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GWOT IV - Bodies
GWOT IV - Bodies
I am told that one of the worst parts of being Warden of Alviso Prison is the executions.
I don't agree.
Keeping the genocidaires reasonably healthy, safe and alive until I can legally execute them is the worst part.
The executions are just logistics.
The bodies are just logistics too.
I needed a doctor, someone who could determine for sure that someone else was dead. They didn't need to be able to, for example, keep anyone healthy or save their life. They just needed to have a pre-War MD after their name and be able to legally determine death.
I found one. He was a drunken sot and a worthless human being. I had to assign a guard to supervise his on duty drinking. (Off duty was his problem.)
I needed an incinerator. I could literally take my pick. Homeland had many of them.
I chose the one that had been set up at the Children's Hospital Oakland. It seemed appropriate somehow.
(It occurs to me that you may not know why. Let's just say that even most of Homeland blanched at the thought of wholesale executions of children. But taking 'sick' children to the 'hospital' was totally OK. Once within the walls...)
I needed a stage, a sound system, bleachers. All easily obtained.
I needed a refrigerated trailer and a mortician. Most of the bodies would never be claimed, but I wanted to be able to store any that were. I also might need to store evidence. But mostly it was to allow for overflow, if our pace of executions overran the incinerator's capacity.
(Only happened once, but since there were lots of incinerators, it was easy to cannibalize one to get the parts needed to repair the primary.)
I got a mortician's assistant instead. Best we could do. I explained to her carefully what we needed. She nodded.
I also assigned a junior investigator. His task was to audit the bodies. Count them and fingerprint them. I wanted no doubt as to what we had done here, and no extra bodies to be added to the lawful pile I was creating. I also didn't want any photos. Take as many photos at the execution site as you want. No anonymous photos of anonymous bodies.
I started wearing a heavier pistol. I made sure a small stock of cut down baseball bats were available next to the stretchers used to remove the bodies from the execution field.
Any mistakes in the execution of sentence would have to be personally corrected.
A human cadaver is a hundred odd pounds of meat, fat, bone and gristle, once the fluids are removed. Or about ten pounds of ash.
Two thousand dead people are therefore about ten tons of ashes. Too much to scatter.
So I worked with our septic engineer and our landscaper.
Genocidaires would end up part of a flower garden, fertilized partly with their own shit and the rest with their ashes. Thoroughly mixed, in death as in life.
Eventually I got a letter from the Charge d'Affaires of the Austrian Embassy, on behalf of the American interests section, asking about the bodies of the condemned.
(I don't think the Untied Snakes ever did accredit an embassy to the Republic. Even now.)
I don't think they liked my reply. I never heard from them again.
Somewhere in the middle of the process, our resident Buddhist priest asked for a tour. I authorized it.
Then she asked me to go on the tour with her.
I did. Once the process was running, I just needed to put in my share of duty as presiding officer, update our contingency plans and prepare for the worst. Eighty hour weeks as opposed to hundred hour weeks. A nice rest.
I realized only at the end that she had been looking at me carefully the entire time, looking for some sign of reaction or response. What she called 'humanity.'
She started to decline my offer of lunch, then said she would keep me company while I ate. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, heavy on the peanut butter, sorry we're out of jelly.
About halfway through, she finally said something.
"How can you?"
"How can I what?" I mumbled through a bite.
"So casual about this death machine you've created."
"I learned kneeling at the feet of masters."
She didn't like it when I mocked her faith. That was fair, I didn't like it that she was here.
"Who?"
"Homeland."
"So what's the difference between you and them?"
"You've been attending trials. And counseling the condemned. Maybe you should counsel witnesses instead."
That was a low blow. She couldn't. The spiritual whores, I mean professionals, we'd brought in to keep the genocidaires properly shrived couldn't then communicate with witnesses, to avoid cross contamination of the justice process.
"Maybe after you're done," she said. "But I don't really know what to say to them. They've suffered tragedy. You make them relive it."
