Author: Bill Cox

“Well,” she says, impatience dripping from her voice, “What’s it going to be?”

I’ve the stylus in my hand, hovering over the pad. I look up at her and it’s all I can do not to stick the stylus in her eye and just keep on pushing it deeper and deeper, until it hits the back of her skull. I grip it tightly, still able to hold back the tidal wave of anger, although my control feels more precarious than ever.

There are two tick boxes on the pad. I’ve to choose one.

Choose the one on the left, a man I once knew goes home to his wife and son. He signed up to the Colonial Expeditionary Corp for them, to guarantee a monthly income and get them moved out of the slums into federal accommodation while he did his duty.

The box on the right means I sign up for another three-year tour and get to remain me. I’m not the guy who would automatically choose that left hand box. He did six months training at the Academy on Mars, before being put into stasis on a faster than light cruiser to Epsilon Eridani.

I woke up at the other end, reprogrammed during stasis by the CEC for the job at hand. The job the brochures call terraforming, preparing suitable worlds for the never-ending wave of emigrants leaving an over-populated Sol System.

In reality, its genocide, the CEC’s dirty little secret.

The problem is life. It’s everywhere, infesting almost every planet we’ve found in the habitable zone. Even intelligence isn’t that rare. Nothing as advanced as us yet and nothing else with a soul, obviously.

That’s one of the little titbits they programmed me with during stasis. The findings of the Twelfth Vatican Council were adopted by the UN in 2205. Only humans have souls, being made in God’s image. Doesn’t mean anything new on Earth, but out here…

Only humans have souls, so everything else is just effectively livestock. We can eliminate whole societies of aliens without qualm, because they’re not really alive. Not in the same way we are.

On Epsilon Seven there was intelligent life, but they had nothing more advanced than bladed weapons, useless against our rifles, tanks and helicopters. We nicknamed them the Aztecs. Obviously, we were the Conquistadors.

I killed thousands, male, female, juveniles, even enjoying it, at times. My reprogramming essentially switched off my empathy. It was an immensely satisfying three years.

Now my tour is up. I can re-enlist, retaining my current brain patterns and associated personality. Alternatively, I can return home with those recorded before my journey out here, minus my memories of the past three years, memories of the species I’ve rendered extinct.

They call the brain wipe machine the Priest, because it absolves you of your sins. Even if I did terrible things out here, I won’t remember them. I’ll still be a good person, the man my family need me to be.

The thing is, I like being me, though there are times I get so angry I just want to hurt someone, anyone. That’s okay though, as the CEC will always find someone for me to hurt. There are whole planets of them.

Go home for your son, for Jacob, I think, but this version of me doesn’t feel that same connection to him the old me did.

I tick a box. The desk-jockey bitch sighs and directs me to where I have to go.

I wonder if my family will ever forgive me. Then I realise that I don’t actually care.