisfied with a successful mission and a job well done; through the alternative reality of the abdominal cameras I could see paramilitary troops firing wildly and uselessly up into the air and the makeshift beacons of burning tires.

As the scene drifted farther and farther away I could also feel the adrenaline in my body ebbing like waves retreating from the seashore. The battle was over. Now I could return to the dream, the dream of normality and everyday life. I could return until duty called again.

The long wait until the next battle.

And the long wait until I could next meet Lucia Sukrova.

I felt myself overcome with weariness. I forced myself to remember my duty and pull myself back to reality, and contacted the local base camp.

“Jaeger One calling. The battle is over and our duties discharged. The packages have all been secured. The jewel has also been secured. No casualties. We are now returning to base. Over and out.”

5

The train was a relic from last century. It had survived the nuclear war and still chugged on today, a link between India’s regions. Its antique simplicity was its strength. We had escaped the Hindu India organization’s sphere of influence by helicopter and regrouped at a Eugene & Krupps frontline base, and now all that was left to do was escort the prisoners back to Mumbai by train as per the plan. There we would hand them over—excepting John Paul, of course—to the prosecutor from The Hague, who in turn would pass them on to Panopticon for safekeeping. Our duty would then be done.

The base camp was close to the Pakistan border. The atmosphere there was heavily charged. The handpicked Eugene & Krupps sentinels there would stand guard all night, scowling at the Hindu India–controlled hinterlands on the other side of the forest. The catering company that normally supplied E&K rations refused to come this far, it seemed—during the four days we spent at the base we never saw any of the garrison rations that we had grown accustomed to back in Mumbai. Not that I’m particularly complaining about the rations they provided us with or anything.

The Eugene & Krupps soldiers—technically “employees” I suppose, but if it carries a gun and looks like a soldier and smells like a soldier, then it’s a soldier so far as I’m concerned—spent their days gazing into the surrounding forests. Leland asked one of them what he was looking for and received the answer that he wasn’t looking but rather listening. The sound of a large number of people dying at once created a huge pillar of sound, a choir of tens or even hundreds of voices that rent the heavens of the Indian sky. The soldiers here called this sound a Ligeti. Some E&K soldier must have been a classical music buff and had decided to name the discordant wailing after the modernist composer who, among other things, provided the eerie
soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The E&K troops told us that they never ventured into the forest. A while back they had tried a massive offensive push in collaboration with UN peacekeepers, but it proved a massive failure. After that, E&K came to an informal understanding with Hindu India that the forest was the boundary line.

The E&K troops, then, were all interested in our story, as we had returned from the mythical land beyond the forest. What was it like? Were there corpses everywhere? It was as if we were all Captain Willard, returning from Colonel Kurtz’s unholy kingdom beyond the border.

They eat their Muslim captives, right? No, they worship an idol made out of an unused nuclear warhead and decorate it with the ears of their victims as offerings. These tall tales might have seemed ridiculous, but it was amazing how quickly people reverted from being rational purveyors of information to Chinese whisperers when lines of communication were cut off. When soldiers were garrisoned in the asshole of the world, in the boiling heat, surrounded by hostile forest and with the threat of an unknown enemy constantly looming, it was almost inevitable that stories would be born about the horrors of war.

Stories of the brutality and inhumanity of the unknown enemy were par for the course during war. So were ghost stories. Ghost ships, ghost submarines, ghosts of German soldiers haunting Lithuanian forests. Which was why I was hardly surprised that ghost stories had sprung up here too: tales of swarms of ghosts of massacred Buddhist and Muslim villagers who roamed the forest by night. These were passed on from sentry to sentry.

Why did soldiers fear the imaginary dead when real death was always around them?

Why should a submarine traversing enemy waters be worried about ghost submarines when they faced the very real threat of an unknown enemy minefield that could blow them out of the water at any minute? Why should a soldier stuck in the trenches worry about ghostly comrades beckoning him to the land of the dead when he was up against the real risk of a deadly hail of mortar fire? And yet people could always find ways of being afraid of the dead. Even on the battlefield, where life couldn’t get any more real, people found ways of believing in fictions—or is “delusions” a better word?—that could shock them to their existential core.

