Superego (29 page)

“When I was fourteen, the Randatti syndicate started making inroads on the planet. They started some protection rackets in the city we lived in. They were just dumb thugs, hurting people and acting untouchable. And then my dad did a crazy thing: He treated them like the dumb thugs they were. When they attacked some people in the neighborhood—people he didn't even really know—he grabbed a bat and fought back. Chased those worthless idiots off.

“The next day, I came home from school to find him and my mother shot dead. No mystery who did it, but everyone just acted like it didn't happen. They were too afraid to lift a finger. Randatti was powerful—a bunch of powerful, evil thugs—and no one felt like they could do anything about it.

“I lived with my aunt after that and kept going to the school my parents had saved for, but I couldn't concentrate on my studies anymore. How was any of that important when murderers could just walk free, untouched?”

I touched her cheek. “You wanted justice; that's natural.” Someone harms you, you want to harm them back to discourage them from doing it again. Quite natural. Even logical.

“Yes, I wanted justice. But not just justice. The more I obsessed over it, the more the hate grew. I wanted revenge.”

People tend to put an almost spiritual meaning behind the notion of justice, but I never felt it was actually distinguishable from revenge. It's just revenge codified by law. “Would any person not want revenge in those circumstances?” Me, of course—I don't kill to satisfy my emotional needs.

“Maybe no one is that levelheaded, but when you embrace such a strong desire for violence, it corrupts you. And I was obsessed. I knew not to talk about my plans—everyone considered it suicide to try anything against Randatti—but I secretly researched them and their operations on the planet. I found their hideouts and spied on them on my own time, trying to plot what I could do to them. I even got a gun. People were afraid to take them on publicly, so I was going to take them down, piece by piece, in secret.

“I was sixteen when I finally decided to start. I knew of a back room at a bar a number of the thugs congregated in. I dressed up to look older, hid the gun on myself, and walked into the bar as calmly as I could, trying to hide exactly how fast my heart was beating. These were human males, so my plan was to smile and flatter them to get them to drop their guard and then kill them all and get out of there. I reminded myself of the sadness and anger I'd felt when I'd found my parents dead, and I knew in my heart I could kill them. So, without hesitation, I stepped into that back room.

“And they were all already dead. Some woman was standing over them. She didn't react much to my appearance—just pointed her gun at me. I looked at her handiwork and back at her and said, ‘I want to do this, too. I want to kill Randatti.'She smiled, and we strolled out of the bar together. And that was the last day I ever saw my home.”

“She was a Nystrom assassin?” I asked.

“Yes. I should have seen that it was just murderers killing murderers, but that wasn't what I wanted to see. After watching for so long while the Randatti thugs just went about their business with no fear of reprisal, I couldn't help but see the people who finally made them pay as the good guys. I was tired of being impotent against such evil, and Nystrom was a way to strike back.

“And they were happy to have me and my enthusiasm. They are quite a sophisticated operation—they have a whole training program for assassins. And I was eager to learn—eager to be able to do something. I was one of their best, they said, and for my final test to become one of their trained assassins, they brought in a Randatti syndicate member, pleading for his life. I was to shoot him in the head to show I was ready. I shot him in the knees, then I shot him in the head.

“After that, I was off doing Nystrom's business. I killed many Randatti members—Nystrom was in a large conflict with them. It became less cathartic over time—started to feel like I was just doing necessary dirty work—like pest control. I liked to think I was making a difference, but there were always more targets. I constantly subjected myself to the worst of humanity on my missions, and I soon began to lose any feeling of respect for sentient life. I knew all the darkness people had in them—how horrible they could be—and death just seemed like such a good thing for so many people. Eventually, Nystrom gave me targets that had nothing to do with Randatti, but I no longer cared who I killed. It was hard to believe any of them didn't deserve it. The universe was full of nothing but violent, selfish people, and I could kill day and night for years and barely make a dent in the evil. Eventually, I didn't even care about justifications for my murders; it was just my job. It was just something to do in the empty, cold universe.

