From: Wilson.M.Clements@dartmouth.edu (Will Clements)
Subject: Lost Aspect of Humanity
Date: 17 Feb 1994 02:33:36 GMT


	Gordon's fears awakened  him.  Today was the day, Test Day, perhaps
the single most influential day in his life ( excluding birth.)  They
tested students to see if they were human or not.  The test itself was
not cruel or unusual.  What the testers did was observe the student
during the test--his reactions were critical.
	Gordon wondered which test they would use on him.
	"Would it be pain?  or stress?  Could it be induced dreams which the
damned teachers studied."   His mind sprinted through the test
categories as he tried to calm down.
	"Which test?  What happens after we are tested?"
	All of the students had observed the last testing.  During it, several
students had failed and were executed on the spot on the basis of being
animals.  Gordon's brother had died on that Test Day with Gordon
watching as the teachers calmly put three laser holes in each student's
head, carried the bodies off to the disposal room, and jokingly swabbed
the wall clear of the cooked animal.
	"Was it bad genes?  Am I an animal, also?  Do I have those bad genes?"
 Gordon wondered.
	To his right the door opened; Dean walked into the room; and passed
his hand over the light sensor which was coded for his thermal output.
The bright, glareless light awakened the rest of the boys whose fears
did not bother them.
	"Damn them!"  Don said.
	Gordon looked over at Don who was staring at the group of select
students.  The select students were those whose genetic lines had been
traced back to Adam and Eve and had never failed a test.  They wore
green, and most could spout ten to fifteen names of famous old world
humans.  One would proudly proclaim to all that Adolf Hitler was in his
line.  The teachers loved the SS and gave them special pleasures and
privileges.
	"Not today, Don.  Don't fuck up your Test Day."
	"Ok, Gordon.  But those assholes even know who their parents were."
	Gordon was astounded.  No one knew who their parents were.  After the
child was born, he was separated from his parents if their genetic
material looked good.  The Association raised the child from a young
age of two weeks until Test Day when the child's full name as given to
him by his parents was disclosed.  The child was then free to find his
parents if he wanted.  Gordon thought the whole thing was a huge mind
fuck designed to place the child's love on the Association not on his
parents.
	"What?  How the hell do you know?"  Gordon asked.
	"I heard Jake talking to Kelvin about his,"  Don replied.
	Both men were dressing in their ceremonial lime green gowns which were
not unlike the old graduation gowns that students used to wear back on
old Earth.  Gordon noted that even the SS had to wear the lime green
instead of their usual kelly green clothes which distinguished them
from the normal students.  The Test did not discriminate.
	After breakfast they were herded into the testing room.  One side was
dull black.   Black meant execution.   He could smell the sweat of the
others as they crowded around each other.  All of them were lost in
their own private fears.   The side opposite the black was forest
green, and the graduates were lined up along this wall after the test.
The other two walls were mirrored one-way glass, and the parents and
spectators sat behind these.
	Protocol dictated that all the students' full names be read so that
their parents could recognize them.  Gordon listened as the ceremony
proceeded through the meaningless ritual of asking God for strength and
as the Teacher reaffirmed the reasons for the test and the
Association's goals.
	All of his statements blurred into one big sound mass as a knot of
pure nervous tension moved from Gordon's throat to his stomach and back
to his throat causing him to be nauseated and unable to breathe at the
same time.  Sweat rolled down his forehead.
	Don broke it up.
	"Bullshit, they don't give a damn about humanity as long as they have
jobs fucking us over."  he said as he leaned over to whisper in
Gordon's ear.
	Gordon waved him away with a finger to his lips. "Don is bitter," he
thought.  "Why?  Because he is a first generation test and his parents
were killed resisting the Association's efforts to take him?  He never
knew them. I thought he had worked through all his anger with that
female sexpsychologist."
	The Teacher broke it up.
	"Gordon Steele Absolom Cohen."
	Gordon stood and walked to the center of the room where the testing
apparatus stood.  Sweat dripped off his forehead and ran down to his
lips where he tasted the salt;  the last thing he ever tasted.
	He sat down in the seat of the machine and was promptly moved to the
center where electrodes were placed on various places of his body
including his balls and his tongue.  He felt a strange electric current
course through his body starting at his tongue and ending at his
fingers.  His back arched and his hips drove forward hitting the safety
strap.