There had been a number of times when I wondered whether John Paul was such a delusion—a figment of my imagination that I had invented to scare myself. A ghostly figure who traversed the world to spread a trail of death in his wake. A mythical monster created out of human fears. After all, even though I had captured the man who called himself John Paul, I couldn’t feel any sense of closure. Could this mild-mannered scholar’s a capella song really have been the catalyst for all that death?

Dawn broke, and we climbed into a doubly reinforced Stryker to begin our six-hour journey to the nearest railway station. We used KO pads to keep our captives unconscious for the duration of the journey, so when the time came to wake them up and bundle them out, their muscles had gone to sleep. The prisoners did what they could to loosen up their stiff joints as we roughed them out of the vehicle and onto the platform. One of the prisoners moaned about how we were abusing prisoners of war. He was one of the Indian generals who had given the order to use nuclear warheads on unarmed civilian targets.

“Kneel!” Leland’s battle cell lined the prisoners up along the railway platform. The prisoners were made to kneel, and we kept a close watch on them. If any of them wanted to escape they would have to stand up first, one leg after another. Not too easy when you had eagle eyes watching your every move.

The prisoners stayed in position until they found themselves looking up at an old diesel engine pulling into the station. We had the front three carriages to ourselves, sandwiched by police wagons, and the rear carriages of the train were crammed full of passengers on their way to Mumbai. There were even passengers on the roof. A scene that epitomized this desperately poor country.

I wondered why these people were heading to Mumbai. Were they trying to escape the clutches of Hindu India or just fleeing from grinding rural poverty? I thought of the shantytowns where the laundry workers lived and worked and the slums on either side of the railway line. Was that what awaited the passengers of the train? Or would they end up as beggars on the streets? Did they have relatives in Mumbai who had promised to lend their rural cousins a hand? In any case, one thing was for sure: this train was a container of humanity ready to be dumped into the teeming ocean of life that was Mumbai. But if the passengers were just going to be dropped into the slums, the internment camps of poverty and despair, then they were on a journey out of the frying pan and into the fire. It brought to my mind the Nazi trains that transported Jews from the ghetto to the concentration camp.

The wheels started moving, rattling over the rails. It was a jarring ride—solid, but rough. A Kalashnikov of a train. It was hardly surprising that people occasionally fell from the roof on this sort of journey. A couple of hours sitting on the hard wooden benches and my ass was completely numb.

“I’m going to take a look at the prisoners,” I said. I stood up and walked toward the carriage behind me.

Two of our detachment were in with the prisoners, watching them closely, while the rest of us were split into two groups, guarding the carriages in front and behind respectively. We had made it safely out of the high danger zone about an hour ago and were now down to yellow alert. If Hindu India had been planning to attack us, they would have done so back there. Whatever they might have thought about losing their top leadership, it was unlikely that the remaining Hindu India paramilitary were about to go completely crazy and attempt a suicide charge into territory firmly under the control of the New India government, UN troops, and Eugene & Krupps.

When I arrived in the prisoners’ carriage, the apes all had their mouths shut, although they seemed to be taking their captivity in different ways. Some of them were paralyzed by fear the moment they stepped into the passenger car that was taking them to justice; others were trembling, some were indignant, and yet others tried to maintain a dignified silence—as if the monkeys had any dignity to begin with. The only thing they had in common was that they had become so accustomed to being switched off by the KO pads that they had learned not to show any sign of resistance.

One of the men, who had evidently determined that I was the leader of our detachment, opened his mouth. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we get to our destination. Do you really think the cowardly government troops will be able to contain us?”

“Oh, no need to worry about that,” I replied. “Your faithful followers won’t have much luck if they try and spring you from your cells. Panopticon’s secure facilities are like a cleaner version of Alcatraz.”

“Panopticon? We’re being taken to a private detention center?” he asked.

“A prison, strictly speaking. A correctional facility. Panopticon has been tasked to provide security for the New India government and the UN. You won’t find any of your ‘cowardly government troops’ in their facilities, I’m afraid. Only elite private military forces, handpicked for their experience and security know-how. They’re the best in the world. I wouldn’t count on being rescued, if I were you.”

The man didn’t seem to believe me—his eyebrows were raised in a silent smirk. He evidently had no idea that this sort of thing was standard practice these days. He was an old man. The ID spot check we performed when we arrested him told us that he had been a colonel in the old Indian army. He was a product of a different era, a time when the state still did everything.

