I felt cold stone against my face long before I could open my eyes.
I checked for the searing agony, but it was gone. I managed to look at the fingers that had been causing me so much pain only a minute ago. Neither red nor white. No different from usual.
My wrists had been taped together. Gingerly I stretched out my fingertips and pressed them against the ground, ever so gently at first. No pain. I pushed myself up and looked around. I was in a dark room, surrounded by what looked like a giant chessboard.
“I have no idea who you are, although I assume you’re here to try and kill me.”
I turned around to see who the voice had come from. It was a shadowy figure, his face backlit by moonlight that crept in through a window covered by a metal grill.
John Paul.
The Lord of Genocide.
“It seems that the American government has been sending hit squads into the countries where I’ve been. I’ve been hearing reports that the generals and politicians I helped out were being killed off,” he said.
“That can’t be a nice feeling, knowing that any day you could be next,” I said.
John Paul shrugged. “When I tried to return to Lucia’s apartment I realized immediately that some clumsy Secret Service agent was trying to tail me. So I put the place under surveillance for a while, and sure enough you showed up. You were obviously Forces, which did trouble me somewhat, I’ll admit.”
“Why do you think I’m in the Forces?” I stared at John Paul. A trained linguist turned PR flak. It bothered me that this civilian could tell the difference between the CIA and Special Forces so easily. It also bothered me that he was talking to me as if we were fellow professionals.
“As I’m sure you know, I’ve spent the last few years of my life in war zones,” John Paul said. “A long time. Places where no UN troops, let alone US soldiers, ever intervened. But there were occasionally PMCs, there to provide tactical and strategic consultancy. They would train up local troops, molding the rabble into a semblance of a proper army. Most PMC soldiers are, as I’m sure you know, ex-Special Forces who crossed over to private work in order to double their paycheck. Well, I started watching these people, and in watching them I started to notice the special type of walk that only trained soldiers have. It wasn’t that hard for me to do. After all, my work as a linguistics researcher was basically frequency analysis—identifying the hidden patterns that lurk behind apparently mundane agglomerations of data.”
I pushed myself up with my bound wrists so that I was sitting on the floor and facing John Paul directly. Like one of Jesus’s disciples sitting at the feet of his master.
“Speaking of patterns,” I said, “the NME was funding your language research, and you were looking for some sort of patterns there. What I don’t understand was why DARPA was involved in the first place. What benefit was there to them in funding an academic thesis? Why was that a matter of national security?”
“Ha. So you’re telling me that neither your superior officers nor the fine staffers of Washington ever bothered to explain that to you? How typical.”
The moonlight was now shining brightly on my face. From where John Paul was standing I would have looked deathly white.
The former scholar put his hand to his mouth before launching into a calm, deliberate lecture by way of explanation.
“The defense establishment wasn’t involved with my research at first. It was academic work, pure and simple. All the materials I was using were in the public domain. Archives from Nazi Germany, radio broadcasts, magazines, literature, military communications. I acquired all sorts of data from the Nazi era—prewar as well as wartime. Much of it was already digitized; I had my assistants convert the materials that only existed in hard copy. Then I parsed it all. Grammatical analysis, in layman’s terms.”
Research into Nazi rhetoric. I tried to imagine how it would relate to university work. Class 101: Fascist Communications—Discourse for Dummies. Don’t embarrass yourself in front of your fellow National Socialists by making a linguistic faux pas! All this was interesting enough, as an interdisciplinary elective that fell between the domains of linguistics and history. But I still didn’t see how that could be of such interest to the military.
“I published a thesis based on my work,” John Paul continued. “The MIT budget committee called me in not long after. The chairman coolly informed me that my research had been selected for funding by the National Military Establishment, so I needed to run along and present them with my research. I wasn’t wild about the idea at first—it would mean that any further research on the topic would be classified and impossible to publish—but when I realized how many perks there would be other than just the actual funding, I reluctantly accepted. After all, it meant full access to confidential CIA documents and to international traffic intercepted by the NSA. Everything from Pol Pot’s wireless transmissions to the Khmer Rouge to Rwandan radio broadcasts. The NME even arranged for me to have full access to the Russian archives on the Katyn Forest Massacre. Most valuable of all to my research, though, was the raw data from the traffic that the NSA and the CIA had intercepted.”
