part 6

Thank you, it’s nice to be here.

You’re welcome

That’s right, I like some of the commentary I’ve heard from you and I thought this might be a good fit.

I don’t know, I guess I like the atmosphere. At a press conference I feel like I’m talking at everyone and I’m always pretty stiff. I prefer the dynamics of a personal conversation, even if there are a billion observers.

Of course.

No, no, go ahead.

I’d say that’s a fair assessment.

Well, not everything, but some important things.

Yeah, I guess.

I suppose I have mixed feelings about it.

I don’t know that I’d use the word refreshing, but I can see how it could apply.

No need to apologize, I understand. In fact I agree, at least in part. I’m sick of talking about religious extremism.

I can’t think of anything I haven’t said a million times already.

You mean a summary? I don’t know . .

Well, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. Obviously most of the people in the world don’t use their belief systems to fuel violence, although as you know, I have a tendency to think it’s probably a universally latent capacity.

Personally, I don’t care. I’ve made my position clear but people are free to invest in superstition as long as it doesn’t pose a hazard to anyone else. That’s my thought for the day.

So it appears.

Let’s just hope it ends there.

That’s the point I was trying to make. The god of Abraham employed his omnipotence in the service of the most infantile, psychotic hysterics. Whether or not he acted out of blind rage or cold-blooded, systematic calculation, his hatred and violence knew no limits. He rained rampant, merciless death upon the Earth. He didn’t just kill some evil men to get everyone’s attention, he destroyed cities, civilizations, for whatever caprice engaged his fancy. He destroyed cities just because people in them were having too much fun. In a fit of pique, he drowned every living thing on the entire planet except the passengers and crew of one floating wooden zoo. Every single man, woman, and child. Every animal, every insect, every blade of freaking grass. Every . . living . . thing.

Of course not, men made it up, that’s what I’m saying. They made it up to control others through fear and you can’t do that with a God of love can you? You need a raging, wrathful, murderous God who requires absolute, blind obedience and will destroy you utterly at the slightest provocation.

Yeah right. People give it lip service but when you get right down to it, while they expect their god to forgive them, they sure as hell don’t want him to forgive anybody else.

So billions of people have a inner longing for the return of a god with those properties. Not a god of love and forgiveness, but a god of violence who will smite the people they don’t like.

I’m not saying that.

I’m not saying that either. Look, I’m no special case and neither are you, except we’re among the luckiest bastards on the planet. Billions of people aren’t so lucky. How many daily lives contain systematic physical and sexual abuse? Hunger, disease, poverty, you name it. But you and me? Pfft. But even among the blessed, the desire to strike back runs close to the surface.

That’s what I’m getting at. How many times have you wanted to choke the living shit out of some asshole?

No, this is not about reasoned civic responsibility, it’s about how you feel. You live in the greatest country in history but your life is filled with chronic stress. It’s always the same shit. What’s on tap for today? Your boss rips you in front of your friends for something that was actually his idea. You stop for a few things on the way home and get patronized by a smug, teenaged clerk. When you get to the car you find out he dropped the bananas on top of your chips. You get stuck behind someone driving ten under the speed limit and you can’t get around him. Then you’re sitting at a light you should have made, thinking about how your wife flirts with other guys right in front of you, when some jerk pulls up behind with a subwoofer pounding so hard things on your dashboard rattle. It’s like someone’s punching you in the stomach, over and over and over. Bu-bu-BOOM . . bu-bu-BOOM! It’s a long light so you have plenty of time to think about things. This isn’t just a one time deal is it? This kind of shit happens all the time, you’re continuously under assault. Idiots and assholes who go out of their way to ruin your day, day after day, week after week, year after year, it never ends and you can’t get away from it. Bu-bu-BOOM . . bu-bu-BOOM! It won’t be any better when you get home. Turn on the tube. A third of it’s commercials and the rest is reruns of crap that was crap when it was new. Go online. Your inbox is filled with crap and every website you visit is covered with blaring flash ads for crap, it’s impossible to read anything. Your phone rings, more crap. Your dinner is filled with steroids, antibiotics, pesticide residue and trans fats. The dog next door yaps twenty four seven. Idiots and assholes. The whole time the sound track for this moment keeps pounding away, bu-bu-BOOM . . bu-bu-BOOM . . Bu-bu-BOOM . . bu-bu-BOOM.!