"So that others don't have to, in the future."
"But the atrocity you commit here, makes more atrocities that much more certain later."
"That point is the entire reason I haven't thrown you out on your ass. This is not an atrocity. This is a justice operation."
"You can say that as much as you want, that doesn't make it true."
"You question, constantly. You test. You push. We need that. Homeland had no one to ask, no one to stop the slide to that lowest moral level. You are a part of this process, an essential regulatory cog to our machine."
She turned pale.
"You didn't realize? The hilt stop is just as much a part of the knife as the edge."
She got up and walked away. I left my half eaten peanut-laden sandwich on the table and followed.
"Leave me alone!"
"No, monk. My prison. You leave, go out the gates and keep going. Or you stay, and you admit that you are just as much a killer as any and all of us."
Her face was terrible to withhold.
If you hadn't seen Homeland loading buses.
Or a smokestack in the desert, fueled the same way the Alviso incinerator was.
Bodies burn the same way whether they are innocent or not.
I pointed this out, in as many words.
"Finally," she hissed. "Finally. You get it."
No, I didn't.
"Every person you kill is just as much a person as their victims were."
So? Quite the tautology there.
She was trying to get me to admit that the genocidaires were on the same moral ground as any other human being.
I refused to do so. I felt that by their wilful acts, by their choices to so horribly take away the choices of so many others, that they had written a letter of resignation from humanity.
Become less, become other. Become meat for the grill, fuel for the furnace.
The Buddhist denied that this was possible. All were human. Saints and sinners, forever and inextricably mixed. Indivisible, under God.
"With liberty and justice for all," I added bitterly. "Buddhism is a slave's religion. Change what you can, accept what you must. Reincarnate. Blow like a willow in the wind. Be ready to die at any moment.
"If I had any faith, and I don't, it would be in the essential spark of humanity. There are no Gods. They are absent without leave, deserters, sleepy sentinels and shirkers of all duties. As there are no Gods, and humanity cries out for succor, it is up to each of us, ordinary fallible human beings, to do all we can. To destruction, then beyond.
"The only thing I admire about Buddhism is the concept of Bodhisattva. That someone could turn back from Nirvana, from their own rescue, and go back into Hell to save others."
She stopped and looked at me very strangely.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
I blinked.
"The California Republic has a job for me to do. I'm doing it."
"You could be a combat officer, on the front lines. You'd be good at it."
"I'm needed here. The Republic has plenty of combat officers, and as we need more, we'll make more."
"But not so many genocidaires."
It took a second to parse that one out.
Bitch called me a mass murderer.
Well, the 'Murican press had been doing that for months.
"The work is necessary."
"You do it so someone else won't have to."
"Yes."
"I believe the work is not necessary. That the work makes it all worse, not better."
"That is your function. But you're wrong."
"Let's say you're right. That this murder machine is the way to prevent atrocities. That lighting a controlled backfire of killings will create a mass murder firebreak for the future. You're still the man doing it. You're still killing."
"Yes, I am."
I paused a moment, looked around. No one in earshot.
"Dear future American Military Commission, I am the Warden of Alviso Prison. I set up the process by which we executed two thousand war criminals."
I held up my hands, waggled my fingers.
"These ten kings did their duty unto thousands. I plead no contest to two thousand counts of manslaughter."
"Not murder?"
"If the California Republic is illegal, all actions taken in her name are illegal. The death of a human being through an illegal act, not amounting to felony, is manslaughter."
"You persist in your belief that this killing is moral. Even if it is not legal."
"Absolutely. With every fiber of my being."
"And if that future American Military Commission - or commandos, or an enraged spouse - kills you?"
"Didn't stop being my duty because it's dangerous, or difficult."
"Hmmm. Goes back into Hell to try to save others. Good day, Warden."
And she turned and ran, faster than I could follow. Not towards the gates. Towards her duties, reconciling genocidaires with their imminent fates.
I turned to my own duties.
Sealing those same fates.