“I did this for years, and Nystrom paid me well. I never really enjoyed the money, though. I was just so empty—so joyless. And then I got a new mission: A group of us would sabotage a transport going between Andalu and Nar Valdum—to kill one target and make it look like an accident. Hundreds of innocent people were going to die—people who had nothing to do with the syndicates—so that's why they assigned it to those they knew wouldn't have a problem with that. And they were right, because I didn't care anymore. In fact, I despised the ‘innocent' people. There were huge conflicts between the syndicates—things affecting countless worlds—and they just went about their daily lives like nothing was happening. They were worthless—willing victims of the syndicates. They were inconsequential, so anything that happened to them was inconsequential.

“Nystrom knew of a problem with the transport that no one else knew of. With just a little prodding to the jump drive, the transport would have a massive failure on its jump, and the ensuing investigation would reveal the actual error in the system as the culprit. No one could know it wasn't really an accident. I almost wonder if Nystrom itself had built the error into the system to one day exploit it like this.

“Technically, the job was simple. Nystrom had contacts that would get us easy access to the starport as a maintenance crew, and from there we could make the ‘accident' happen. Then we'd change back into civilian clothes and wait in the terminal to make sure our target got on the transport. I don't even remember who he was—some official associated with another syndicate. So I sat there, pretending to read a book as I watched him out of the corner of my eye—ignoring all the other people. The…” She teared up. “…children running around. I didn't care. I was just a soulless monster, concentrating on the job.

“And then someone asked me, ‘Are you alright?' It was a young woman about my age, and I was a bit surprised, because usually I was very good at blending into the background when I needed to, and I thought my face no longer portrayed any emotion except when I willed it to. ‘I'm fine,' I told her. And she said, ‘Sorry, it just kind of looked like something was wrong. I didn't mean to impose or anything.' And then—on a whim, I guess…maybe because I thought it would shut her up—I said, ‘Actually, my parents just died.' She looked so concerned—and I think I was a bit amused to play with her emotions like that, but then she smiled and said, ‘Tell me about them.'

“I wanted to brush her off, but I didn't want to make her suspicious, so I thought I'd just give her a few quick details using my actual parents. So I tried to remember some meaningless stories. I told her how my mom and I used to have a special ritual for making brownies, which we did every movie night. And I told her how my dad would take me with him on his fishing trips as a little girl and let me reel in every fish he hooked. They were supposed to be pointless anecdotes I had no emotional attachment to, but I hadn't thought about my parents in so long, and I couldn't help but see their faces. They used to look at me with such love, and I wondered if they could see the soulless monster who was ready to sit idly by while hundreds went to their deaths. Their little girl they had so much hope for—that they worked so hard for—was even worse than the thugs my dad had tried to chase off with a bat. Worse than the ones who killed him and my mother.

“I guess I had been silent for a minute while thinking about it—the woman asked if I was okay. I recovered, smiled, and said I just missed them. And now everyone was boarding, so the woman got up, told me she'd say a prayer for me—it seemed like such a useless gesture—and then headed off to die. And I sat quietly while everyone left the terminal to board, because that was my job and I always just did my job without thinking about it. But now I could feel a pit in my stomach as the people calmly walked onto the transport. It bothered me; I hadn't felt anything about killing people in a long time, but I just assumed it would pass.

“I went with my team to a backroom area we'd set up to monitor the transport and confirm our kill. While I waited for it to undock from the station and jump, I tried to assess what had happened to me. I seemed to have been affected by the notion that my parents would have hated what I had become, but then I reminded myself that my parents were just some of the worthless ‘innocents' the syndicates stomped on all the time, so it didn't matter what they would have thought. Of course, if my parents were so contemptible, what exactly was I so angry about that had me on this path in the first place? I started to realize how pointless and hollow my existence was, just violence with no real end in sight, just because it gave me the illusion of having a purpose. But I had been loved by my parents….That was the last time I ever felt content. I had written love off, thinking it was something I would never have again, that all I had left to embrace was emptiness. I was on a slow march into the abyss. And as much as I had convinced myself that killing people was meaningless, I knew if I let these innocent people die, that was an abyss I would be stuck in forever. And that finally terrified me.

