The Future Is Japanese by Unknown

didn’t grin and bear it out of “necessity.” No. What had happened was we had completely transformed into children who knew nothing else, who couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. They were going around killing us, so we needed to go around killing more of them. That was the setup. How the world worked. Necessity, or duty, or anything else you wanted to call it, didn’t even come into the picture.
    So, the institute. Hoa were walking around freely. The same Hoa who had raped and murdered my mother and sister were walking around without a care in the world, and we were being fed this malarkey about how we shouldn’t hate them or want revenge. So I decided one day that I would just think of our new instructors as machines. Heartless, unthinking automatons. Made in America. Just like the floating fans that hovered overhead in the alleyways, or the thirteen-legged freaks that pursued us when we retreated into the caves to escape from their armored vehicles. They were machines that looked and sounded alive at first glance, but a closer inspection would reveal they were empty on the inside.
    I was in a foul mood. I didn’t have any of the Khatsticks I’d become so used to chewing on the battlefield, nor any dope. We used to use gunpowder in a pinch, snort that when we were out of the good stuff, but now that they had taken away our guns and ammo we couldn’t even fall back on that. Even a smidge of gunpowder would have been enough to zone me out. Enough to ignore the fact that a Hoa bastard was sitting right next to me. As it was, though, I was full to the brim with rage and pent-up frustration.
    So long as I was in such a state, throwing me into a classroom along with a bunch of Hoa and telling me to get along nicely was a recipe for disaster. You might as well have ordered me to flip out and start mowing down my classmates with a machine gun.
    All things considered, I reckon I did pretty well to hold out for a whole month.
    Now, there was no doubt at all about the fact that these guys had attacked Xema villages, burnt them to the ground, killed our people, violated our women. They wouldn’t have been here otherwise. The House of Smiles was specifically for former soldiers. If they were Hoa and they had been soldiers, it was inconceivable that their hands weren’t steeped in the blood of a thousand rapes and murders.
    So when I noticed a bunch of them in the corner pointing at me and laughing, I knew the time had come.
    I’d been preparing for this moment, this instant, for some time: I’d taken pains to make sure I always had a sharpened pencil on me. I’d known this moment would come sooner or later, and that it was my destiny. No questions asked.
    When the moment finally came I was relieved.
    I didn’t even need to harden my resolve. My body moved naturally, and I found my target, in the form of the back of the hand of the disgusting Hoa nearest to me.
    “Mondays are bad enough as they are,” I said, driving the point of the pencil deeper and deeper into the gaping and bleeding wound, “without having to look at your ugly fucking face.”
    The Hoa squealed like a pig, but I knew that was just an act. The captain had told us as much. Hoa don’t feel any pain.
    Just as I thought of the instructors as robots, the Hoa were basically just machines too. Sure, they showed all the outward signs of experiencing pain—they writhed around in agony, with tears and snot and drool streaming from their faces—just like we did, but that was no more than an act they put on to try and manipulate us, designed to try and make us feel sorry for them. In reality, they couldn’t feel any pain at all. The captain once said to me that they were more or less like zombies. After all, if the Hoa bastards could feel pain there’s no way they could have done the things they did to your father or mother or sister. It’s only because they don’t know what pain is that they can’t imagine what suffering might feel like to other