“And you discovered something from all this?”
“Yes. That there is a grammar to genocide.”
I didn’t understand.
John Paul saw my incomprehension and explained. “Whatever the country, the political climate, or the syntactical framework of the language used, the data always showed that there was one thing in common: a deep structure of the grammar of genocide. There were always certain patterns in the media of a society that was about to start committing genocide, present in its newspaper articles, radio and television broadcasts, even the novels and short stories published. We’re talking about at a deep structural level, not something noticeable in the surface structures that non-linguists are used to accepting at face value. In other words, only a trained linguist who was specifically looking for these patterns would ever have been able to find them.”
The grammar of genocide.
A predictor of atrocities to come.
I couldn’t believe it. “Language is something humans learn. It’s the result of acquired learning. A posteriori knowledge. It’s just language. It can’t affect people’s souls in such a fundamental way,” I said.
“Ah, the old tabula rasa canard. Touching to think that there are still people who believe it. The human mind is a blank slate? I suppose next you’ll be telling me that autism is caused by people not receiving enough love and affection when they were children.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked.
“Genetics predetermine most things about the way a person turns out, from their personality to any physical or mental handicaps, even down to their political leanings. Environmental factors play a marginal role at best. There are those who have tried to argue that human beings are purely a product of their environment, and that all people are essentially born equal. Well, I’m an egalitarian myself, and I believe that it’s a uniquely human trait to be able to transcend our genetics by creating this concept called ‘culture.’ But I can’t allow my belief in the potential of humanity to muddy the objective results of my scientific inquiry. All I’m saying is that every human action has a source, with perfectly good biological and neurological explanations. We need to start by acknowledging to ourselves that we are no more than bundles of flesh assembled according to a genetic code. Our livers and bowels and kidneys were made according to a predetermined genetic formula, so why should there be a special exemption for our minds or hearts, or anywhere else we choose to believe our mysterious spirit might reside?”
I thought of Lucia’s words that the human heart was a product of evolution.
Had she just been regurgitating John Paul’s philosophy?
The thought made me sick to the core.
“But the language that a child learns while growing up is the language spoken by the people around him,” I said. “It’s not as if babies are born with Esperanto carved into their brains or anything. Isn’t that what scholars mean when they call linguistics an a posteriori discipline?”
“No. Let me give you an example. Back when slavery was still legal, the old plantation owners could have cared less what sort of language their slaves spoke. The slaves had been abducted from all four corners of Africa and were just thrown together to work, regardless of whether they had any language or culture in common. Now, this state of affairs wasn’t going to last for long. Soon, the slaves started picking up fragments of their masters’ language—English. But their version of the language was much more simplistic than the original and grammatically all over the place, but at the same time much more rigid and restrictive than English. You couldn’t change word order in a sentence or collocate words easily, for example. In its first generation, this was called Pidgin English.”
John Paul took a deep breath, readying himself to continue his lecture.
“The children of those slaves grew up with Pidgin English as their mother tongue. When they interacted with other ‘native’ pidgin speakers, interesting things started happening: the language started shifting from the rigid original toward a much livelier and more fluid language. A more naturalistic grammar emerged. Grammatical rules that the parents had never used started coming into play, effectively invented by the children. This new language was based on English but was definitely not a language developed by people who had grown up listening to the original. Linguistically and grammatically speaking it was an entirely new language that developed out of a pale imitation of the original. Today it’s called Creole. The children, in other words, acquired a sophisticated grammar that eluded their parents. The only convincing explanation for this is that the human brain has an inherent ability to generate its own grammar out of the linguistic components it has on hand.”
“And that’s what you mean by deep structure—our innate grammatical potential?” I asked.
“Yes, an ability seared into our brains by our genetic code. An organ that gives birth to language.”
A built-in organ inside our brain that gives birth to language.
The organ that contains the portents of massacres.
I was starting to understand. “So DARPA was interested in your research because they figured that if there was a hidden grammatical code inside the human mind that led to chaos and disorder, then they might be able to preempt outbreaks of genocide by monitoring and analyzing communications in countries that were already known to be politically and ethnically unstable.”