A Decent Human Being(Wilbur Arron) A DECENT HUMAN BEING

Wilber Arron


“I got a hot one for you,” I heard in my earpiece. “Administration says we need to take care of this immediately and they are ordering you to go.”

“What do they want me to do now; questioned another Doomsayer? Let the media censors handle it,” I told Ernie, not caring which Administration honcho was jerking his chain this time.

“Nope, this one is much worse. The guy is a former member of the Data Analysis Committee with Level Three Clearance.”

That got my attention. DAC staff people were some of the most stable and reliable members of the Policy, Planning, and Procedures Agency we all worked for. Why would anyone like that go shooting off his mouth?

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Anything else you want to let me in on?”

“No, just pick up your travel orders at Q-Desk and pack for about three days. Your plane will be ready in two hours.”

“Three days,” the words repeated in my head, “Just where the hell are you sending me?”

“Camp J-2, so have fun, and no, you don’t have to thank me.” Ernie’s Georgian sarcasm was as annoying as his horrible southern accent.

Camp J-2 is a rock in the middle of the Pacific where the PPP holds people they don’t want anyone talking to. In the old days, the former USA used the place to destroy nerve gas. The place was ideal to house prisoners because it was so isolated no one could escape and more importantly no one would ask pesky questions about what was going on.

Besides the two blocks of holding cells, a nuclear power plant, a desalinization plant, storage buildings, long runway, a security staff of 50 and support staff of 25, there was nothing there but seagull shit, and people the PPP wanted incommunicado, but not yet dead. It was, is, and forever will be, a barren hunk of coral rock that no one gives a shit about. The post was considered punishment duty for those PPP staff members who managed to piss-off PPP Administration for some reason.

I landed the Agency jet on the runway with a thud. My spine figured out immediately no one had taken the trouble to repave it now for a decade or two. After I pulled up to the one gate, I was met by a staff of three security men. One wore the gold stripes of a base commander. I got out of the small craft carrying my travel bag. I looked around the base while walking over. It looked to be in about as good a condition as the runway. No scarce resources going to waste here.

“I am Base Commandant Sun-Lee,” the short thin man wearing the gold stripes said. “I'd like to present my other two……”

“Not interested,” I interrupted, not caring who these clowns were. They weren’t my problem. I then thrust a piece of paper in my outstretched hand under the short guy’s face. “Read this,” I told him.

The Commandant looked about as pissed off at me as I was to be on this rock. He snatched the paper away and read it for about ten seconds before he stiffened ramrod straight.

“These orders are from Administrator Roberts,” he squeaked. Still, it wasn’t every day you get a set of written orders from the third most powerful person on the planet. I was surprised myself when he gave me these documents personally, along with my briefing.

“Yes, and they say I have absolute authority over the prisoner listed. You will bring the prisoner to an isolation cell. Set up a small table and two chairs. After that everyone, including you, will leave us alone. No one will approach the cell until I say so. Are these orders understood?”

I got a curt nod from the short Commandant. “Take my bag to my quarters, and then show me where I can freshen up. Finally, do not say a word to the prisoner that I am here.”

They led me away without further ado.

# # #

The cell door was old and rusty; no one had bothered to maintain it and iron and steel do not do well in the salt air. It was still sturdy enough to hold the prisoner inside. Not that it mattered; it was a 1500 kilometer swim to Hawaii.

The prisoner was about as nondescript as it gets. He was middle age, medium height, medium built, slight fattening around the waist. The kind of person you pass every day on the street and ignore. No one could tell from the outside that he was one of the best computer modelers of resource availability on the planet. The PPP did not put assholes in DAC.

I walked in and sat down on one side of the table the guards placed in the room. The prisoner was sitting on the bed. He looked startled when I came in. “Please sit down in the other chair,” I said motioning him to sit.

He walked over and sat down without a word. I could see several 2-cm circular red marks on his temples and one on each wrist. They had worked him over good before I got here. Not the local staff. More likely the marks came when Investigations Bureau questioned him after he was arrested.

