“I’m lost. What are you talking about?”
He gazed out over the street, his jaw working. “In dismantling human beings, chemically, socially, psychologically, we made the same discovery, Goldman and I. Without this obsession with achieving happiness, without the carrot an inch or two out of reach but tantalizingly close-you end up with dispirited zombies, useless for operational purposes. Fit only for YouTube disinformation.”
“Okay.”
“So both Goldman and I found ourselves working at the same problem, from different perspectives. I was intent on healing, he on developing a human war machine. In both cases we came up against the same mystery.”
“Yes?”
He chuckled. “Goldman is not a philosopher or a psychiatrist or a deep thinker. In the end he came to the only human being who was in a position to help. Me.”
“Yes?”
“The answer was simply too much, too terrifying, too awful in the style of Oppenheimer’s terrible quote from the Bhagavad Gita-‘I have become Time, slayer of worlds’-only infinitely worse. Oppenheimer only destroyed bodies and buildings. What I had discovered destroyed souls.” He let a long time pass, during which I sneaked looks at him from the corner of my eye. He seemed racked by a spiritual torment that would not let go. Finally he shook himself like a dog and stared at me. “When they realized there were going to be children born in the camp, they changed their attitude,” he said.
As if that constituted a full and final confession, he sagged back into his chair. I was left none the wiser. He raised his ancient head that now looked something like that of a vulture with spare skin hanging at the jowls.
“I would never have consented, d’you see? I held off until I saw what they were doing to the kids.”
“You mean after they took them away?”
“It was a gift they had only dreamed of. Young people without any national or cultural identity, with no legal existence at all, who if they belonged to anyone belonged to the CIA, in a country where children were looked on as chattels anyway. I told them, ‘No, no, you don’t make functional people like that. Not with sadistic exercise, enhancements and war games-too superficial, children are deep.’ ” He moaned softly to himself; I was not sure if he was expressing pleasure or pain. “They cited the Spartans. That’s when I seized the moment. I said, ‘Are you crazy? D’you have any idea what intricate and extensive mythology filled the head of a Spartan lad? In exchange for a grim material world, he lived in an inner world of gods and heroes, another kind of consciousness. For such a warrior the only purpose of life was to provide the opportunity for an honorable death. You have to start with the mind, the psyche-the body will follow. Enhance the body by all means, but don’t meddle with the mind, you’re simply not qualified.’ ” Another moan. “The first of their very sad and pathetic failures had come to light. A kid with an enhanced body who was too confused to get out of bed. A head case for life. A disaster. They said to me, ‘Okay, do it your way.’ They were scared because of what had happened to their star zombie. I said, ‘It has to be the archetypes, gods and heroes, a Jungian education. Magic is part of it.’ ” A pause while he worked his jaw. “They literally stopped up their ears: ‘Don’t tell us, keep your mumbo-jumbo to yourself, we’ll make a contract, you take the kids, you deliver them at age sixteen, we take it from there.’ ” He raised his hands and dropped them.
There was no point trying to goad him on. I waited. He took a deep breath. “So I worked with Goldman. He played General Groves to my Oppenheimer. We both realized independently that trying to capture or define the human spirit was a pointless exercise. The way forward was to indulge it.”
“Indulge it? Like indulging an animal in its favorite food?”
“Exactly. I’m afraid it was exactly like that. Except that we are here talking about psychic food. A kind of nourishment peculiar to human beings.” A pause. “A form of nourishment well studied by those societies we are taught to despise in modern times. A form of nourishment someone like Hitler or Himmler might have understood, although they were no more than beginners, dark clowns nibbling at the edges who quickly became victims of their own meddling.” He looked at me. His voice shook. He was a quite different kind of old man when he said, “We discovered the rage of fragments cut off from the whole and the way to harness it.” He could not keep the triumph out of his voice.
Now he stared at me like a madman. “The awful thing was that it worked. D’you see? I think even Goldman hoped it was not so. Unfortunately, we had found the God particle on the psychological level, which is the only level that matters. Suddenly the whole of human history fell into place, human sacrifice by another name: Aztecs, Romans, Nazis, European colonists, American imperialists, video games, endless holocausts.” He shook his head. “Goldman went mad. Even now he is only sane fifty percent of the time. That’s why the CIA tries to keep him at a distance. But they cannot do without him. He is the only one they have who fully understands the new weapon system.”
“So why not dump the new weapon system?”
He smiled wryly. “D’you know, I think they would like to do just that. But they cannot. Competition, d’you see? You can’t stop arms races once they start-the logic is irresistible.”
“But a race with whom?”
“Do you really think the Americans are the only ones working on this? Experiments on helpless humans is universal wherever there is an absence of democratic surveillance, which is everywhere because democracy is failing. The Japanese did it in World War II, the Russians did it led by Professor Ilya Ivanov under Stalin in the twenties and carried it on in secret after Ivanov died: the so-called humanzee project. Now the new player is China. They have made a lot of progress, but they’re coming from way behind. They have no comparable program, but their need is great. This kind of weapon is more suited to homeland security than war. Soon there will be two billion people in the PRC, just when food and fuel start to run out, worldwide. Keeping the peace, putting down riots with muscle-that’s the policing and soldiering of the future. A normal man who has been trained to kill cannot manage more than a few hundred slaughters without breaking down. Himmler discovered that.”
A long pause during which his gargoyle returned. His expression was pop-eyed, triumphant and vicious now. “In fact, that was the main problem they wanted me to solve: how do you kill relatedness between humans so that a single warrior can go on killing without any psychological fallout?” He smiled. “It was such an intriguing puzzle, I couldn’t resist the challenge. Then I came up with the answer. Do we worry unduly that literally billions of animals-cows, sheep, chickens, pigs-are killed on our behalf every day? It does not trouble us because of the differentiation of species.” He stopped to check I was following. He was eager to share his brilliance. “I said: ‘I will make them gods, for the gods never care how many little humans they destroy.’ ” He shook his head. “And that’s what I did. After all, what is identity other than a subjective certainty based on no evidence at all? A manipulable fantasy, in other words. Descartes didn’t dig deep enough. It would have been smarter to say, I think therefore I am not, since honest thought destroys identity. A Buddhist like you knows that.”
“So you created a new species?”
“Yes.” He warms to his theme. “Naturally, I gave them many of my own tastes in music, history, cuisine, and the arts-perhaps went a tad too far with the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution, which are my favorites, along with metaphysical poetry and Renaissance choral music-but I was careful to give them a wide range of religions to choose from. Or they could be atheists, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were too different, too superior, ever to relate to normal people.” He let a couple of beats pass. “Even Goldman and his gang realize that seven billion people living on credit and surface tension is not a goer long-term. The transhuman has to be higher and deeper than that.”