GWOT 2 - Razing The Village
GWOT 2 - Razing The Village
The problem with being well rested is that it gives one time to think.
Brooke had bounced back faster than I had. She was back on her duties - patrol, training, supervision of sentries - within a day.
It had taken me two days. And on the second day, I'd had a chance to actually think.
I realized that I'd been exhausting myself with work as a coping mechanism. Then I'd had to think about all the things I'd been coping with.
All within arm's length of a powerful handgun.
In the privacy of my own skull, I had to admit that the only reason I hadn't seriously entertained becoming a technicolor art exhibit on the wall was the thought of Brooke coming back to her quarters and finding my body.
I actually fired up a Word document - not an E-mail - and made a list.
"Shit Echo 18 has had to deal with since the Firecracker:
-- San Francisco burning
-- kicking people out of their homes in San Mateo
-- not knowing what happened to some of my friends
-- Stanford
-- post checks, and finding out what happened to most of my guards
-- the bowel excision tied to the handrail of the open stairwell
-- meeting Mr. Murphy
-- the massive attack
-- promising Mr. Murphy
-- headjobbing that first trespasser
-- convoy operations
-- that fucking apartment building
-- "Molotov! Molotov!"
-- Mr. Estrada's son
-- stopping Betty from her own ceiling decoration moment
-- ... "
... and that was just the first month. It had gone far downhill from there. Far.
I had shown pictures of our evacuation of the H1Bs to a Homeland officer, and laughed and joked about the detainees cowering in fear under the barrels of our rifles.
I had killed.
I had murdered.
I had plotted the murder of innocents, driven by operational necessity. That my plots had not been needed made me no less a murderer.
As for lesser offenses, I could basically drop a copy of the Penal Code on my desk, open it to a random page, and find something. Except the 290 series. No sex crimes.
I knew the theory of what I was going through. Complex PTSD driven by situational psychosis. I had memories of my brain and body doing things that I hadn't consciously thought through at the time. Muscle memory of pulling triggers, kicking faces, cutting throats.
I'd seen Dr. Rize's best moves. The same Betty I'd kept from kacking herself, and continued to do. But I realized suddenly that talking her out of suicide had just as much been talking _me_ out of suicide as well.
Shit.
The essential facts were these:
-- 3300 people
-- in a disaster zone turned occupation zone
-- dependent on the site working on its contracts
-- surrounded by starving desperate angry people
-- fed by desperate measures
-- alive only by the mercy of Homeland, which notoriously had none
We had created a walled village. I had overseen the building of the walls - actually mostly barbed wire. The village had been an accidental creation, with corporate executives and veteran managers forced to play at games like mayor, militia, medical ethics committee ... and also mayhem.
Other people had gone crazy. We'd dealt with it. Some had not survived. But the village had.
It was _important_ that I survive, to keep these 3300 people alive. We had contingency plans for when I was killed, but they sucked.
But it wasn't about the company or the contracts or Code Wins Wars. It was about those lives. That was why I had risked so much to save the H1Bs. I knew about Homeland Bound. I couldn't save the thousands. But I could save those few.
I could not save the hundreds of thousands in Homeland detention facilities. Or the thousands Brooke and I had seen at the Homeland killing site. No euphemisms: it wasn't a 'concentration camp' and it wasn't a 'work center.' It had been exactly what it said on the tin: a killing site. And the stink of those burning bodies would rise through the centuries to come.
"One is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
Holocaust. Rwandan Genocide. Homeward Bound.
I could not see a victory here.
I could keep these 3300 alive for a time. But then Homeland would come, with their gun trucks and cattle prods. I would be dead, or worse. And they would be dead, or worse.
We all die.
But Homeward Bound would survive us all.
I had no desire to survive the Firecracker. Or what I knew would come.
But I did want some child, reading about Homeward Bound, to ask.
"Why didn't anyone do anything?!?"
And I wanted someone to be able to answer that child.
The Allies could have bombed the tracks leading to the German execution camps in occupied Poland. The decision was made: win the war, we will save more lives that way. But we didn't.
The United States was begged by the UN relief force to fire anti-radiation missiles at the "hate radio" station, Hutu Power, coordinating the Rwandan Genocide. It's top song: "I Hate Hutus." The refrain: "I Hate Hutus who don't kill cockroaches." The cockroaches: Tutsis. And that's how you let 800,000 people be killed mostly by machete, except when they begged to be allowed to pay for the bullets that killed them.
No missiles were fired. The national sovereignty of Rwanda was worth more than 800,000 lives. Or less than $300,000 - the cost of a HARM.
No one was going to fight Homeward Bound. China was fighting for her life, and reading between the lines of the propaganda, becoming a tricky and bitter opponent. The rest of the world was sitting this one out, except for Britain.
The United Kingdom was standing up to the United States. Telling us to our faces what we had become, shielded by her own ballistic missile submarines and the threat of nuclear war.
Homeland had ruled that possession of a shortwave radio was a death penalty offense. Even the chance you might be listening to the BBC was enough.
But enough people were listening that we now had a Resistance forming.
So I had to make a choice.
I was going to die horribly, and soon.
But for what? A little time for 3300 people, or a little chance at that child knowing that someone who lived then actually gave a shit.