	A high pitched squeal left his lips sounding strangely like the sound
tape of a butchered pig he had heard once.  He had an erection despite
the pain centered in his balls.  He thought he could feel them melting
and sliding out of his urethra as he came; however, no sound escaped
his lips.
	He was vaguely aware of the wetness in his pants and his diminishing
erection, but a new kind of pain centered in his tongue making it seem
like a live fish was being cooked in his mouth.  His tongue was
swimming and thrashing inside his mouth while slowly dying like the
fish.  He passed out after his breakfast rushed out of his mouth and
fell on the floor in a multicolored sprawl of chunks and liquids.    He
didn't taste it as he slowly blacked out into a vision of whirling
black dots.
	"Stand up."
	Gordon couldn't speak.  Bile was thick in his mouth, and his jaws hurt
to move so he stood without comment.  As he stood, he noticed the green
crystal hanging around his neck and the dark green graduate robe
swishing softly about his naked body.
	He found his voice as he blinked away the whirling dots which were
trying to speak to him. "What the hell?"
	"You passed out. Go stand against the green wall."
	Gordon walked proudly through the door and to the wall where he turned
around to face the black wall.
	He didn't let the smile of enjoyment show when he saw two of the SS
cowering against the wall, naked, trying to conceal their shame.
	He watched with stolid features as one of the other's test was to kill
his former best friend.  The boy passed to his surprise.
	Two weeks later, Don and Gordon sat in the common room of their
apartment talking of Test Day.
	"Don, can you believe that two of the SS failed the test?" Gordon
asked.
	"Yes, I can.  Those bastards deserved everything after the hard life
they gave me."
	"Don, What was your test?"
	Don turned away from Gordon and began to cry.  Gordon thought that Don
had a weakness which he shouldn't show his friend or any human.
	"They told me that I was a failure, that I was a base animal just like
the animals on Alpha Centuri Five and Earth now that we have abandoned
it.  I passed because I didn't break down under their abuse because I
couldn't cry when they mentioned my parents. What was your test?"
	"Pain.  I cannot taste anything anymore.  I can eat anything without
tasting it.  The last thing I tasted was the salt in my sweat."  Gordon
said monotonically without any emotion.
	"Well, what happened after the pain?"
	I don't know.  I threw up and blacked out.  However, I feel that
certain restrictions have been imprinted in me.  When I woke up, these
black dots were dancing around my vision, and they stayed there for
about a week.  Sometimes I would awake, and the dots would be arranged
in words, but I could never figure out the words.  It's like they knew
I saw them."
	Dean walked in the door and without acknowledging either man said,"The
Head wants to see you, Gordon."
	Gordon walked nervously to the Head's office while sweat beaded down
his face and onto his lips and into his mouth.  He didn't notice.
	"Sir, you wanted to see me?"
	"Sit, Gordon.  We have much to talk about."
	The Head had a thin nose with glasses perched precariously on the end.
 Gordon couldn't understand why his eyesight wasn't corrected.  After
all, medical care was perfect.  In fact, it couldn't be a genetic
defect because all defective babies were killed.  Gordon knew this
because of his assignment to the killing rooms where he was forced to
kill the babies with his hands.  He used to dream at night about
twisting their fragile little necks and hearing their gaping breaths
and cries before he broke their necks and watched them die.  Recently
those dreams had stopped about the same time as the black dots had
disappeared.
	"Gordon, my test was pain.  I lost partial sight in both eyes.  This
loss reminds me of my humanity and the responsibility I bear.  We, the
humans of this universe, have a special purpose to care for the rest of
the animals; therefore, we allow nothing to pass by our awareness."
	Gordon sat silently.  "Why does he tell me this?  I don't want to
meddle in the natural order of life.  I hate killing and destroying,
yet that is all we seem to do.  Kill and Destroy.  Sack and Burn.
Pillage and Rape.  What has humanity become?" he thought.
	"Gordon, we must make a better place  to live.  If our plan involves
terminating a few useless species then so be it.  Genocide is nothing
new to humanity.  Well, we, the Association, want you to return to
Earth and try to reclaim it for our purposes.  We have given you all
the training  you will need to attain our goal.  It is time for you to
repay your debt to humanity.  Several others have gone before you to
establish what we call 'THE CARETAKER PROJECT.'  We have trained you
for the past 22 years of your life so that you could pass on the goals
of the Association to the various races of humans out in the universe
while making sure that they remain genetically pure.  Remeber the motto
of the Association. Be loyal to humanity. "
	On Gordon's space flight to Earth which took eight normal years at
light speed, he reviewed all of what was recent Earth history through a
computer hookup which was attached into his dreaming sleep.  When he
awoke, his thoughts centered on the Association's goals and purposes.
