Zero and Other Fictions (12 page)

By Winston

I am sixty-eight this year. Given the medical advances of today, that is an insignificant age. But I suffer from an illness and know that my time among the living is limited, perhaps another three months. It is a disease for which the medical community as yet has no name. After they announced a cure for cancer, the last enemy of humankind, this illness became a joke of sorts. Three months. What should a man who has only three months left to live do?

Perhaps everyone would give a different answer. But as for me, I rejoice at finally coming to a point in time when I must face myself. I believe I have a responsibility to evaluate my life in the most objective and impartial fashion. And more importantly: I must tell myself the truth.

I served as secretary of the Supreme Committee for thirty years. In those thirty years, I participated in humanity's final, earth-shaking, and violent changes. Not only that, but I was privileged to share in a secret the public will never know about. If I hadn't been afflicted with this mortal illness, perhaps this secret would have been swallowed by the torrent of time. Of all the people who participated in these events, including Max Kristen, no one but me has experienced this, called “one of the activities of the degenerated human intelligence—the process of the struggle of conscience.” I lost my family during the violent changes. Originally, this suffering was compensated for by a sublime ideal, meaning that in those days I transferred my cherished feelings to the great mission of “leading humanity into the new age.” But in these last three months, the final days of my life, I feel I have lost the ability to cheat myself and others any longer. I must speak, I must speak.…

The great Max Kristen, who will be treated as a divinity by generations to come, was, in fact, a villain, a swindler. He was an insane idealist. And the Supreme Committee was a violent, cruel, and bloody organization.

I daresay that anyone who has read to this point will have to look away or experience a subconscious conflict. In any case, please be patient and continue to read. Unmasking a universally accepted lie or overturning an irreplaceable idol will produce something akin to a mental collapse. And as for myself? Well, when I say these things, I experience an almost laughable sense of committing a crime. After all, the Supreme Committee and Max Kristen occupied an important place in my life, and suddenly to deny them is not only tantamount to a crime but also disillusionment with life.

The first time I met Max Kristen was one week after I had joined the secretariat. That was in 1997. The secretariat was located in New York and subordinate to the Nanning Committee. At the time, no one had a clear understanding of the committee. Even Congress knew only that the secretariat was directly responsible to the President of the United States in an official and unofficial capacity. Prior to this I was the South African representative to the United Nations Committee on Racial Discrimination. South Africa was a rich and beautiful country, but also a place that was criticized by the rest of the world. Outsiders, however, didn't necessarily understand its true internal situation. Many large nations that had achieved “racial equality” actually suffered from the worst racial discrimination. After an especially heated debate, I lost all confidence in the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination. You could say that I was totally disheartened. So I packed my bags and was ready to go home to my family and country. It was at this time that a member of Nanning approached me and asked if I would be interested in working for them. It was the first time I had ever heard of an organization called the Nanning Committee.

I don't know why, but I was persuaded to work first and decide later, so I stayed in New York and within a week met Max Kristen.

I can still clearly remember Max Kristen's appearance, because in thirty years he never changed.

“I understand the difficulties you have encountered,” he said, looking at me with kind, paternal eyes. He was forty or fifty at the time, ruddy complexioned, and with facial features that left a deep impression on everyone. “But this problem was solved by Darwin ages ago.”

As he spoke, his eyes were fixed on mine, carefully examining my facial expressions.

Following which, he began to redefine the word “human being.” Today, thirty years later, when I recall his words, my hair stands on end. History has no shortage of such precedents in which the words of one giant at a certain time have a frightening influence on society, so much so that a single word can result in a river of blood.

The ultimate aim of the human species, according to Max Kristen, setting aside its origins, was to become the highest organism. Accordingly, the significance of its existence was to continuously eliminate any and all obstacles to its progress, such as physiological decline, mental degeneration, and all inherited defects. No price was too great to pay for achieving the goal of human perfection.