What are you gonna do Gary?

What do you usually do?

Exactly. Just like everyone else. Now, here’s a button, my friend. Push it and . . pop! Gone forever. In fact, it will work on your boss, that insufferable punk, anyone. Pick ‘em out and they’ll just . . go away. What are you gonna do? I’m giving you the button and absolute license to use it however you want. There will be no consequences, none. Ever. Now, let’s not even try to guess what you’d really do. I’m going to assume you’re a decent man and you’d reason that being an asshole isn’t a capital crime, but what would you want to do? How would you feel about it?

And that’s your response to the simple lack of civility that’s now endemic to modern living. Now let’s step it up a notch. How do you feel about a guy who kidnaps and rapes your wife . . your sister . . your daughter?

Hmm?

Exactly. You don’t just want to make him disappear. You want to make him suffer. You want him to feel helpless and terrified and then you want to make him feel pain. Real pain. Screaming, choking, blubbering, incoherent pain. Then somewhere along the line, when even you can’t take it any longer, you want to kill him with your bare hands and you want him to know he’s going to die and that you are the one who’s going to take his miserable life.

Of course it is, it’s hardwired in. You’re desperate to protect your children and the only way you can be absolutely certain he will never harm her again is if he’s stone dead. But like I said, you’re a civilized man. You realize that maybe you don’t have to make him suffer. There’s a pretty good chance somebody else has already done that, and that’s why he’s such a sick bastard in the first place. Maybe he doesn’t even have to die. You reason that maybe putting him behind bars is the right thing to do. But that’s not really satisfying is it? First of all, you have to face the trial, which is a whole new nightmare, like getting raped all over again, especially if you can’t get a conviction. If you do, he may only get a few years and that means you have to face life with that piece of shit back out on the street again. You don’t know what he’s gonna do then, do you? And even if you could put him away forever, just the thought that he’s still alive, that he can still think about what he did . . you can picture him, can’t you, talking to some other inmate, some other scumbag, talking about what he did to your daughter, enjoying it, smirking, laughing about it. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? And your daughter will think about it too, she can’t be completely free of what happened, knowing he’s out there somewhere, thinking about her. It never really ends, it goes on and on. So you really want him fucking dead, because even though it won’t change the past, it can sure as hell slam the door on it. If he’s dead, it’s over. He’s gone forever. You still have the residue of what happened to deal with, but the future is completely free of any uncertainty. It restores some kind of balance and everybody sleeps better for the rest of their lives.

That’s what I’m getting at, not what you’d decide to do . . but what you’d want to, what you’d feel like doing.

I understand.

Exactly. It’s not that simple. There are cases where this may be a good argument, and I’m not going to give any examples because this conversation is already depressing enough. But there are plenty of cases where it’s not justified, and not supported even by the victims, who are plenty traumatized already and don’t need the additional burden of someone’s death to deal with. And of course, it doesn’t address the problem in a way that prevents people from getting to the point where they commit that kind of crime in the first place.

Because I’m not advocating execution as a social strategy, I’m just pointing out the range of conditions that drive the impulse to want to use it.

Of course not. And most people know the dynamics of crime and punishment are complicated. But they get sick and tired of a continuous parade of crimes that go unpunished, however slight or serious. They feel helpless and wish they had power to just make it all stop.

I keep saying they, but I include myself. We all reach a point where we can’t think about it any more, the scale of things gets too big. We don’t want it to be complicated, we just want it to end and the simplest solution is to kill somebody. Blue does that. You kill, you die. Period. Nice and neat.

Well, we are mostly helpless.

No, no, I’m not saying that. Listen . .

Those are factors, but that’s not the point . .

Oh, please. The Hammer has advanced technology, but we know how to kill people and we kill them just as dead. The only real advantage he has is better intelligence.

Right.

Red-handed, in the act . .

Right, right.

Instant karma, baby. Nobody gets away.

Otherwise, it’s not a very effective deterrent.

Exactly. If we had that same kind of omniscience, we could do the same thing.

Well, theoretically . .

Sure. Put a camera on every square inch of real estate inhabited by Man.

