Codons of Contempt: A Crime Against Empathy

We came not for conquest, but for containment— though conquest is what happens when containment itches beneath the skin like sulfur spores in a sealed lung. They had the secret. Not gold, not weapons, not prophecy— but language that healed. Real language— not poetry, not prayer, but syntax of cells. Their infants spoke in codons. Their trees rustled in protein sequences. Their dead decomposed into algorithms that rewrote the soil's neural net. We saw them— laughing in magnetic dialects drawing isotopic spirals with iodine-stained fingers. Their cows gave antimatter milk and their shadows shrank from Newton’s mechanics. I remember the vote. Marek raised his snarled hand said, "If they’ve coded compassion they’ve cracked deterrence." And that was it. We became the knife. We baptized our pitchforks in lithium. Recited von Neumann’s last confession before the march: “With computing, comes consequence.” I led the advance. Through flax and rain and cholesterol haze. I held my daughter’s micro-spliced braid in my breast pocket like a war amulet. We killed the first girl because she healed a fracture without speaking. The bone curled like a fern. Marek called it devil-deep sorcery. They tried to gift us something— a box of glass vials inscribed with Gödel numbers, each one a dream folded into matter. We thought it was a curse. We torched their orchard where the pomegranates bled quarks where Newton’s third law hung from the branches like seditious fruit. I dragged a child from the Archive. He screamed in Sanskrit-accented Haskell. He begged us— not for mercy but for verification. "You can audit the code" he cried. "It's open-source empathy." We closed his throat with copper dust. After the slaughter we tore the sanctuary doors and found it. Not a weapon. Not a doctrine. Not a god. Just a machine— built from tendon and manganese driven by grief fed by memory spitting out recipes for joy. Real joy. Not pleasure. Not luck. Joy, distilled into molecules we had names for— dopamine serotonin oxytocin— but never earned. It didn’t enslave. It gave. Their secret? They learned to manufacture forgiveness. To administer it intravenously. To pass it through skin. To encode it in bread. They had learned to weaponize love and refused to weaponize it. What do we do with a truth that cannot be monetized? We crush it. We grind it into folklore and feed it to our myths. We buried the machine beneath our census ledgers. We wrote laws against the geometry of their alphabet. We recast their genome as a curse in our catechisms. Now our fields bloom with obedient hunger. Our sons do not dream. Our daughters do not sing. We rule in peace because peace is not permitted to choose. Sometimes, when the wind comes off the burnt hill I taste the old secret— the one we took the one we killed the one we called evil because it needed no chains. And I ask the wind, Why did we harvest them? And the wind retorts, Because they offered you grace, and grace cannot be owned — only eradicated.