“‘We have to stop this,' I said. My coworkers looked at me, but it's like they couldn't hear or understand what I said. So I took a deep breath and said it louder. And they just stared at me. And then one of them went for a gun, but I was quicker and killed them all. I ran to a radio to tell the ship to wait…” She took a long pause, trying to wade out of a horrible memory. “…but I was too late.”

“You tried to stop it,” I said. Technically, whether she was remorseful or not, those people were still dead, so it seemed to hardly matter, but people always tend to put heavy weight on intentions.

“I was a coward, and I waited too long to remember that I was a human being. Now all those people are dead. I guess if I really was remorseful, I would have confessed and turned myself in.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “Wouldn't Nystrom have gotten to you immediately if you'd done that?”

“Yes, they would have killed me pretty quickly if I'd ever been in police custody…yet that still feels like I'm making excuses.” She still didn't look at me—just stared off into nothing.

“It's still considered an accident; no one even knows there's justice to be served. After the transport's destruction I went into survival mode, knowing Nystrom would be after me. I had some money, but I didn't have anywhere to go. And my first order of business was to get off the starport the transport had docked at. I realized lots of people change the transport they're leaving on at the last minute, and Nystrom had gotten us access to the station's database, so it would be easy to make it look like someone who had been killed on the transport had switched her schedule, and then I'd just take her place. I just had to find a human woman who somewhat resembled me. I found one, about the same age, and she was even an orphan heading to a brand new planet for a job, so no one would recognize her. She was a police officer, but I figured I could find another way off Nar Valdum before that became an issue. I saw the picture of the woman I would be replacing—she was the one who'd asked about my parents. Who'd said she'd pray for me.” She teared up a little.

“So I put the dead bodies of my coconspirators out an air lock, changed Diane Thompson's data to match my picture and identifying markers, switched her schedule, and got on the new transport. And then I realized exactly how alone I was. I was long since estranged from any of my family, and the only people I knew, my Nystrom contacts, would be out to kill me if they ever found me. All I knew was that I wanted to change what I was—what I had become. And I was scared, because I knew I couldn't do it on my own; I wasn't strong enough. I thought of the story of the prodigal son—how his father ran to embrace him when he gave up his wicked ways and returned home. But there was no father to greet me, no home to return to. I had nothing, and all I knew was how to lie and kill. I wanted to change my ways, but it seemed inevitable that I would fail. And then I thought of a brilliant solution—one way to make sure Nystrom never got to me and I never went back to my old ways and hurt anyone else. As soon as I got to Nar Valdum and could get some time alone, I was going to kill myself.

“After the transport docked above Nar Valdum, I spent the ride down to the planet's surface thinking of ways to do it. It would be the last thing I'd do, so I wanted to at least get that right. And it wasn't like I had to write a note, since there wasn't really anyone who'd care. I'd just be gone, and the universe would be better for it and wouldn't even notice my passing….

“These were my thoughts as I walked through the landing station. And then someone yelled, ‘There she is!' I almost panicked, but then I saw all these smiling people who were so happy—so overjoyed—to see me. And then a woman—Hana—ran up to me, crying, and hugged me. She said, ‘Thank God! We thought you were dead!' And, for the first time in ages, I cried too.

“Diane had contacted a church on Nar Valdum to make sure she wouldn't be alone there—to make sure I wouldn't be alone.” Tears started streaming down Diane's face. “To make sure that when I returned home, there would be people running to embrace me and welcome me back. Despite all I had done, God had forgiven me and wanted me to have a second chance.” She was quiet for a moment, smiling in her memory, but eventually the smile faded and she wiped away the tears and looked at me. “And now all I can think is that if I had killed myself, Hana and her family would still be alive.”