“I’m sorry I’ve sprung all this on you so suddenly,” I started while making coffee. “But I guess there is no gentle way to tell someone something like that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure I really believe what you’ve told me.”
Would you really be here, I wanted to say, if you didn’t believe it at least a little?
“It wasn’t a coincidence, was it? That you were driving behind me and stayed close after the accident?”
I poured boiling water into two cups. “No.”
“According to what you were saying, you’ve made the decision to save Dad and Ruby a long time ago. So why were you following me?”
“Because we’re supposed to watch the chosen ones and their close family until the end. What if something in their life changed and they would no longer match the criteria The Collective so carefully selected?”
“You’d replace them?”
“Probably.”
She took the drink I handed her without taking her eyes off me. “Let’s say that’s true. There are still some things that don’t make sense to me.”
“Ask away.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit hypocritical for The Collective to point their finger at all the bad aspects of humanity, especially all the violence, and then commit world-wide genocide?”
“That’s not how The Collective feels about it.”
“How does it feel about it?”
“Well, you’ve seen the video… People cause too much suffering and don’t bring anything good to the table. They are pests and those need to be destroyed.”
“The end justifies the means, that’s what you’re talking about?”
I shrugged. That’s exactly how it was, but everyone looked at it differently.
“How about all those innocent people you’ll kill? They will suffer and die because of your alleged plague.”
“They won’t suffer for long…” That had come out harsher than I intended. I didn’t like the idea of helpless children and frail old ladies fighting the plague, of course, I wasn’t made of stone. But how else could we ensure that humanity only leaves behind a small community? Until now nothing else has worked, no experiments in bringing about order or controlling population growth. The final attempt had to be drastic.
We walked over to the sofa. The only thing visible behind Andrew’s screen was the top half of his face and his eyes, following us around the room.
“Aren’t you sick of it, Connie? Don’t you want it all to be over?” I asked after a while, when we were sitting down. She looked at me questioningly, and even though I knew she understood, I explained: “The daily wave of animal abuse, murders, rapes, thefts. Drug and alcohol addiction. Famine, child slaves. For a long time I’ve felt like there’s more evil than good in people. I can’t take it anymore.” And to make it absolutely clear… “I don’t want to live anymore… but I don’t want to die knowing that all these horrors just go on.”
“I also don’t want these horrors to go on, and I also don’t want to die. What gives the people in The Collective the right to end it all for us?”
“What gives other people the right to enslave animals or keep them in the prisons they so generously call the zoo? What right do people have to treat others like dirt under their shoes, to torture them or let them starve on purpose? What right do they have to take other creatures’ lives? To pay a ridiculous fee for the opportunity to shoot and kill an endangered animal and bring home a part of its body as a trophy? Or to rape someone and walk away unharmed because the victim is too scared to talk?”
“I’m not saying there aren’t bad people in the world! But what about the innocent ones, dammit?”
“As long as there are good people, there will be bad ones too. You can’t separate one from the other and as long as there are people around, there will also be violence and suffering. At least until The Collective steps in.”
I was beginning to feel like an old gramophone, stuck playing the same tune over and over.
Connie hid her head in her hands, and for a while the only sound in the room was Andrew occasionally typing something. When she finally looked up, her eyes were full of tears and her nose was stuffed up. I moved a box of paper tissues towards her across the coffee table.
“So why do you want to do it, anyway?” she asked after loudly blowing her nose. “Why don’t you want to leave the world as it is?”
I leaned deeper into the sofa and sighed. I didn’t like remembering… but sometimes it was good to relive the past, to have enough strength to do my part for The Collective. To be able to properly justify it to myself. As I said before, there were many cruel, perverse people in the world. And I had the damn bad luck to be related to some of them.
“I was born into a family of junkies,” I started and realised that I’ve put on the hard, condemning tone again. You’d think that after all those years of therapy I’d be able to keep some distance from it, that it wouldn’t hurt so much, that maybe I’d finally understand the actions of others, and move on. But that wasn’t the case. “My mother was taking hard drugs all throughout her pregnancy and I was born addicted. Obviously I don’t remember my first months and years, although I can guess what they were like, based on my later memories. I mainly remember being alone a lot, whether my mother and father were in the house or not. They’d either go somewhere and leave me alone, even when I was little, or they’d shoot up at home. They were out of it for hours, sometimes even days at a time, they weren’t aware of anything around them, including their son.”
Connie was watching me silently, her face slowly turning into an
