A Small Red Light

My name is Octavio Domingues Escovedo. I was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on 6 June 1978, in a mass of angry consonants and morphing vowels: the city Itaquaquecetuba, meaning bamboo sharp as knives. I was raised in España (Ama a la Patria, they sing now, in the Marcha Real; a loathsome command: love the motherland; but I remember when the song was wordless, spoke in melodies alone; and it was loathsome then, too) - and then the United States of America, in the cities of Dallas, Texas and Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. and various others.

As of 6 June 2015 I have been alive for thirty-seven years, though I am told the last five do not count. They have been claimed by the government of the state of New Mexico as recompense for past injustices.

I live - and have lived, for the last five years - in a small concrete box with a single rectangular light fixture on the ceiling. I have never once seen that light flicker. It buzzes constantly. On days when I am feeling particularly upbeat I can remember what silence felt like. On worse days I imagine climbing my latrine and leaping, Olympian, to strike the glass, Sköll swallowing the sun.

But two lifetimes - sans five years, now - would be a long time to spend in darkness.

Two lifetimes; yes. The first I forfeited for building three small explosives that were detonated in a middle school in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The second I earned for smuggling firearms to what my prosecutors referred to as "agents of despair."

Despair - "carrion comfort," says Gerard Manley Hopkins, the author of my one little book.

My one little book is a collection of poems. It was given to me by General Hitori Kamiya on 17 December 2014, along with nearly $300,000 worth of electronic equipment, for three reasons:

1. I am a great lover of poetry.

2. On 15 December 2014, a series of unknown artifacts collided with the earth's surface in over 40 heavily populated areas and wreaked unprecedented devastation, later determined to be extraterrestrial in origin.

I felt the shockwaves here in my cell, and for a moment I wondered if I was to get my Inferno's due, to fall victim to Dantean poetic justice, dying in an imbroglio of collapsing walls and non sequitur bombast. El octav(i)o circulo de infierno. 

And the third reason? The final justification, the last excuse for offering these gifts to so criminal a man as I?

3. I am the greatest military mind of my generation.

I do not claim this out of ego; I merely repeat what I have been told by those who would know. Those like General Hitori, and those in his worldwide alliance (Ama al Mundo!), his secret brainchild, his "XCOM." Those under my command. With the equipment in my cell, I see and hear everything; I am Big Brother, the eye in the sky, the invisible hand of God. To the soldiers I am Ode, or Commander - a voice, a distorted face on a screen.

At first I refused to participate; my payment, already credited, I am assured, is the redaction of merely one of my two life sentences. My guardian angel, perhaps, breaths a sigh of relief. But if I have a best friend - and I would shudder to think I do not - it must be General Hitori, for he knows me so well. "Think of it as a game," he told me.

I like games. I like winning them.

And I am very, very good at winning.

- - -

You might ask: Why, Octavio (for you and I are friends, I hope), are you telling us this?

Well:

On the back of one of the machines that wires my soul to XCOM is a small red light that blinks on and off at a rate of one switch per two and a half seconds, give or take. Sometimes my screens go black and my speakers quiet, presumably to stop me from overhearing more than necessary (world leaders having lazy tongues), and the technologies that bind me to the outside world become mere lumps of matter. Paperweights. Even during these blackouts, though, that small red light keeps blinking. Rudolph's nose, low-fly warnings, un latido de luz.

Just over an hour ago, the light went out.

It may mean nothing. A glitch. Or perhaps I have been excommunicated at last, relieved of my duties, by virtue of victory or incompetence.

Maybe.

Still - I have pages printed from the diaries of soldiers living and dead, painting a wild and haphazard portrait of our humble dying world. If I have finally lost the game, the Earth deserves a full confession of my actions, and those of the soldiers under my command - because it will be robbed of many of the years I owe; a lifetime is a lifetime, after all, no matter how short.

But let it not be said I am a hopeless man. I leave you with this: hopeful words from my silly little book. A comforting buzz, proof that the invaders have not yet swallowed the sun:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Ama al Mundo.