Simurgh compulsions

Thirty years in the future, a child was programmed.  Messages, impulses, and a noise that ears weren’t receptive to reached into a pregnant belly and they filled the child with rage.

The mother held her belly with both arms as the child thrashed and kicked within its hot bath of amniotic fluid, smiling.

Every living thing was an extension of a greater machine.  These children would be trained, weeded out, honed, and made into exceptional weapons, before being flung at one another.  Powers would be distributed by a system, utilized against one another, analyzed, and broken down.

Elsewhere, other pieces of the same machine were being programmed with the impulses, needs and courses that would slot them neatly into the superstructure.  There were researchers, theorists, civil managers, stables, farms.  Populations were bred to bring out traits that would fit them to their role, refine their ability to think the way they needed to think for their roles.  Controlled randomness threw wrenches into the works, keeping minds agile and forcing them to adapt.

[...]

The baby here, when born, would join a caste of the population driven to find the worst and most inventive ways to hurt one another with the tools and powers they were provided with.  Brother against sister, kin against kin, in a ceaseless struggle from birth to deathbed that spanned generations.  Other segments of the population were made to work harder by the fear that they would be in the bottom seven percent of their caste, given over to people like the torturer this baby would grow up to become.

The mother felt pride that she herself had been programmed to feel, imagining the monster her child might become.

- Infrared 19.z