LUDIC LOG

So that's it, eh, Roger? After all this blood and effort, that's all you've got to say. "Because it's wrong" and "I'm playing God". That's what you've got. I wish I believed in you enough to be disappointed.

I have believed since I met you that you that you have no argument than force. This does little to dispel that notion.

No, don't bother, Roger. You are not a thinker. You are bad at it. You have spent all your time on learning how to fight people who disagree with you and no time at all learning why you fight. You risk death every day against monsters like me, and when someone finally bothers to ask you why, you say "because it's wrong". As for playing God, well, someone has to. There's a vacancy, if you hadn't noticed.

It's a pity, really. A shame. Once force is taken away from you, you've got nothing left. You sit there tied to a chair, and when I offer you the opportunity to convince me why I should give up my work, you bring me nothing. No thought behind your fists and guns. Nothing but received knowledge worth less than the time it takes you to regurgitate it.

I will spare you a lecture on the arbitrary nature of morality. I doubt that you have the intelligence to appreciate it or the disposition to accept it. I do ask you to contemplate for a moment the path my life might take if I were to accept your world, your life, your morality. I ask you to consider to what use my talents might be put. Perhaps I could be a well-paid surgeon, relieving plutocrats of the symptoms of their dissipated habits. Perhaps I might be lucky enough to work for a pharmaceutical company, who would put me to task creating pills that would make men's penises grow, because that's what makes them money. I'm sure that's not what you would do, if you were me, would it? If you could do what I can do with my hands, with my mind, and my will?

Because you see, in the end, that is all it takes. Will. You simply have to make the decision that you're going to do what other people would not. You made that decision, and it led you in one direction; it led me in another. The wonders that unfolded before me once the decision was made...I can scarcely tell you. The things that I have learned about life, about death, about the mind. What lies through that door, those ruined corpses -- it sickens me to consider that because of a feeble inherited morality, an unquestioned set of common assumptions, an incredible body of knowledge has been delayed. Delayed until me, until someone who possessed the will to learn.

When I die, people will learn what I have done. Not what I have done to those urchins and castoffs and cretins. I mean what I have done with them, what I have learned because of them. And people will curse my name and call me a torturer and a murderer, and, well, I certainly can't argue with that. I torture people and I murder them. I certainly wouldn't want anyone to do to me what I did to them, but really, there's not a lot of weight to that argument. But people -- some people, at least -- will also realize how much I have accomplished. A century of progress, two lifetimes of learning, all in a decade, because of my will and my genius. And how much will be gained? How much knowledge will I contribute to the world that curses me? How much many lives will benefit because of the lives I took? How much will I have accomplished, at the cost of less lives in a lifetime than claimed by the weather in a year. Why don't you go and declare war on a tornado, Roger?

Now, I will give you this much. You were willing to risk your freedom and your life in pursuit of an abstract principle, even if it isn't one that you really comprehend. There is a ludicrous sort of integrity in that, so I am going to do the same in exchange. Here is the offer I make: I will let you free, and once you are free, I will offer you no resistance. I will give myself up to you. You may arrest me. You can send me to jail or to a madhouse or you can even kill me if you like. I would imagine that despite your false piety about the sanctity of all the lives I took, you would be very happy to see me dead. And you can go to your people and tell them what I have done, that I was worse than the vilest murderer. You can tell the world the truth: that I kidnapped people, that I murdered children, that I took human beings and tortured them to death in aid of hideous experiments. Everyone will praise you and tell you that you are a hero for having done away with someone as awful as me.

But before I let you go, I will walk to my laboratory, and I will destroy all my work. I will burn my papers, I will wreck my experiments, I will delete the records from my computers. All evidence of what I have done here -- all save those lifeless things in the next room -- will be gone. I will be, to the world, nothing but a purposeless killer not better than the lunatic serial killers your country produces in such quantity. No one will know why I did what I did, no one but you. And all that I've worked for will be for nothing, and all of those lives will well and truly be wasted, thrown away to no good end. Only you will know the greatness that I acheived through death and through will. I will give up what I have worked for all these years; but I will not let you have the fruits of my effort without recognition of their cost.

It's all in your hands now, Roger. You can have me, or you can have what I have done. Make up your mind. Think.