Nov. 27th, 2007

dexfarkin: (Default)
I have become something unfortunate to you, haven't I?

That pinched, tired expression you get every time we have a debriefing following a contract. Those little twitches going over the files about casualties and innocent lives lost. You don't like the cost of doing business this way at all, do you?

You're right. I find that interesting. You have two degrees; twenty-two years of experience, first in the field and later from this office. All that time, playing in this dirty little sandbox, but because you told yourself that there were rules, you could stay clean. As if your patriotic motivations and platitudes about the greater good meant it wouldn't touch you.

It's a shame that a man as intelligent as yourself has trouble understanding someone like me. You made me. Piece by piece, I was constructed out of all the assets at your disposal. You went looking for a loner; someone that had problems connecting to people around him, that might have a certain moral flexibility when it came to doing the job. That's what you wanted to start with when you made your pitch about how the country and the people need people that sometimes. That it's a hard job, but a necessary one. After all, I volunteered to be a soldier; this was just some new level of training and a different branch of the service.

You wiped away my records, first the military ones, and then all the rest. No birth certificate, no license, no school transcripts or recruitment paper have my name on them. I'm a ghost. unable to prove I'm even a citizen, Ohio born and raised. Then, long and isolated training. How to disappear, to be non-descript. How to operate inside any society and leave no trace more substantial than a wisp of smoke at my passing. Most of all, you taught me how to turn off my empathy, and look at the people you sent me to as targets only.

Now you bluster about innocent children and civilians. Does it matter? If they aren't targets, they are resources or obstructions. I don't remember how to recognize people any longer. What happens to the country, to the President if it goes public is equally disinteresting. It's no longer my country, never was if you look at the records. Why should I care?

I'm not especially worried that you're going to try and quietly end me either. No, you won't. Because the next one will take years to train, and it's a dangerous and frightening world. You made me to work for money, and I'm happy to be loyal to the contract. You will continue to agonize about all the poor people who get killed with my targets, but you won't stop sending me names and the means to remove them. You have to, because they made you too.

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