CHAPTER FIVE

1

One.

Two.

I was counting the coffins.

Three.

Four.

I stared up at the sky for a long time. A real long time. Long enough that I never wanted to have to look at the sky again. I stared so much that the motherly form of the Globemaster gradually approaching the runway was starting to look like a whale or a dolphin, or maybe some nameless prehistoric fish. A black fish swimming through the gray June skies. And I was standing at the bottom of the sea. The fish swam through the ocean of grayness and eventually touched down gently in our vicinity and opened its giant womb to the world to release the eggs it had been carrying in its belly.

The eggs emerged from the womb. The eggs of the deceased. The steel fish gave birth to eggs of death.

One, two. I counted them. The coffins emerging from the gaping womb. The eggs.

The corpses that had been scraped up, patched together, reconstructed from nearly nothing restored, draped with the Stars and Stripes, and tagged.

Five, six. I counted the coffins.

I wasn’t the only one counting. The US Armed Forces were also counting.

They counted the coffins and let the appropriate people know of their arrival. One, two, three, four. To be precise, it was IMADS doing the counting: the International Military Auxiliary Delivery Service. Using the metadata embedded in the tags in the coffins. Fedex let you know when your parcel arrived; IMADS let you know when your coffin arrived.

Soldiers carried the coffins. I carried the coffins. Williams carried the coffins. The survivors carried the coffins.

Inside them were fragments of flesh.

They had been carefully pieced together and reconstructed. I caught a glimpse of the operation back at base camp. Technicians skillfully piecing things together. They needed to have something resembling a body before they could send the remains back home to their families. The technicians used genetic markers and the tags on the fragments of clothes to match the correct pieces of flesh to the correct bodies. The correct intestines, the correct fingers, the correct skin, the correct eyeball.

The coffins were full of corpses that had been fabricated just like that.

As I carried the coffins I tried to figure out if I was angry. My comrades had died. Many of them. I was allowed to be angry. I was supposed to be angry. I should be hating someone. The soldiers who ambushed us. Or the mastermind behind the surprise attack.

But the harsh reality was that the anger and the hatred that should have been welling up inside me was nowhere to be found.

Without turning my head I looked over to Williams, who was carrying the same coffin on the other side. There, in his face, were anger, hatred, sadness, just as they should be. Tight lips and a shining desire to kill the as-yet-unidentified mastermind. I tried copying him by stiffening my lips and squinting. After holding the face for a couple of minutes I started to think that maybe I was beginning to feel angry after all. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be hating yet, but maybe I could hate them once I found out.

I wondered if Williams’s righteous anger, his anger for his fallen comrades, could be called a manifestation of the conscience. To be angry on behalf of somebody else. To hate on behalf of people who were not yourself.

I didn’t have that feeling. I did feel sorrow, but that sorrow steadfastly refused to blossom into anger. And who was I supposed to hate, anyway? Our assailants? The mastermind behind the attack? John Paul?

I was empty. I had no idea who I was supposed to hate.

Not that I could share this fact with anybody. Not my buddies, not Williams, not Colonel Rockwell, not the counselors.

We had orders from above to receive post-combat counseling. To avoid developing PTSD.

Williams was angry. Really pissed, just as a real soldier should be. “Who needs that shit! Just let us at the bastards who attacked us! I’ll shove my PTSD so far up their asses—”

He didn’t feel any emotional trauma. Just anger toward the ambushers. That was what he was trying to say.

I tried to adopt the same attitude. I put on a show of being angry. Esprit de corps and all that. But then it was announced that any soldier who failed to turn up for his prescribed counseling session would face court martial. You Special Forces troops are highly valued human resources, we were told. It’s our duty to make sure you’re properly maintained.

I didn’t need any counseling.

What I needed was punishment.

I needed someone who could punish me.

I desperately wanted to be punished for all the crimes I had committed.

“This beats any counseling bullshit.” That was what Williams said when he left his wife and daughter at home to come round to my house. What did he want? Why, the usual holy trinity, of course: Domino’s Pizza, beer, and a movie. I wasn’t really in the mood, but then I had no good reason to say no, so I let him stay.

This was what we’d done when Alex died too, I realized as I opened a Bud. And Williams wasn’t necessarily wrong when he said that this was better than any counseling. Whenever Williams or I experienced anything traumatic at work, beer and junk food and lazing around really did seem to relieve the stress.

I took a sip of my Budweiser. Definitely a different taste from the Budvar. Williams was chomping down on the pizza and choosing a movie from his own archive.

Williams didn’t have much to say for himself today. Well, not compared to his usual self. I could tell he was fed up with the counseling, tired of forcing out the emotions that were allegedly trapped inside him.

The film started. King Arthur appeared from the mist, closely followed by his squire, who was tapping a pair of coconut halves together to emulate the sound of horses trotting. It was Williams’s favorite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He laughed loudly at all the jokes as usual, but every once in a while he cast a glance at me as if to seek confirmation. It’s okay to laugh at this stuff, isn’t it?

Williams had been out for the count during the whole ambush, safely out of harm’s way in the rear car. So he hadn’t been hit, and he did not take part in or even witneess the battle of the soldiers who felt no pain even though they knew it was there, the soldiers who turned one another into mincemeat. I was sure Williams couldn’t forgive himself for not being there. Not being part of the battle that saw his comrades slip away one by one. The shame and the frustration of not being part of it was hitting Williams just as hard as the reality of losing his comrades.

“None shall pass! None shall pass!”

In the movie, the Black Knight was speaking to Arthur and his squire. The battle began.

Williams spoke. “It’s scary how much Terry Gilliam looks like a servant in this, don’t you think?”

“Well, he’s supposed to be the servant, no? He plays the squire, right?”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. You know. He’s too convincing. Makes it hard to believe he went on to be a famous director.”

I turned back to the screen to continue watching the film. King Arthur had just sliced the Black Knight’s left arm off. Orangey fake blood spurted from the stump where the arm had been.

“ ’Tis but a scratch!” The Black Knight continued fighting.

Just like the battle in the train, I thought, gulping back some beer. Except we had all been Black Knights, the enemy and us included.

In the movie another one of the Black Knight’s arms went flying off. “Just a flesh wound!” The knight carried on, kicking Arthur, hurling insults at him, bleeding from both shoulders. By the end of the scene he had lost all his limbs and was a stump on the ground, but he was still threatening to bite Arthur to death right up until the very end.

I remember, back in the mortuary in India, just before the bodies were about to be stitched back together, staring at the mounds of flesh laid out unceremoniously on slabs and thinking some dark thoughts. That the wings of the Meatplanes and the flesh of the Intruder Pods under their cellulose husks and the Achilles tendons of the Chicken Leg Porters were all made of the same stuff. The only difference was that one was human flesh and the others came from dolphins. But flesh was flesh. Both worked in the same way, both needed blood and a pulse to function.

I remember thinking how convenient it’d be if our bodies had metahistories. If each cell had its individual tag full of metadata, then how easy it would be to slot these piles of flesh back together.

Metahistories. Alpha consumers could spend all day staring history in the face in the form of the provenance of whatever consumer good they were considering purchasing. You could trace each individual ingredient of a Domino’s Pizza back to where it came from. A microhistory of each constituent part: cheese, jalapeños, ham, pineapple, the wheat and egg in the dough. All were fully traceable, not just back to where they were made, but how, when they were harvested, which distributor transported them, how they were prepared. The history of the flour. The history of the cheese. Once known as “smart consumers,” these influential early adopters did at least have the collective modesty not to want to have to refer to themselves as “smart,” so their name was changed to “alpha consumer” in order not to offend their own sensibilities. They were a highly influential bunch, not afraid of spending great time and effort discussing the products, founding consumer forums, gently or not-so-gently encouraging producers toward improved best practices.