As fertilizer for flowers.
I am told that one of the worst parts of being Warden of Alviso Prison is the executions.
I don't agree.
Keeping the genocidaires reasonably healthy, safe and alive until I can legally execute them is the worst part.
The executions are just logistics.
The bodies are just logistics too.
I needed a doctor, someone who could determine for sure that someone else was dead. They didn't need to be able to, for example, keep anyone healthy or save their life. They just needed to have a pre-War MD after their name and be able to legally determine death.
I found one. He was a drunken sot and a worthless human being. I had to assign a guard to supervise his on duty drinking. (Off duty was his problem.)
I needed an incinerator. I could literally take my pick. Homeland had many of them.
I chose the one that had been set up at the Children's Hospital Oakland. It seemed appropriate somehow.
(It occurs to me that you may not know why. Let's just say that even most of Homeland blanched at the thought of wholesale executions of children. But taking 'sick' children to the 'hospital' was totally OK. Once within the walls...)
I needed a stage, a sound system, bleachers. All easily obtained.
I needed a refrigerated trailer and a mortician. Most of the bodies would never be claimed, but I wanted to be able to store any that were. I also might need to store evidence. But mostly it was to allow for overflow, if our pace of executions overran the incinerator's capacity.
(Only happened once, but since there were lots of incinerators, it was easy to cannibalize one to get the parts needed to repair the primary.)
I got a mortician's assistant instead. Best we could do. I explained to her carefully what we needed. She nodded.
I also assigned a junior investigator. His task was to audit the bodies. Count them and fingerprint them. I wanted no doubt as to what we had done here, and no extra bodies to be added to the lawful pile I was creating. I also didn't want any photos. Take as many photos at the execution site as you want. No anonymous photos of anonymous bodies.
I started wearing a heavier pistol. I made sure a small stock of cut down baseball bats were available next to the stretchers used to remove the bodies from the execution field.
Any mistakes in the execution of sentence would have to be personally corrected.
A human cadaver is a hundred odd pounds of meat, fat, bone and gristle, once the fluids are removed. Or about ten pounds of ash.
Two thousand dead people are therefore about ten tons of ashes. Too much to scatter.
So I worked with our septic engineer and our landscaper.
Genocidaires would end up part of a flower garden, fertilized partly with their own shit and the rest with their ashes. Thoroughly mixed, in death as in life.
Eventually I got a letter from the Charge d'Affaires of the Austrian Embassy, on behalf of the American interests section, asking about the bodies of the condemned.
(I don't think the Untied Snakes ever did accredit an embassy to the Republic. Even now.)
I don't think they liked my reply. I never heard from them again.
Somewhere in the middle of the process, our resident Buddhist priest asked for a tour. I authorized it.
Then she asked me to go on the tour with her.
I did. Once the process was running, I just needed to put in my share of duty as presiding officer, update our contingency plans and prepare for the worst. Eighty hour weeks as opposed to hundred hour weeks. A nice rest.
I realized only at the end that she had been looking at me carefully the entire time, looking for some sign of reaction or response. What she called 'humanity.'
She started to decline my offer of lunch, then said she would keep me company while I ate. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, heavy on the peanut butter, sorry we're out of jelly.
About halfway through, she finally said something.
"How can you?"
"How can I what?" I mumbled through a bite.
"So casual about this death machine you've created."
"I learned kneeling at the feet of masters."
She didn't like it when I mocked her faith. That was fair, I didn't like it that she was here.
"Who?"
"Homeland."
"So what's the difference between you and them?"
"You've been attending trials. And counseling the condemned. Maybe you should counsel witnesses instead."
That was a low blow. She couldn't. The spiritual whores, I mean professionals, we'd brought in to keep the genocidaires properly shrived couldn't then communicate with witnesses, to avoid cross contamination of the justice process.
"Maybe after you're done," she said. "But I don't really know what to say to them. They've suffered tragedy. You make them relive it."
"So that others don't have to, in the future."
