Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My target now was Lucia Sukrova.

I wanted to see Lucia again.

I wanted Lucia to tell me that she forgave me.

God was dead. God is dead. So what?

As long as Lucia could grant me absolution.

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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