They kept his skull in a box. A nice little glass box. It sat on the edge of the receptionist’s desk. Not many people were ever received at the facility, and the receptionist took absurdly long lunch breaks, so it was almost like the skull itself was the greeter. No one could say that it did a bad job, though. It gave the right impression of the place, and, frankly that was better than could ever have been expected from a young man who was contractually forced to smile.
Nobody really ever questions about the skull, anyways, besides the few guests, of course. Reason was that nobody really had any of the answers. It was just there. It was a decoration. And yes, in fact, it was real.
Well, that wasn’t true. They knew practically everything about the skull except why they had it. Years ago one of the younger interns had the thing’s genes sequenced, and they’d been able to track it back to the records of its former owner on a world far away. He’d been a nobody, it seemed. But, to be fair to the person who once used the skull, he had died at the age of nineteen, so he hadn’t had much of a chance to turn into somebody, anyways. He had no living relatives, at least, none within the range of second cousin. That was improbable, but, well, he’d died during the war, so improbable things were quite common. At the end of the day, everyone just expected that he’d died of a bullet to the heart, or the spleen, or he’d fallen from the sky, or something. The skull showed no signs of fracturing or trauma, but, well, it belonged to a nineteen year old, so the end must have been tragic.
And that’s where the questions stopped, because they started venturing into a space where there was no light, and they had brought no flashlights of their own. The lab’s entire crew had changed out three times since the end of the war, when the kid presumably perished, and there was nothing written down as to its acquisition. Oddly, there was also no record of where the rest of the boy’s body was located. No burial records, no anything.
Odd, but not so odd that anyone really cared.
At a few points, the staff deliberated on whether they should get rid of it. Plans were put forward to ship the skull back to its world of origin so it could be given a proper burial. This proposal received almost unanimous approval. Unfortunately, the accounting department were never able to scrounge up the funds required for shipment, and pleas to upper management for the sum fell on deaf ears. After all, interplanetary shipment was expensive, especially for human remains. There were all sorts of rules and regulations, and those came with their own corresponding fees.
Some more pleas were made at different junctures, all of them resulting in little more than silence. So, everyone just began to forget, until one night when some of the staff got drunk for the holidays and realized, once again, that there was an actual human skull on the counter for absolutely no good reason.
One of the older males offered to simply smash the thing. This idea, of course, did not sit well with his inebriated friends. Another offered to bury the thing in their backyard, to which a third pointed out that there were observation drones out and about to keep an eye on peoples’ watering habits, and burying a skull would certainly look like they were covering up a murder.
So, the skull remained. Again. And the staff cycled out once again, per protocol. The same questions were asked. The same void of answers was seen. Nothing changed.
And again. And again.
So it was. I cannot tell you if the skull mattered. It would have mattered to the boy, had the boy lived. But he didn’t, and the dead do not care. Only the living may, and when the truth is shrouded in beauracratized obscurity, why… even the living find the apathy of the dead.
It never happened. I know. I know. I, the narrator, have been lying to you about the story by the very framing I imposed on it. I watched. I listened, as I always do, time being little more than an annoyance to my observation. After all, when one has so many eyes to see, and the will to look, then you find things that not even the people standing on top of them will ever witness.
Nothing strange was ever observed in Trenton’s neural patterns. Nothing at all. Well, there were certainly abnormal things, but they were abnormal in the way that the neuroscientists were never able to parse. And everything that they wanted to observe was clouded over in trauma, anyways. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. One person died.
So the mayor-constable was right, obviously. But right merely in retrospect. The war ended. She is gone. Even her specter seems to have exited this plane. All that ever happened was that innocent blood was spilled.
And yet… and yet none of us really know who was right. We can say, yes, obviously, the kid should not have died. But do we… we cannot understand the burden of the past, even as we carry it with us.
So we wished to save millions. We did not. So we wished to save the life of a young man. We did not. So we wished to save the life of the multitudes by the preservation of order, of our system. So we did. But only by accident.
In the face of spiraling, monumental problems, it is difficult for us to know what to do. Do we sacrifice of our own innocence? Do we sacrifice the innocence of others? Or ought we to abandon the precepts of innocence altogether and pretend that there is no such thing as good?
The answer is, of course, that we do none of those things. To clear away mess, to abide by pure, crystalline principles is to lose clarity on the sheer complexity of the universe. In their own way, all three were right. In their own way, all three were wrong.
Very few of us will have to make such decisions, and those who do can never be prepared. So the best thing to do is as it always is; take the best small decisions you can. Build the groundwork of existence in such a way that no unknown skull ever has to sit on any countertop. Easier said than done, but still, isn’t it true?