“Who are you?” he asked in a calm voice? That was surprising after what he went through.

“That is not important,” I said. “Now before we start let me say that I am not going to torture you. I do not have to. We already know what you tried to do.”

With that, I opened the small leather carrying case I had with me and grabbed my Spencer Dart gun. In one smooth motion I brought the gun up and fired a 5mm drug-filled dart into his left arm. He glared back at me with wide dark eyes. I could see it in his face; he was wondering if I just poisoned him.

“No, that is not a lethal drug,” I answered him in a passive voice. “I didn’t come seven thousand kilometers to this forsaken rock in the middle of nowhere to kill you. I could have made a phone call to do that. That drug will work on your brain to make my job easier and faster. My superiors want answers to their questions, and you will give them to me.”

The drug was similar to Pentothal. It relaxes the victim and suppresses the judgment centers of the brain, making the prisoner more open to questioning. At the same time, it maintains intact the memory retrieval and knowledge centers of the brain so he wouldn’t become a gibbering idiot in the process.

“Why?” he pleaded, “I already told Investigations everything I know?”

“True, you told them a good deal as my file says. Doctor William Frances Martin. You have multiple PhDs in Programming Languages, Boolean mathematics, and Resource Allocation Theory. You were a world-class leader in the computer modeling of resource supply estimates and supply allocations. You were also a trusted member of Program Planning and Procedures Agency; working with the Data Analysis Committee. Two weeks ago you took highly classified information and tried to release it to the Worldnet News Service via an anonymous FTP client. I know from your interrogation notes you felt some moral imperative that overrode the oath you took never to reveal any of the information you learned in DAC to anyone outside senior PPP staff. From your interrogation, Investigations concluded that for some delusional reason you felt compelled to tell the people in Sub Saharan Africa, South America, and the Indian Subcontinent of PPP’s decision to deprioritize those areas for resource allocation once Stage Two of the reorganization began.”

“Reorganization!” he spat out. “Socioeconomic and political collapse you mean.” His face went flush with a tinge of red. I had struck a nerve. “Once the Collapse started we in the European, North American, Russian and Australian countries would cut them off from all agricultural supplies. Left alone on just their own resources they would slowly starve to death over time because they don’t have the native resources to feed their current populations, and climatic shift would destroy most of their food growing areas. Social disorder would take care of the rest.”

“Yes,” I told him, “but you already knew that. In fact, you’ve known that for the last seven years. You knew all these facts because you ran the analyses and projections yourself. You knew the food supply estimates, you knew what population it could support, and you knew that at best we could maybe keep two billion people alive in a world now numbering nearly ten billion. That’s what I want to know. Why did you wait until now to break your silence, why not five years ago when the policies were discussed and put into place? The numbers haven’t changed; the Collapse is still on track to begin in seven years. The population will most likely decrease from ten billion to two billion in about a decade. You are, or were, a model employee up until two weeks ago. You were promoted to senior PPP Administration. You knew you and your family would have been in the group to be taken to one of the Havens. You and your family would live through this mess. Now, you’ve thrown that all into the sewer, and you knew that would happen also. Why then did you speak out now when you had every reason to keep your damn mouth shut?”

He looked at me wide-eyed and pale. Interrogation didn’t care why this idiot blabbed. All they cared about was who did this and a basic motive. They never asked themselves what made him change? What had pushed him over the edge? That was not their job to do, but it was mine.

He sat there in stunned silence. I could see him trying to form words, but not succeeding. He wanted to say something, but he either didn’t or couldn’t bring himself to say it. Finally, he shrugged his shoulder and let me have a weak, non-committal, “I don’t know.”

I shot to my feet and slammed my hand on the table with a blow that sounded like a hammer hitting the steel. My fist actually dented the gray metallic top. “Not good enough, Doctor,” I told him. “I want an answer to that question and if you force me to, I will have to beat it out of you or give you medication that will turn you into a zombie.”

