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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.
Copyright ©
Daniel Henry Rodgers
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