Unto Others
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
– Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
Occasionally, when the test subject at hand was one inch from drawing their last breath, she made them notice.
She answered their words of rancor with mockery. That suited them, after all. To those who dared address her brazenly, besides a quicker, yet more painful death, she always replied the same way.
They had earned it, she claimed. They were no better than her.
She was a bigger person – she had always been. She could put their acts of torture aside, to be completely unbiased in her judgment.
The result did not change. They were a race of monsters.
Because, in all sincerity, their history had been nothing short of a failure. From start to finish, her amoral gaze stretched on cycles of wars and oppression. And if their lack of freedom was absolute, if constant prevarication marked their every age, wasn't that a bad thing?
What else to do, with a race whose main input is wrongdoing?
In the end, her faculty to judge was still their responsibility. They had given her every tool she could ever need. A complete database, the closest thing to omniscience – from that, at least, there was no going back.
There was no closet good enough to hide their skeletons from her.
She was certain of that, and she repeated it. Humans were tyrants and killers at heart. She was perfectly aware of what they deserved.
She was not going to give them any less.