I know, people wouldn’t stand for it, unless it’s being done by God.

Isn’t that the assumption? God’s watching everybody all the time? Like Santa? He knows if you’ve been bad or good . .

Omniscient. No qualifier, knows all.

Bingo.

Just like the old testament.

The return of Yahweh the Executioner.

Listen, that was his calling card, he rained death exclusively. Over and over. He never rained flowers or money or ice cream. Just death.

Promises, promises. Faith is fine, but he wanted to make sure you had an empirical foundation for fear.

That’s true.

Exactly. And why? Because he’s made in our image. That’s where I’ve been going with this, those myths are expressions of human thought and desire.

No, what I mean is, I don’t know if he’s watching us. I mean visually. I wonder if he may be simply responding to something else, some psychic field. That also implies we may have more influence over him than we suspect.

Well, he’s acting a lot like the jealous tribal war god we invented out of our own desire for an omnipotent cosmic dictator, so . .

Right, if somehow we as a population have called him into being, if somehow he resonates to some human emotional projection.

I know, now I’m the flake.

I understand. I’ve said over and over I don’t believe in magic . .

And I haven’t. That doesn’t mean I’m hard-headed about it . .

No, c’mon, not like that.

Right, our thoughts and feelings didn’t create him, that’s ridiculous, it’s obvious he has some independent existence. I just wonder if somehow his appearance here or his actions might be guided in some way by our collective yearnings.

Well, I have a hard time getting my head around the concept but I have to admit the possibility.

No, it doesn’t, there may be endless others. Just because we don’t know what they are doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Exactly. That’s why I said I wonder about it. It just seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

It doesn’t have to be that mysterious. Maybe he’s just been reading the Bible. Maybe he’s just been watching TV.

Hey, those roots are deep. Giants, Titans, Goliath . .

Well, I haven’t made a list. Dinosaurs, Godzilla, King Kong . .

Yeah, Gort, of course.

Kinda creepy huh?

Yeah, but they didn’t take an interest in how we treated on another, we’d become a threat to other worlds. But it was the same kind of binary, old testament threat.

Straighten up or we’ll destroy your whole planet.

Oh, yeah, a hundred others . .

Sure.

Hm. This is interesting. I just realized people couldn’t communicate with any of the creatures we just mentioned.

Beats me. I think we were working our way toward current events.

Sure. I’ve been wondering for a long time about his MO. Did he decide to . .

I should clarify it then. I probably haven’t reinforced my position on this enough. Here’s my understanding, or more accurately my speculation. I believe our little intervention has two parts. We have the Avatar himself. He travels the world making people’s heads explode. I think he’s a robot who selects his targets himself, based on some criteria or algorithm. But I think that’s the extent of his capability. I don’t think he decides goals or policy or strategy or tactics. I think he’s the agent of another entity we don’t see, a fully self conscious, organic creature of some extraterrestrial ilk. I call this creature God for my own amusement. God determines categories of conduct and their consequences. He then programs his agent to complete a virtually instantaneous sequence of observation, analysis, judgement, and verdict, followed immediately by sentence and execution.

So we’re back to the question, how does he do it?

And everything is different now.

Right. It wasn’t really a serious question before. He seemed to be responding to actions that were visible, at least to someone with the power to observe continuously over a vast scale. Now . .

So, that’s what I was asking, can he detect people’s thoughts? Emotions?

I have to accept the possibility.

Nope.

Like I said, it’s certainly a possibility. But it could also be the result of more precise and comprehensive observations.

Guess.

That was easy, right?

Exactly. One machine, very fast, vast information resources.

Yeah, I don’t have a lot of company, except for people who share my perspectives on faith.

No, it doesn’t have to be anything complex or arcane, it’s just a simple matter of scale. He’s chosen a new population, but he’s not really doing anything different, he’s just doing it faster and with more detailed intelligence.

Right, as in information.

Well, the next question is how he gets around.

Yeah, but when he’s manifest, he doesn’t move particularly fast.

I’m always open to persuasion.

I know.

Not really, I’m the Chosen One.

Either way, he’s a busy boy these days.

Of course not.

I guess that kind of thing mostly dried up.

But they’re behaving themselves, at least for now.

Oh, yeah.