"But the atrocity you commit here, makes more atrocities that much more certain later."
"That point is the entire reason I haven't thrown you out on your ass. This is not an atrocity. This is a justice operation."
"You can say that as much as you want, that doesn't make it true."
"You question, constantly. You test. You push. We need that. Homeland had no one to ask, no one to stop the slide to that lowest moral level. You are a part of this process, an essential regulatory cog to our machine."
She turned pale.
"You didn't realize? The hilt stop is just as much a part of the knife as the edge."
She got up and walked away. I left my half eaten peanut-laden sandwich on the table and followed.
"Leave me alone!"
"No, monk. My prison. You leave, go out the gates and keep going. Or you stay, and you admit that you are just as much a killer as any and all of us."
Her face was terrible to withhold.
If you hadn't seen Homeland loading buses.
Or a smokestack in the desert, fueled the same way the Alviso incinerator was.
Bodies burn the same way whether they are innocent or not.
I pointed this out, in as many words.
"Finally," she hissed. "Finally. You get it."
No, I didn't.
"Every person you kill is just as much a person as their victims were."
So? Quite the tautology there.
She was trying to get me to admit that the genocidaires were on the same moral ground as any other human being.
I refused to do so. I felt that by their wilful acts, by their choices to so horribly take away the choices of so many others, that they had written a letter of resignation from humanity.
Become less, become other. Become meat for the grill, fuel for the furnace.
The Buddhist denied that this was possible. All were human. Saints and sinners, forever and inextricably mixed. Indivisible, under God.
"With liberty and justice for all," I added bitterly. "Buddhism is a slave's religion. Change what you can, accept what you must. Reincarnate. Blow like a willow in the wind. Be ready to die at any moment.
"If I had any faith, and I don't, it would be in the essential spark of humanity. There are no Gods. They are absent without leave, deserters, sleepy sentinels and shirkers of all duties. As there are no Gods, and humanity cries out for succor, it is up to each of us, ordinary fallible human beings, to do all we can. To destruction, then beyond.
"The only thing I admire about Buddhism is the concept of Bodhisattva. That someone could turn back from Nirvana, from their own rescue, and go back into Hell to save others."
She stopped and looked at me very strangely.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
I blinked.
"The California Republic has a job for me to do. I'm doing it."
"You could be a combat officer, on the front lines. You'd be good at it."
"I'm needed here. The Republic has plenty of combat officers, and as we need more, we'll make more."
"But not so many genocidaires."
It took a second to parse that one out.
Bitch called me a mass murderer.
Well, the 'Murican press had been doing that for months.
"The work is necessary."
"You do it so someone else won't have to."
"Yes."
"I believe the work is not necessary. That the work makes it all worse, not better."
"That is your function. But you're wrong."
"Let's say you're right. That this murder machine is the way to prevent atrocities. That lighting a controlled backfire of killings will create a mass murder firebreak for the future. You're still the man doing it. You're still killing."
"Yes, I am."
I paused a moment, looked around. No one in earshot.
"Dear future American Military Commission, I am the Warden of Alviso Prison. I set up the process by which we executed two thousand war criminals."
I held up my hands, waggled my fingers.
"These ten kings did their duty unto thousands. I plead no contest to two thousand counts of manslaughter."
"Not murder?"
"If the California Republic is illegal, all actions taken in her name are illegal. The death of a human being through an illegal act, not amounting to felony, is manslaughter."
"You persist in your belief that this killing is moral. Even if it is not legal."
"Absolutely. With every fiber of my being."
"And if that future American Military Commission - or commandos, or an enraged spouse - kills you?"
"Didn't stop being my duty because it's dangerous, or difficult."
"Hmmm. Goes back into Hell to try to save others. Good day, Warden."
And she turned and ran, faster than I could follow. Not towards the gates. Towards her duties, reconciling genocidaires with their imminent fates.
I turned to my own duties.
Sealing those same fates.
As fertilizer for flowers.