The problem with being well rested is that it gives one time to think.
Brooke had bounced back faster than I had. She was back on her duties - patrol, training, supervision of sentries - within a day.
It had taken me two days. And on the second day, I'd had a chance to actually think.
I realized that I'd been exhausting myself with work as a coping mechanism. Then I'd had to think about all the things I'd been coping with.
All within arm's length of a powerful handgun.
In the privacy of my own skull, I had to admit that the only reason I hadn't seriously entertained becoming a technicolor art exhibit on the wall was the thought of Brooke coming back to her quarters and finding my body.
I actually fired up a Word document - not an E-mail - and made a list.
"Shit Echo 18 has had to deal with since the Firecracker:
-- San Francisco burning
-- kicking people out of their homes in San Mateo
-- not knowing what happened to some of my friends
-- Stanford
-- post checks, and finding out what happened to most of my guards
-- the bowel excision tied to the handrail of the open stairwell
-- meeting Mr. Murphy
-- the massive attack
-- promising Mr. Murphy
-- headjobbing that first trespasser
-- convoy operations
-- that fucking apartment building
-- "Molotov! Molotov!"
-- Mr. Estrada's son
-- stopping Betty from her own ceiling decoration moment
-- ... "
... and that was just the first month. It had gone far downhill from there. Far.
I had shown pictures of our evacuation of the H1Bs to a Homeland officer, and laughed and joked about the detainees cowering in fear under the barrels of our rifles.
I had killed.
I had murdered.
I had plotted the murder of innocents, driven by operational necessity. That my plots had not been needed made me no less a murderer.
As for lesser offenses, I could basically drop a copy of the Penal Code on my desk, open it to a random page, and find something. Except the 290 series. No sex crimes.
I knew the theory of what I was going through. Complex PTSD driven by situational psychosis. I had memories of my brain and body doing things that I hadn't consciously thought through at the time. Muscle memory of pulling triggers, kicking faces, cutting throats.
I'd seen Dr. Rize's best moves. The same Betty I'd kept from kacking herself, and continued to do. But I realized suddenly that talking her out of suicide had just as much been talking _me_ out of suicide as well.
Shit.
The essential facts were these:
-- 3300 people
-- in a disaster zone turned occupation zone
-- dependent on the site working on its contracts
-- surrounded by starving desperate angry people
-- fed by desperate measures
-- alive only by the mercy of Homeland, which notoriously had none
We had created a walled village. I had overseen the building of the walls - actually mostly barbed wire. The village had been an accidental creation, with corporate executives and veteran managers forced to play at games like mayor, militia, medical ethics committee ... and also mayhem.
Other people had gone crazy. We'd dealt with it. Some had not survived. But the village had.
It was _important_ that I survive, to keep these 3300 people alive. We had contingency plans for when I was killed, but they sucked.
But it wasn't about the company or the contracts or Code Wins Wars. It was about those lives. That was why I had risked so much to save the H1Bs. I knew about Homeland Bound. I couldn't save the thousands. But I could save those few.
I could not save the hundreds of thousands in Homeland detention facilities. Or the thousands Brooke and I had seen at the Homeland killing site. No euphemisms: it wasn't a 'concentration camp' and it wasn't a 'work center.' It had been exactly what it said on the tin: a killing site. And the stink of those burning bodies would rise through the centuries to come.
"One is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
Holocaust. Rwandan Genocide. Homeward Bound.
I could not see a victory here.
I could keep these 3300 alive for a time. But then Homeland would come, with their gun trucks and cattle prods. I would be dead, or worse. And they would be dead, or worse.
We all die.
But Homeward Bound would survive us all.
I had no desire to survive the Firecracker. Or what I knew would come.
But I did want some child, reading about Homeward Bound, to ask.
"Why didn't anyone do anything?!?"
And I wanted someone to be able to answer that child.
The Allies could have bombed the tracks leading to the German execution camps in occupied Poland. The decision was made: win the war, we will save more lives that way. But we didn't.
The United States was begged by the UN relief force to fire anti-radiation missiles at the "hate radio" station, Hutu Power, coordinating the Rwandan Genocide. It's top song: "I Hate Hutus." The refrain: "I Hate Hutus who don't kill cockroaches." The cockroaches: Tutsis. And that's how you let 800,000 people be killed mostly by machete, except when they begged to be allowed to pay for the bullets that killed them.
No missiles were fired. The national sovereignty of Rwanda was worth more than 800,000 lives. Or less than $300,000 - the cost of a HARM.
No one was going to fight Homeward Bound. China was fighting for her life, and reading between the lines of the propaganda, becoming a tricky and bitter opponent. The rest of the world was sitting this one out, except for Britain.
The United Kingdom was standing up to the United States. Telling us to our faces what we had become, shielded by her own ballistic missile submarines and the threat of nuclear war.
Homeland had ruled that possession of a shortwave radio was a death penalty offense. Even the chance you might be listening to the BBC was enough.
But enough people were listening that we now had a Resistance forming.
So I had to make a choice.
I was going to die horribly, and soon.
But for what? A little time for 3300 people, or a little chance at that child knowing that someone who lived then actually gave a shit.