Four: Echoes of the Past

__________________

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

__________________

2052 Old Germany

The glossy photograph displayed the scene in grisly detail. Mwamba clutched it, piercing it with his dark amber eyes. The remains of a small town lay frozen in the frame, the charred rubble of buildings still smoldering from the fires that had consumed them. The photograph focused on a pile of bodies heaped beneath the barren limbs of an ancient and twisted looking oak tree. Yet the bodies were no longer whole, and instead lay in a shocking array of dismemberment, cleaved apart by some unseen terror; in fact there didn’t seem to be a single corpse that was not defiled or mutilated in some manner. Arms were disconnected from torsos, heads from necks, feet from legs. It would have proven too much for most people, but of course, Mwamba was not most people.

“Where is this?”

“Was.” McKrougar’s stolid and matter-of-fact tone gave nothing, and the bloody reality of the past tense hung in the air for a harsh moment. “It was a rural farming community between Wittenberg and Dannenberg, Northwest of Berlin, a fairly new township that had been set up since the German Syndicates had affected peace. Their main agricultural product was wheat and barley. There were over fifty families living there, right around three hundred people in sum.”

“How many survived?”

Otis paused for a moment; a look crossed his face as he balanced figures in his head and decided whether he should privilege Mwamba with such information. “One. A small boy, we guess he’s about fourteen or so.”

“You guess?”

“That’s right, the Durenbergers were the ones who found him, he was hiding in a pantry closet in one of the houses that had burned down, but the fire hadn’t totally consumed the house and he had survived, somehow. We guess his age because whoever attacked his village cut his tongue out, and he doesn’t seem able to write or communicate otherwise. As you can imagine, he’s pretty messed up.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”