The Children of Fenric

War makes people into puppets. Figures whose worth is in the space they take up, the orders they follow, interchangeably. They are a resource spent as simple flesh; the damage to their unique lives and minds is just an inefficient transfer of energy in the relocation of the flesh marionettes.

One of the biggest obstacles to this profligate handling of life is that mending people after they’re damaged, a delicate but necessary process, costs so much labour time. A solution is speculated at in Doctor Who’s The Empty Child (2005), wherein the Doctor encounters nanogenes – floating swarms of imperceptibly tiny robots, designed to identify and patch up injuries. The story’s climax reveals that a crashed warship from an alien world has leaked its own variant of nanogene, a type specifically for use in a battlefield ambulance; mending soldiers in an instant so that they might go straight back to war. Rapid, airborne transmission of the genes enables such a war to be fought on an inconceivable scale. Thus a facility that nominally exists to save lives, even care for them, is in practice one that cheapens life by cheapening the act of repair: matters of life and death ascribed to an inanimate, autonomous computer programme, left to its own devices.

Unfolding across the story is the horror of what happens when that technology fails to self-correct. It contains a template of the alien warrior it’s meant to rebuild, but knows nothing of mankind. It assumes its own crude programming will apply to everyone. Diligently following their own logic to its conclusion and then repeating, the nanogenes begin editing human beings into illogical abominations. They’re unaware of the harm they wreak; they’re physically incapable of independent interpretation, imagination, or evaluation, because their ignorant data set is their entire existence. As a result, the human victims of this ‘treatment’ undergo a reduction of everything they are. Because they did not factor in the creation of this data, but are nonetheless abandoned to its system, they are rendered subhuman – ’empty’.

Nall Gone

This little island we live on is an endless exercise in the elevation of emptiness. For example, the class of people who get to decide what happens to us all – and whose best mates usually decide how it should be reported, mediated, commentated, processed – are a squalid collection of vacuous failures. Animated by vapid, cruel fantasies rather than insight or knowledge, they generally operate the country by slamming it into a wall over and over until money falls out (for them to pocket). When this starts to look to people like the senseless violence it is, official reasons are soon invented for why There Is No Alternative. A bit of creative mathematics here, a bit of xenophobia there. None of them actually make sense. Not one mote of this has ever made sense; all of it’s just an empty rationale for plunder and poverty. Our consensus reality, our culture, is a matryoshka doll of bullshit.

And no culture can accept that it’s an enormous sham. Not when its participants need the emotional safety net it provides.
So instead of being chased away or made to suffer every human indignity they’ve inflicted on the masses, the leaders of our political and media establishments enjoy widespread tribute to their emptiness. They attend a perpetual banquet of adulation and unearned trust. It’s heaped upon them in the genuine belief that they somehow deserve it, they’re better, they’re qualified, because they must be, because that’s the only way the way things are makes any sense whatsoever. All they have to do in return is play up to our subterranean expectations of them.

Decades of this have watered down our hopes and desires to such ephemeral levels, it’s spiritual homeopathy. An atom of the most half-hearted pandering appears magnified in this barren landscape, in the eyes of consumers so numbed to the desert that they’re hypersensitive to the smallest drop – the faintest acknowledgement they exist. Viewers as raw nerves waiting for a puff of air in their direction, convulsing from head to foot when one at last skims them. This is the product of training. Human beings can be trained to react the same way to an empty visual cue as you might to a great victory, a confession of love, the safe return of a dear family member. Trained to interpret a handful of crumbs as a three-course meal. It’s achieved by stifling their curiosity, their capacity to even imagine a life beyond their own.

Only in the utter absence of counterexamples can a nostalgic farce government look like a safe pair of hands, a briefcase-dragging tribute act sound like a champion, a hierarchy of sadism feel like a loving family. Only there might we see carceral fanatics as valiant protectors. Apologists for inaction as fearless wits. Shallow signifiers as substance. This suite of dim iconography has become a substitute for our interest in fellow humans, in each other, even in our own thoughts. Why am I feeling these things? What is happening in my brain? Why do I like this? Why do I dislike that? What made me this way? Why do others think differently? Who are these people on my screen and why are they saying those words?
People who’ve given up asking those questions, force-fed the truism of “this is just the way things are“, only get any fulfilment when the icons slot into place. The momentary thrill of recognition replaces hope itself. The reassurance that the same old gruel can still be spooned out transcends any evaluation of said gruel. Opinions can only be had on the presence or absence of the signifiers – not on why they exist or whether they should.

This inverted world, this conceptual black hole, is where the quality of life goes to die. Compassion? Emotional honesty? Self-respect? All demolished. Nothing can ever be made right when we no longer even care to notice we’re upside down.

Which is a roundabout way of saying this is the episode we deserve:

ACE: Gold bullets, tin-heads! Did you think UNIT wouldn’t be ready?
TEGAN: Why isn’t it working?!
ASHAD: We long ago developed resistance to gold.