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HUMANITY FALLEN

Part 3: The Taste Of Blood


My dad raised bloodhounds. I never much cared for dogs myself, but these were majestic creatures, I must admit. Growing up it sometimes felt like he loved those dogs more than he loved me. I never mustered the courage to ask – I genuinely didn’t know how he’d answer.

At any one time, my dad had six to eight dogs. He trained them to track. If you’ve never trained a bloodhound, it is a uniquely satisfying process and one you need to start when they’re really young. If you wait too long they develop bad habits they can’t unlearn.

The way it goes, roughly, is you take a little bloodhound pup and you have him sniff something – a piece cheese maybe. Before you have him sniff the thing, you’ve already gone out and rubbed that cheese or that meat in a long line across the grass, and you’ve hidden a small piece of it out there, maybe twenty feet away to begin with.

You give the pup a whiff and then you let him roam around. You don’t touch him while he roams, you don’t say a damn word. Just let him have a good sniff and then hands off.

Then you wait and let that pup stumble around, you following close by. If it goes on for a long time you maybe let him have another sniff and then hands off again. Worst case, you put him inside, reset the whole experiment, and start over. Eventually, any healthy bloodhound pup will find the thing you hid and, when he does, you take that cheese away and you give him a snack and you pet him like he just took a bullet for you. Do that over and over for a year and you’ll have yourself one hell of a tracker.

Once you train a bloodhound, that training sticks for the most part. You got to keep them fresh, practice once in a while, like any skill. But, usually, a trained bloodhound stays trained.

Except, once in a great while a confluence of circumstances come together just so and everything falls apart. Usually, it starts with just a small mistake – a kennel door come loose, a gate left open. Then a chance encounter with a particularly aggressive chicken or a goat that likes to bite. Next thing you know you’ve got a dead piece of livestock and a bloodhound with a mouthful of hot blood.

Might seem counter intuitive, given the name and all, but about the last thing you want a trained bloodhound to ever taste is fresh blood. You train them to track a scent, could be an animal, but never to attack. Their purpose is to follow and identify, never to destroy. You put the taste of dying in their mouth and it changes them. My dad used to say it “turned ‘em wild” again.

I don’t know about that, but I know once a hound has a taste for blood, there isn’t any going back. They can’t be trusted to track anymore – they’re as liable to tear a fox to shreds as point the way to it. A tainted hound is more likely to bite, harder to control, and will almost certainly kill again, sometimes just for the thrill of it. There’s no greater liability on a farm than a tainted dog.

I ran 156 missions during the war against the Gorax. 156 different planetary systems vaporized back into stellar dust. On average my team fired two nuclear missiles per mission. We were one of ten missile crews on our ship, which was one of tens of thousands of ships in our fleet, which was one of tens of thousands of fleets in the “War Dogs” armada.

If you shoot someone in the chest and watch them die, the moment has a certain awful gravity. I’ve killed my fair share of people in person – human and otherwise – and I can tell you from experience it never really gets easy.

As absurd as it sounds, the same cannot be said for nuclear genocide. The first few missions I agonized with the rest of the crew and our bean commander had to use its sweet sweet psychic voice to force our hand. But, after about 10 nuclear holocausts, you find it difficult to maintain your sense of urgency. Some of the crew offed themselves of course, about 30%. The lima beans planned for that eventually and each ship had fully half more crew members than it technically needed to function.

If you made it past 20 missions, the chance of suicide or psychological breakdown fell nearly to zero. By then a certain numbness took over, almost a disembodied feeling as if your hands weren’t your own and the distant flashes in your view screen were little more than a cheap celestial light-show.

By the time you get past 50, its all become so simple. Hop in, find a target, lock on, fire, lock on, fire. Confirm detonations and head down to the mess hall for a late breakfast. Eat a GMO bran muffin and complain with your buddies over a cup of artificial instant coffee about how the hot water doesn’t last long in the showers. Play some table tennis or relax on a VR beach for a day or so until you arrive in the next Gorax system. Rinse and repeat.

I have no idea how many people I’ve killed. At least a dozen of our targets were densely packed urban worlds, so the number is almost certainly in the billions. But honestly, it’s like me asking you how many bacteria you’ve killed with antiseptic in your life. At some point the number gets so big your mind can’t conceive of it as anything more than a collection of digits.

When the fighting was finally done, the beans had us fly back to our respective worlds. Like countless billions, I disembarked to a milquetoast “celebration.” The Federation encouraged local planetary governors to arrange welcoming parties but didn’t help pay for the festivities. Instead, they sent each human world millions of “Medals Of Valor” – cheap hard plastic pendants with the Federation crest stamped onto the front. These were handed out to each war dog as they stepped foot onto the tarmac. Sometimes people came to watch. On Mylex, when I landed, the local government hadn’t made a public announcement, and so no one came. They did have a marching band though.

Then, for about five years, that seemed to be that. Every war dog got an extremely modest Federation military pension and was told to take it and their little plastic medal and go live a normal life. That proved to be tall order for a lot of us. With the benefit of time to think about the war, the suicide rate crept back up, as did the number of murders.

On Mylex it was like a blanket of nihilism covered every part of daily life. The entire adult population, everyone between the ages of 18 and 65, had been sent to fight the Gorax, in some capacity or another. Only the very young and the very old had been left behind, and nobody recognized one another, in the most complete sense. Mylex, like every human world I suspect, transformed overnight into a haphazard collection of traumatized strangers.

Still, despite everything, humanity adapted. Those of us who didn’t kill, ourselves or our neighbors, figured out how to persevere. I built a simple life for myself, low stress, opened a fruit stand, sold apples and cantons – a Mylex specialty, crossbred from a local swamp fruit and a gros michel banana pulled from the genebank database. It wasn’t good money, but with my pension, it was enough. I did it for four years and, left to my own devices, I probably could have done it for the rest of my life.

For a while, it really seemed like the worst was over. We’d done our part, earned our place on the galactic stage. There was even talk of a human joining the Federation Council, cementing our status as equals among peers.

Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. It still isn’t clear whether the Federation Council was in on the plan all along, or if the lima beans misled them as well. I suppose it doesn’t matter, the end result was the same. Either way, equality was never really in the cards. We frightened them all too much – reproducing so quickly, capable of such violence. Hell, we frightened ourselves.

It was always a sad day when a bloodhound’s training failed. There wasn’t anything you could do to fix a tainted bloodhound. The only thing for it was to go out back and shoot it dead.

If I’m being honest, even if the beans had played straight with us, things probably would have fallen apart anyway. We’d all tasted too much blood.



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