THE FACE OF DEATH *or* THE EXECUTIONER HUBER
‘We do not make war, nor do we make peace - we allow those driven before us a chance to redeem their pathetic selves by bowing in reverence before the Khan. If instead they insist on begging for their pathetic lives it guaran-fucking-tees they WILL suffer torture they never dreamed possible in this life, Baby. I am NOT become Death - but I am her CONSORT and her favorite Sorcerer. I shall have none other before her. Death is supreme among the denizens of Earth and the heavens- trespass against me and you offend the Grand dame whom I serve - and Hell hath NO fucking fury like the goddess reaper of souls!’’ - Khan Bui Fang Wong (apocryphal) at conclusion of the Battle of St Louis, 8 AWD/1991 AD
‘‘The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire’’. - Richard M. Nixon
‘’And there was war in heaven - Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels; And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him’’. REVELATION 12:7-9
‘’The primary obstacle to the development of a meaningful and complete science of historiography is conceptual. Even men who are adept in the subtle precision required for pattern recognition in truly massive stock of data cannot fully overcome conceptual prejudices. This is reinforced at every Revolutionary juncture, spontaneous or man-made, by appeal to precedent not just to establish and substantiate a claim to exclusive sovereignty, but also owing to the need to generate a historical record that is as complete and painstakingly precise as is possible while foregoing any and all unnecessary factual minutiae that stands to burden the massive data set(s) required to facilitate historiographical science with redundant or useless information stock.
It is in this way that formal governmental structures - including those extant in the decades immediately preceding WARDAY - had virtually nothing to do with the business of government. Rather, the machinery that made government at scale possible and (more existentially significant) that facilitated the waging of war represented the only true sovereign agent.
This had nothing to do with the inherent ‘’godlessness’’ of artificial intelligence, nor the machinations of generals and ambitious, power hungry functionaries. Rather, the very existence of machine-based decision making renders all other modalities obsolescent. A Command and Control machine could and can identify a threat, characterize the threat, and execute 10s of thousands of decision-orders to assault and neutralize that threat before a human decisionmaker could even identify the emergence of an altered set of present conditions requiring war orders.
The implication, thus, of the ZAR-TX program, the catastrophic and total character of its purported ‘’failure’’, and the ongoing political and military crisis wrought by the development of ZAR-TX, is that the so-called ‘’Terran Imperium’’ is at best a ceremonial institution that facilitates moral consensus among the body politic by functioning as what appears to be a tangible, spatial and temporally definable and socially relatable ‘Government’ consisting of human beings assigned and insinuated into myriad roles that are alleged to constitute the control group of the State apparatus. Considered in the most punitive terms, the ‘’Imperium’’ is a calculated ploy, tailored to obfuscate the fact that only an agent capable of ‘’Machine Thinking’’ can meaningfully wield sovereign authority over any human polity, let alone one of planetary scale.
Clearly, the ambition of the Zone Assault Robot program was not merely the continued perfection of warfighting technology and in particular the expediting of transmission of critical data and information from human minds to artificial intelligences by way of a merger of both agents within a vessel of perpetual longevity which, if fully realized, would facilitate a means of reconciling evolutionary and historical realities with the inherent conceptual limitations and psychological and sociological needs of human beings vis a vis their relationship to sovereign authority and highly scaled political structures.
The fact of LeMay Alexis Huber’s unusual enthusiasms, [alleged] tendencies towards paraphilic sadism, and overly developed appetite for personal power is certainly not irrelevant, the character of Huber was not the driving impetus of the ZAR-TX program; nor was Huber’s ambition to quite literally transpose his conscious mind, memory and personality into the vessel of ZAR-TX even an essential contributing cause to the development of the program. The creation of ZAR-TX - or a cybernetic organism sharing the essential characteristics of ZAR-TX - was and is inevitable.
I
Location: FOA-DZAC* ‘‘Villainous Redeemer’’, in Orbit of TRAPPIST 1b (39.6 Light Years from Earth)
Date: February 15
Year: 1056AWD/3039AD
Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini dreaded the briefings he was obligated, by both duty as well as ethics, to present to Senior Martyr Caste Executioner and Steward-Acolyte LeMay Alexis Huber without exception, and he never was able to subdue the painful dearth of moisture within his mouth and throat and about his lips, nor remedy the subtle but excruciatingly persistent ulcerative stomach pain that unfailingly arrived and remained for the duration of time spent in the terrible man’s company despite having performed the aforementioned duty on at more than three score of occasions preceding as many Zone Assault operations.