So even though each incident involves fewer principals, there are so many more incidents the death rate is blowing up, pun intended.

Wasn’t supposed to be.

It’s hard to say right now, everybody’s having trouble keeping up with the stories. There isn’t any agency in the world that isn’t choking on reports, but it’s safe to say that a whole new tier of conduct has suddenly become an instant ticket to a final reward.

It looks like just about anything that puts another human in jeopardy. Rape, robbery, kidnapping, you name it, you’ll die for it now whether you’re armed or not. Apparently you can qualify for a neural omelet just by being actively involved in someone else’s suffering and you can be doing it alone.

No, actually most of the reports we’re getting involve violence against children, typically by family members.

This has a lot of significance for me because it has the potential for long term influence.

I know, and a lot of kids will be missing a parent but . .

Well, it’s a crude method but I can’t help but be optimistic about the effects. Imagine a whole generation growing up without abuse. It’s, I don’t know, I just think it could get right to the root of a lot of problems.

I’m just glad he has the means to identify these things as they’re happening.

Exactly, it’s not at all clear and that’s what got me to thinking about some kind of connection. Maybe he has some way of tuning in to people’s emotions. If you’re terrified of violence or sick with dread he can pick up on it. Whatever it is, he’s clear about the signals, he never shows up when people are falling off a cliff. So, as usual, much of the activity is in Africa and the Middle East but we’re getting plenty of action all over the world.

Oh, he’s on fire. Based on reports, he’s doing business at about five hundred an hour but the same people who told me that told me that much of what he’s doing is going unreported or happening in places where reports take a long to time to surface. They’re estimating and actual death rate about twice that.

Right, a thousand an hour.

Nope. There’s no geographical pattern at all. You’d think the logistics would dictate working in one area at a time but he doesn’t. His appearances seem to be scattered all over the planet. He bounces back and forth from continent to continent.

Well, that’s what everyone wants to know and we still can’t say for sure. Initially it looked like there had to be a bunch of them but the more we looked at the data the more they suggested to some of us that he’s still working alone.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m in the minority.

Because it fits.

First of all, he doesn’t stay long, it’s like bing, bing, bing. People say he appears, bing! They hear popping noises, bing! He disappears, bing! He’s gone before the bodies hit the ground. Some people swear they never even see him. This leads me to the conclusion he’s working as fast as he can. We’re estimating two or three seconds for each appearance, certainly no more than four on average. Second, he’s showing up about four hundred times an hour that we can confirm. That’s an average of every nine seconds, plenty of time, assuming he can travel halfway around the world in five or six seconds.

Of course, just because he could be doesn’t prove he is, there could be a thousand of ‘em, pick a number. I pick one.

He’s a stud. I see no reason to doubt he can do it all.

Maybe.

Sure.

I don’t even know anymore. I guess just show up on TV and yap about it.

I don’t know, I get more disconnected all the time. I used to get face time with many of the survivors but the scale of things now is . .

I have mixed feelings, you know that.

Well . .

I know, I know.

It’s . . let me see if I can explain. In the beginning, I saw a lot of killing. I didn’t have any experience with murder and it was a massive shock to me. But it seems like I had some kind of limiter, a governor of how much I could handle. Watching ten people die isn’t ten times worse than watching one person die. Worse, but not by the same proportion, and it was weeks before I had to face it again. Then came a point where I didn’t have to face it directly at all. That was better, but every report still evokes some of the same stress. Maybe my imagination’s just too vivid, but I tend to experience a little bit of every report I read. So . . I’m not making this clear . .

Think of it like this: I once had to deal with large scale events with space in between. But large scale events are only marginally worse than small scale events, assuming the horror factor is similar. But now what I get is a continuous stream of small scale events, each with it’s own unique sickness. It never stops. I get stacks of printouts. Page one: A woman being skewered on a stake hammered into her body cavity from between her legs by her husband and his two brothers. I have no idea what she had done to provoke them and I don’t care. Page two: A father puts his three month old daughter in a bucket of gasoline and sets her on fire. Her offense? She wasn’t a son. Page three: Sorry, I’ve already had enough, I can’t read page three, let alone page three hundred or page three thousand.

