GWOT III - Why The Actual F___?

[drewkitty]

GWOT III - Why The Actual Fuck?

"The existence of actual fucks implies the existence of irrational fucks. In fact, fuckery is isomorphic across the symbology spectrum." - some college math major

It's been a week.

Five days of civil conversation with the second interrogator. He has not deigned to give me his name, nor does he wear his Homeland issued ID when I am present, but I have to call him something.

He's an educated man. Knows somewhat of military history. Kind of surprised he is working for Homeland. Something is very wrong with everyone who puts on that funky campaign hat. Never mind all the murdering.

Some would say I have no stones to throw on that point. Securing Site and keeping it safe has required quite a bit of killing. And some murdering. I've reserved the latter to myself or to others under my specific direction.

Homeland is far more catholic. Universal in their willingness to share the culpability.

On the seventh day, he rested. At least the interrogator did. I waited all day in my cell for a trip down the corridor that never came. Lunch was delivered - a rude but pleasant shock.

Then it happened. A side effect of adequate nutrition, occasional sleep, an afternoon nap and time to integrate all that had been done to me.

I woke with an erection, and the temptation to do something about it.

This was something I was NOT OK WITH.

First of all. It was the first such event since my erstwhile lover had been killed.

Second. I'd had inappropriate sexual contact with instruments of Homeland, particularly what I had come to call to myself Biko's chair. One of the side effects of electrical torture can be involuntary erection and ejaculation. Yes and yes. But I'd known it was a side effect of torture.

This damned sausage was a volunteer.

Somewhere, some Homeland analyst - or worse, psychiatrist - was noting this down in my record as an indicator.

Having fingers shoved up my ass to search for contraband was part of the prison life.

Getting a woody was not.

If I felt like doing the obvious thing, which I didn't, there would be seven cameras recording from various angles, and more analytics. I also didn't want the images that would likely run through my head.

And not a single pair of female underwear to be found on this floor, unless one of the cell extraction guards was kinky or the rare female that wore something other than granny panties on tac duty.

So I picked up the issue Bible and started to read.

That's generally a guaranteed erection killer.

Songs of Solomon. No.

Ezekiel 23:20. Hell to the no. "She lusted after her lovers, whose..."

Leviticus 20:13.

Hmmm.

I genuinely had no idea whether I was bisexual, gay or straight. Never had, probably never would.

What do brussell sprouts and anal have in common? You like them more as an adult if they weren't forced on you as a child.

Every now and again, I could enjoy sex with a woman.

I didn't enjoy sex with men. I could do it, and had no moral issue with it, but mostly my jaw got sore, my butt got sore, and his butt got sorer.

No offense to transfolk, but I hadn't slept with one before the Firecracker, and Homeland's absolutely binary view of gender made them a rare and vanishing species. As in nearly extinct. Genocide does that.

So there's this sausage, and no idea what I would do with it if I were free. Which I'm not.

Think of it as a semaphore, waving my defiance? The prisoner trying to escape, peeping up his little (that's a lie) head and saying "I am not a number of inches, I am a free phallus!"

I turned to my Bible again. No help there.

So I thought for a minute.

The technical term, for those who treat psychological casualties (or inflict them, as with Homeland's psychs), is 'moment of clarity.'

I'd tried very hard for some years, long before the Firecracker, to avoid those.

Yet I was stuck in a cell with one.

Why was I going through all of this?

There wasn't a single one of those 800 evacuees that I actually honestly gave a shit about. Several of them were in fact on my "better dead for the good of humanity" list. The asshole who'd powered up his phone while we were trying to sneak across the Black Rock desert. The jackass who'd attempted to hijack the tow truck. The mom who'd raised her son so poorly that he'd snuck off during a piss break, and said son who had come back just in time to keep me from leaving a guard behind to kill him.

They were afraid of me. I'd commanded people who'd pointed guns at them and shouted at them a lot.

I'll be honest. They smelled. All human beings smell, yours truly included, but when you mix several ethnicities of humanity in close proximity for several days with no opportunity to wash, they're gonna smell, and the back of your brain doesn't like that aroma.

Avenue Q had a great song titled "Everyone's a little bit racist."

I was rather more than that. But I didn't go around murdering people because I didn't like what country they or their parents were from.

Homeland made an art form of it. Their 'Homeward Bound' program.

I'd crafted a careful lie, an imitation born of flattery, that I had murdered those 800 evacuees and left their bodies scattered from Susanville to Winnemucca.

Homeland had caught me out on it, at least as far as psychological profiles were concerned.

Killing and murdering are two very different things.

