The Future Is Japanese (10 page)

I stopped in my tracks at the entrance to the village to behold houses reduced to ashes and corpses scattered about the place. There were limbs piled up next to the chopping block where we cut our firewood, and the evil SLF were responsible. Later on I learned the full extent of what exactly they had done—after all, I ended up doing more or less the same thing myself to the other side. But at the time I couldn’t even register what the mound of severed arms and legs, piled up like so much kindling, even was.

Overcome with dread, I rushed like a lunatic toward the place where my house once stood.

So, first there was Mom. I wasn’t so concerned with the fact that her shirt was ripped to shreds and that her face had been beaten so badly it was a swollen mass. Mainly because she was prostrate and there was blood flowing copiously from the numerous open wounds on her back. The earth around her had drunk her blood and was stained reddish black. Next to her was Sis’s body. Or rather Sis’s corpse. My clever little sister Minnu. There was a bullet hole decorating her broad forehead. The SLF barbarians had repeatedly and mercilessly used her prepubescent body as a fucktoy. She wasn’t even ten years old. Unlike Mom, Sis had been stripped completely naked, and semen was still dribbling from her spread-eagled crotch.

I’m pretty sure I fainted right then and there. It was too much to take in.

I wonder how long I lay there unconscious next to the dead bodies of my family. Eventually, though, I heard some voices, men’s voices, register amidst the fog of my mind.

I still had no real idea what was going on, but I found myself gently propped up by a man in military fatigues. How ya holdin’ up, kid, he asked, and then something else: Sorry, if only we’d got here sooner we wouldn’t have let the SLF do this, get away with this.

The man held me up as I staggered out of the house to survey the scorched village. Mom was dead. Sis was dead. After having their last scraps of dignity ripped from them and after suffering more than any woman should ever have to suffer. Pop was gone too. Also killed, no doubt. M’tougwai from next door, who used to help me with my homework as if he were my brother, had his arms chopped off and his chest was riddled with bullets.

No one I had ever known was alive anymore.

And that’s how I became a soldier with the SDA. So that I could see to it that every last one of the SLF was annihilated.

“You’re absolutely right that a ceasefire has been declared, of course,” continued the white doctor. “The Dutch managed to get the SDA, the SLF, and the Government Forces to agree on that. Now, do you know what ‘DDR’ means?”

I shook my head.

“It stands for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration. Basically, it’s about getting former soldiers like you back into normal life. It’s a vital part of ensuring that a war is well and truly over.”

Bile rose up in me. DDR … particularly the last part of it. Reintegration … integration … Were we now supposed to somehow get along with the fucking Hoa? The words made me almost dry heave. Integration … If it came down to it I’d rather go down, AK-47 blazing, taking as many of those little shits down with me as I could before the police ended me. Rather that than be “integrated.”

The doctor carried on speaking, blithely oblivious to the rage that was seething inside me. “So, let’s see. The decommissioning of the weapons has started properly, hasn’t it? You were given a sledgehammer so that you could destroy your AK-47 with your own hands, weren’t you? And then you were freed from the army.”

“Fired. Not freed.”

“Come now, son, you weren’t the only one who was ‘fired,’ as you put it, were you? Soldiers from all sides were ‘fired,’ young and old. Your new country only needs a small standing army, after all. That’s what we mean when we talk about demobilization. A country at peace has no need of so many soldiers, and besides, children shouldn’t really be fighting in the first place.”

“I don’t know about your country, Doctor,” I replied, “but in this country, what ‘should’ happen and what does happen are two different things.”

“Well, then,” said the doctor, “I guess you could say I’m here to make sure that what ‘should’ happen does actually happen.”

We were bussed over to the ruins of a place that had once been a five-star hotel somewhere in downtown Heaven City. American and Shelmikedian armored vehicles were parked outside, and both countries’ national flags were flying. Next to these flags was another flag with a picture of the earth wrapped in a ring of leaves, and next to that yet another flag, this one with angels of yellow and cream and brown holding hands and forming a circle around the earth.

“What’s that flag there?” I pointed and asked as I got off the bus. The doctor, who had gotten off right behind me, peered at it and replied, “That’s UNICEF. It’s an international organization dedicated to protecting children around the world.”

Hmm, great job you’re doing there, I thought but didn’t say. I continued my questioning. “And what about the one next to that?”

“Oh, that’s what’s called an NGO. It’s not a national or international organization, exactly. It’s more like a civilian organization here to try and help the people of this country get back on their feet.”

“What about this CMI that you’re from, Doctor? Don’t you have your own flag?”

“No, we’ve been hired in by MSD—that’s short for
Monde Sans Divisions
,” the doctor explained. “That’s what this NGO is called. And we come under their banner.”

The hotel had been abandoned during the war, and with no guests or even a skeleton crew to maintain it, it was now in a real state: a crumbling husk of a building with an empty, cracked swimming pool that now functioned as a giant trash can. Looking at the pool now it was hard to imagine it ever being full of water. It was as if the rectangular hole was the obvious thing to expect there, a natural part of the landscape.

