The Future Is Japanese (14 page)

Should
hate them? The man who used to be my captain was now spouting such shit that I was rooted to the spot in dumb amazement.

Did this man really think we hated the Hoa because we “should,” because we had some sort of logical reason to do so? What a fucktard. The reason I hated the Hoa, why I hated them all these years and would continue to hate them, was because there was nothing else I could do. They killed my family, Mom, Sis, Pop, and there was no other way I could live except to hate them. The question of what I “should” or “shouldn’t” do never came into the equation. If it were just a matter of deciding what I “should” do, why wouldn’t I have done it by now?

Most of all, though, the thing that was the funniest and the most fucked up was the fact that this man sounded exactly like the fat-bitch teacher back at the institute. This man who had ruthlessly and indiscriminately mown down women and children on the battlefield was now spouting exactly the same sort of platitudinous crap as she did. “Working side by side for a better future” my ass.

I considered the man in front of me. All it would take would be for me to reach out toward his holster and grab his gun, I was sure of it. That barrel that was covered in engravings, not that this made it any more practical, although it was cool …

All I needed to do was take the gun, pull it out, and shoot him. I could do it, I realized—but then it hit me that I had absolutely no desire to kill. Sure, I’d had a rush of blood to the head a minute ago, but now that was subsiding I realized what an insignificant speck of fly crap this man was in the grand scheme of things.

Besides, if I were to kill him, I’d be shot to shit by the guards patrolling the perimeter. He wasn’t worth it.

“I’m really sorry, Captain,” I said honestly, “but I don’t think I’m going to be able to stay here after all.”

I went back to living on the street.

I wandered the city aimlessly, taking care only to avoid any place that looked like it might be somebody’s patch. I briefly considered returning to the institute, but the idea of having to spend my days surrounded by people when I had no idea whether they were Hoa or Xema was just too unbearable.

After a few days like this I was back to my former physique. I could feel my ribs jutting through my skin. My joints ached and I felt weak all over.
Well, I guess this is it, I’m going to waste away now
, I thought to myself as I meandered toward the center of Heaven City.

Faces, faces, faces with their white eyes, looking at me. Were they Hoa? Xema? I still couldn’t tell, of course. Kids would stop their begging when I passed by, looking up at me, checking out who it was invading their patch.

If I were to start looking for food or alms around here I’d be surrounded and lynched in no time flat. I was starving, parched, and was withering under the cruel sun. The city gave me no shelter, no comfort, no sustenance. I was a cipher, a ghostly figure, probably. Not that I was the only such specter in this town.

Then I smacked into something.

“Hey, watch where you’re going, kid.” The speaker was carrying a gun and wore a flak jacket adorned with pockets. An American soldier.

I stumbled backward from the impact. I tried to catch my balance but my legs were too weak to support me. My knees crumpled like paper. I must have been a truly pathetic sight as I folded up and landed on my ass.

“Jesus Christ, kid. Look at the state of you. Are you okay?”

The American soldier helped me up. He really was something else in his camouflage gear, his flak jacket and his big gun. A model soldier.
I wish I’d had all this back when I was fighting
, I thought to myself for a moment. This was a different sort of cool from the carved gun that the captain had. The latest. The best. The soldier helped me up, but it still took me some time to find my footing again; that’s what happens when you’re so low on energy, I guess. Sorry, it’s just ’cause I haven’t eaten for days, I said, or rather I tried to say—I had no idea whether my parched vocal cords had been able to get the words out.

“Don’t sweat it, kid. Take this,” the American soldier said, and handed me a bar of chocolate.
FIRST STRIKE
, it said on the plastic wrapper. Cool. The American also gave me his canteen full of water to swig on. I gulped it down greedily. Just like I had at the captain’s hideout. Like a dog, like the dog I had become.

I noticed the evil stares I was getting from the kids who claimed this territory, but there wasn’t exactly anything they could do when faced with an American soldier.

“I need to get out of here,” I begged the soldier. I needed him to get me out of this place, or else the moment he left I’d be a sitting duck.

“Why’s that, kid?”

I’m not allowed to beg for scraps here, I explained, and then the rest of my story started pouring out almost of its own accord. I’d already told most of my story once before, to Captain Entoleh, so I knew how it went already. This time, I was able to tell it even more fluently.

The American seemed to understand. He escorted me out of the area.

We found ourselves by his barracks, and we sat down next to them. I dived into some more candy and water. The soldier asked me who I was, and I gave him my real name. I’m Williams, he told me in return.

“CMI has done all sorts of stuff to my brain too,” he said. “Stuff that stops me from stressing out when I’m in combat, or after I return home. Some of the guys don’t like the idea of being interfered with this way, of course. As for me, well, I’m not crazy about it, but I guess I see why they do it. Probably a good thing on balance.”

My hand holding the candy bar stopped midair. So this guy also had doctors mess around with his mind, huh? How, exactly, I asked? There’s no way of telling what sort of “shot to the heart” somebody has had just by looking at them, of course. It’s not like losing a leg or an eye.