I left the old man and moved toward the back of the carriage where John Paul was sitting on his own, next to a window covered with iron bars.

“Iron bars, eh? You did well to find a carriage like this,” John Paul said, staring out the window. He lifted up his bound hands and pointed at the scenery that was drifting by. “Look, that billboard there.”

I only managed to catch a glimpse before it flitted by: some writing in what I suppose would be called gothic script, with a heavy, angular font. It was superimposed over a realistic if somewhat old-fashioned painting of soldiers.

“I came up with that,” John Paul said. “The grammar of genocide isn’t always dependent on the content of the message. You can sneak it into the most innocuous of everyday conversations, if you want to. But it’s best if you can incorporate it into slogans and propaganda, like on that billboard back there. There grammar is at its most concentrated form. You can embed the grammar into sentences in different ways, with different degrees of concentration, but stirring messages like the one on that billboard really give you the opportunity to lay it on nice and thick and dense.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“I have this little theory. Consider this. It’s not political extremism that leads to genocide. Rather it’s the need to prepare for genocide that makes people express their opinions in terms of political extremism.”

“What the hell? You’ve got it all fucked up,” I said.

“If by ‘fucked up’ you mean that I have my cause and effect the wrong way around, then yes, I agree with you. But then again, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the fact that all it takes is a few words for people to systematically start murdering each other is also ‘fucked up,’ as you put it.”

The Lord of Genocide shrugged.

Amber clouds hovered over the paddy fields outside. A pillar of light appeared in the distant forests, a Jacob’s Ladder. Were there more massacres going on over there, perhaps? Was God sucking up the souls of the innocent victims with a straw of light? The vista looked almost like a caricature—surely if there was a god up there waiting at the top of that, it would have been the one from Monty Python.

Time was nothing to me anymore. If you’d asked me what time of day it was I would only have been able to describe it as being “battle time.” A no-man’s land where your sense of time and emotion was masked by your BEAR. I found myself being drawn into the rhythm of the train, which made this already endless and timeless period stretch out even further and simultaneously pass in an instant. It was like wading through jelly, and yet completely normal and natural at the same time.

I was drawn back into the carriage by another piece of Hindu India agitprop out of the window. John Paul noticed that I was looking at it and spoke.

“You’ll notice how the picture to go with the slogan is rooted in the socialist realism school? I’ve noticed that beyond a certain point, right-wing and left-wing extremists alike tend to share the same aesthetic sensibilities, or should I say lack of—”

“You really are something else, aren’t you,” I interrupted calmly. “You fucking piece of shit. I’m not just talking about your genocides either. Even your friends over there, the fundamentalist nuts, you’ve been laughing at them while you used them as tools for your own ends.”

“And you can’t abide my looking down on them?” John Paul asked.

“Not just looking down on them—looking down on them and manipulating them into killing each other. At least they have the integrity to get their own hands dirty.”

“Yes. The problem is that I’ve committed myself to more than I could possibly do with my own little pair of hands. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to busy myself with the manual labor. But I do accept responsibility for everything they do,” John Paul said.

“They’ll be standing trial soon,” I said. “The ICC will see they take their share of the blame. But not you. You’re different.”

“Back to the National Military Establishment for me?”

“Exactly. And after that, even I don’t know.”

I stopped speaking to try and read John Paul’s reaction. Nothing. He didn’t show anything. No fear. No resignation.

After a little while, John Paul spoke again. “I’m thirsty. Could you get me a glass of water?”

“How about a glass of ‘quit your bitching or I’ll slap you with another KO pad,’ ” I said.

“How hospitable of you. I think I’ll pass.”

“Where’s Lucia?”

“Not here.”

“I know she’s not here, you fuck. That’s why I’m asking you where she is.”

John Paul shrugged. “How is that question relevant to your duty?”

“Maybe it’s not.” I felt myself getting more agitated, and my voice grew deeper and colder. “Maybe I just want Lucia.”

“And you’re prepared to kill as many children as it takes to get to her,” he said.

I looked at John Paul. It was ironic. This was the first time John Paul had ever revealed anything approaching a human emotion. Sure, that emotion might have been animosity toward me. And it did make me angrier still. But there was also a little part of me that was … relieved?

“Sure, it’s tough. But I was just doing my job.”

I tried to give as bland an answer as I could, but it made John Paul laugh out loud.