As such it was hard to imagine that inside would be much better. It looked like these guys had set up camp here a few days ago. Cardboard boxes were scattered all over the place. The hotel was made of stone, like all the fanciest places were once upon a time, but right now it was a dump. The soles of the doctor’s shoes clattered on the marble floor as he walked along.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” the doctor said with a hint of apology in his tone. “But up until three days ago there was even a pack of wild dogs roaming about the place, running through the corridors and guest rooms.”

So what’s happened to them now, I asked, and the response I got made me laugh.

“We got rid of them, of course. We had to make this place safe for you guys.”

Safe. What a word to use. Up until recently there wasn’t a single place in this country you could have called safe.

There were twelve of us in total who had been brought from the school, and now we were escorted into a large room. As I looked at a mural on the crumbling wall I thought what a beautiful room this would have been only a short while ago. It had a skinny guy in the middle who was glowing, with his arms outstretched, and around him were a bunch of men. It must have been painted by some of those Christians who used to run the country. It looked like the guys in the painting were at a dining table or something, but for some reason they weren’t gathered around it but rather lined up neatly on one side. Each to their own, I suppose, but it seemed like a strange way to eat dinner to me. It almost made our own gatherings around the campfire chewing our Khatsticks seem normal.

Anyway, the room we were now in, it was full of lots of weird-looking chairs.

Almost like the robots used by the American forces. They were brand-spanking-new shiny, and I imagined that they were ready to grow a pair of legs and walk off at any time. The strangest parts of them, though, were the bucketlike contraptions attached to the tops of the chair backs.

“What are those things that look like buckets?” I asked, pointing at one.

“Well, after we’ve given you all your little shots, we’ll just need you to put them on for a little while and take a little nap,” the doctor explained. “Goes without saying they’re perfectly safe, of course.”

“Why do we have to put them on?” I asked.

“These are the things that are finally going to bring your war to an end,” the doctor said. “As I said before, as long as you do this you’ll be able to stay part of the program. You won’t return to the House of Smiles, of course, but you’ll be able to carry on your studies in peace at another institute nearby, and you’ll be well looked after.”

That’s why I was here, after all; that’s what was on offer. It was just me and my ilk who had been brought here from the House of Smiles. In other words, kids who had joined the SDA after they’d had their family and friends killed by the Hoa. We weren’t the only kids who had joined the SDA, remember—some kids signed up because it had been the only way to get a full belly. But none of those kids were here with us in the hotel today.

“You keep on talking about this injection. What is it exactly?”

“Well, you remember how we were talking about the shot to the heart that we could give you? This is it.”

“How does it work?”

“How does it work?” The doctor laughed nervously. “Uh, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to explain, but I suppose I could try. You know what the brain is, right? It’s the part of us that controls how we think or feel.”

“Have you ever seen a brain, Doctor?” I asked him.

“No, well, I’m what you call a nanomachine technician. I’m not a brain surgeon.”

Nanomachine, schmanomachine. This much I did know—I’d seen enough brains to last me a lifetime. Even if I’d never seen a whole one intact, as they were always messed up and spilling all over the place. What right did this guy who hadn’t even seen a real brain have to lecture me about how they worked?

The doctor just carried on, though, completely unaware of how much of a fool he looked in my eyes. “To get a bit more technical, the procedure’s called
Geistesgestaltbedeutungseinsatzexistenzlokalisierungsveränderungsausführung
. All you really need to know, though, is that we lightly, uh, modify your brain, so that you end up looking at the world in a slightly different way. We call it the Indifference Engine.”

At the time I wasn’t thinking too hard about what the “slightly different way” could mean. I am who I am, after all, and it’s hard for a person to get his head around the idea that he could be any different from who he is.

I was more interested in asking whether the procedure had been tried out on anyone else. “I’m not being used as some sort of guinea pig, am I?”

“Not at all. There are plenty of people in my home country who’ve already had the same operation as the one you’re about to get. They all chose to have it—it’s an elective procedure. And even here in your country, there are quite a few adults who’ve had the operation and are working to make the world a better place. Take microfinancing, for example—oh, I guess you wouldn’t know what that is, would you?”

“Not exactly,” I replied.

“Microfinancing is where you lend money to people who just need a tiny bit of capital to get a business off the ground: seed money, it’s sometimes called. Now, normally, the condition of the loan is that the person who borrows the money has to pay it back and then some. After all, the lender is entitled to make some profit, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, this extra amount is what we call ‘interest.’ Now, the NGO that employs us makes these sorts of loans to people who want to start businesses, but they give them a choice. The borrower can choose to pay back the money with interest, like with a normal loan. Or they can choose to have the shot to the heart. Many people go for the shot. Most of the traders you saw back at the market have already had it, for example.”