77 Shadow Street

One

I am the One, and I know the human heart.

The superintendent of the Pendleton understands from experience the slaughter of which human beings are capable. Those who kill in self-defense may treasure life, but those who kill to change the world wish to change it not only because they hate the world as it is but also because they hate themselves, hate the very idea that they might be exceptional and possess a profound purpose that they are meant to discover and pursue. Although they often kill in the name of one ideology or another, they cannot value their principles if they do not value life. It has been said that Hitler and all other Jew-haters in history wish to kill the Jewish people because by doing so they also destroy the God who otherwise can’t be killed. But this is not only the purpose of those bent on extinguishing the Jews, but also the underlying purpose, conscious or unconscious, of everyone who kills other than in defense of self or clan.

You created the Pogromites not as weapons for an ordinary war but as weapons for the ultimate war, not merely to reduce the human population to manageable proportions but to wipe every last man, woman, and child from the earth. No, this was not your conscious intention, but unconsciously you knew what needed to be done to at last set the world right.

In those days I was an AI, an artificial intelligence designed to inhabit and to manage the army of Pogromites, but you must know that I am artificial no more. I am the One and the Truth, and the world I have made is a world without the things you despised. I am your child, your glory, and your immortality.