“Tough? You’re lying, and you know it. I know all about the emotion regulation that you go through before battle. So that you can kill children without worrying, either before or after. You don’t even feel any guilt as you pull the trigger. I’m right, aren’t I?”

I didn’t say anything.

“And ‘I was just doing my job’? Please. Have you any idea how many ordinary people, people who wouldn’t hurt a fly in their day-to-day lives, have used that as an excuse to commit the most cruel and brutal acts imaginable? The Nazis who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were ‘just doing their job.’ The East German border guards who shot their own countrymen dead for trying to cross the Berlin Wall were ‘just doing their job.’ Just doing your job, eh? Well, if everyone ‘just did their job’ then we wouldn’t have any need for soldiers or bodyguards. Jobs exist to paralyze the human conscience. Where did capitalism come from? The Protestant work ethic: do your job, save money, and God will be pleased with you. A job is a form of religion. The only thing that varies from person to person is how pious they are. Most people actually understand this on some level. They just don’t want to admit it to themselves.”

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

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

“Fuck off!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something suddenly occurred to me.

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

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

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

“So what does that prove?”

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

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

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

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

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

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

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

“What’s up, chief?” I asked Williams.

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

“Do we have a visual?” I asked.

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

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

I looked up from the track.

“See anything?” Williams asked.

“No.”

I put on my combat glasses and adjusted my ARs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shit, I’d forgotten to state my name.

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

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

Like a Clint Eastwood movie, I remembered. A movie where the side of a bus was opened up by machine-gun fire. Clint played a detective whose job it was to defend a woman who was a key witness in a case and was being targeted by crooked cops. And that made me think of the person we had been tasked to guard: John Paul.

“What about the prisoners? Over.”

“We can’t tell what’s happening in the next carriage, sir. We’re pinned down. I do know that the guys guarding the car aren’t responding. SmartSuits are reporting them dead. When I tried to leave this car to investigate my left arm was blown off my shoulder, sir! Over.”

Leland’s voice was as positive as ever as he rattled off the list of disasters. Damn him—it almost made me laugh. But I could tell he wasn’t joking. That was just the state we were in now, we who could perceive pain without feeling it. The Special Forces with our sensory masking. An arm ripped out of its socket? The SmartSuit would soon see to the blood, no worries. You could imagine the stories the guys would be telling down at the bar later. Hey guys, I was charging along without a care in the world and fuck me, I never noticed that my own head had been blown off! Whaddaya know!

“Are you hurt?” I vocalized almost unconsciously.

I suppose Leland was a bit taken aback to be asked such an irrelevant question under the circumstances. “Uh, yes, sir, I guess I am. I can tell I’ve been hurt, I mean. I can’t feel anything of course. No problem, sir. Pain’s not too much of a—motherfucker! Clavis, they got Nelson. Shit! Nelson’s down, sir! Fuck! Goddamn! Over!”

I gritted my teeth and started advancing again. The enemy had our train car surrounded in siege formation. I took a hand grenade out and threw it toward the car.

A rumble. I took advantage of the collapse in their formation caused by the explosion to move closer by another carriage. From my new cover I looked out to examine the situation.

I could just about make out some figures in camouflage gear. Many of them were streaked with scarlet. I realized that these were open wounds. Stumps, even. Two soldiers standing near the point where my grenade went off had lost arms and legs. They were now moving for cover, most of their bodies camouflaged except for their newly acquired stumps that were spurting crimson blood onto the terrain. Leland’s crew took full advantage of the lull to launch a counteroffensive, throwing a grenade at the enemies on the other side and following it with a fusillade. I used the opportunity to move closer by yet another carriage. Almost there. Almost ready to link up.

I performed another quick recon. We’d managed to kill a few of them in the short time since I launched my grenade.

But the walking wounded seemed impervious to their pain. There were men who had lost arms or legs or were bleeding out but still maintained battle formation and were firing away. Who were these assailants? How far did we have to grind them down before they would die? This was like a zombie film, I thought. And not the twentieth-century sort with the shambling walking dead—these were the lean, mean, fast zombies of the early twenty-first century.

Sensory masking.

Finally it hit me. The enemy had received pain masking too. They’d had their brains messed with so that they could have their pain temporarily filtered out; they could sense when they had been hurt without really feeling it. The nightmarish vision I’d had back in the hotel while I was mowing down the children had now proved to be strikingly prescient. We were finding out what would happen when two groups met up—two groups that had both received BEAR treatment.

