Genocidal Organ (28 page)

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.