Instinctively he sat back in his chair. His face was now ashen white and his eyes showed the fear that I was serious about beating him to a pulp. I would have done it if necessary. The drug I gave him works best when the victim is under stress. I needed him to open up to me. He started to breathe rapidly. I could still see him struggle to form words.

“Anytime, Doctor,” I said with a grimace.

He swallowed hard and looked at me with a blank stare. I thought for a second I was actually going to have to start beating him to get the answers when he cleared his throat and spoke to me in a sheepish hushed voice hard to hear.

“Have you ever heard of Doctor Ashok Patel’s monoculture wheat grain?”

“Yes,” I answered wondering what that had to do with anything.

“Doctor Singrey in Food Resources asked me to fly over to Doctor Patel’s experimental station in Punjab to see if the new grain would alter my computer estimates of the harvest yields in India. That new wheat could grow in the rocky ground and at altitudes where wheat normally doesn’t grow. I went over there and looked it over. It was amazing, but at best it could feed maybe twenty million more mouths. Not a drop in the bucket when you have to satisfy the needs for the one point two billion people in the country. Even under the best conditions, once the climate shift finished destroying the monsoons and we cut them off from food shipments, they could feed maybe half of that.”

I nodded and wished he get on with it. “I saw that in your file, but please continue.”

“Well Dr. Patel’s station was up in the Himalayan foothills and as you can imagine, there aren’t any Class-A accommodations around there so I stayed at the station. After work, I'd go into the nearby village and I got to meet several of the local people. They were kind to me, shared their food with me, and in all treated me like a royal guest. I think Dr. Patel told them if I liked the place, it would be easier to get more funding which gave work to many of the people in the village. Over a period of my two-week stay, I got to know many of the villagers personally. They were decent people, hard workers just trying to make a better life for themselves and their children. In short, they were just like us, minus the education and privileges.”

He stopped for a second as if to gather his strength. “On my last night there, they threw a party for me and while I was enjoying myself, Dr. Patel’s granddaughter, who is about three, came up and sat on my lap. She was adorable and I played with her. Children can’t lie well about affection at that age, she genuinely liked me. I looked down into her deep black eyes and then it hit me.”

His voice trailed off, his face drooped and he looked like he was going to cry. “What hit you, Doctor?” I asked.

“She was going to die,” he said sobbing. “I knew that in about ten years she would be dead. She would never grow up. The people who were so kind to me in this village would also most likely be dead either from starvation, disease, or the breakdown of social order. I knew that for a fact, yet I couldn’t tell them. You see, the insights you get in DAC are frightening, but we are all rather isolated. We have our homes, our families, our work, and that’s about it. It didn’t hit me until then. I had seen the numbers on a computer screen and knew what was happening and also knew what was going to happen. The thing is when you are there where the apocalypse is actually going to happen, those numbers suddenly have faces, have lives; they become people like you and me. Then the numbers aren’t numbers anymore. They become those faces, they become those lives. They had to know because we already knew. I owed them that knowledge.”

A sudden realization came over me. Investigations had missed it. The only way the PPP plan would work to save at least a part of humanity would be if the vast majority of people remained ignorant of our actions until the very end. If what we knew became general knowledge, there be a worldwide panic with every mother’s son trying the save his own neck. No one would be saved in that situation. It would make The Book of Revelations look like My Fair Lady.

“What the hell did you tell them, Doctor?” I said leaning over the table. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he shouted. “I told them nothing. I swear to God I said nothing to anyone.”

I sat back in my chair. “If that is more bullshit you will spend the rest of your short, miserable, life in agony I promise you.”

“No,” he gasped. “It’s true I swear it.”

I believed him, but that brought up another question in my mind. “Very well, let’s assume I believe you. Then why didn’t you tell them right then and there instead of trying to tell everyone now? That makes no sense. You could have told them and then try to disappear into the countryside. It wouldn’t have worked, but your chances were better there than back at PPP Administration.”