Some of these alpha consumers became real opinion leaders when it came to particular consumer goods, and every brand had at least one champion. These champions would take an advisory role on the forums, helping to create public opinion and in some cases having substantial influence over the sales of a particular item. They would take a particular type of shoelace used in a particular type of shoe, investigate its metahistory, and debate and discuss the merits of other laces (cheaper?) and even the materials used in them (would this type of fiber be stronger?).

Thus each consumer product became an accumulation of discussions and memories.

Having said that, we didn’t actually need to have each individual fragment of flesh be tagged, as our lives were already replete with metadata of their own. We would have to make do with that for now.

If you had a free hand over someone’s records—power of attorney—then you could bring up almost anything about them. Records of their purchases and movements. Records of all sorts of communications. Their personal albums and diary, of course, and even a computer-generated biography if you wanted one. A person’s complete metadata in one handy volume. The editorial skills of the software programs that autocollated biographies were something else, and could make even the most mundane existence sound like a lifelong roller-coaster ride. Most people of my generation would be lying if they told you they hadn’t Biogged themselves at least once. A thirty-year-old, for example, would have to wait only about three hours or so for a machine to render their life so far into a four-hundred-page masterpiece.

I thought back to those few days one summer ago when my mother was awaiting my verdict as to whether she would live or die. I had looked through all the useful documents I could find on her family pages and the guest account for her personal pages, but there were no Life Graph documents available. I didn’t even know if Mom had ever bothered to have her biography collated. According to a report published last year, at least seventy percent of Americans had had biographies done at one time or another. It wasn’t as if it required any effort—you just pressed a button and the software did the rest—and it was hard to imagine that there were too many people around who weren’t at all interested in what a machine had to say about their lives.

More to the point, even if I had been able to access my mother’s biography, would there have been anything that would have affected my decision? If I’d been able to read a full account of her life, as pieced together by millions of pieces of metadata, would things be different now? Would I have chosen to keep my mother in that ambiguous space between life and death? Would I have quit the Forces and taken a desk job in an office nearby so that I could visit her once a week to see how she was doing?

As it was, I’d outlived my mother, and the survivor can only guess at what the departed would have wanted. You’d have to be quite a narcissist to believe that those guesses were ever anything more than a subjective shot in the dark aimed at reality.

The fact was that the deceased always held dominion over us. Because it was impossible for us to experience what they experienced.

Apart from Williams and myself, the only ones left in I Detachment were Sean, Bob, and Daniel. It had been the worst surprise attack that the US Armed Forces had experienced these past two decades and the first time the US had ever been up against an enemy that was on a level footing in terms of training and firepower. We were the first Special Forces unit in living memory to experience defeat on the battlefield.

The corpses of the enemy soldiers were also all over the place, literally. One reason why it took a full week to fully reassemble the bodies was that our dead assailants were dead people in more than one sense. They were all PMC soldiers who had somehow “died” in the past—MIA on the battlefield, or abducted and allegedly beheaded by enemy insurgents. It had taken a week for their data to catch up with their bodies.

There were no records of our attackers having entered India through official channels. Dead people can’t travel, of course, so they must have acquired fake IDs from somewhere. Perhaps from the Uncounted of Prague. In any case, we still had no idea where this well-equipped, BEAR-treated unit of soldiers had come from. Judging from the trace quantities of radioactive material found on their equipment we could speculate that they could have come through Pakistan, over the craters and through the Hindu India heartlands, but Pakistan was still a failed state following the nuclear war, and there was no way to get in to follow the trail.

Despite this, it wasn’t really a big problem for us that our assailants would remain ghosts. Because we had been able to identify the prime suspect almost immediately. A mole within Eugene & Krupps: one of the directors, namely the senate majority leader. It was the magic of technology that brought him down. The oracle of SNDGA. The NSA’s very own Deep Throat. A global game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It seemed that SNDGA held the key to all the world’s mysteries. I wondered how many degrees of separation between the fine senator and the now bloodied and limbless corpses of our assailants.

A top-secret internal investigative team within Intelligence had apparently been watching the majority leader for some time. Each assassination attempt on John Paul had led them closer to him, and by delicately adjusting the details of the information they leaked to the senator Intelligence had been able to tighten the noose. The corpses of our ambushers were, apparently, the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

I could still remember the exact words that John Paul had said to me just before the train had been ambushed. “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.” John Paul had fully anticipated that the majority leader would intervene to rescue him, even if that meant the majority leader would implicate himself in the process.

No one in the government wanted a public hearing and the associated scandal. That was why the White House and the NME swept the whole thing under the carpet. Of course, when it did finally all come out down the line it was a scandal the size of Watergate or the Iran-Contra scandal. But that’s another story.

Legal action against the majority leader would have meant all sorts of things coming out in the wash: John Paul’s close involvement with DARPA’s research and the secrets of the NSA’s Deep Throat. No, that just wouldn’t do. So the government and the politician came to a quiet deal—he would retire from politics citing ill health and disappear from their world. He went on to work full time for Eugene & Krupps.

Meanwhile, my comrades were sealed in caskets and brought back to the US. The ambushers’ corpses were also reconstructed, and following autopsies their bodies were repatriated to their various countries of origin. Of course there were also other corpses. When the engine had exploded the train was speeding through a curved portion of the track. The pent-up centrifugal force acted as a slingshot, hurling the rear carriages away in an arc. Williams and I really had drawn long straws that day, but many of the Indian passengers hadn’t—they’d been thrown around like the contents of an old-style tumble dryer. The passengers sitting on the roof were simply flung into the heavens. The record holder was a child who landed a full five hundred feet away, head first, ramming his face and neck all the way up into his torso.

As for the Hindu India leaders that we had captured, they never did have to stand trial at The Hague. They never even made it to the Panopticon facility. They just went straight to their graves. They had all been shot dead, cleanly, one bullet per person, right in the forehead. The ambushers evidently had no interest in Indian politics. The entire assault was staged for one reason and one reason only: to free John Paul. He was all that the ghost soldiers had ever wanted.

And now there was really only one thing left to deal with. John Paul.

2

This had to be our last Seaweed drop.

We were flying through the African skies, en route to what was supposed to be the final leg of the John Paul saga. It was still a full three months before the whole scandal was due to break—soon, the twelve-member investigative committee would look into the irregularities behind the sudden retirement from public life of the former senate majority leader and find that the trail of the official cover-up led them all the way to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, the head of DARPA’s research arm, various generals in Intelligence, Colonel Rockwell, and finally to me.

I wondered what Williams and the others were up to. We had been sheathed in our Pods back at the aircraft hangar at base camp, so we could only communicate by wireless.

“This is Mouse Two. I’m going for gold, Seaweed!” Williams was chatting to the pilot.

“Looking forward to it, Mouse Two. Commencing countdown. Over.”

The copilot started the count. I could barely contain my rising excitement. Not because I was feeling tense about the drop. Because I was ready to carry out the first step of the plan. I had been waiting for it.

Lucia was going to be at our next destination.

“Enemy sirens have activated!” The copilot sounded nervous. “Ground radar has detected us. How the hell? Can they see us or something?”

“This is Jaeger One. Cut us loose now, Captain. Immediately. Over.”

“What are you talking about, Jaeger One? They’ve spotted us!”

The copilot was losing it. Stealth bomber crews weren’t used to the idea of being targeted by enemy fire just before they were about to unleash their payload. Particularly if the enemy was supposed to be some third-rate African tin-pot dictatorship.

“All you have to do is press the release button. Quickly! Over.”

