It appears I have been shot, laying waste to my life. Who would’ve thought the afterlife would be so dark and so…endless. One thing I have gathered in this state of darkness, alone with nothing but my thoughts is how much easier it is to accept just how wrong you are when you no longer have to accept the consequences of being wrong. 

The regime experimented on babies, faceless babies, the kind of pure innocence. Faceless babies that were dragged out of their faceless mothers and subject to inhumane conditions. This was something kept a secret from all those in the regime, including me. It appeared to me like it was hypothesis testing, searching for proof that the faceless were different to us beyond their discomforting aesthetics. As a kid I was groomed into this way of life and this way of thinking, by people who themselves didn’t believe it. Then I clocked it, faceless…it means person without face, doctor Modork had turned me into a faceless over a month ago, that means I’ve been faceless for a month. The distinction between faced and faceless is simple, if you have a face you are faced, if not you’re a faceless, that simple. Factors like what colour you bleed or god forbid what face you were born with are irrelevant. I killed countless faceless people on behalf of a regime that wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if I lost my face

Jane Goodall probably never killed a chimp, even the ones that looked different. To my knowledge she actually liked them, she realized they were a lot more similar to humans than the world had thought. Each one of them had distinct personalities. Makes me think, if chimps and people actually lived together instead of you know…segregating, then how much better would their lives have been, if they hadn’t spent so much of their lives worrying about chimps…hating chimps…killing them on behalf of the regime

My life up to this point has been wasted, when I had a face I wasted my life being hateful, then when I lost my face I wasted my life being careful. But had it not been for hate would my life have been any better? If I had walked among the faceless, as a faced, without killing them would a happy life still have been possible? When you grow up believing all your problems can be shot and killed you start to believe it, the same applies to when you’re told just what your problem is. 

It was a month ago when I saw a faceless baby for the first time, an innocent baby, to this day the only faceless baby I had seen outside of block C. I think it was at that point I truly realized what being faceless really meant, I just didn’t know it yet. I don’t know when I thought a faceless transformed from innocent baby to rotten vermin but I definitely thought it was something that occurred. 

I was born into a world of cruelty, a world where I administered the cruelty. A world where, even those that aren’t victims of the cruelty still must live within it. A world where you are born hated, and likely born to spread it.

It’s difficult to know you were raised brainwashed when you were brainwashed out of knowing what brainwashing even is. The signs were always there. We weren’t thought where the faceless came from, nor were we thought about life prior to the regime beyond the fact that it existed. The most striking of these in hindsight is that we were never thought what a faceless was and why they were bad, and we would never ask because…

I guess the question still stands, do I regret my life? Kind of…I guess there is no right way to live, I did what I was told and did so under false promises. Regret does imply a wish to do something different, and I’m not sure what I would’ve done differently. My life was bound to be wasted from the get go and so was that of anybody else unlucky enough to be born while the regime was in power. You never realize just how much you hated your own existence until you can feel it being stripped away from you

And just as Cyrus had accepted his fate, hoping that would be enough for him to pass on, for him to be at peace he wakes up, face to face with James

“Hello Cyrus”, James says smugly, “unfortunately you survived being shot, so now it's time we had a little chat”.