There were at least a thousand of us in the programme, maybe more. Hard to say now, with all the facts turned over and covered with tangles of red tape and a full sweep of conjecturing headlines, bot-fed posts and hollow assurances.
A thousand, to start. Maybe twenty or so passed out or passed away before any kind of training could start. To prevent the waste of any splicing chemicals, they set to work on the gene therapy before the training. Some bodies just couldn’t take the modifications. Harder bones, stronger muscles, increased lung capacity, numbed nerve tips, a larger heart. But the most significant change to our biochemistry was the neurotransmitters. Even today, no one is sure what they put in there. But it heightened our aggression beyond its natural capacity and to counter, they filled the other half of the brain with massive violence inhibitors. They stretched our extremes out to the furthest reaches, constrained only by physical law. When we were on, we were on. When we were off, we were walking corpses. A kill switch, housed in human meat. Our brains were more our enemies than our enemies, had we any.
The United Kingdom was most assured that the coming war would be the final war, fought with intercontinental ballistic missiles, electromagnetic pulses, drones, lasers, spies and, somewhere in there, some traditional, hands-on wetwork. That's what we were for. To do things no natural person was considered capable, physically or morally, to do. Throw in a year of training so intense it killed another three of us, and you had just short of a thousand killers, of unknown stability, housed in the bodies fresh out of childhood, that knew how to tear a jugular before they’d sat down for their first legal drink.
The problem, then, or lack thereof, was that there was no war. In fact, soon thereafter, there was no United Kingdom. Or any nation state. The following accords veered humanity away from mutually assured destruction and, in spite of what history has shown us, for once we decided to change something. There was some instability and resistance at first. The idea was big. But humans are nothing if not adaptable. At least, the normal ones are.
The problem with ushering in an era of absolute peace is, what do you do with all the swords you’ve tempered? Lock them away in a museum, perhaps. The problem with us, is that unlike swords, we breathe, we speak and, unfortunately, we feel. What to do with a subrace bred for war, in a world finally in harmony? Nothing, it turns out. Let them loose in the population and pray they integrate of their own accord. There’s optional therapy sessions every week. There’s a bike club.
A hundred and two had killed themselves after five years. No objectives. No structure. No purpose. Our only social interactions were with each other and with instructors teaching us how to be better killers. Hard to get along at your local when your only interest is murder. At first, we were curiosities to the people around us. Then we became problems. Scuffles in supermarkets. Hard drinkers accosting passers by. Many turned to substance abuse. Some started acting up in some really fucked up ways. There was a string of violence, about ten years in, that shocked a world getting used to life without it.
So, what else was there to do? Which lands us here. On the island. Nothing but sea around us. They drop off supplies via drone and leave us to it. We have built the basic structures. The houses, from local wood, a central hut where we meet to have big dinners. We farm. We hunt. We’re making our own plumbing system and have started converting our wood-burn generators into wind farms.
But we haven’t built anything between us. The dinners are a formality, like we are copying what we have observed. It doesn’t do anything for us. Those that have gotten together are spouses only in the most foundational sense of the word. I’m not sure there is anything there. I think we’ve had it carved from us, first by the programme, then by the decade that followed. We feel pain, they left us that. But empathy, vulnerability, love, even, is like trying to hold water in your hands. It always ends up slipping out eventually. And yet, we can do nothing but desire it. So we are left waiting, to become more like you, or tear each other apart, or simply fade from the world we inconvenience. The worst thing is, I hope we are forgotten.
Paddy Dobson
31st January 2021