I could kill with catholic impunity because I projected my self-defense over the people I accepted an obligation to protect. Parents will kill to protect their children. I had 3300 of the little snots.

Murdering took commitment. We'd had a skilled programmer, whose work was useful to the site, who had a hobby that was morally unacceptable to our Site Location Executive. The SLE had asked me to rid him of the troublesome priest, I mean programmer. So I'd pushed him down a stairwell, picked him up, broken a critical vertebra as casually as peeling shrimp, and thrown him down the next stairwell.

That had been murder. I'd had to steel myself to do it. But I'd done it.

Sure, he was a kiddie fucker. But aren't you all?

Betty and I had had arguments about that. A few stray comments, a discussion of how I'd ended a guard's employment at knifepoint (and framed his victim for the non-crime), glossing over my own childhood, and the way in which I'd verbally executed a former Employee for hostage taking had combined into an unpleasant discussion.

Betty asserted that based on her training and experience, well fewer than one in twenty parents diddled their kids.

Logically, I knew it was selection bias. Just because I'd been nailed, everyone had to be a hammer, right?

Emotionally, I looked at every adult as a potential child molester. Because I'd met several in my youth, of both binary genders. (No transfolk, though. Go figure.)

There was no harm and likely some good in setting up the child care procedures for Site in such a way as to protect children more carefully. The SLE and I had seen eye to eye on that point, without detailed or any discussion.

I had not found it easy to murder that programmer because he was a kiddie diddler. I didn't have that level of detachment. Or commitment.

I hadn't murdered [Oliver Stone] despite intense motivation to do so. I'd gone well out of my way to keep him alive when the other would have been easier and safer.

His offense had been worse than kiddie diddling. He'd been telling the truth about the War and Homeland, and hinting at the murder of San Francisco.

For the record, if he had a sexuality, it was news to me - and I'd done everything but sniff his underwear investigating him.

One of the banes of my existence is that I think quickly and find it hard to derail trains of thought, even when they lead down dark tracks I'd prefer to forget.

As most abused children do, I'd had my first erection while being molested.

So the whole topic - arousal, sex, consent, violence, murder - was hopelessly intertwined for me. Only panties were a safe zone, so to speak.

The kindness of Homeland was painting me into a corner where I would start talking. And talking and talking and talking. And admit to something that would reveal that those 800 were still alive. Given that thread, Homeland would pull on it - and find them - and kill them.

Would that I could choke to death on my own dick. But that's not the way any of this works.

I couldn't fight the cell extraction team. They were ready for it.

I couldn't ambush my second interrogator. He was alert and careful, never letting me have that much of a chance.

Someone had taken an angle grinder to the corner of the concrete bed, rounding it off, while I'd been in the cellar cell after murdering the first interrogator.

Thorough, weren't they.

So why not just confess, and be rewarded with the ultimate end of suffering?

What did I owe those eight hundred smelly people? And their relations and brats and sundry folk?

Why was my one solitary life worth so much less than theirs?

I remembered something Janine had said, no, played in a video clip.

"What we do in life, echoes in Eternity."

I could not stop Homeland from committing genocide. I could however revoke my participation. Not give my consent. Resist to the utmost of my ability.

"Here lies a man with a hard-on, who will die before conspiring to genocide."

I can motherfucking count.

Eight hundred is eight hundred times one.

Luke 15:4

"What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?"

They were the one. I was the ninety-and-nine.

I would help them stay lost.

I would die screaming for that.

They would never remember me, or care.

But it wasn't for them.

It was for me.

My criminal aesthetic, if you will.

I kill for just reasons. I murder for my own reasons. Neither is for Homeland.

I hated those eight hundred so much that I would give up my own life to spite them.

Homeland hadn't put me in that chair and rammed a lubricated anal plug with electrical contacts up into me. They had.

Homeland hadn't broken my ruined hand. They had.

A drunken sot of a former dental assistant hadn't given me a taste of burnt teeth. They had.

All unknowing. But still guilty.

I would protect them. Not from love, for I felt none.

"From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."

Homeland was only the instrument. They were the player that made the music of my agony.

Let us dance.

The kindness would end. The hard torture would resume.

And I would, by defying Homeland, curse those eight hundred souls to a lifetime of fear and an unpayable debt.

My moment of clarity had reached one last crescendo.

I'd achieved my objective.

Achievement unlocked.

I have now successfully gone mad.

Clinically insane.

Mad as a hatter.

I cackled under my breath.

Now we would dance, those eight hundred souls and mine.

Fuck 'em all. Every single one.