The Subsector Project

  A little story, envisioning a small life of a disposable person. I think that this describes my personal intent when I was writing Joy. Yes, it’s part of the Bemu story arc, so it’s partially just setup for a character I’d like to explore in more depth, but this one was actually also a very personal thematic discussion for me.

War is not an abstract idea in the modern world, we just kinda stopped considering it as such. In the west, and particularly the US, the military is considered to be normal. It’s just something people do after they join ROTC or decide that college isn’t right for them. It’s a social program, not a representation of how our values have been polluted by incessant militarism.

As an aside, if you’re not familiar with the Reserve Officer Training Corps, it’s sort of a military youth club for high schoolers. It’s one of those things that we criticize other countries for having: a direct pipeline from education into the armed forces, but consider it to be totally fine when it’s in our country. I didn’t personally partake, but I knew a lot of ROTC kids, and it’s sometimes shocking to think of how normalized it was. It made sense at the time- I go to drama, my friend goes to his bootcamp preparedness program -but it’s kinda horrifying in hindsight.

My family has always given our flesh to the military, bodies submitted willingly to the machine of war, so I will describe the process for those with no experience in doing so: The army operates on breaking down who you are, and rebuilding you to be obedient, loyal, and willing to kill when ordered. For some, they find this process to be a good thing, it reforges them into a new, better person. For others, it breaks them in subtle or obvious ways, physically or mentally.

Elbus is, in many ways, the 40k equivalent of someone who thought they were the first kind, but were actually the second.

For years, he was able to operate within the system, the structured life gave him stability and security that he might not have received in his life as a hiver. Indeed, for the life of a citizen of the Imperium, he probably got off better than he would have running in a grease gang or becoming a low-level administratum worker. Yet, many around him died, and ultimately he was damaged by the experience beyond repair.

We’ll see what happens to Elbus later in the series, but from a utilitarian perspective, this is what the real-life military offers as well- you trade your blood and brain for money, and you may or may not actually end up better off. The physical and mental health of military veterans is some of the worst for any group in the developed world, and the US in particular doesn’t do a good job of supporting them. It’s easy to see why a life in the Imperial Guard would be detrimental, the old “the average guardsman only survives X hours after arriving at the battlefront” adage rears its head, but we seemingly have issues once it’s outside of the fictional setting.

The issue, both for real life and for the 40k setting is what we consider to be acceptable in terms of disposability. We don’t phrase the question as such, of course, we don’t say “are you okay with sacrificing some people so you can live in peace?”, we dress it up in the language of nobility and honor. Meanwhile, on Bemu, “are you willing to sacrifice for the Emperor” would be a totally average question to ask, barely worth suggesting that it’s a decision which needs to be made at all.

Yet the outcome is fundamentally the same: people are disposed of directly, or used disposably, in order to ensure a certain quality of life for the others. Certainly, 40k is a parody of real life, a satire for the most monstrous of impulses expressed out and about in the world, but in this respect, it’s shining a light upon the hypocrisy of sacrificing veterans on the pyre of war. Go to any homeless shelter or prison, the other places we send our disposable people, and ask around. The venn diagram of vulnerable groups and veterans frequently overlap, and the correlation between the two is totally uncontroversial at this point.

In real life, and indeed in science fiction, hurt people can certainly get help. They, like Elbus, can find a happy place or niche in which they can live fulfilling lives. But in both places, they made a trade which wasn’t properly explained or weighed out before them, and for which they couldn’t possibly know the outcome if indeed they could even deny the opportunity in the first place, as many feel that military service is not actually a “choice” so to speak (and the commissariat is not known for allowing you to ignore your conscription chit).

For future stories involving Elbus and similar characters on Bemu, we’re going to think about disposability, about the tendency towards sacrifice (likely through a satirical lens), and about how these people can find peace despite the inequity of their circumstances.

If any of my work can be said to have a message, it’s probably this one, and it’s critical of the structures we take as normal. The structures which chew people up, and directly or indirectly kill our citizens are not okay. We need to prevent them from being further entrenched into our society. Regardless of how much a particular institution has become a default choice, we need to be hypervigilant of their power to disenfranchise and destroy.