The Association had started in the year 2134 as a school for overly
bright and ambitious students.  The first test for humanity had
occurred after the Expansion of humans throughout the sixteen galaxies
in 2256.  Slowly, the Association had subverted the major political
parties on the best planets and taken them into its Empire.  However,
Earth had resisted the takeover and defeated the Association and thrown
it from the Solar System--in the only war the Association had ever lost
in the year 3201.  Now, Earth had undergone several nuclear wars, and
its humanity was mutating and changing.  The year was 5689, and the
Association wanted its homeland back.
	Gordon had gained weight on the space trip.  At the time of his Test,
he had weighed 165 pounds, and he was 6'2".  The school was hard on him
and had kept him skinny and desperate, but he had been on edge at all
times waiting for someone to fuck with him.  Now that he was a "full"
human, he had become soft.  He now weighed 210 pounds of mostly pure
fat.  His face before had been hawk-like and lean with an intensity
reflected in his eyes.  Now, rolls of fat surrounded his eyes, and fat
hung from his chin like meat hanging in a shop.  Since Earth's gravity
was heavier than his homeworld, Gordon used gravity negators to help
him walk with ease.  With his laser and equipment he looked totally
alien to the humans on Earth, and in the cities people stared at him
wondering who this man was and wondered if he was the true human like
all the propaganda said.
`	His subordinate, John, was a thin man with thick, strong hands.  In
the two months that Gordon was on Earth, he had seen John kill three
humanoids with his hands.
	Gordon was in City One, a rather dull name, but the former name was
London, and the Association had given the number to it to steal the
identity and make its residents forget their heritage.
	After the death of the last leader, the resistance had grown and had
regained most of the city.  Gordon had started a vicious counter-attack
against the opposition, and the Association forces had pushed forward
to take over most of the city, but the government and the London army
were holed up in the old palace of the Queen.  The Association's first
order of business when they restarted the fight against Earth had been
to kill all the nobility left alive in London.  Gordon thought it a
wise decision.  Todays business was a cease-fire meeting with the
government.  Gordon had no intent of letting them leave the building
alive.
	After the meeting Gordon noticed his crystal; the first time since he
had looked at it when he learned that Don had committed suicide.  The
crystal had turned darker then.  Now, it was black.  Gordon knew that
all the leaders of the Association had black crystals.
	Gordon loved Earth.  He loved the American South with its low
mountains and balds with fields of waist high grass on top.  He loved
the Smokies at morning when one awakes and looks out over the sprawl of
mountains peeking above the low lying fog.  In spite of all the
technology of the Association and the dead planets which they
possessed, Gordon hated the silver skies and black rivers of his
homeworld, and he knew that Earth would one day end up as did his world
with artificial atmospheres and water as a very precious commodity if
the Association regained it.
	With the resistance in City One or London as Gordon had recently begun
calling it gone, Gordon had moved onward to City Two or
Atlanta-Chattanooga.  Once separated these two cities had become joined
in the year 2705 with the advent of the second American Civil War.  In
this war the American west had tried to split from the Union citing
irreconcilable religious and moral differences.  Gordon had learned the
problem was that the Westerners had no morals or religions.  The
central religion of the South was Christianity-Aztec.  Human sacrifice
was back.
	Gordon was now attending one of the religious ceremonies.
	"Bring the chosen forward." The priest intoned.
	A man was dragged forward bearing a cross.  He was thrust towards the
priest who placed a crown of thorns upon the man's head, and spat in
his face.
	"Are you guilty?"
	"I have sinned against Huetzlipotchli and Jesus"
	The man's face was flushed with the onslaught of the massive amounts
of cocaine injected in him.
	"Then you must die."
	The crowd started to chant softly and then it became louder.
	"Crucify him.  Crucify him."
	Now yelling."Crucify him."
	Two priests grabbed the man and his cross, set the cross on the
ground, and placed the man upon it.  Picking up three long spikes, they
pounded these through the man's arms and legs.  The man screamed.  The
mobbed crowd repeated the scream in a frenzy and yelled for the heart
of the victim.