“But that’s against all protocol—enemy missile incoming!”

I gritted my teeth and activated the manual override, preparing to cut loose the external safety hook from the inside. I pressed the buttons and pulled the manual release lever just as we’d been taught in training. I heard a shrill beeping in my inner ear and then a woman’s voice. “Priority override ejection request activated. Five seconds to release. Three, two, one, release.”

I heard the faint sound of the flesh hook releasing my Pod.

I was weightless—the Pod had been released. A moment later I heard a roaring noise, and the Pod was buffeted from side to side. Maybe the missile had hit the Seaweed. But I had no way of knowing anything—I was sealed off from the world, no way of making wireless contact, no way of speaking to the pilot or even Williams.

It suddenly occurred to me that all of our missions involving John Paul had started with HALO drops of Intruder Pods. It was never a straightforward land or sea assault. The only exception had been the secret agent business in Prague. Why was it that we always had to emerge from something in order to deal with John Paul? It was as if we had to experience an arcane birthing ritual before we had the right to engage with him.

The Pod calculated the variation in course that my early release and the shock wave had caused and quickly adjusted the thrusters that covered its shell. I knew that I had been thrown off course, and there was no longer any guarantee that I’d safely land anywhere near the vast surface of Lake Victoria.

I was falling. But I felt no need to pray.

“Here’s the situation.” Colonel Rockwell was briefing us in a windowless SOCOM meeting room. “Lake Victoria used to support over four hundred distinct species. It was a prime example of biodiversity in action. Anyone know what other name the lake was known by?”

“Darwin’s Dreampond,” said Williams. “Boss, is this going to be a geography lecture? Should I go grab us some popcorn?”

As usual, Boss ignored Williams’s backchat and plowed on. “Until the middle of the twentieth century, the primary industry in the area was, unsurprisingly, fishing. I say ‘industry,’ but it was mostly subsistence fishing. Small, self-sufficient communities living comfortably on the lake’s shores. Then in 1954 the ecosystem of the lake was irreversibly altered by the experimental release of an exotic fish called the Nile perch.”

Not just altered—violently assaulted. The Nile perch was a delicacy in foreign climes, but in the lake it was a highly aggressive invasive species. The Nile perch thrived and were fished commercially and exported as far away as Russia and Japan, where people were prepared to pay good money for it. Ironically, this pushed its price out of the reach of locals. Not only that, the perch thrived by eating the cichlids native to the lake that the locals had traditionally used as their food supply. The only difference between the locals and the perch was that the perch preyed on the small fish so aggressively that they were virtually driven to extinction. The people of Lake Victoria had lost their heritage and their livelihoods in one fell swoop. There was no other industry in the area. The locals were driven to despair. Local women were driven to prostitution, and AIDS spread like wildfire; local men were reduced to scavenging scrap heaps to look for—ironically—Nile perch bones to gnaw on.

“But then the era of the Nile perch came to an end. Because smaller fish were driven to extinction, the plants in the lake that they normally fed on started thriving in their absence and soon started growing out of control. Water hyacinth—itself an invasive species—proliferated, deoxygenating vast tracts of the lake, smothering aquatic life underneath it and depleting the nutrients in the sheltered bays where the young fish could mature in relative safety. As a result, the Nile perch died out.”

“So things returned to normal, sir?” Williams asked.

“No. During the 2010s some businessmen realized that there was massive potential in the lake that had been brought to its knees by aquatic monoculture. They released nanomachines designed to eradicate the water hyacinth, and then started to bring the lake back to life. The goal of these businessmen was industrial mass-production of a recently discovered technology utilizing a breakthrough in neuroscience: artificial flesh. Even today, artificial flesh is insufficiently sophisticated to transmit visual data or thought or sensory information, but the technology to manipulate artificial flesh into contracting at will was already well into development.”

“Is artificial flesh made in Lake Victoria, sir?” Williams asked.

It was. Though most people didn’t know that. Or that lube was made from seaweed.

“Strictly speaking, there’s nothing artificial about artificial flesh, so it’s not ‘made’ anywhere. It’s harvested from genetically modified aquatic mammals such as dolphins and whales.”

“You gotta be bullshitting me, sir.”

No bullshitting going on here, Williams.

And the thing called caviar that you eat? Lumpfish roe with black food dye.

I spent some of our substantial downtime between Prague and India looking into all this. Artificial flesh was basically used only for industrial purposes, and it didn’t really come up as a consumer good that the general public could buy. The only place you could find it in what you could possibly call a consumer good were the Chicken Leg Porters that you occasionally saw in offices or in the houses of the rich—and even that was a stretch. They were contraptions consisting of a sturdy pair of legs topped by a pair of long arms, designed to carry heavy items between floors and across warehouses, hopping up and down stairways or in and out of elevators. I remember looking at the online catalogues of one of the leading brands of Porters so that I could investigate its metahistory.

I clicked through the various metadata links, cycling through the details of the Porter’s component parts. The outer layers were made of organic resins and highly malleable smart alloys. The operating software had its own complicated history, as did the internal balancer module. The smart alloys in turn had their own alternative prehistories, as they consisted of recycled metals that had rich commercial pasts of their own. Finally I arrived at the artificial flesh components, but when I traced their histories they all led me to the same dead end: a factory on the shore of Lake Victoria. That was where the flesh was “produced.” There were no further details.

There were no further details on the web forums either. There was no lobby group, no alpha consumers who had any opinion whatsoever on artificial flesh. There certainly wasn’t any discussion about the fact that the flesh came from dolphins and whales. Not that I had really expected there to be any discussion. It was only largeish enterprises and government organizations who bought Porters in any sort of quantity. They weren’t exactly top of the list of any consumer group discussion. Consumers were interested in household goods and commodities in the private sphere. Food and vacuum cleaners, now, they were important. There was plenty of discussion about those. Capital inputs such as artificial flesh? Not so much. People see only what they want to see.

Most people, of course, weren’t even particularly interested in the metahistories of the goods around them. Myself included, at least until Lucius opened my eyes back at his club in Prague. What right did I have to call out Williams for not believing this briefing on the provenance of artificial flesh?

“Not bullshit, Williams. Exceedingly not bullshit.” Colonel Rockwell turned to include me as he continued. “The whole lake has been turned into a giant breeding ground for whales and dolphins that have been genetically modified to live in freshwater. The animals are then dissected at local factories, and the product is exported worldwide. Lake Victoria basically came back to life by reinventing itself as a giant fish tank.”

“Jeez, how can you call that ‘coming back to life’?” Williams gave his head a vigorous shake, as if he were trying to rid himself of the disgusting mental image.

“The production of artificial flesh is currently the region’s staple industry. Its only industry, in fact. And it was all going smoothly until the inhabitants of the lakeshores started agitating for independence. The lake borders three different countries: Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. But its inhabitants miraculously agreed to forget the usual tribal distinctions and cooperated to unilaterally declare independence.”

“And they made enemies of all three surrounding countries?” Williams asked.

“Effectively, yes. The coastal dwellers declared themselves to be the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation and are now recognized as an independent state by the UN. The name might sound more like a chamber of commerce than a fully formed nation, but as their war of independence was essentially fought over trading rights, it’s actually pretty appropriate. After all, given their effective monopoly over the world’s supply of artificial flesh, their relationship with the advanced world is essentially an economic one.”

“And John Paul is there right now?” It was the first thing I’d said all meeting.

“Yes.” The colonel touched one of the briefing room’s walls, and a nanoscreen appeared. It showed pictures of child soldiers carrying AKs.