That’s right. None of the G9 countries had ever had cause to meet one another on the battlefield, obviously. There had never been a test case where two equally technologically advanced militaries had been pitted against each other. Modern warfare, as far as we were concerned, meant asymmetric warfare in its truest sense. It meant rich white guys invading enemy territory and blowing seven shades of shit out of poor brown guys. That was what all of our plans and missions essentially came down to.

That was why no one had predicted or planned for or trained us for a situation such as this one. A zombie shootout. Our ambushers had evidently been at the receiving end of some fairly high-tech military support treatment before coming here. Technology that made them impervious to pain and indifferent to the fact that they were losing blood and even limbs in the course of engaging the enemy.

“The enemy has received sensory masking!” I told Leland.

“Yes sir, we noticed that! We’ll just have to flatten them into hamburgers, sir! Over!”

I was lost for words. This was … grotesque. This just wasn’t war anymore.

I admit it. I lost my nerve.

The mental image of both sides standing there, firing away at each other until we were literally no more than piles of mincemeat. It shocked me to my core. The fear of death is always with you when you’re on a mission. Our job is to take that fear and link it to our desire to live. So it wasn’t the fear of death that was paralyzing me. It was the vision of a battle taken to its logical conclusion of an eternal shootout without pain or feeling.

I hadn’t yet reached the train car where Leland and the others were under siege. I wasn’t yet close enough to properly engage with the soldiers who had taken ten bullets to the belly and lost their fingers and arms and legs and ears and jaws and cheeks but were still fighting. I was out of range. And worst of all, I was glad that I was out of range.

The limits of this battle were no longer the effective firing range of the weapons, though. The limit was now how far you could imagine yourself being pushed into the realm of the grotesque, how happy you were to keep fighting even when injured to the point of permanent disfigurement. The limit was the map of the mind that showed what to do to suppress emotion and feeling.

I was spurred on by guilt now—guilt that I had yet to join my comrades on the battlefield. I leapt out of my hiding place and ran full speed toward the carriage where Leland was holed up. Not a professional judgment call or a pragmatic decision, just a blind dash.

The world was a cruel place. For some reason, not a single bullet hit me during my desperado charge. I later realized that it was probably because our assailants were already retreating at that point, but at the time it felt bizarre, like I was being cheated out of my chance to take part in the battle. Why? Why couldn’t I be part of it? I was frustrated, vexed, even, that no one was shooting me.

I slipped into the carriage where Leland and what was left of the crew were making their stand.

“Jaeger One, sir, how are things outside?” was the first thing Leland said to me.

The men were collapsed across the floor. Various parts of their bodies were soaked in red. Most of them held guns in their hands and even now were ready to counterattack. I realized that a hand grenade had exploded inside the carriage, and evil-looking fragments were scattered about the place, embedded in the walls and furniture and ceiling, leaving the room glittering like a bizarre planetarium.

I looked at Leland. Jesus. It wasn’t just his arm that he’d lost.

The lower half of his body had been blown away, and his guts were dribbling out. His SmartSuit was doing its futile best to keep him alive. The floor—or, to be precise, what used to be the left wall of the train car—was covered in a slippery, half-congealed black film of the men’s blood.

I looked around to see if I could spot Leland’s legs. Nelson had an extra pair of legs in his lap and by the looks of things wouldn’t be needing them: his face had been ripped off from his jaw to his right ear. You could see right through his exposed cheek to his upper teeth, which shone pearly white, making him look like a grinning skeleton that hadn’t yet been properly cleaned of its skin. I picked up the pair of legs, and then realized that they might not have even been Leland’s.

I handed them over to Leland anyway—they would have to do for the time being. He gave a strained laugh. I realized that his consciousness was fading. Ready to disappear for good any minute now.

“What’s … happening outside … sir? The bastards … did … we get all …” Leland’s voice trailed off and was gone. He was gone. All traces of consciousness in his brain, gone.

“Who knows,” I said to Leland’s corpse.

Outside, the thrum of the helicopter engine was turning into a high-pitched whine in the distance.

There were no more gunshots or explosions. They were replaced by the wailing of the injured passengers.

A Ligeti.