	After the cross was dropped into the hole in the ground, the high
priest took a laser knife and cut open the man's chest.  He ripped out
the heart, held it up to the crowd who bowed before it, and dropped it
into a bowl beside the altar.  The man's face displayed pain, so much
pain, that even Gordon couldn't look at him until the priests started
praying for a sign from god; a resurrection.
	"Oh Lord! This man has sinned and been cleansed.  Return him to the
living so that we may have a sign of your existence, and that his blood
has fed you and kept you from becoming angry with us."
	God was dead, and religion had no place in the Association.  In fact,
the Association always attacked religions first.  This was to clear out
the most zealous and fanatical of the population.  "After all, if they
believe in God, they're crazy," Gordon thought not knowing that he was
espousing Association policy.
	The church was in a small section of Atlanta-Chattanooga known as
Chickamauga.  During the first Civil War, the Confederates had defeated
the Union in a very bloody battle in the fields of the American South,
but the human deaths at least made sense to Gordon.  He understood
dying for an ideal but not for a god.  An ideal was tangible and
defined by reason.  Gods were worthless to Gordon.  He walked to his
groundcar and drove to his headquarters on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
 He was occupying Craven's House, a miraculously well preserved wooden
house of around 4000 years old.  The  white pine, now yellowing and an
extreme fire hazard, used in the house had been extinct for 2000 years,
and the oak doors alone were worth 200,000 Association credits, each.
	He called the head of the Association by ansible.
	"Sir, how have religions persisted on Earth?"
	"Without the guidance of a higher ideal, the animals on Earth have
developed their own crude methods of guidance from above.  The
Association is designed to take over these methods and bring humanity
along to a more mature stage of development.  You, Gordon, have reached
the adult stage of our development.  No entangling alliances bother
you, no love for a person rules your life, no god interferes with your
mind, no poetry or literature infest your mind, you are a total human
being, one who trusts his superiors and understands discipline and
control."  The teacher paused like he had just told Gordon a secret.
His voice became softer. "Humanity depends upon us, Gordon.   Emotions
have long been our downfall.  Lose your emotions, and the secret of
humanity will open itself to you. Become totally objective."
	"So our ultimate goal is to preserve and teach humanity?  We should
not care what happens to each individual as long as his choice helps
humanity?  So I must not care what happens to me as along as I make the
right choice for humanity?"
	The teacher said nothing but nodded slowly.
	Gordon continued, "So these animals on Earth are not humans?  Why?
They are descended from humans, they have the same DNA.  We could mate,
and the offspring would survive."
	"They wouldn't understand our goals for humanity;  we must make the
human race phenotypically pure.  When we encounter other sentient
beings, they must understand that humans do all for the sake of
humanity.  We must become a hive organization with each human bearing
some responsibility for humanity persisting."
	"So the animals on Earth with their strong sense of personality and
originality wouldn't survive our system because they are selfish?"
	"Exactly."
	Gordon finished the call and sat down in his chair in front of all the
incoming intelligence and battle reports from around the world.
	"I am a bee.  I thought that I meant something to the Association.  If
I die here, they probably have another leader on the way.  I am a bee.
Thousands of people could take my place.  I wouldn't be missed."  The
crystal glowed green from under his shirt.  It was burning hot against
his skin.  The pain reminded him of his test except the hot firey
burning of his flesh was real this time.  The glow suddenly quit, and
the crystal sat against his chest pressing on the forming blister.  The
previously forgotten black dots danced before his head.  Gordon could
just make out the words they spelled.  He laughed as he pulled out the
burst gun and placed it to his head. He then recalled then head
teacher.
	"Gordon, stop that."
	"I have to--for humanity."
	"You don't understand humanity.  You haven't been taught to understand
humans."
	"Oh, but I do."  Gordon flashed the teacher copies of all the books he
had read in the previous two months on Earth.  Old copies, barely
readable, Gordon had found the books in the library of the Craven
House.  At first he had wanted to burn them, but he found them
attracting him, begging him to read them. So he did, and he understood
humanity.  He thought of himself as the first Association member to
understand humanity in a very long time.  He then turned towards the
screen.
	"Gordon, you won't pull the trigger.  It's not right for humanity."
	"Yes, it is."  A low whisper from Gordon then nothing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Let me know what you think.
Will

I know of machines that are more complex than people.  If this is
apostasy, hekk ikun.  To have humanism we must first be convinced of
our humanity.  As we move further into decadence this becomes more
difficult.
Thomas Pynchon