“Captain Shepherd successfully tagged Lucia Sukrova with pheromones back during the Prague mission. We were able to use Tracer Dogs to follow her as far as Prague Airport. Of course, she and John Paul were using multiple fake IDs, so we were unable to track them any farther. But then we hit upon the idea of reverse-engineering tracking, or tracking via process of elimination. We investigated all the IDs of the people who boarded the plane at the gate the Tracer Dog led us to. We then followed up on their movements from the moment they left their destination airport. Most people went straight to their homes, or to the shops, or basically acted in a consistent manner. We discounted all these people one by one until we were left with a number of IDs who behaved unusually, avoiding certain types of checkpoints. We identified the people whose trail ran dry. It was a huge undertaking. A painstakingly dull operation,” the colonel said, rubbing his beret.

“Anyway, the end result of all this is that we now know that John Paul is staying at this guesthouse, where he’s bringing together all the domestic media. The anticipated enemy military presence is the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation Armed Forces. They have no air force, but they do have antiaircraft missiles and, as might be expected from a country that encircles a strategically vital body of water, a navy.”

“A navy, huh,” Williams grinned at the very idea. “Africans on boats—now that’s something I gotta see!”

“They have a number of corvettes and one fast attack missile craft inherited from the Japanese Jieitai.”

“Seriously? Sheesh!” said Williams.

I, on the other hand, could barely keep my mind on the briefing.

All I could think of was Lucia Sukrova’s face. The black streaks of eyeliner running down her cheeks as she turned away from me. She would be able to give me the punishment that I needed, surely.

Unlike our usual HALO Intruder Pods, the contraption I was now inside was designed for naval warfare. Its job was to pierce the surface of the water like a torpedo, entering at as shallow an angle as possible so as to best absorb the shock of impact, and then use its external flesh to swim toward the target like a bizarre mermaid. Like their land-based counterparts, these aquatic Pods contained virtually no mechanical parts, so they were virtually undetectable to underwater sensors that relied primarily on sonar. After all, the Pod was basically made up of the same stuff as aquatic mammals, the only real difference being that it carried a passenger inside it.

The only worry was whether the troops who had fired the antiaircraft missile at the Seaweed had spotted me. I didn’t imagine they had any missiles capable of shooting down a small, fast-falling vehicle like mine midair, but I definitely didn’t want them to be waiting for me when I hit the water below.

“Estimated contact with water in five seconds’ time.”

The Pod spoke to me.

“Three, two, one.”

I heard a splash, and the Pod entered the water. Having said that, the angle of incidence was less than thirty degrees, low enough to soften the impact so that I barely felt it. The optimally streamlined shape of the Pod meant that the viscosity of the water exerted only the slightest bit of resistance, leaving the Pod to gently decelerate in its own time.

Once the Pod sensed that its speed had dropped enough, it bent its tail like a dolphin and deployed its fins that had hitherto been retracted inside its body. It started swimming. It was quiet below the surface of Lake Victoria, the silence only occasionally broken by whale song or dolphin calls. The Pod’s final destination had already been programmed in; all that was left for me to do was wait and be vigilant for any irregularities. Once in a while water jets would roar overhead, pinging out active sonar, but the Pod was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

The lake is here to support our lifestyle.

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

Airplane wings. Pods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it had, but then the ethical code had somehow been reset, returned to its primordial stages, and the game had yet to regain its former complexity.

I finally made it across the lawn and merged into one of the guesthouse walls. I traversed the passageway that led to the inner courtyard and entered the guesthouse. The atrium courtyard acted as a conduit between the rooms all around it. Its centerpiece was a small fountain surrounded by palm trees.

I walked boldly toward the centerpiece, nanocamouflage on full blast, to scope out the corridors. Occasionally one of the guards passed through the courtyard in the course of his patrols, but even when he passed within a meter of me he showed no sign of noticing me.

“Good evening, Madam Paul.” I went for my knife reflexively when one of the soldiers started speaking. But I immediately realized that he wasn’t speaking to me, but rather someone behind me on the second floor.

“Good evening, Mugabe.”

A voice I knew well.

A voice that had told me about the Holocaust. A voice that had lectured me about the inevitability of the evolutionary development of the conscience. A voice permeated with regret about her past.

Lucia Sukrova.

“How are you today, madam?”

“Well, thank you. I’m starting to get used to this place. Although it is still difficult for me whenever I see the hardships of the people on the outside …”

“Try not to let it bother you too much, madam. We are all so grateful to you both for taking the trouble to come all the way from America to help us improve our living standards.”

“I hope we will be able to help.”

“Has your husband—forgive me—has the deputy minister for culture retired for the evening yet?” the soldier asked.

It seemed that the story here was that John Paul and Lucia were a married couple. Of course, it was always possible that they actually had married since arriving here.

“No. He rarely sleeps. He’s hard at work in his room.”

“I do so admire his dedication to his work, madam. I hope one day to become a fine politician just like him.”

“I think he’s just an insomniac, really.”

“But your husband is doing so much for us. When I listen to the radio speeches he writes, my heart is lifted up. He makes me feel that if only we could all pull together we could raise this country out of poverty and get rid of AIDS once and for all. He makes me believe that the fish will come back soon. That we can carry on exporting meat to make money and at the same time live off the fish that used to swim in the lake. He makes me believe that we can have it all again. That the girls who work and sleep in the factories will soon be able to go to school instead, and that children won’t have to scavenge anymore through scrap heaps of offal and bones just to find enough to eat. He makes me believe in his dream that tomorrow will be a better day than today. Any person who can write speeches like that must be a fine human being, madam.”

There was silence. Lucia had nothing to say in response to the soldier’s words.

Sorry. Actually, my husband is here to make you hate each other.

Sorry. Actually, the only dream that my husband has is the dream that your skulls will be added to those scrap heaps of offal and bones.

I imagined those thoughts running through Lucia’s head.

Dost thou, peasant scum, truly believe we come here to spread peace? Nay, villein, we command thee to fight for our own amusement!

But no. In all probability, Lucia was still oblivious to what John Paul was doing.

“That’s … very touching. Very touching of you to say so. Good night, Mugabe.”

“Good night, madam.”

I watched Lucia retire into her room. The central room.

I waited for the soldier to continue his patrol and checked that he had left the building before dashing up the stairs. The soles of my boots automatically adapted to the flooring, helping me make a silent ascent. I felt like a ghost. These noise-canceling boots made you forget the fact that you had two feet planted firmly on the ground.

The door was open. I readied my gun and charged inside.

But Lucia was nowhere to be seen.

There was only moonlight, scattered and diffuse, shining in through the windows.

I quickly scouted the empty room. There was a desk, and it looked like someone had been working at it until a moment ago. There was a paper notebook and what looked like some sort of manuscript, and a fountain pen. The manuscript was titled The Federation, and on closer inspection it looked like a handwritten draft of a presidential speech. John Paul evidently did his writing longhand.

The notebook next to the manuscript was filled with code and strange words, far removed from ordinary English. It was evidently some sort of shorthand key that described the characteristics of certain words—their gender and connotations, looked like—logic symbols that described word and sentence orders and patterns of incidence. The linguistic jargon and code were all crammed densely together, and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to truly understand what was written there.

Then I heard the sound of a safety lock unclicking behind my back.

“Hello again, assassin.”

I spun around.

It was John Paul, smiling sadly and holding a pistol to my face.

4

“I thought that my rescue force might have killed you,” John Paul said.

We were standing in a reverse snapshot of our first face-to-face encounter in Prague. This time I had my back to the bright moonlight and John Paul’s face was bleached white by it. His expression was the same though—very sane, very sad. He was holding an antique, a Browning semiautomatic. A gun without an ID. A throwback to a time when anybody could use any gun to kill anybody else.

