aftermathb

Straightening the jacket of his tan military uniform, Onaran stood. He took his hand and ran it along the top of his head. It was an action originally intended to brush back wayward hair, but Onaran had long-since gone bald, and so now the reflex action only signaled an observer that he would be putting on his hat, which he did. In life, he had been General Onaran Ndari, and if he was finally going to face up to his actions, he was going to stand up and do it like the officer he had once been.

* * *

“Three years.” He began, like San, by reflecting on how much time had gone by since his downfall. “Three years ago, I arrived here. Three years ago, I sealed my fate by committing the most heinous act in the history of mankind. And three years ago, I died.

“We were nearing the end. Nearly two full decades of war were about to come to a close; we could feel it. Of the three warring factions, two had finally reached the point where they had the same objective: destroy the third; destroy the Supremists. At the time, I was a four-star general and the leader of the Unitist forces in my home country of Ghana. When the decision was made to launch a decisive attack on the Supremist capital of Madrid-an attack which, if executed correctly, could single-handedly bring an end to the war-I volunteered to head up the mission, and was quickly chosen to do so. If only they had known what would happen, they never would have chosen me. If only I had known, I never would have volunteered.

“We spent weeks brainstorming, strategizing, organizing, and planning for that single attack-the one that would end the war. The basic plan involved arming a strategic missile with a neutron warhead and using it to destroy the Supremist central command in Madrid. It took us nearly a month to locate and ship all the necessary materials-resources were scarce after twenty years-but that gave us more time to iron-out the details. By the time we got everything, the plan had been fine-tuned to the point that we thought we had accounted for every possible contingency. The primary obstacle we had faced was that the Supremists might be able to hack into the missile’s onboard computer system using a radio link-up. Being a bit of a computer expert myself, I suggested that we control the missile through a satellite via radio link-up rather than just program in its target prior to launch. That way, the Supremists would have to hack directly into our system in order to tamper with the missile’s course. Now, we weren’t naive enough to believe that they couldn’t possibly hack into our computer systems, but we figured that such a thing would take at least twenty-four hours, and the Supremists would have less than two hours between the missile’s launch and its arrival in Madrid. The plan was fool-proof. Or so I thought. And it was my suggestion that led to disaster.

“The missile was launched on schedule at 2300 hours, Global Military Time, September 13, 2129 from a military base in eastern Brazil. Once launched, the missile was to take approximately two hours to reach Madrid. It was equipped with full stealth capability; there was virtually no chance of the Supremists detecting it until it was far too late. The missile would reach its destination at approximately 0100 hours and wipe out every Supremist in Madrid. All intelligence reports indicated that there were no humans in the Spanish capital, only Supremists. They were too arrogant to believe that they needed to use human shields. We figured we’d use that against ‘em, but it turned out that they were right to be arrogant.

“In spite of all the planning we’d done to ensure that the Supremists could not have prevented the attack, they did. At 2300 hours, 17 minutes, the missile altered its course; its target was no longer Madrid, but a neutral scientific outpost in Antarctica. For an hour and a half-the longest ninety minutes of any of our lives-we scrambled desperately to readjust the missile’s course. Nothing worked.

“At some point-I think it was five minutes before impact-one of our engineers figured out what had gone wrong. The Supremists had sent a mission into space twelve years earlier and altered the satellite’s programming to read whatever coordinates we fed into it as the coordinates of that Antarctic base. They had anticipated our plan twelve years before we even came up with it.

“But that wasn’t the worst part. It had been my idea to route missile control through that satellite! I, a thirty-year veteran of strategic operations, had been so overzealous, so determined in my desire to destroy those fascist freaks, that I missed a glaring defect in the plan. I caused the deaths of over two hundred innocent civilians. They did not die in order to serve a greater purpose. They weren’t acceptable casualties that arose from an otherwise successful military campaign. They were victims…of my ego. And because of that, after watching in silent horror as the blip on the radar screen arrived at its destination and killed two-hundred innocent people, I quietly walked outside the compound, removed my sidearm from its holster, held it to my head…and pulled the trigger. I had to pay for what I had done, and no punishment on earth could have possibly sufficed; so I turned my soul over to whatever god or gods may exist for punishment.

“And that is where the worst part comes. You see, as I found out later, those two hundred scientists that I killed were conducting experiments in quantum physics. And at the moment that neutron warhead hit, it reacted to some sort of ‘quantum field’ that the scientists were generating, ripping a hole in the dimensional fabric. I forced open a gateway between our world and whatever ‘parallel dimensional plane’ that the souls of the dead go to. In other words, I brought Hell to Earth!

“I brought countless billions of ghosts back to Earth, and forced the people of the world to live with them. Our already-overcrowded planet suddenly quadrupled its population. And I brought back everyone that had ever died-including every serial killer, Nazi, cannibal, rapist, dictator, and genocidal maniac that had ever lived. And I was one of them. I sealed my own damned fate. I was not brought to the afterlife. I never got a chance to be judged; I was left stranded here on this hell-on-earth that I had created…

“I was supposed to end a war. Instead, I became the man that damned the human race, that condemned it to live in Hell for the rest of eternity… And the sad thing is, the war went on. Not even literal hell-on-earth could stop it. But I was sick of it. So I came here to the one place on earth similar enough to Hell that I could feel I was being punished but where I would never really have to face the consequences of my actions…never have to face the never-ending war…”

* * *

Onaran shivered in spite of himself. His fists were balled, his arms locked, his jaw clenched, and he stood at attention, but in spite of all this, he shivered. He was a broken, haunted man; no amount of military posturing could hide it, and he knew it. And so, he gave up. He sat, all rigidity in his body lost.

San didn’t know what to say. He had known that Onaran had been haunted by something, but had no idea that it was something so grave. Neither knew what to say. There was nothing to say. How could you comfort someone unwilling to be comforted? How could you even try to forgive someone unwilling to be forgiven? Thus, with the secrets of their pasts now out, San Majura and Onaran Ndari sat once again in silence. Nothing changed. No burdens were lost--eased perhaps, but not lost… never lost. And so they sat, in silence.

The End