Chapter 4

Then I saw a television advertisement run by one of those anti-smoking groups. There was this youngish woman on screen, talking through a hole in her throat by means of an electronic wand that magnified the vibrations from (I guess) her vocal cords, or else substituted for vocal cords, if hers were gone.

She told about how she’d messed up her life by becoming a smoker, and urged others not to follow her terrible example.

That night, I killed off every executive who worked for a manufacturer of smoking products, worldwide.

Wow! The all-news channels almost choked on that one! There were any number of highly respectable citizens who had suddenly been marked for overnight death. By now, the international press was pretty sophisticated about these sudden outbreaks of mass death. While they didn’t blame “God” directly, there were less-than-subtle references to who or what might be the Cause of these doses of instant justice.

In the ensuing week, the executives replacing the old executives at these manufacturing plants rapidly suffered the same fate.

There were, of course, no third-generation replacements named. The organized manufacture of smoking products quickly came to an end, worldwide.

Cigarettes are a hard habit to break, and some people continued to grow tobacco, roll it and smoke it. They didn’t die, either — at least, not instantly.

But industrial production came to an end, and cigarettes quickly became far more difficult to find than, for example, marijuana. (The marijuana trade was booming as never before, and legislation to legalize it was being adopted almost everywhere.)

I pondered, once again, my somewhat ill-considered action of killing off all those men and women who’d been engaged in the manufacture of smoking products. Obviously, many of them had been decent-enough individuals, and none of them was known by me to have been guilty of any recognized criminal conduct. If, as individuals, they’d been doing anything earlier that had been seriously criminal in nature, my earlier round-ups should have gotten them.

It turned out that there had even been a few tobacco people who’d been earnestly engaged in efforts to limit the negative health-effects of smoking, or to discourage young people from taking up the habit.

Well, too late now. I’d killed them all. Every last one.

Let’s face it, people. Research is hard! If you’re going to make a real difference in the world, you’ve gotta use a cleaver, not a scalpel.

Sure, I fretted over it some. Mostly, though, I was just pleased with myself. If a few people had to die so that the whole damned planet could be freed from tobacco addiction, well, that was a small price to pay.

I had done a good thing.

Essentially.

I contented myself for several months, just checking the news of the world, watching for new forms of evildoing that I could conquer, but not imposing any new death sentences. I noticed that a new crop of dirty politicians was gradually emerging here and there, so I worked for several weeks to describe a number of different types of conduct, by politicians, that would cause them to go to bed one night and not wake up ever again.

It was an excellent exercise, and scattered additional political leaders began to die suddenly. The world was getting wise to “God’s” justice by this time, and when a political figure died, there frequently was open speculation in the press about whether he’d been dirty.

This was unfortunate for a couple of perfectly honest politicians (an American state governor and the premier of a small Pacific Island nation), both of whom died natural deaths during the period when the incipient bad guys were getting theirs. There would always be an undeserved cloud of suspicion over those two unfortunate souls.

Well, it was an imperfect system that I was running here. I was sorry about it, but what could I do? It wasn’t as if I’d killed them. Their reputations had been excellent, but even I couldn’t be absolutely certain that their deaths had been from natural causes and were mere coincidences.

People began to trust their political leaders a lot more than in the past, since everybody was now aware that anyone running for public office or accepting a governmental appointment would probably fail to survive his or her own first attempt to skim a little off the top.

Schools, churches, governmental institutions and the world’s writers, philosophers, and spokespersons were now addressing — frequently and without embarrassment — the changing nature of life on earth.

People (especially young children) were taught carefully to raise themselves up as trustworthy, friendly, courteous, kind, and reverent, because the wages of sin had become, in this brave new world, extraordinarily direct.

Except for my forcible rape campaign, I’d stayed pretty completely clear of all the forms of sexual misconduct in the world. (And we are told that forcible rape, after all, isn’t really a sex crime, but an aggravated form of violent assault.)

I gave the matter a lot of thought. I’d always been a liberal sort of fellow, and didn’t have any weighty moral compunctions when it came to sex. If somebody wanted to screw somebody of their own sex, or wanted to fuck somebody, of whatever sex, in the ass, or wanted to run a threesome or a foursome or a fivesome, well, I didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with that.

The touchstones, I’d always thought, were (1) mutual consent and (2) the avoidance of deliberately inflicting bodily harm on another person.

So when I started getting into the area of sexuality, I tried to be damned careful. I thought some of the practices I’d read about in some of the far-off areas of the world were pretty disgusting, or were sexist and unfair to one sex or the other (mostly to women).

But I tried to stay sensitive to the fact that differing cultures could have widely contrasting points of view, dramatically different from my own.

Still.

The humiliation of women in many cultures continued to be rampant, and I wanted to do something about it. But I did worry. Was it appropriate to impose Western standards of behavior on all the world, just because Mr. Assistant God had happened to have been raised in the USA?

Well, no. Clearly, it was not appropriate. But I could take baby steps.

And so, after that day, any man or woman who, without just cause, deliberately attempted to inflict serious bodily damage or death upon a sexual partner, would himself die. Instantly.

There were more weird and unjust practices in the world, associated with sexual activity, than I could possibly cope with just by employing, in my formulations, generic descriptions of conduct. I knew I would have to move carefully in this area.