“They almost did.”

“Ho-hum. Shame.” John Paul pulled up a nearby chair and sat down, keeping the gun trained on me all the while. “Anyway. You showed up in time for once, eh? I’ve only just begun planting the seeds of discord throughout the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation.”

I looked into the eyes of this man who was now sitting before me in a rattan chair. His eyes were so calm and so still. Even though this unassuming middle-aged man was confronting a skilled assassin such as myself, he managed to exude an aura of quiet dignity that put me in my place.

It occurred to me that a religious fanatic who imagined himself to be the Messiah would probably also have this kind of assured charisma. The difference was that John Paul exhibited none of the trappings that came with a Messiah complex. No wild flash in his eyes. No trace of pride or hubris. None of the affected kindness.

“Why are you still doing this?” I asked. “Is this some kind of experiment to see how many people you can kill?’

John Paul paused for a moment and then looked down at the muzzle of his gun. It was as though he couldn’t quite work out how it came to pass that he was holding this weapon of murder in his hand.

“I finished experimenting years ago. Do you perhaps think that I’m some sort of madman who is just itching to see how strong my powers are?”

John Paul’s eyes stayed fixed on the cold, shiny Browning. Was he digesting the reality that he held in his hands a real weapon of murder, an actual object that could directly cause the death of another human being?

“I’m guessing you’ve never held a gun before,” I said.

John Paul looked up. “You’re right. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually held one myself. No matter how deep I was in a war zone, I never touched one, and I always stayed away from them.”

“Yeah, why would you bother when you already have the power to massacre thousands without ever having to get your hands dirty?”

John Paul shook his head and chuckled. “It’s not my power.” He stood up. His voice sounded tired. “The language of genocide was always there in the human mind. It’s a presetting, a default. I just discovered it, that’s all. If you could even call it a discovery. I’m not that different from the first anatomists who ‘discovered’ and classified human organs.”

“I doubt Einstein felt that way when he discovered the atomic bomb,” I said.

“Cruelty is an inherent characteristic of the human brain. How is that so hard to understand? You don’t need my grammar of genocide to see that people are intrinsically capable of great brutality. Murder. Robbery. Rape.” John Paul used his free hand to gesture toward the hand that held the gun. “See? I’m getting ready to kill you even as we speak.”

“What about primitive societies, or isolated societies that haven’t even come into contact with the modern world? They’re peaceful, aren’t they?”

“No. That’s a lie spread last century by scientists—or social activists, really—who had a political agenda. The truth is that these so-called noble savages can be just as vicious as us. More so, in some cases. They covet and steal and rape and kill just like we do. Margaret Mead’s tropical Samoan paradise was debunked with the most cursory of follow-up research. She was, as they say, not even wrong. But one thing is for sure—plenty of rape and murder have gone down in Samoa over the years.”

“And wars?”

“Of course! Why not? Why should the civilized world have a monopoly on war? There are tribes in obscure corners of the Amazon rainforest that have never seen a white man and yet are happy to fight, plunder, kill, and rape. It seems to be a basic evolutionary need, passed down from generation to generation.”

“But people can make a choice,” I declared calmly. “I carry my sin around with me. You can choose to accept the responsibility for your choices. Saying that murder or rape or theft is just human nature is not the same as saying that any of these things are ever justified.”

“Absolutely. I agree with you.” John Paul smiled.

Well, that was anticlimactic. “What?”

“If the impulse to pillage and rape and murder derives from basic survival instinct, then so too do sympathy, love, and self-sacrifice. Our brains have evolved to contain a multitude of conflicting emotional modules, each one derived from a basic survival instinct. Some of these are redundant, and others have become positively counterproductive. A sweet tooth, to give you a trivial example. Great for when you have to compete for food, as it helps you absorb nutrients quickly. Not so great when you live in a world of superabundance and you’re trying to stave off obesity and diabetes.”

“So you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with the modules that turn us into murderers and rapists—they’re basically just outdated?” I asked, incredulous.

“Hm. I’m not sure if that’s a fair way of putting it. ‘Outdated.’ That’s a subjective concept. Orthogonal to the current social mores of the so-called advanced nations, perhaps. Anyhow, like it or not, the grammar of genocide is also one of these modules.”

“What do you mean?”

John Paul looked past me, out through the window, at the night vista of the shores of Lake Victoria, where countless families were suffering in poverty, starving, selling their bodies, doing whatever they needed to do to get by.

“Okay. Imagine there’s a drought. We’re talking pre-agricultural times. Well, people have already learned by this time that by forming a group and cooperating with other people, you stand a better chance of survival in the long run than by betraying the others and just taking what you wanted. Maybe this was due to evolution and genetics, maybe due to memes, but either way, altruism or love, or whatever you want to call it, emerged as adaptive behavior designed to help preserve the self. So what happens when you have an unexpected outside shock such as a drought, and there is no longer enough food and water to go around? Does the entire community perish along with its evolution and altruism?”

I thought I understood what John Paul was trying to say. “So the grammar of genocide was just a way of adapting to food shortages?” I said.

“That’s right.” John Paul nodded. “The grammar of genocide is a vestigial module from a time when humans were not yet able to regulate their food supply. When other animals want to exert influence over their entire group, they use pheromones or scent to pass on their message and influence the group. But the nose was a relatively weak sensory organ, at least in humans. The best way to spread influence over a large group of individuals became language. If a person wanted to communicate with an entire group, rather than one to one, language was the only way to do it.”

Acts of enlightened cruelty.

Mass murder for the sake of survival.

I shuddered. However primitive a group of people was, if they could communicate and show altruistic tendencies within their group, it became impossible to deny that they were in their own way a fully fledged society. The grammar of genocide didn’t result from people becoming increasingly aggressive on an individual basis. I thought back to what John Paul had told me during our previous encounters—that the Jews in Nazi Germany also spoke using the grammar of genocide. No. This definitely wasn’t a module that affected people at an individual level. It was a module that started functioning only on a structural level after it had been transmitted to a given number of people within a group. Their value judgments were bent in a certain direction. There’s a genocide brewing. There’s a massacre on the horizon. The mood was set. And then once that society passed a certain threshold, those people who had a conscience-related module suppressed by the grammar of genocide would start taking matters into their own hands and engage in all sorts of atrocities.

But then I remembered Williams’s story about the lemmings. Individuals didn’t tend to evolve in ways that caused them to act against their own self-interest. The phenomenon of lemming mass suicide was virtually unheard of in real life.

“The grammar of genocide isn’t some sort of self-destructive curse.” John Paul smiled. “Because, after the killings, the population is back down to a manageable number. An adequate food supply is once again ensured. Equilibrium is reached. The group’s will to preemptively forgive the act of genocide and to collectively mask their consciences as they do so is a great advantage in the evolutionary stakes, not a disadvantage. It’s hardly surprising that this characteristic gets passed down to the next generation—it’s the ultimate example of a successful adaptive mechanism toward one’s environment.”

“So what! There’s an ancient adaptive mechanism left in the human mind that can spur humans on to kill each other on a grand scale? Big deal! How the hell does that justify your going from one impoverished country to another killing people? What is it that you even want? To prove that people are basically evil?”

“No. It’s all because of me.” A woman’s voice. The owner of the voice must have been hiding, but she was now out in the open, and her slender white arm now pointed an old German Luger directly at John Paul’s head.

Lucia Sukrova.

She started walking toward us, guided by the moonlight.

John Paul’s gaze remained fixed on me—or rather the scene behind me. The moon’s iridescence made Lucia’s face look as cold as a corpse’s. As beautiful as a corpse’s.

