Losing My Religion

Omnipotent, He has arranged the universe so that He sits behind the protection of an unprovable negative. For all I know, He may even exist. Perhaps the virus doing a stereo brunch on my brain is god. It is a question designed to have no answer. What I did do was to prove why we believe. Turns out, it's laughably obvious. The emperor has no clothes, and I was the little boy, shouting to the crowd. The crowd loved me, at first. "More, more," they cried, and I gave them all they asked for. The whole song and dance. No God, no Consciousness, finally, nothing at all. But I was sawing off the branch we were sitting on. Break apart the raft you float on at your peril, the waters are deep and cold, and filled with hungry shadows.

My studies were on terrorism. My group was one of the first to study terrorists from a socio-psychopathic perspective, financed by the Patriot Commission. We tried to understand how groups could turn normal (if any teenager can be called that) girls and boys into suicide agents, packed with microWMDs: bioweapons in the noodles, nerve agents in the nail varnish, explosive threads woven into jeans and packed into sneakers. Our experiments were classified, off the books. The project was code-named "Mystic" and we knew of no other name. If you search the archives, you will find nothing. We experimented on live volunteers. Well, the children of Guantanamo Bay have no legal existence, and in a sense their parents did volunteer their future offspring when they dared to oppose the Coalition forces. At first we did not know who the boys and girls we worked on came from. Our sponsors told us they were poor children (strictly speaking, correct - these kids had nothing, not even a nationality). I have to admit that when we found out the truth, we did not care any longer. Mystic corrupted us. Total power over these young people – especially the girls, the sweet girls – was addictive and we became deeply dependent on that power. More, we asked for. Always more.

I should be penitent. But how can I be? We succeeded in our goals, hard-working little sociopathologists. We developed a formula, a system, that could turn any person into the willing tool for any task. Initially it took about three months, but through much hard work we got it down to two short weeks. We did not invent so much as refine existing knowledge into its purest, most extreme form. "Stockholm Syndrome" is an old name for one of the human reactions to danger and fear that we used. The others are well known by dark institutions around the world: force an empty language, dress, and behavior, and the sense of identity slips away. Hammer what's left with unpredictable brutality, illogical rules and rites, forced intimacy, oh yes, and they lose their souls. Concentrated into two weeks, with the help of the right drugs, and minds fall like pearls into the palm of one's hand. Suicide is not a hard act for a walking, living zombie. We demonstrated that.

I guess we put almost a thousand people – children, teenagers, men and women, even grandparents – through our experiments. Nothing new here, you will say. The Reich's doctors tried the same. But where they failed, we succeeded. We had resources they never dreamed of. Money to buy anything and anyone we needed. On-line genetic maps to de-construct the human mind. Power to experiment on people and groups throughout the Liberated Areas of the globe. And we were the best, the very best.