Brave New Worlds

worked well for us, in a number of cases.

Why I like the chin. A bunch of reasons.

I like its complexity. It's not a major pain-point, relative to the kneecaps and knuckles — but there are intersecting nerve systems there, which give the chin a different character, a different flavor. And there's something particular about the way the destruction and remaking of the face impacts a subject. We'll mirror Ali almost continuously during chin-work, and I've found, time and again, that a kiss on the chin, when Ali is watching, does more to concentrate his mind than complete powdering of the kneecaps.

What else? I want to be careful here, because I'd never want to make it seem as though some private form of catharsis is ever among my Objectives in a Session — but there is a satisfaction, for me, in the physical transformations that some of our CC subjects undergo. They come in, they've got the Intel hidden; they leave, the Intel's gone, in a sense, and the fact of the extraction is written on their faces; it's physically manifest. The chins heal over — some of them, you can't even see the scars — but the faces, the subdural structures, are changed. It's like we've literally chipped the Intel out of their heads.

I like it, also, because, for me, the chin represents a threshold, a point of commitment. Once we've changed his face, Ali can't see the light of day, whatever happens. That means he won't be available as a witness, we can't trot him out if there are hearings, inquiries. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he's gone. And that's not my rule; it's in the Protocols: nothing that shall bring embarrassment or discredit to the State. In English, that means something like, you broke it, you bought it.

For me, then, the chin is an important moment. Before you go into the chin, you're hamstrung, a little bit. You're always thinking, in the back of your mind, can we make this guy presentable. After the chin's when you can really squeeze him. From that point forward, Ali's value is purely dark. Maybe we can bring him in for leverage in another Session, if we've got a relative or friend in the Chair, but for the most part, he's a source of information for us, and that's it. So we can push him harder, we can go longer. And, a lot of times, we can get more than we thought was there.

And that, of course, goes to another question, which is when is an interrogation over. It's hard to say; it's always hard. In some ways, it's similar to a question that I faced in legal practice. At what point have I reached the end of my research on a particular question?

And the answer is, you can't always know. There's no every-time rule. Because it's so hard to tell, in some cases, what Ali's brain is sitting on.

I had someone on a steady Program, once, for two straight years. We had an Executive Warrant on him, which meant the Protocols were off. 18-hour Sessions, six-hour Rests, he's colostomized, castrated, pinpoint- stabilized, liquid meals, catheter, two full years we ride the guy. 20 months, he gives us nothing. Suddenly, month 21, he's talking about Montreal. And through that piece of intel — the stuff that came out after 20 months—we're able to track down five more guys. And through those five, we get six more. And from those six, we get a lead that helps us stop a gel-attack in Rochester. All because I had a feeling: this guy's got more to tell.

It doesn't always work that way. One Suspected, we took him 50 months, never got a scrap of Usable out of him, not a drop. And so, again, it's that question, of when do you throw in the towel.

For me — and this is just for me — this is how it works. For 49 months, my Ali insisted he was Innocent; he didn't know anyone we named, never heard of Yassir Omar, wasn't a devout Muslim, we got him by mistake. All that time, I'm sure he's bullshitting; I'm sure of it. At 50 months — for what reason I can't say — I flip, and I'm starting to believe him. For me, that's the end. I admit, then, that it's partly intuitive.

So we initiated Exit Protocols. We stabilized Ali, injected him with Nurturer. We eased him down. Then my PFCs got him suited up and took him to his new home, down in Medium Restraint. Far from the sun — but far away, also, from the Chair. After 50 months with me, most Alis will take that trade.

It's better now, for sure. The old way, it was messy, and — just — messy.

I didn't like the messiness. Part of it is just my nature; I'm a tidy person. When I first started at the Unit, before the Chairs were Standard Ops, we were doing Water Parties, Music Parties, Stack-Ups, Fingerscrewing, Group Sessions, Electricity. Wiping Ali's face with menstrual blood. Wiping the Koran. I thought it was fake menstrual blood, I found out after six months, no, it's real, they get it from the Women's Unit. A lot of that kind of stuff.

Now, I will say this: any time you permit a measure of chaos, there are going to be good and bad things that come of it. Sometimes, under the Old Model, we got surprising results — stuff we couldn't have predicted, stuff we couldn't have extracted in the Chair.

On balance, though, I prefer the Chair. At the end of the day, I want to feel that I'm a professional. It's important to me that the boundaries be clear. I'm not a doctor, but — it is professional, what we're doing here. And you lose moral credibility with Ali when you're urinating in his presence, when you're laughing over some funny costume you put him in. It always felt disrespectful to me: disrespectful to Ali, disrespectful to the process.

So, certainly, the New Model's much better.

There are some, I know, who'd assume, just based on my family background, that I must be motivated by a desire for revenge. People will believe what they want. But nothing could be farther from the truth. As soon as I sense that a member of my interrogator corps is motivated by revenge — revenge, or a perverse enjoyment of cruelty — I strike him from my team; he's gone.

It's true — it may be true — that a soldier has to hate his enemy, but we aren't soldiers here, contra The official narrative. Here, strange as it may sound, we have to love our enemy, in a way; we have to understand his pain, empathize with him, his fears and desires. And we have to be curious about him in a way that a trained killer must never be; we have to Thirst, and I use that word quite consciously, to understand the workings of his mind. And we have to credit his humanity. It's a cliche, but true nevertheless: there's no fortress better defended than the human mind. Our technology gets us into that fortress part-ways, but human intuition goes a long way too, and without human intuition and compassion, it's impossible to get to where we need to be. Dr. Ghose calls them the sacred spaces. Sacred spaces of the mind. To reach the sacred spaces, you have to love the mind. You have to want to keep it intact as much as you can even as you methodically break down its defenses. And the subject's mind has got to love you back, peculiar as that sounds; you've got to accustom Ali's brain to your presence inside of it, until your presence there seems as natural as anything else. It's like date rape: you start with force, and then you seduce.

All that being said, I would never deny that my father's death was instrumental. His death set the course for my entire life; that much is obvious.

It's Stalin, I think, who said the death of one guy is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. In that sense, if only in that sense, Dad's death wasn't a tragedy.

I was seven years old on 8/23. Like thousands of kids — tens of thousands, maybe hundreds — I watched my father die in real time, on live TV. Watched the buildings melt, run together — those unearthly swirls of color, the greens and vibrant blues. All that life and death, bleeding together, pooling and spreading, hardening into a marbled brick that, to my eyes, looked just like candy. It was a kind of murder — and who knew such things existed? — that totally erased its victims' individuality. Bodies and birds and plants and rock and metal, all disintegrating and reforming into this elastic, anonymous whole.

When I was younger, you know, I shared in my mother's outrage at this additional taking, the blotting out of identity, which made it impossible for the survivors to bury their dead. As I've grown older, though, I've come to find a poignancy in the way the Gel Attack melted down and mixed the human remains with the remains of the city. On August 23rd, it was impossible, for once, if only briefly, to ignore the ways in which all of us are one, and the ways in which we're one, also, with the physical world. And then too, as I grew up, I started to appreciate the parallels between this epic act of destruction and the equally epic acts of creation that were, and are, my father's legacy.

Dad was an artist. He would never have called himself an artist — he always insisted, a little impishly, I think, that he wasn't one, he called himself an ad-man — but of course he was an artist, and a great one at that.

By the end of his career — the ending that should have been the apex — he was chief communications sculptor at CFG. He'd been at CFG his whole career, and anyone who knows will tell you Dad was personally