“When your wife died, when Sarajevo disappeared, you couldn’t forgive yourself for being in bed with me at the time. You couldn’t forgive yourself for betraying your wife and daughter.” Lucia pressed the muzzle of her gun into the back of John Paul’s head. She was crying. Her white cheeks were shiny with tears.

“That’s why you had to convince yourself … that betrayal and violence … that there is an inescapable human instinct to hurt other people. You’ve been proving how black and twisted human nature is just so that you could escape from your own guilt and despair. And you’ve killed so many people in the process—”

“No, Lucia. You’re wrong. I haven’t done all this to try and prove anything.”

“Then why?”

“I discovered an ancient function of the brain. But at the same time I know full well that love is just as powerful an instinct—no, more powerful, really—than brutality. It’s a basic biological function. I may have discovered a genocidal organ, but it hasn’t shaken my basic faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity. Not one bit.”

At this point I realized something really weird. There wasn’t even the smallest cloud of despair hanging over John Paul. His gaze remained true and untroubled. He was as lucid, as calm, and as sane as ever. How could this be?

I took a step toward him, ignoring the gun in his hand. “So let me get this straight. If you’re not killing all these people out of despair, what other possible reason could there be?”

The pause seemed to stretch out to infinity.

And then the Lord of Genocide answered:

“To protect the people I love.”

5

When did patriotism become the primary motive for war?

The kamikaze pilots who smashed their own planes into aircraft carriers in order to protect their mothers and sisters. The French Resistance fighters who died trying to regain their country. The U-boat crew who suffered a briny death in order to shield their fatherland from invasion.

To fight for the greater good. Before the birth of the nation-state, that motive would have been right at the bottom of the list, if it featured at all. People fought in wars to advance their own interests or to make money. War was a specialist subject. Even if a soldier felt allegiance with the group that he was fighting alongside, it would never have occurred to him to think on the scale of “for the sake of all the people in my country.” Citizens did go to war, almost always in the form of a mercenary transaction: pay me this much, and I’ll lend you my arms for this length of time. Patriotism never even entered the picture until after the establishment of the national army. How could it? The concept of a standing army, a body of loyal troops that could be called upon at a moment’s notice, simply didn’t exist. Take the British fleet that against all odds miraculously managed to break the invincible Spanish Armada. It was a historic battle that changed the course of history forever by establishing British naval supremacy—and yet over half of the ships that fought that battle were souped-up merchant frigates, armed just for the occasion. Since time immemorial, war meant hiring mercenary forces as and when you needed them.

In other words, the very psychology of sacrificing yourself for your country was an extremely recent development. Taking a historic perspective, PMCs and independent contractors were actually the norm, and national armies such as the US or British armed forces were the aberrations. It was only recently that the business of war changed to become what we now know as modern warfare.

Ordinary citizens only started going to war out of patriotism after war became theirs—in other words, after they started feeling that the country was governed in their own interests. The exact form didn’t matter; it could be a representative democracy as in America, or a popular form of limited constitutional monarchy, as in Britain. The people were happy with their leaders and the leaders had taken them to war, so the people were happy with the war. It was their war. And if it was their war, well then, it was the most natural thing in the world that they should take responsibility for it. Dress that responsibility up with fancy ribbons and voilà: patriotism.

You fought to protect someone. Your father or your mother or your sister.

Fundamentally it was an act of self-sacrifice. An act of neighborly love. An act of altruism, admittedly within certain preset parameters. Accordingly, war was fought out of love. The so-called mutually exclusive desires to love other people and kill other people had, on the battlefield at least, managed to reconcile with each other.

This was what John Paul was talking about right now.

I love therefore I kill.

“When I lost my wife and daughter in the nuclear blast I made a decision. That I would never let that sort of thing happen again. That I’d had my fill of sorrow.”

“But you’re the one causing all the sorrow!” Lucia bit down on her lip. “You led all those people to their deaths—you’ve spread sorrow across the world!”

“True, but it’s a sorrow that people choose not to notice.”

For the briefest of moments I thought that I detected a flash of despair in John Paul’s words. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“People see only what they want to see. People don’t care about the tragedies that happen elsewhere in the world. If you spend too much time worrying about them, you just end up overwhelmed by a sense of your own helplessness. Or possibly it’s a case of people actually being helpless to do anything about it, so they can’t be bothered to take an interest. It’s pretty pathetic, but it’s still my world. It’s where I grew up. People go to Starbucks and shop online at Amazon and live their lives seeing just what they want to see. It’s decadent and wasteful and shallow, but I love that world nonetheless, and I care deeply for the people who inhabit it. What is civilization? Conscience is a brittle and fragile thing. Civilization generally involves working toward the happiness of other people in your world. But we’re not there yet. No one yet has seriously taken it upon themselves to rid the world of all its sorrows.”

A world of CNN clips. The ubiquitous Domino’s Pizza. Movies streamed straight to your house, the first fifteen minutes free. Metahistories that only go skin deep. That’s about as far as our ethics of our civilization went.

“The people of my world seem to have become obsessed with personal identification and surveillance, even though these are almost completely ineffective as antiterrorist measures. When terrorism is born out of hopelessness and despair, traceability is no deterrent. Why should a suicide bomber care whether or not he’s going to be identified after the event?”

“Yes, Lucius often used to say things like that,” Lucia said.

“And so I considered the situation,” John Paul said. “Rather than wait until they start hating us, why not make them hate each other? We don’t have to let them kill us. We can focus their energies so that they only kill people within their own worlds. We can keep our world separate from theirs. A world of hatred and death for them, and a world of peace for us.”

Find a country teetering on the edge, a country jealous of our wealth and leisure. A country that hated us.

A country that was starting to realize that their own misery and poverty was a byproduct of our freedom. That the corollary of our economic imperialism was their economic servitude.

And then, just before they got around to actually doing something about it, find a way to enter that country and introduce the grammar of genocide.

Once the resultant civil war kicked off, the country would no longer have the will or the capacity to turn its anger outward. Once the genocide began, there was no room left for thinking about killing people in other countries; you were too busy killing people in your own. The seething rage that had been about to spill over into the outside world in the form of terrorist attacks would now be contained, neutralized. John Paul had been sowing the seeds of destruction as a preventative measure against terrorism. His genocidal world tour was a preemptive strike against those who might one day seek to attack his world.

“I get them to kill each other. I’m not letting them lay a finger on my world ever again. The deep structure of the grammar is always the same, but it needs to be rendered differently for each language, according to the syntax. This makes it very easy to control. Each time my target existed in a distinct linguistic milieu. As long as you don’t need to use English to spread your message, it’s a pretty straightforward task to adjust the parameters every time you want to introduce the grammar to a new territory.”

“Do you honestly believe that what you’re doing is fighting terrorism?” I asked.

“The statistics speak for themselves. Look at the data released by your own, the US State Department—all in the public domain, of course. The fact was that the incidence of terrorist attacks was increasing exponentially, even as we busied ourselves by submitting to a biometric surveillance state. It was only after I started planting genocide around the world that incidences of terrorism in the US truly started falling. And now, there is none. Mission accomplished. Of course, there is a trade-off, and the price we pay is the sharp increase in civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and massacres in Third World countries.”

John Paul lifted his head and closed his eyes as if to congratulate himself on a job well done.

“I’m not saying for a moment that what I’m doing is right or fair. I’m just doing what I can to protect that which I want to protect,” he said.

“Please. John. Put down your gun.” There was nothing frail or weak about Lucia’s tone of voice now. “Do it now or I’ll shoot. You know I can, and you know I will.”