It seemed that every characteristic of Huber that could be cultivated and practiced or optically manipulated was so tailored for no meaningful nor conceivable purpose other than to remind any who found himself in the presence of the aged, yet shockingly robust and physically vigorous, Security Echelon Corps of Executioners commander of death - of its ubiquity not merely within the domain which Huber moved, labored and thrived, as a shark effortlessly and with evolved hyper-efficiency slices through deep waters, but to remind his hapless beholders of their basic powerlessness in the face of death itself. Huber had cultivated an, arguably delusional, subconscious response in the minds of those within his orbit that the old man WAS death itself.
Huber’s face resembled nothing if not THE face of death - owing to peculiar body modification custom, of disputed origin, that had in the last two and half centuries fallen out of favor, by custom if not by law, large, symmetrical strips of flesh and underlying muscular tissue on Huber’s face had been artfully removed so as to reveal the skull beneath. The exposed, alabaster surface of which had been treated and polished with caustic agents. The effect was a rather startling optical illusion of bright, nearly vivid, white bone coated with an armoring agent that also produced a reflective sheen.
The entire left side of Huber’s jawline was stripped of flesh, creating an illusion that he was perpetually ‘‘grinning’’ or alternatively, that he was grimacing as the way a creature of the deep ocean - not having evolved the circumstantially superfluous ability to mimic emotional responses of the sort discerned in higher mammals. The horror of the effect was exacerbated by the fact that Huber’s left eye socket was devoid of organic tissue, the eye itself having disintegrated when, in the course of a then common Zone Assault operation carried out on Earth, Huber had opted to forego faceplate armor - as many Zone Assault leaders did out of custom and because there was not present an absolute necessity for such things owing to a breathable (if carcinogenic) atmosphere.
This absence of a protective shield had led to severe injury when the man 12 paces in front of him had been killed by a direct hit from an RPG round, the detonation shredding the man’s exoskeletal armor and saturating Huber’s face with a stream of boiling hot lubricating and coolant fluid that was utilized at joint insertion points of Executioner battle armor. The eye and much of Huber’s, once handsome, face had been destroyed. In lieu of opting for cosmetic reconstruction, Huber had simply had the flesh stripped off entirely and appeared pleased to at last have come upon a pretext to revive the arcane Military-tribalist body modification practice. Implanted deep within the gaping eye socket was a bare optical sensor, visible as a dull green glowing pinpoint, Huber also having decided to forego the cosmetic overlay of a cosmetic - if useless - artificially grown and harvested - replacement eyeball.
Arguably, Huber’s misanthropy and unabashed fetish for sadism, uncommon within Executioner ranks and particularly distasteful when exhibited by a man who had reached Martyr caste, led alone THE senior-most rank of all SECE Temple acolytes, was tempered by the fact that he not only exerted no effort to mask his true nature nor hide his malevolence from view but was in fact an example of that rarest of specimen whom is so confident in the inability of any rival to harbor capabilities adequate to threaten him that he could quite literally wear his propensity for personal violence upon his face at all times.
It was this version - the conqueror and master of death, the sublime monstrosity, the Villainous Redeemer - a moniker devised by an otherwise middling functionary in employ of the Ministry of Cultural Learning and Moral Instruction that the monster had adopted as a favorite honorific - of LeMay Alexis Huber who stood in the precise center of his quarters. The room was exceptionally large - even by the conventions and standards of a gargantuan Fleet Orbital Arcology class strategic platform. Arcologies functioned as spacefaring vessels, as off-world habitats of massive scale and - most significantly - as weapons platforms; the capabilities of which were destructive almost beyond comprehension.
Owing to this unique combination functions, the Arcology class designation was not a matter of mere trivia, of interest only to war planners and design engineers and data managers. There were Imperium subjects - of all castes - who were born, lived, and died on board a Fleet Orbital Arcology who had never set foot on a rocky planet; distinguishable from the Spaceborne not by any style of life or ontological divergence, but by culture and custom and the attendant genetic insularity wrought by the Founder Effect.
Huber was Earth-borne and had spent the entirety of his early life on a rocky world, with natural gravity, and surrounded by autochthonous flora and fauna. Nevertheless, he harbored a deep and visceral terror of confined spaces, a feature of his psychology only truly known to his personal minister-surgeon, the disclosure of which to another would result not only in the death sentence that was unconditionally imposed upon minister surgeons who violated a confidence of any temple acolyte (let alone a martyr caste Executioner to say nothing of the fact that Huber held the most senior rank of any living man within the SECE.