“Huh, well, let’s see. Before I go into battle I get this little jab that stops me from feeling pain. It works on my brain. Now, if this jab really stopped you from feeling pain at all, then if you took a bullet you might not even notice that you were wounded, right? You could end up bleeding to death over what should have just been a flesh wound.”

I nodded.

“So what happens is this,” Williams said. “When a bullet hits you, it registers in your mind that you’re hurting—how do I say this—it’s a bit like ‘knowing’ in the sense of knowing what’s happening in a book you’re reading, or a conversation you’re having. You follow, you know, you process it, you just don’t end up rolling around in agony. That’s the sort of thing we get injections for.”

“So you know that you’re in pain, you just don’t feel pain,” I said.

“Exactly, kid. You’re quick on the uptake. You put it far better than I do. It took me almost two months to get my head around it.” The American kept a straight face as he spoke. No hint of a smile. It seemed so weird he could talk about this with such clinical detachment, such a lack of emotion.

I thought about what Williams had just told me. If American magic was capable of such weird stuff, then it must have been easy for them to make it so my head couldn’t tell the difference between Xema and Hoa anymore. I could still tell the difference between individual faces. Who’s who? It was just that when I saw someone for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether they were Hoa or Xema—that was all. The most natural thing in the world to anyone born and raised in this country, and I couldn’t do it.

Was this what they meant by “indifference”?

This was crazy. Did they really think that by removing the target of my hatred, my hatred would just disappear? That the world would suddenly somehow become a peaceful place? Who came up with this scheme? Was it the new government? The Americans? Our teachers? Who could have honestly thought that this would solve anything?

“It’s the NGOs,” Williams said. “Who’re behind these mind-changing programs, I mean. It’s a popular school of thought in Europe and America at the moment. The idea that all the world needs is for people to stop treating different races differently and then we’d have a perfect world where harmony and equality prevail. And once people believe in an idea strongly enough, they’ll do anything to try and make their ideology become reality.”

“Are there wars between different tribes going on back in your country, sir?” I asked.

“No, no, nothing quite as drastic as that. There are plenty of people who’ll point out that there is still a sort of low-level discrimination that hasn’t yet completely disappeared, though. And it’s usually those people who put themselves forward for the mind-altering surgery. So that they can make a dramatic statement to the world. To tell us all they are not prejudiced—and to wear the fact like a badge of honor. And it works. It helps these people get ahead in life, get a promotion at work. In some companies, at least. These people get stuck in their grassroots volunteering on Sundays, they sort their trash and their recycling religiously, they attend their monthly counseling sessions faithfully, they participate enthusiastically in consumer focus groups and the social progress debates of the day, all while keeping a meticulous log of their social virtue so they can brandish their good citizenship credentials at a moment’s notice.

“Hardly surprising that it’s these people who are the most enthusiastic about the idea of fiddling about with people’s brains to make it so they can’t distinguish between different races anymore. It’s almost become a prerequisite to being a ‘good person,’ someone society can trust. And I guess that some bright spark at some NGO somewhere had the idea that this sort of social engineering could be taken and transplanted into some other country where different tribes were killing each other. Figured it would somehow bring about peace.”

I could hardly follow half the things he was saying, but one thing did stand out: this man’s home country was, all things considered, a pretty peaceful place compared to ours. It had to be, for people to have the time to worry about whether they should or shouldn’t go in for an operation that would make them utterly unable to distinguish between races.

Try that in the war here so that you couldn’t tell the difference between Xema and Hoa. You’d be dead before you had time to blink.

“Yeah, my country is hardly the theater of war that your country’s been these past years,” Williams said, almost as if he were apologizing for the fact. “Sorry to put it so bluntly.”

“So what gives you the right to come over here and impose your values on us?” I asked him. “This is a war zone here. Not being able to tell the difference between races can get a person killed.”

“The war’s over though, isn’t it?” the American replied, a trace of doubt lingering in his voice. “We ended it, didn’t we?”

I wanted to shout at him—not just to say it was the Dutch and not you arrogant Americans who ended the war, but to scream that for me the war wasn’t yet over—but I knew it would be pointless. We were just doing what the president of this white man’s country was telling us to do, after all. Forget your hatred. Forgive the crimes of those who murdered your family. And this is what we were being forced to do in reality: not a single Hoa had been tried for his crimes, and they were all going about their business in Heaven City as if nothing had ever happened.

Now, of course everyone wants peace. Believe it or not, I myself didn’t particularly enjoy the act of fighting—not at all, in fact. But there was really only one answer you could give when the white man came to your land and told you that all you now had to do was to forgive the people who raped the shit out of your sister before killing her. The answer being:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

I thanked the soldier for the food and said goodbye and walked away. After a while I looked back to see one of those flying fans floating just above the American’s head. This machine, oh so clever and oh so soulless, was surveying the land below it, master of all it could see, camera and machine gun both ever ready.