“Of course. That would be your way of taking responsibility for your own sins.” John Paul said as he pointed the Browning away from me. It only just occurred to me how long he had been talking —pretty impressive considering he had a gun shoved into the back of his head for most of it. What a bizarre situation. I walked over to him and plucked the gun from his hand.

“Mr. Bishop … What is your real name?” Lucia asked. I looked up at her face. Her eyes were clear. She knew exactly what she had to do. She was focused. I’d never once seen her with eyes like this when we were together in Prague.

“Clavis Shepherd. Captain. US Armed Forces, Intelligence.”

“Clavis. Please arrest this person.” Lucia’s voice was composed and clear. “Please arrest him and take him back to America. You need to bring the story of the grammar of genocide to trial. People need to know. People have a responsibility to find out. If your people truly want to be free and truly want to live in a free country, they need to take responsibility for that freedom. They need to accept the burdens that come with the freedom of being able to make choices.”

“Lucia, I’m afraid Clavis has orders to kill me.” John Paul smiled wistfully. “He is, after all, an assassin.”

I came here this night determined to kill this man. It was my own will. For once I wasn’t interested in what the NME wanted, or asked, or ordered. I just wanted to put an end to all the atrocities with my own hands, for my own sake.

And now Lucia, the only person in the world who could administer the punishment that I needed, was asking me to arrest John Paul and deliver him to justice instead of killing him as I had planned. As I had promised myself.

“This man’s research was highly classified,” I said. “There’s no public record of it. The same goes for all of our missions to date. There’s no corroborating evidence. Given that, do you really think that people will believe that this one man is the source of all the massacres and atrocities that have been occurring throughout the world?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe the jury will laugh the case out of court. But if you kill him now, if he’s killed before anyone has the opportunity to learn the truth, and everything is just brushed under the carpet, then as far as I’m concerned all the people who ever died in those massacres that he caused might as well have been killed by our hand. We’d be ignoring all the corpses just so that we can selfishly grab a little peace and quiet for ourselves. That would be unforgivable.”

Corpses.

Our world was built on top of corpses.

And it was filled with people who stood on a foundation of corpses and never suspected a thing.

But Lucia and I knew. That was the difference. We were past the point of no return. We couldn’t go on cashing in on the misery of others.

“Fine. Let’s take your John Paul with us and go,” I said.

Bzz. A sound. Lucia’s forehead expanded into a giant marshmallow. I stood there dumbly for a moment. Oh, a hollow-point bullet. I felt bizarrely calm. Lucia’s forehead burst like a ripe tomato. I was standing right in front of her, so some of her blood and brain matter splattered across my face.

Lucia’s left eye had been blown clean out of its socket; there was now a gaping hole where it used to be. What brain tissue she still had started oozing out through the new opening in her face. Lucia’s body shifted and toppled over, carried forward by the energy of the blast. She slumped over John Paul’s shoulders. Where she had been standing I could now see Williams, who was brandishing a handgun with a silencer attached.

“Lucia—”

She had lost half her head. A sight I’d seen numerous times before. It was a common enough way to go in battle. To have part of your face blown away by a bullet.

I screamed. No, I tried to scream, but no sound emerged. My mouth was wide open, but only my anguish came out. I pointed my rifle at Williams and fired.

Williams charged at me, right into my line of fire. He couldn’t stay where he was in the corridor—the guards would be here any second to investigate the sound of the gunshot.

“Clavis! Calm down! Our orders were to kill on sight!”

“She wasn’t the target! You didn’t need to kill her! You didn’t need to kill anybody!”

Williams had run into the bathroom. I could hear voices in the distance, outside the door. I shoved John Paul away from Williams’s line of fire and tossed him back his Browning.

“Use this to protect yourself,” I said. John Paul nodded in silent assent.

This was a small room. Once Williams came out of the bathroom it would be a close-range battle. A bloodbath. Well, the guards would get here first anyway.

“Why did you kill her?” I shouted.

“For Monita and my baby.” Williams’s voice was calm but forceful. “So that they don’t have to know what a shithole this world is. My baby doesn’t need to know that our world is teetering on the edge of the abyss. All she needs is the opportunity to grow up at her own pace, in our own world. Got that, Clavis? I’m prepared to protect my world. I’m going to defend the world where you can order a jalapeño pizza and pay for it by thumbprint. I’ll fight to the death for my family’s right to eat as many Big Macs as they like and then throw away whatever they can’t eat.”

I heard the sound of footsteps converging outside the door. The worst-case scenario now would be a three-way shootout involving myself, Williams, and the guards. And we were heading straight in that direction.

“Lucia didn’t need to die. And now you do. You have to die here,” I said.

“Clavis, buddy, calm down. We have to work together now, remember? You and me. The way it always is. The guards are coming. Cooperate with me, like we always do? Whaddaya say, buddy?”

“Sure, I’ll cooperate with you, buddy. I’ll cooperate with your corpse. After I’ve killed you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clavis. Look! Those were our orders, okay! Shoot to kill. You just weren’t told about them, that’s all. And I can see why now. Well, I was briefed to kill both Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. We have to wrap this case up once and for all. It comes straight from the top.”

“Why?”

The guards finally started amassing by the doorway, so I fired a suppressing volley, full automatic, in their direction. One of them took a hit to the shoulder and spun around before collapsing to the floor.

“Dude, think about it. Think of the scandal if it ever got out that DARPA funded the research that led to international genocide. And think how bad it’d be for morale if John Paul told the world his story. Specially all the stuff about the surveillance crap that we do being basically useless. How there’s no correlation between traceability and the fall in terrorism. Think how people would feel!”

“But there is no correlation, you idiot!”

“So what are you gonna do, huh?” Now Williams was shouting too. “Turn back time? The people want increased security measures, don’t forget! Not just the government and industry, ordinary citizens too. People are happy to sacrifice a few freedoms in exchange for a safer society. So tell me, Clavis, what are you gonna do? Dismantle the entire surveillance infrastructure? InfoSec is a huge industry, you know that. Money’s still being poured into it from all angles. It gives jobs to tens of thousands of people, if not more. And it’s part of the system now. So call me an idiot if you want, Clavis, but just tell me this. What are you gonna do?”

With that, Williams chucked a grenade out of the bathroom and through the door that led to the second floor corridor. There was an explosion beyond the doorway, then screams and dust.

I turned to Williams again. “But it’s all bullshit! It’s all pointless! We don’t need all that security!”

“It might be bullshit, Clavis, but it’s our bullshit. And the horse is already out of the barn on this one. We’re committed. The whole economy’s committed.”

We had reached an impasse of sorts. But at this rate I would be out of bullets in no time.

I grabbed hold of John Paul’s arm, chucked a grenade over my shoulder, and jumped with John Paul through the moonlit window to the ground below. We landed on the lawn in a messy heap but scrambled to our feet and made a dash for the shore.

There was an explosion behind us. The grenade had just exploded. It had almost been a reflex action. I hadn’t even stopped to think what would happen to Williams. Not that I cared anymore.

The guards fired their AKs at us, but they were all terrible shots and a little too far away. The nanocamouflage probably helped some too. John Paul had no protective gear, so as much as possible I covered his back as we ran away.

I realized that John Paul’s shoulders were covered in Lucia’s blood and chunks of brain. I realized we had left her body behind. My chest wanted to explode. There was nothing we could have done in that situation to bring her with us. We had done the right thing. Logically speaking. But none of these facts helped to numb the gut-wrenching soul-pain I was feeling. I ran with John Paul, and before I knew it there were tears streaming down my face.

“Are you crying for her?” John Paul asked.

“I just left her there. Her corpse.”

“Surely you’ve seen plenty of corpses in your time.”

The girl whose head was exposed to the heavens.

The boy whose guts spilled from his ruptured belly.

