Mardock Scramble

their burden and take what life throws at them.”

“Are you saying, Professor, that you’ll be able to teach me again whether life has any value?” asked Boiled, an unusually dignified and serious tone to the words spilling forth from his lips, even for him. “Does life have any value?”

But Faceman shook his head. He smiled placidly and continued. “That question is folly—you have it all upside down. Value is not something that just exists. It’s a concept, a construct. And when people neglect their duty to construct their own valuation of life, they revert back to being no more than beasts. After all, what is society if not a peculiarly human invention that allows people to conceptualize and propagate their own belief systems?”

Boiled remained silent, his eyes dark.

Faceman continued in his quiet voice. “It’s been observed on numerous occasions that the act of killing other members of one’s species is not limited to human beings—it’s a trait observable in all animals. The reason that animals are furnished with the ability to kill is so that they can kill. For animals, the impetus to kill is always there, constantly at the ready. That’s their system of self-perpetuation, you see. Their system is pure and simple, just like human society.”

“Are you calling me an animal?”

“All human beings are animals, of course. But you, having lost your sense of values, are trying to fill that gaping hole with a particular set of instincts—that’s why you’re an animal. When animals cannibalize each other or persecute outsiders or create outcasts or commit suicide, or patricide, or infanticide, or fratricide—all these apparently abnormal acts are nothing more than a regression to a base animal instinct, when you think about it. Animals learn from their environment and their circumstances and pass their learned behaviors on to their children, who inherit what they can from their parents. But when environments and circumstances change so that they appear to contradict what we have learned—well, that’s when learning goes out the window, and animal instinct kicks in to produce these behaviors that we call ‘abnormal.’ Whenever there’s an outbreak of killing within a species, this is usually the primary factor.”

“Are you saying that it’s abnormal for me to have a gun?” Boiled asked.

Suddenly, Faceman’s eyes narrowed, and he threw the question back at Boiled. “So, when I said ‘abnormal,’ you immediately associated the word with your gun, did you?”

Boiled didn’t answer.

Faceman smiled and continued. “Abnormal behavior could be, for example, the ill-treatment of other members of your own species. There are some animals, for example, which, for various reasons, toy with weaker beings before killing them. Even their own children. There are some cases where they rape their own children repeatedly, or eat their children. Besides that, there are countless cases in which animals engage in group suicide, or end up eating each other or killing their own parents.”

Faceman uttered this entire speech with his usual, apparently disinterested, tone. Boiled stood and listened without emotion.

“Let me give you another example. In the savannas of a protected nature reserve, when the numbers in a herd of herbivores grow beyond a certain level, the herd engages in conduct that can only be described as provocative. Namely, they find a carnivore and deliberately pass close by, encouraging the carnivore to chase them. When, eventually, one of the herd falls by the wayside at the end of the chase and falls victim to the predator, the others in the herd stop and watch as their fellow gets ripped to pieces. Scientists have analyzed brain wave patterns that, in these situations, indicate that the surviving herd members are not just excited, but also enjoying the spectacle.”

It was as if Faceman was methodically retrieving the data stored in his mind, selecting the best piece of information to impart next. “And what about the lowly insect that’s organized into the most regimented sort of society. Take the bee—in every hive, there’s always a particular bee that isn’t assigned any role. It isn’t allowed to do anything, and it just gets ignored by the other bees and dies. The existence of such a pitiful creature is usually explained as being a necessary measure to keep the population fluctuating, but essentially what’s happening is that the majority are finding an outlet for stress by creating an outcast. It’s a type of amusement. Then, there are the activities that are supposedly unique to human beings—take war, for example. Your former line of work.”

Boiled said nothing. He stared at Faceman, a dark glint brimming up in his eyes.

“You think that human beings are the only animals to wage war? Think again. It’s actually fair to say that pretty much any animal with a herd instinct will wage war one way or another. From insects to herbivores—all living creatures wage war. Ants, for example, will attack a rival anthill and raid its food supplies. They even occupy the other’s territory, enslaving the surviving ants. This sort of action is an exceedingly common animal impulse, in fact. So, you see how it is? Human beings are a long way from escaping their animal instincts, as I’m sure you understand clearly. In which case, what exactly is the difference between man and animal?”

Faceman took a breath here to better enunciate his next phrase. “The creation of values,” he said. “On one hand, animals have come up with all sorts of reasons—besides simple predation—to kill each other. On the other hand, over time human beings have come up with a notion of valuing life and death. It’s not that life has any value in and of itself. It’s that human beings have come up with a notion of value and applied that in various ways to the idea of life. In doing so, man started to resist total domination by his baser instincts and managed to give birth to a society overwhelmingly stronger and more complex than any other, surpassing all other creatures and ascending the pinnacle of life on earth as master of all he surveys.”

Here, Faceman opened his eyes wide and tilted his head, that is, his whole self, forward. “What is the definition of a human being? It’s based on whether a creature understands the concept of a value system. Human infants are very much like animals in that they don’t understand the idea of values, but then they study them, and in doing so arrive at their own sense of self-worth, as well as the value of other objects, recognizing the value of other people, and in learning how to heighten their own sense of values they finally begin to participate in society as a human being. Although, on the other hand, there is a certain type of person who seems to have found his niche in society without a fully developed value system—and they exist as little more than animals.”

Then Faceman grinned mischievously, although Boiled didn’t respond. “Oeufcoque knows what values are,” Faceman said, his eyes gentle and narrow, but in a tone of voice clearly designed to elicit a response from Boiled. But it did not work.

“Originally he was just selected as a Living Unit because a mouse’s metabolic system seemed extremely compatible with what we were trying to achieve, and he happened to be selected as that mouse. But as he had his intelligence amplified, he gained a personality. He understood the concept of values, and so he changed from just another lab animal to a creature called Oeufcoque. Oeufcoque made a conscious effort to amass his own value system and tried to recognize value in others. He did this because he recognized that this was the main reason human society has managed to develop to the extent that it has. Surmounting crisis after crisis, human will has always striven to rebuild society anew, to develop it to the highest level possible. The reason Oeufcoque has elected to concern himself with all of society’s ills is precisely because he recognized and understood all of this.”

The Professor continued in earnest. “You’re the exact opposite—the very definition of folly. Even as you try to erode your own sense of values, regressing back into an animal state, you still desperately cling to human society. If you’re looking for the opportunity to kill, pure and simple, then why not head to a jungle in a nature reserve and kill all the animals and fish—bugs and germs, even—that you want? There’s no reason that you have to be around humans.”

Boiled responded for the first time, almost as a reflex reaction. “I was a soldier. I defended one set of lives and I studied warcraft in order to fight more effectively against another set of lives. It’s an existence designed for a high level of defense and attack. Even now, I protect lives even as I take them.”

“Is that the thing you’re most proud of in your life? What a bundle of contradictions human beings are. On one occasion they will devise a killing machine called an army in order to better defend themselves. At other times they’ll go on a looting spree as a means to increase prosperity—even though doing so makes their victims think of them in turn as a collective object worth attacking in the future, rather than one worth cherishing. And these are your values, are they?”

“What would a person who has deliberately isolated himself in a manufactured paradise know of society’s values?” asked Boiled.

“It’s precisely because we understand society’s values that we founded Paradise here. This is my challenge to my own values.”