Curiously however, at least to those unfamiliar with Huber’s remarkably binary value system as well as his service record, there was not a single observation window or portal within the massive quarters,
Huber’s violent aversion to cloister or confinement, or that which he merely perceived to exemplify such in even the most minute capacity, owed in part to the fact that Huber had spent nearly fifty five years in space borne operations, most often leading or commanding Zone Assault direct action missions. Even when commanding, Huber insisted - regardless of risks owing to proximity to OPFOR, to epidemic space sickness and risk of infection (although many - if not most minister-surgeons believed space sickness was not in fact a communicable disease, it was officially classified as such and denying the factual basis of this categorization was a criminal offense) or absence of shelters to protect against solar radiation - on commanding from a Forward Operating Base located On-World within mere kilometers of the Zone slated for assault.
Men who spent lifetimes traversing deep space tended towards one of two psychological extremes - and the manifestation to which he was prone acted as a defacto litmus test for fitness for serving off world: they either found themselves broken in mind and spirit by the yawning vastness, the incomprehensibility of the endless starsea, or they found themselves only truly comfortable within its abyss; utilizing their need to return to its anti-embrace as a self-motivational agent when deployed on Zone Assault - the sooner the objective accomplished, the target annihilated without remorse, the sooner the return to the tomb-like silence and comfort of deep space.
This particular vagary of mind that afflicted Huber was however, under ordinary shipboard conditions of the Fleet Arcologies was under every circumstance buttressed by the placement of a massive observation window, constituting an entire wall of the chamber. The calming effect of this specially tailored feature, if in fact Huber could be said to experience such normal states of mind and nervous constitution, had the opposite effect on the man, if in fact he could still be referred to as human, when the vessel he was aboard was orbiting Earth. It mattered not if tidal locking prevented the planet from ever coming into proper view. Familiar Imperium craft arriving and departing, passing in orbit, the effect of the (deliberately) reflected and refracted sunlight (Huber demanded his quarters be kept in total darkness at all times) were enough to send him into an impulsive fury.
LeMay Alexis Huber had fallen in love with being a monster - something more - or less - than merely human, except when he was reminded of the life he led previously. Huber, unconventionally (and inarguably) brilliant as he may have been was grossly deficient in his ability to perceive and interpret, let alone identify,the ultimate sources, concrete as well as symbolic, of his own impassioned responses, be them covetous or aversive.
The fact that the life Huber had led as a young man - and the things, personages, and sensations that so powerfully seduced him- to say nothing of the power wielded over human (and thus historical) affairs by his forebears (proximate and ancient alike) that obsessively captured his fascination was, in all meaningful aspects identical to his present existence, was for one reason or another, each as elusive to the rational observer as the other, was something that Huber was utterly incapable of reconciling intellectually or emotionally,yet he was apparently - owing to an impulse originating from deep within (proverbially) what remained of LeMay Alexis Huber’s human aspects - mourning the death of his former self whenever proximity reminded him of that long destroyed visage that he was then so fond of admiring in any proximate reflective surface. LeMay Alexis Huber had always been a monster.
That day so many decades ago when he became, catastrophically, his true and essential self; his splendid body and handsome - almost beautiful face - ripped into pieces had merely been a shedding of skin. As a cobra or an insect undergoes molting and sloughs off its dead skin to reveal new skin, already developed and intact, below. Just as what replaced Huber’s biological organs, skin, cells was something that was in fact virtually identical to what had preceded it. He had not undergone any true metamorphosis as had his spiritual progeny Victor Von Leers upon being resurrected as ZAR-TX. In contrast Huber’s catastrophic injuries, his extraordinary and unnatural longevity, his deadly cybernetic enhancements were merely cosmetic in the case of mapping and metaphorically dissecting the mind and soul of Huber.
Yet in his mind - even when in tidally locked orbit of Earth, cloistered his tomb-like living quarters that were purposefully devoid of light (natural or artificial), of viewing portals of either the blue Earth or the abyss of space there were still instances when either by conspicuous presence of a psychological trigger, owing to the negligence of hapless servants serving shipboard or a completely unforeseeable psychic association, Huber became enraged and despondent beyond consolability or reason. Not unlike, Minister Surgeon Woldemar Mohamet Al Husseini, who perhaps knew the great Temple Martyr Caste chieftain and, (true) Lord Executioner better than any living man or woman, likened to the grief that he had witnessed in the hearts of young mothers who had endured the casual slaughter of their children - sometimes mere infants - in the wake of a Zone Assault.
