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No matter how lazy or unmotivated a person is, if he feels his life is on the line, he will devote every available resource to not being killed. Civilization goes out the door, and pure survival kicks in. When people are that awake and that focused, they intrigue me. So you can say I have a job that brings out the best in people.
There is little in body language that is universal between species, but ignoring someone is a good way to assert dominance; it communicates that I do not find an individual or group to be threatening or even worth my time.
I really have to remember to be polite, though, because of my intense disdain for pretty much every sentient creature.
Years ago, there was once a sensationalist piece in the works at the Laverk Times calling me the “Universe’s Deadliest Man.” Funny story: the day before it would have appeared, I killed the entire editorial staff in a completely unrelated matter. Well, it was funny to me. Maybe you had to have been there.
I’ve never liked hanging out in such places for fun, as I don’t drink; I only go to bars when I’m killing people. I go to a lot of bars.
The why was never important—that’s big picture stuff and it all gets rather pointless in the larger scheme. It’s all just power struggles that creatures have had since the first two single-celled organisms competed for the same food source.
“How can you say that? Can you really take all the mental states of all the sentients out there and determine a norm? And even if you could, wouldn’t that just be the normal mental state selected by the vagaries of evolution and thus not necessarily the best?”
To me, eating, sleeping, walking, and strangling a puppy in front of a crying child are all just different activities, and none of them holds any “moral” weight for me. The first time I killed someone left no bigger impression on my psyche than the first time I tied my shoe.
I have a pretty strict rule that I don’t kill anyone or anything when I’m not on a job—not even insects or the planet’s equivalent. It takes too much work to figure out which creatures are acceptable to kill and what’s an acceptable way to kill them. So unless my life is in direct danger, I’m a complete pacifist when nobody is paying me to be otherwise.
Mass slaughter of innocents is supposed to be horrific—even if I had no idea who they were or any reason to care.
This may be a more common sentiment than Rico thinks.
For me, these casual conversations people have all the time are mentally taxing exercises. It amazes me, the complex social calculations everyone else can do without even thinking while I struggle just not to stand out.
Women find me handsome and mysterious, and I’m good at superficial interactions. I could be quite a prolific serial killer if killing helpless targets held any interest for me.
I like sex—though I suspect my libido is lesser than a normal male’s. But it’s only worth so much trouble to me. Certainly nothing of lasting use comes from it.
Punching a person in the face would be an efficient way to signal the end of a conversation, but it’s almost never socially acceptable.
It would have taken little effort to kill him, either by pushing him off the cliff or by drawing and shooting him in the head. And with that little act, I’d have had the full force of one of the universe’s largest criminal syndicates trying to hunt me down. That would have been…different.
people don’t like being mauled by a wild animal even if it has good reasons.
How do people live like that? Existing only by staying beneath the notice of someone more powerful?” “They don’t think about it. I find that much of life for most people is just a shared delusion of stability.”
Civilized people like to think they don’t have to kill, but I don’t know of any sentient species that didn’t evolve from predators.
In a way, all of man’s highest creations—from art to literature to science—only came about because of his basic need to kill.
I imagined firing into a crowd full of diverse species and making a rainbow of blood splatters. It would be like art.
Despite all the PSAs about not judging sentients by appearances, most people get nervous standing next to something that looks like a giant insect. They want to smash in its head. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just instinct. Humans can anthropomorphize anything, but it helps if the species throws us a bone by at least having a face. Almost every sentient species I’ve bothered to research had racial battles before they advanced to the point of interstellar travel, and they tend to look at interaction between alien species with that frame of mind. But it’s not the same; the physiological
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I rarely kill so indiscriminately, but my instinct would be to go for the children last. They are smaller targets, but their survival instincts are usually very poor, and they probably wouldn’t even know to run and hide.
Nothing is more suspicious than something that’s just a bit off.
One can point out that religion is just a bunch of superstitious, irrational beliefs; but is that any different from the beliefs of atheists? Everyone likes to think they’re logical and reasonable, but I find all people to be equally absurd and irrational. The main difference is that the religious tend to be a bit more organized in their irrationality.
I kill people because it’s something to do. They feel they’re doing something right and good, the way others might when helping poor people, but with fun killing instead.
“civilized” people do nothing but panic and scream in these situations, which would seem to be the opposite of civilized).
It was odd killing people in a socially acceptable manner; it felt like trying to walk around on my hands.
“Do you plan to kill her?” “That would be a little forward for a first date.”
Anyway, panicking is never, ever helpful.
There was fire in her eyes, and I felt a little blood rush to a place that wasn’t helpful at the moment.
#ThatsWhatRicoLikes
Sucks to have a conscience.
I certainly saw more alien diversity while walking through the outer edges of the city than I had downtown. Unlike those in the more sophisticated areas, these people weren’t ashamed of sticking with their own kind for safety. The simple fear of violence tends to make sentients cling to easily identifiable groups. Humans struggled with racism for centuries; it turned out the way to overcome it was to replace it with something nearly equivalent.
But if it was people on your own planet blowing things up, the least you could do was kill them.
Well, religion is a messy subject. I try not to judge and just shoot whoever is threatening me regardless of their belief system.
I was tiring of being around people, though, and was happy when I could relax a bit in a small break room alone.
We actually were a decent team: the rogue detective and the murderous psychopath.
I shot a bunch of people that pretty much everyone agreed the worlds would be better off without. I wasn’t sure why that was supposed to weigh on my psyche.
“You want to feel bad you killed some violent idiots who were trying to kill you?”
I had sometimes caused people to pray, but in my experience it wasn’t very effective.
As I’ve said, fear isn’t a useful emotion—I can logically determine the odds of danger and don’t need my subconscious rashly trying to push me into action.
I could usually filter out such an irritation, but fear had apparently made me more alert than I wanted to be.
I would have called them attractive if I didn’t already hate them.
So instead of doing this the smart way, I had gone for the direct approach:
I’d screwed up big-time, basically because I was sexist. And this wasn’t the first time I’d almost died by underestimating a woman, which made my situation that much more pathetic.
it’s probably best to think of me not as a good man or an evil man but instead as more of a natural disaster—like an earthquake—just destroying everything around it. Sure, I’m going to kill you and some of your allies, but my destruction of your enemies will be much greater. Now, your people will be martyred and receive their reward. You will be martyred and have your reward. And I assure you that one day soon, at my hands, the evil empire of the Alliance will be gravely injured. Now, how hard do you want to fight against such a beneficial outcome?”
I put on my shocked face—mainly just a blank expression with mouth slightly open. Don’t hold it too long, or you look really stupid.
Sex doll face?
She seemed quite tough for a woman, and I found that interesting, but she was adorable when vulnerable.
Dat feel...
I fantasized that maybe she would try to hunt me down, and we’d run into each other again one day, but as sworn enemies. That could be fun.
All in all, I really hate people. All sentients annoy me, but it’s that closer connection with my own species that allows humans to get under my skin. As a child, I fantasized about killing all humans until I was the only one left, though that really was infeasible without access to weapons that could destroy on a global scale. A daydream, really.
🖤
One awesome thing, though: They were threatening children. By my understanding of social norms, that meant that I could do pretty much anything to the terrorists, and it wouldn’t seem too extreme.
