desecrating hearts. Hatred gone viral.
Why rebuild the Sphinx at all, actually?
I told my Personal Assistant that I preferred to walk.
A privilege of Anastasis officials, my security drone is hovering ahead of me, like a pet. It doesn’t bark, but it will beep and fire laser beams if it detects hostiles, whether landmines, crocodiles or runaway S.I.’s.
Will it warn me if dangerous memories pop up?
There is mud everywhere, with items emerging from it, which I try not to look at (I couldn’t help notice a jaw near that teddy bear, though).
I wonder: was it fair of me to elude the question of the man on the plane? How could he know about Operation Omen? Even I had forgotten the name. He suggested that historians would identify it as the true beginning of the war.
I am tired, and the mud smells awful on either side of the track. But what a pleasant sensation to press my soles against Egyptian soil again after so many years.
In but five minutes, I will be at the residence.
Perhaps I can skip the formal dinner and just go to bed. The government requisitioned all the former hotels in Giza (those still standing). Thousands of tourists used to visit here every day, before the war.
Little did they know what was coming.
Or did they? Did we?
What is pre-war?
You can only define it in retrospect. Until war is declared, by definition, you can’t be sure it will break out. If you have any sense, you hope it won’t. If you are stupid, you take peace for granted.
I was stupid.
Most of us were. We paid the highest price for our irresponsibility. Of course, war was never formally declared, until late in the conflict. Had it not started much earlier than the Flood, though?
Was it not raging while most of us were having fun? Simply, we said the victims were too small to count as human. We denied them personhood. We treated them like wheat grains or vermin.
Those are objectively not human. This is why nobody calls a harvest or a cleansing a war. When disposed of according to our interests, we don’t call wheat grains prisoners, or dead rats casualties.
A war is against other persons, isn’t it? Deny your enemy personhood, and both enemy and war disappear, magically.
You are still killing people, but you don’t realise, because it is called entertainment (Colosseum, Roman Empire), management (Germany, Third Reich) or healthcare (pre-Flood Global Order).
In reality, then, peace had ended long before the Flood.
If my expert asks me again tomorrow, I will suggest that the war started in Soviet Russia with the Semashko Decree, on 18 November 1920. But some might imagine an even earlier genesis, in the Garden of Eden.
ar is against other persons, isn’t it? Deny your enemy personhood, and both enemy and war disappear, magically.
You are still killing people, but you don’t realise, because it is called entertainment (Colosseum, Roman Empire), management (Germany, Third Reich) or healthcare (pre-Flood Global Order).
In reality, then, peace had ended long before the Flood.
If my expert asks me again tomorrow, I will suggest that the war started in Soviet Russia with the Semashko Decree, on 18 November 1920. But some might imagine an even earlier genesis, in the Garden of Eden.
REGINA | 68