There was absolutely nothing new to this argument. Many people had advocated the same thing, but all they had done was talk. At the time, I naturally agreed with him; the population pressures on the world were becoming greater and resources were becoming scarcer. The populations in highly developed countries were controlled, while those in less developed countries were out of control. This led to what is termed the issue of “less desirable populations.” The slightest accomplishments of civilization were unable to bear the pressures of overpopulation. Our ancestors solved this problem through war. It was a simple solution: all that had to be done was select the preferred place for the battlefield. But once modern atomic warfare exploded on the scene, battlefield factors meant little or nothing—the first to be affected were the scientifically advanced nations. After one such war, the only survivors would possibly be the primitive peoples of the Amazonian rain forests. These half-wit savages were a joke compared to a highly intelligent organism capable of space travel.

Max Kristen, however, wasn't so explicit. In the beginning he merely hinted. The situation at the time had reached an imminent crisis. Many small nations possessed nuclear arms but maintained a cavalier attitude, as if not fully realizing that such weapons could blow the earth to smithereens. For this reason, the superpowers grew concerned that recklessness on the part of one small country could result in a global nuclear holocaust. The United States had been cognizant of this problem ten years earlier. A lab code-named Giant Star was born. After ten years of concerted effort, they developed a new weapon called Nanning. It was a mysterious and terrifying device. Deployed in space, it was capable of destroying any nuclear weapon on the face of the earth.

It was only six months after I joined the secretariat that I learned the secret of Nanning. At the time, more than two hundred people were employed there, one third Germans, a small number of Asians, and the rest Americans. Max Kristen was Swiss, though this was doubtful. Strangely, there were no Jews or blacks. Owing to intelligence considerations, I have no way of ascertaining the composition of the Supreme Committee or executive organizations. The duties of my job— global racial analysis—were very complicated. I had to assemble materials on the bloodlines and cultures of more than one thousand races and then organize, arrange, analyze, evaluate, and submit the results to the committee.

Three years after I joined the secretariat, Pakistan detonated its first atomic bomb. The UN immediately announced sanctions. Rumors emanated from all parts of the globe, but none implicating Nanning. Afterward a series of mysterious nuclear detonations occurred periodically. The world succumbed to extreme hysteria and all countries grew suspicious of one another. The UN, for its part, seemed to be half in a stupor, and all international activities ground to a halt. In addition, natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, and plagues came in quick succession, due to environmental degradation. The Soviet Union was on the point of collapse. The United States was accused of being responsible, but there was no sufficient proof, so it flatly denied any responsibility. But what was its response to the unending series of human catastrophes? According to
The New York Times
, the leading newspaper of the day, “The White House called for all Americans to remain calm in the midst of the chaos.” The American president appeared frequently on television, accompanied by a number of high-level technical consultants, who criticized the disasters caused by the “small nuclear states” as “serious technological errors.” They believed that the manufacture of nuclear weapons was not difficult, but there was much to learn in the management of them. Then Max Kristen appeared at the president's side. I recall it was the first time he spoke publicly. His speech was moving and rousing. The following day, all newspapers without exception carried his speech and heaped praise on him. In those days, Max Kristen was Chairman of the White House Committee on Science and Technology. However, rumor in the secretariat had it that the president was already under his control. Max Kristen declared that the series of disasters represented a turning point in the history of human civilization. A ray, emanating from somewhere deep in the universe, had detonated the stockpiled nuclear weapons. It was a warning to humanity about the careless use of these ultimate weapons. “We sorrow for and are deeply grieved by the plight of the people in the disaster areas. Each and every one of us has a responsibility to look ahead to the future and to continue the as yet uncompleted mission of humanity.” It was precisely at that time that Max Kristen issued his “View of Human History,” after which he described the beautiful prospects in a disaster area after rebuilding. The explosion had overturned everything, which bestowed on us a
tabula rasa
, a new land filled with hope. What remained for us to do was to get rid of the remaining atomic dust and initiate a new beginning for humanity. Following this, he announced in all seriousness the Nanning Committee, proclaiming it the “fountainhead of the future happiness of mankind.” Afterward the committee gradually expanded and eventually came to replace the UN. Max Kristen's power also increased. He made the contaminated land productive again as well as gathering together the refugees who had fled elsewhere (these included the cream of the place—the government officials, teachers, doctors, engineers, and the rich and powerful), and then, as he saw fit, reestablished the homeland.