He swallowed hard again and went on. “I went back to work, but every time I ran a new analysis, every time I saw the projected deaths from starvation, from fighting over the last resources, from the collapse of social order, they stopped being numbers. They started being faces in my mind. So after four or five weeks I just couldn’t take it anymore. When I saw my wife and kids, I saw those faces. When I saw people on the street, I saw those faces. When I heard the claptrap on the news nets that things were great and nothing was wrong, I saw those faces. What gave me the right to live and in turn condemn them to die?”

He stopped talking and I did not push for more. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. I now partly understood why he did it and to an extent sympathized with him. If we weren’t living in a world that had self-destructed due to over a century of economic greed, resource exploitation, political incompetence, and utter environmental mismanagement, I would have agreed with him. We didn’t cause this mess, we were just the generation that had to pick up the tab when it became due and pay it the best way we could. That was our cross. Yet, there was still one glaring point in my mind that needed an answer.

“Very well, Doctor, I think I understand your actions, but there is still one thing that makes no sense to me. You of all people also knew what would happen if we told the world that 80% of the people on this planet would have to die to allow the rest of humanity and civilization to continue. You knew in that scenario the death rate would be at least 95% percent. There was also the strong possibility that the knowledge gained by man over the last 7,000 years of civilization would be lost forever. Assuming you succeeded in your plot, civilization would be in its death throes now. At least using our way humanity has a 79% chance of survival and we can rebuild our society in two to three decades instead of centuries. All of that would be gone if we went your way. You and your family would also have survived, but now that is not going to happen. What did you think you would gain by telling everyone?”

For the first time the eyes glared back at me. He didn’t look so helpless in that chair. “Because doing it my way, everyone would have the same chance to survive. There would be no favorites, no new master race, and no privileged salvation. Doing it your way, you decide who lives and dies. No one has the right to do that: not me, not you, not your masters, not the jokes we call our leaders, nobody.”

In his mind that made perfect sense, and that was all that mattered to him, in his mind. I understood now so my job was over. It was time for the other part of my briefing. I got up and slightly bowed. “Thank you, Doctor Martin, you have answered my questions. You also have my deepest respect.”

Before he could say anything in return, I reopened my carrying case and once again brought out the dart gun. I fired quickly hitting him just below the heart. The eyes bulged out and the muscles stiffened because this was a neurotoxin and not a drug. He tried to get up, but his legs would not move. He tried moving his mouth, I was able to see his lips rapidly turning blue trying to form the words, “but you said.”

“I am sorry,” I told him and watched him collapse on the table and then roll off onto the floor hitting with a dull thud. There was one good thing; he would never learn what Investigations had done to his family. If I was a religious man, I would have told him his wife and children were already waiting for him in a better world than this one. An example made to quiet any other potential loudmouths. At least that part of this job I didn’t have to do.

I walked out of the cell and over to the base control center. I put my head in and spoke directly to the Commandant.

“The prisoner is dead,” I told him. “Cremate the body, and throw the ashes into the sea. Expunge his records from your system. He has never been here, understood?”

It was getting dark outside; I hate flying over the open ocean at night, even with Navcom. “Since it is too late to fly back to Hilo this evening, have my plane refueled and ready for departure tomorrow morning at first light.”

With that I went to bed and slept soundly.

# # #

Ernie handed me a glass of my favorite bourbon. “So how do we prevent this in the future?”

“You mean how do we prevent our people from acting like normal human beings? Good question. My gut feeling says we don’t. My recommendation to Administrator Roberts was that once we appoint people to positions like DAC, we keep them close within our sphere of influence. We don’t let them go out and see the world with its doomed people. We keep them under tighter control.”

“It’s an idea, but I am not sure how Administration will warm to it,” Ernie added, sipping on his Scotch.

I already knew that answer. “They will do it because they know what is at stake. They will do it because they are too frightened not to do it. Doctor Martin’s only real crime was that he was a decent human being living in a world where most decent human beings are going to be dead soon. Only the Machiavellian bastards like you and me are going to live through this. That doesn’t give much hope for the future, to have a world full of people like us, does it?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Ernie said swilling his scotch.

“Not in the least,” I told him. I still shuddered at the thought.

THE END

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