A man more normal and less depraved in spirit and intellect might speculate that Huber, a remarkably handsome man of truly aristocratic pedigree who was notorious for compulsively pursuing the fairest women of the Prime world of the Imperium was, rather frivolously, lamenting the fact that the loss of his beauty of physique and visage in most grotesque manner had cost him opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of the finest feminine specimens that Imperium society could provide - this was absolutely not the source of Huber’s enraged lamentation. LeMay Alexis Huber was as prolific a rapist in his youth as he was - at present - an immortally aged monster.
There remained a genuine mystery to this discrete vagary of Huber’s mind and vestigial personality, as inundated every aspect of the monster’s being, What was most remarkable to al-Husseini was the ability of Hubers rages to not abate one iota in sadism or intensity over the intervening decades.
Al-Husseini had relayed to a youthful acolyte, a young minister-surgeon who had been only months previously afforded security clearance - having long since demonstrated his practical skill for military surgery, augmentation and Zone Assault emergency medicine in addition to impressing (and in no small measure intimidating) his Ministry superiors with publication of a series of papers on the possibility (the young surgeon’s theories at present were exclusively theoretical, although radically groundbreaking) epigenetic memory and its precise cultivation - and ultimately perfect generational transmissibility - across linear generations even among individuals who were conclusively proven to not exhibit pineal sensitivity.
Despite the notorious and at times vicious, jealousy that was characteristic of every professional guild or bureaucracy in service of officialdom. Yet, the Ministry of Surgery and Applied Eugenics displayed the aforementioned in extremis to point of its reputation being colored by a certain moral tarnish that bespoke of a callous cynicism, particularly misplaced in and institution such as the Ministry - which even the most cynical realists and morally hardened scholars of government believed should be above the most debased of cannibalistic intrigues within its own ranks.
It was the proverbial outsider status of al-Husseini’s brilliant young protege - name of DeVilbiss - that prompted the otherwise cautious, and taciturn, wise Arab doctor to confide in the younger man not just his concerns about Huber’s tyranny (Huber was the true and absolute sovereign power despite his lack of formal political office or title) - and specifically the implications therein for the epigenetic program (colloquially, and incorrectly referred to rather flippantly as ‘’quantum immortality’’) but also to relay anecdotes about the man - events Husseini himself had borne witness to that had shocked his conscience so profoundly that he remained shaken by these instances of Huber’s penchant for casual homicide decades subsequent to Husseini’s initiatory witness to such occurrences.
Perhaps it was just as much Husseini’s subconscious, but ever present, suicidal ideation that led to his abrupt confidence in DeVilbiss. Of course, there was no law against discussing one’s own opinions of LeMay Alexis Huber, discussing directly witnessed (or merely suspected) grotesque crimes against the laws of God or Man perpetuated by him. One did not even risk being situated into penal jeopardy, even if one had taken leave of reason so completely as to openly insult or defame the man. Yet any of these such utterances, if reported to the common police officials of the Ministry for Public Order let alone within earshot of the ubiquitous eyes and ears (human and machine) of the Security Echelon Corps of Executioners would guarantee certain death, preceded by tortures largely undreamed of, let alone contemplated by even a practiced amoral sadist.
An ancient self consciously quaint custom had emerged among citizens of every caste within the Imperium. At least one of the ubiquitous decorative telecom monitors in virtually every home, on Earth, on Off-World dominions, in the civilian living quarters of Fleet Orbital Arcologies - including even those of the Spaceborne, which was remarkable on grounds of their almost uniform rejection of Imperium social conventions - was permanently set to a splendidly rendered image of LeMay Alexis Huber, garbed in ceremonial dress of a martyr caste Executioner, the coveted Order of Irminsul draped around his neck, the left breast of his black-as-space uniform tunic adorned with a row of death’s head medals (each indicating a Zone Assault deployment). Notably, and entirely deliberately, the image was current - Huber’s destroyed face, seemingly made of nothing but razor like teeth, criss-crossing veins like rivers indicated on an ancient paper map, and impossibly white alabaster bone.
Huber resembled nothing if not something from the deepest ocean, evolved to breathe sulfuric poison, and banished forever from daylight, Husseini was introspective enough to realize that his desire for death owed not merely to his genuine piety and concomitant desire to serve Allah, but also to atone for the savage destruction of the innocent by the monster that he served. Men, women, and children who, like Husseini, wished only to serve God. But who, unlike Husseini, had not damned themselves by their fealty to a Godless monster. Husseini had spent a lifetime devising a way to die for these sins, but only after years of enduring suffering comparable to that which he had bestowed upon the righteous by serving Lemay Alexis Huber.