The women and children doused in gasoline and left to burn in the giant hole in the ground.

Up until now I’d always thought of corpses as things. When a person died, he or she became an it. An object. And as Lucia had lost half her face and what was left of her soft brains was now dripping out of her eye socket, she was surely a perfect example of how a person could turn into an object in the twinkling of an eye.

And yet she wasn’t just a thing. I refused to see her as just a thing. She was still Lucia Sukrova, even dead. She wasn’t just a mass of flesh. She might have been a corpse, but she was Lucia’s corpse.

“Of course I’ve seen corpses before,” I said. “But this time it’s just so personal. When the person is important to you, they can’t become just a corpse.”

I gritted my teeth and we pushed on. John Paul and I made it into the jungle.

It wasn’t easy moving through the jungle with John Paul. He might have been familiar enough with war zones, but he was still a civilian. It required quite a bit of skill to be able to maneuver through this sort of terrain. Jungles weren’t designed for late-night leisurely strolls.

To make matters worse, John Paul had also sprained his right ankle when he jumped from the second-floor window. It wasn’t that far to the Tanzanian border where our recovery team should be waiting, but there was a limit to how fast we could move when his leg was like this.

“There’s no way I can hand you back to the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation,” I said, my eyes on the path in front of us. “If you were to go back you’d just start singing your song of genocide again, I know.”

“I’m not interested in going back,” John Paul muttered. The confidence he had back at the guesthouse had now all but disappeared. “Lucia said that I should explain what I had done to the world. She wanted me to tell the world just how shaky a foundation their ‘peace’ rests on, I guess. Well, I will stand trial, and I may be sentenced to death. Or perhaps I’ll just be dismissed as a lunatic and laughed out of court. Whatever happens, I’ll accept it, because that’s what Lucia wanted. It’ll be my way of apologizing to her, however pathetic and inadequate the gesture. I was the one who brought her into all this. I had only intended to stop in Prague long enough to get a fake ID, but then I found I wanted to see her face again for old times’ sake. That was all …”

I listened to John Paul’s story without saying anything. I just hacked through the jungle with my machete.

“I betrayed my wife and child and now I’ve also killed the woman I once loved.”

“What about all the people who died in the massacres you caused? Don’t they count at all? That’s quite a solipsistic sense of guilt you have, don’t you think?” I was feeling pretty cynical by now. “Don’t forget that there’s a staggering number of corpses behind you at all times.”

“No, of course not.” John Paul nodded. “I know. It’s something I’ve carried with me from the very first time I used the grammar of genocide.”

I realized that, in talking to John Paul, I was telling him to do as I said and not as I did. I was telling John Paul not to forget about all the corpses, and yet I had no idea what to do about the burden I carried with me. All of my sins, not just my matricide. The sin of killing people without having chosen to kill them myself. The sin of dodging my responsibility. I wanted closure. From Lucia’s mouth. Redemption—or condemnation.

But Lucia had died. And there was no one left in this world who could either punish me or forgive me.

This was hell, right here, right now. I was trapped in a hell called myself. “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd” was what Alex had said. And he had been right. I was in the deepest pit of hell. I had come here to be punished and, at the end of the punishment, find a glimmer of hope, the possibility that I could be redeemed. That was why I had come to Africa. But shortly after I arrived, the prospect of punishment and forgiveness slipped away forever; it disappeared, broken.

Maybe this was my punishment. To be doomed to walk the earth till the end of my days, weighed down by the burden of corpses.

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Now that Lucia’s dead, do you regret what you did? Laying the groundwork for so many people to die?”

Now that he had lost Lucia, I wondered whether John Paul felt any sort of solidarity with the people who had died, or the people who had lost loved ones.

John Paul shook his head. “No. Not at all. I have no regrets on that front, at least. I put two sets of lives in the scales. The lives of the people in our world on one side, and on the other side were the lives of hostile people who lived in poverty and hatred and cast a shadow over our happiness. I went into this thing eyes wide open and made a completely sober and rational decision. I even had a good idea of how many people would die in the process. Once you know what you are capable of doing, it becomes impossible to escape from your own potential.”

“And what will you do next?” I asked.

“Well, I was originally planning to continue bearing the burden all on my own. But if we get to the stage where, per Lucia’s wishes, the world learns of what I’ve done, then I suppose the choice will be theirs. They’ll have to make the call as to whether they want to keep their world without terrorism, even if it means building it atop of a pile of corpses.”

“And you think that’ll make you feel better? If you hand the baton on to someone else? Will that excuse your crimes?”

“By no means. You can never escape from your own decisions. They are with you always.”

We walked on without rest.

All things considered, and taking a long-term historical perspective, the world was probably becoming a better place over time. The world did occasionally fall into the clutches of chaos and regressed, but broadly speaking the story of humanity was a story of progress. Relativism only gets you so far. There always comes a point where you can say that one culture has more sophisticated or enlightened values than another, and this can be a good thing in absolute terms. The story of civilization is the story of the battle of human conscience against the instinct to murder or rape or steal or betray, and how even against the harsh backdrop of the world, the conscience is still moving inexorably in the direction of altruism and love for family and friends and neighbors.

But we still have a long way to go before we can accurately describe ourselves as moral actors. As ethical beings.

For humans can turn our eyes from all sorts of things.

John Paul limped along behind me, desperately trying to keep pace. He was panting hard.

Now he asked me a question. “What about you? What will you do after this? Will you go back to assassinating people? To making the world a better place?”

“I’ve never been fighting to make the world a better place. I just did what I was ordered to do because they were my orders.”

“And is that all going to change now?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But what I do know is that I’m starting to see things a lot more clearly than before. At least I think I am.”

The jungle ended. Suddenly.

There was a clear sky that stretched out forever. Dawn was breaking, and a white horizon unfurled before us.

There was a Jeep parked up in the distance. It was still a little too far away to confirm with the naked eye, but it looked like there were two soldiers waiting there. According to our pre-mission briefing, these guys should be deployed from the Tanzanian army, here to help us.

I took a deep breath, and then John Paul and I started walking across the flat, grassy savanna.

A hollow, dry explosion echoed all around.

One of the soldiers in the distance was pointing a gun in our direction. I spun around. There was a small hole in John Paul’s forehead and he was lying on the ground.

“Welcome back, Captain Shepherd, sir! And congratulations on your successful mission.” One of our sergeants was there to welcome me—a black man, no doubt chosen for this mission because the color of his skin helped him blend in with the local African soldiers.

“What happened to Williams … ?” I asked absentmindedly.

“Killed in action, sir. According to a wireless transmission intercepted by an NSA team, sir.”

I was overcome by a fatigue that seemed to penetrate every last nook and cranny of my body. I felt like a lump of wax. As soon as I climbed into the Jeep and sat down I was assaulted by drowsiness. Williams, Lucia, John Paul. All were now distant, half-forgotten memories. The emotions that I thought I had felt and the insight that I thought I had gained—all seemed so unreal now. It was as if I could only remember the whole journey in a series of blurry low-resolution snapshots.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The Jeep started rolling. Moving gently toward the white horizon in the distance. For a moment I imagined that this Tanzanian savanna was the only place in the world that was real, that it stretched across the whole world, and that the Prague and the Paris and the Washington and the Georgetown that I knew were all just a bad dream—a nightmare called civilization.

Somewhere behind us in the vast savanna was John Paul’s final resting place. There his corpse would decay gently under the African sun. His sun-bleached body would be preserved for some time to come, and in this respect he was just like Mom, whom I’d had embalmed so that she would never rot away. John Paul, though, would eventually be able to return to the soil. Maybe the thought of that would have made him happy.