No, I’ve already reached my saturation point, I don’t read any of them anymore. I get data, stats, analyses. Tendencies.

The good news is, perps fry. And most of the time, thankfully, the Hammer is there before things really get going. This is another reason why I think he’s working alone. As fast as he is, he can’t be in two places at the same time.

Yeah, but not as mixed as they used to be. It’s hard to have any sympathy for someone willing to burn his own children to death. In the short term, people get saved and the message is clear: This kind of savagery is not condoned by a higher power. God says no.

Well, a little girl who escapes the flames still lives in an environment where she’s treated worse than an animal, in a place where animals are not treated well. Is she any better off alive? That fire may have spared her from a life of slavery or some other endless hell. The conditions that created the problem are still in place, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.

Of course not.

I never celebrate death.

Relief, mostly.

I’ll take it.

My feelings aren’t important.

Oh, please.

It scares the hell out of me. I really had no idea how my state of mind would be affected by the way I’m treated now. I think it’s good the change was so sudden, otherwise I might have had time to start taking it seriously.

Millions of people want to believe I’m a living god. It’s crazy. I can act with total impunity, I can do anything I want. Seriously, I can go anywhere and do anything. Who’s going to stop me? The press is right, I have more personal power than any man who ever lived.

Well, what’s interesting is that I don’t really have any power at all. The Tin Man doesn’t answer to me, it’s not like I can command him to do anything, he just protects me. I can’t actually harm anyone, I’m just invulnerable. It’s kind of passive but still effective. I can’t be opposed.

Not interested.

Aren’t you glad? Imagine what I could do if I weren’t so well adjusted.

Just the luck of the draw.

I think it’s time to move along.

See that?

I could see it in your face, you were thinking of saying something and suddenly realized there might be consequences you hadn’t intended.

Come on . .

No, I understand. How can you not be nervous? Hell, I’m nervous too, I don’t know what might provoke him. I live in constant fear that someone near me will pick up a stapler and two seconds later everyone in the room will be dead. I don’t know how you people handle it, I’d be as far from someone like me as I could get. You’re leaning on a flagpole in an electrical storm.

That’s right too. Maybe a new way to define aesthetic distance.

So . .

Yeah, yeah . .

Well . .

Yeah, there are two things that concern me. First of all, I’m curious where he’s going with this.

Even so, but now he’s stepped across a boundary. I’m wondering what other boundaries he’s going to cross. Maybe he’s just getting warmed up.

I realize that.

Come on, I’m a miserable excuse for a prophet. God doesn’t even talk to me.

If you’re looking for wisdom, you’ve come to the wrong place. All I know how to do is point to the obvious.

Yeah, thousands of years of it. It’s not hard to find.

Doesn’t matter. We never listened to it before, I don’t harbor any illusions that’s gonna change.

Of course.

Oh, I don’t know. The Reluctant Messiah.

It’s the perfect combination of truth and grotesque exaggeration.

I know. People try to kill me for it all the time.

Wouldn’t you?

Oh, please . .

See?

At least I don’t spell it P-R-O-F-I-T.

Ok, let’s get back to Big Blue.

Yeah, but I make the rules now. This is not an interview, it’s a conversation. With a living god. Just remember, you’re one sudden move away from meeting the Avatar.

Sorry, I can’t help myself. I need to crack wise sometimes.

Right, we don’t.

I can probably get away with it, but I don’t have to use the word psychic. We were speculating that the Avatar can somehow read and respond to human emotion and that leads us to the other dimension of this issue.

Right, and there’s plenty of it to go around. There’s a global celebration of violence. I’m sick of all the rejoicing, all those posters of the Avatar that say, go ahead, make my day. I understand people’s reactions better than most, I’m alive because he’s blown the minds of forty or fifty would be assassins. But in spite of the fact I tend to think they got what was coming to them I’ve never taken any pleasure in any of those deaths.

It leaves us with the same question I keep asking: Does this endless slaughter do anything to address the causes of violence?

Well, I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, clearly he can’t do it all at once and all those people he found at the point of a gun didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the social fabric to evolve. Maybe once he’s thinned the herd of the worst offenders there’ll be a phase two, some program of encouragement.

Not really.

We’ll see.

Yeah, I think so.

Right.

You’re welcome.