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Joy knew exactly what she had to do — what she had agreed to do for her country, and yet she couldn’t help but think too hard about it. Her sacrifice was the ultimate act of patriotism, but she seemed to already be believing the lies crafted about her. She knew the truth; she knew why she was there, waiting to die at the hands of her most beloved disciple, all ordered by the country she swore her life to too long ago.
Joy didn’t know whether to pity herself, or pretend she wasn’t going to die by the end of the week.
Jack was good, she had made sure of it, so she would be dead by the end of the week, surely. The Pain, The Fear, The End and The Fury, all dead, in a span of days. Volgin would be dead too, possibly Ocelot, but she doubted that. Jack had let him go, multiple times, for no obvious reason. Under no circumstance was it necessary or acceptable to let your enemy go alive: that was the principle of war. He had been built out of war; out of the looming prospect that a war would break out and he would need to fight. Joy supposed it was a war, a war of government and loyalty. She had told Jack to go home, knowing he wouldn’t listen: he was taught from the day he joined school, pledging allegiance to the flag of the ‘greatest country on Earth’, that loyalty to his government, to his country, came before anything else — your family, your friends, your feelings. Loyalty to America was a non-negotiable fact, a reality that could not be escaped; the ‘American Dream’ a breeding ground for capitalism and indoctrination, removing the individual from their soul and crafting them to be part of the workhouse for success that is the United States. The promise of a better life, of a better present and future lies within the United States, though like all things that sound like a dream come true, it is a sick lie; a facade constructed by the American government to fuel their egos and their exploits. The American Dream was cheering on the ‘brave boys’ in a proxy war who are facing inescapable horrors for the country they were before so dearly devoted to, for the sake of freedom, democracy. Had it ever occurred to some of these people that America was as two faced as its leaders? ; the land of the free, and the land of human experimentation being hidden from the adoring, domesticated public, its men trying to avoid being sent back to war, and its women beginning to understand self-worth.
America was a doomed country, as long as it stayed as transparent as it was. Anyone with common sense could see the game played ever so well by the government; the puppy like obsession for their country the American public held.
She was as besotted as them: willing to give her life for her country’s success. It was how she was raised, and it was how she would die.
Now she was stood against the wall of her room, staring out the small, dirty window that ‘let light into the room’ according to Volgin — the room was dark and dank either way, smelling uncomfortably and vaguely of damp. At this moment, it was impossible for the room to be light anyways, apart from the gentle moonlight seeping through. There were stars above Groznyj Grad, though they could only be seen when you were outside and it wasn’t cloudy, which was rare, Joy had found. She loved the stars, she loved space, she loved being up there. She wondered if at some point during Project Mercury, someone had looked up and mistaken her for a star, cast so far above civilisation she had finally felt peace. She hadn’t been out of some version of conflict for years, and up there, amongst the planets and stars, Joy had felt peace. True, unwavering peace.
She remembered seeing Jupiter, a large sized sphere in the distance, looming over her in her little spacecraft, a speck amongst the celestial giants that surrounded her.
When she was up there, she didn’t think of her exploding, all alone, far away from any other human.
She thought of Ocelot, of Adam, who had no idea he was sometimes in the same room as the mother he heard him mention to Tatyana or Raikov a couple of times. The mother who he believed to be dead, along with his father, who was indeed.
She thought of The Sorrow, a man who seemed to be over her shoulder, watching, like he did when he was alive, talking in intervals that only made sense to himself, or sometimes Joy and the rest of the Cobras. A man who spoke to the dead — a man who spoke to her soul, it seemed. He was detrimental; he was the beginning of everything.
She thought of Strangelove, a woman infatuated with her, gazing up at the stars for years, constructing rockets and satellites, yet no scrap of patriotism in her. Strangelove wasn’t American, and certainly couldn’t care less about England’s wellbeing, but she spent years of her life helping America in the facade that is the Cold War. She spent years of her life entrenched in NASA for her, for Joy. Strangelove was far too brilliant for NASA: she was made for more, for breaking the known boundaries of the Earth in code and computers; nothing Joy understood. Strangelove was stardust, unaware of her own brilliance, shining into the void of those around her. She was a universe, something larger and more gorgeous than any system or galaxy, and she was still left behind. Where was she now, what was she doing? Waiting for her to return? How long would it take her to realise that Joy was dead, buried in an unmarked grave in some backwater graveyard? Would she move on in her life, forget about Joy, and change the field of science forever? Or would she be trapped in her galaxy forever, alone and clueless as to what had happened to her joy?
She thought of Jack, chained to his country just like she was, raised by pure-blooded Americans who spat on immigrants and patriotism. Their food the Pledge of Allegiance and their drink the sweat of those, unrecognised, who built America to the powerhouse it is known as. He wouldn’t shake off the mindset until he’d killed her, when it would finally hit him what he had just done and why. The poor boy wouldn’t know what she had done for him, for their country, unless he found the officials who suggested it to her.
Joy felt the echo of attachment to them all, as it seemed her situation had propelled her into a state of indifference for them all. It would pass, and in her last moments of breath and life, she would feel everything. She had seen death many a time in her life, watched friend and foe’s life drip out of their eyes in their tears, when she had had the honour of being there as they left the Earth, their soul dissipating into the air and going to wherever is afterlife. In those last moments, she had heard people beg for forgiveness, for comfort, for anything other than death. It seems in those last moments, the desire to live a life kicked back in, even if that had already been done. Joy didn’t believe in a peaceful death; there was always some sort of pain, physical or mental. Death was abrupt, it was violent, it was brutal. There was no comfort in it, apart from the fact you finally free of having to wonder about what happened after life.
When she was younger, it was a question that had often plagued Joy’s mind, yet no longer it did, as she didn’t particularly care. She knew she could not escape her death, so her will would have to be passed onto the next generation, as was always the plan. The world had been constructed by the Philosophers, people with contradicting ideals for it; what the world needed, what Joy needed to pass on her will, was a group of people with the same ideals and goals, following her own principles; the world needed a group of patriots. People whose ideals would remain as rigid as they were when they were crafted, and would be dealt out efficiently, never suffering the fall from grace the Philosophers faced. Their — Joy’s — ideals would remain the instructions for the social construct of the world for generations, preventing anyone else the fate Joy was resigned to. No longer would the public be the toys of the government, no longer would a country’s soldiers be dogs of war, but respected individuals who weren’t called upon like servants.
Strangelove would understand this; Strangelove would carry it on.
Maybe Jack would, maybe Tatyana or whoever she was would, maybe even Adam; but it was Strangelove, it was always Strangelove, who would understand. Out of every single one of the people who could possibly carry on her will, her legacy, it was Strangelove: she would be the one to live the longest, looking at the way the rest of them were going.
The stark smell of damp once again snuck back into her nose, reminding her where she was: a dank old rotting room in the ex-Soviet fortress Groznyj Grad, alone in the world, knowing she’d be dead in days. That was the strangest thing of all. Death can be unexpected, unpredictable. Even those who are told they will die within days sometimes survive for another twenty years; but not Joy, Joy was certain. There was no escape for her, no loophole, no way of survival: she would be dead.